“
          This was a land of lost souls. Human beings who had weathered great storms in life, had suffered unspeakable loss, had been put to painful tests of existence, and still remained standing—but just barely.
          ”
          ”
         
        Clare Vanderpool (Navigating Early)
       
        
          “
          We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little more open and they are always more on the horizon. But you can't face up to the that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those you instinctively know are liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough you'll attain the godlike status we accord those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately. But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn't value it, you'd realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don't really want and keep from us what we really do need. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're getting in touch with our condition at last. It's horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone.
          ”
          ”
         
        Irvine Welsh (Filth)
       
        
          “
          You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the seas' double rocks and now you inhabit a foreign land.
          ”
          ”
         
        Euripides (The Plays of Euripides, Volume 1)
       
        
          “
          [[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.
The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. 
By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. 
Neo-China arrives from the future.
Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo.
Retro-disease.
Nanospasm.
          ”
          ”
         
        Nick Land (Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007)
       
        
          “
          What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
          ”
          ”
         
        James Joyce (Ulysses)
       
        
          “
          We cannot navigate and place ourselves only with maps that make the landscape dream-proof, impervious to the imagination. Such maps – and the road-map is first among them – encourage the elimination of wonder from our relationship with the world. And once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost.
          ”
          ”
         
        Robert Macfarlane (The Wild Places)
       
        
          “
          In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.
          ”
          ”
         
        Patrick Modiano (Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue)
       
        
          “
          This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island. 
          ”
          ”
         
        Plato (Timaeus/Critias)
       
        
          “
          While landing a spacecraft on a planet via Skip Drive navigation was officially and strongly discouraged by the Colonial Union, the Colonial Defense Forces recognized the strategic value of sudden and unexpected arrivals.
          ”
          ”
         
        John Scalzi (The Ghost Brigades (Old Man's War, #2))
       
        
          “
          Land and sea.
We may think of them as opposites; as complements. But there is a difference in how we think of them; the sea, and the land.
If we are walking around in a forest, a meadow or a town, we see our surroundings as being made up of individual elements. There are many different kinds of trees in varying sizes, those buildings, these streets. The meadow, the flowers, the bushes. Our gaze lingers on details, and if we are standing in a forest in the autumn, we become tongue-tied if we try to describe the richness around us. All this exists on land. 
But the sea. The sea is something completely different. The sea is one.
We may note the shifting moods of the sea. What the sea looks like when the wind is blowing, how the sea plays with the light, how it rises and falls. But still it is always the sea we are talking about. We have given different parts of the sea different names for navigation and identification, but if we are standing before the sea, there is only one whole. The Sea.
If we are taken so far out in a small boat that no land is visible in any direction, we may catch sight of the sea. It is not a pleasant experience. The sea is a god, an unseeing, unhearing deity that does not even know we exist. We mean less than a grain of sand on an elephant's back, and if the sea wants us, it will take us. That's just the way it is. The sea knows no limits, makes no concessions. It has given us everything and it can take everything away from us.
To other gods we send our prayer: Protect us from the sea.
          ”
          ”
         
        John Ajvide Lindqvist (Harbor)
       
        
          “
          What would happen," Zeitoun asked the captain, "if you and I went below the deck, and just went to our bedrooms and went to sleep?" 
The captain gave him a quizzical look and answered that the ship would most certainly hit something -- would run aground or into a reef. In any event, disaster. 
"So without a captain, the ship cannot navigate." 
"Yes," the captain said, "What's your point?" 
Zeitoun smiled. "Look above you, at the stars and moon. How do the stars keep their place in the sky, how does the moon rotate around the earth, the earth around the sun? Who's navigating?" 
The captain smiled at Zeitoun. He'd been led into a trap. 
"Without someone guiding us," Zeitoun finished, "wouldn't the stars and moon fall to earth, wouldn't the oceans overrun the land? Any vessel, any carrier of humans, needs a captain, yes?" 
The captain was taken with the beauty of the metaphor, and let his silence imply surrender.
          ”
          ”
         
        Dave Eggers (Zeitoun)
       
        
          “
          Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end
of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds
of women—those you write poems about
and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction
lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., 
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast
as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power
never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely
a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, 
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, 
as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed
antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long
regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don’t know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light
of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, 
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing
into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn’t make the silence
any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses
I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out
of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years
to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate
to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.
          ”
          ”
         
        Jeffrey McDaniel
       
        
          “
          Like swimming squirrels, you navigate with the help of Heaven and a stiff breeze, but you never land where you hope to—do you?
          ”
          ”
         
        Robert W. Chambers
       
        
          “
          I Have Walked Down Many Roads
by Antonio Machado
translated from the Spanish by Don Share
I have walked down many roads
and cleared many paths;
I have navigated a hundred oceans
and anchored off a hundred shores.
All over, I have seen
caravans of sadness,
pompous and melancholy men
drunk with black shadows,
and defrocked pedants
who stare, keep quiet, and think
they know, because they don’t
drink wine in the neighborhood bars.
Bad people who go around
polluting the earth . . .
And all over, I have seen
people who dance or play,
when they can, and work
their four handfuls of land.
If they turn up someplace,
they never ask where they are.
When they travel, they ride
on the backs of old mules,
and don’t know how to hurry,
not even on holidays.
When there’s wine, they drink wine;
when there’s no wine, they drink cool water.
These are good people, who live,
work, get by, and dream;
and on a day like all the others
they lie down under the earth.
          ”
          ”
         
        Antonio Machado (Times Alone: Selected Poems)
       
        
          “
          There was no point being a fan these days if you weren't willing to go the extra mile for your idols. It wasn't enough anymore to send them fan mail and kiss the posters above our beds. These days you weren't a true fan until you engaged in Twitter death threats and endless stan wars. The fandom landscape was peppered with land mines, and there was no other way to navigate it but to walk until you hit one. You come out the other side a little crazier, yeah, but you're also stronger. You are a true believer. You will do anything for the object of your affection.
          ”
          ”
         
        Goldy Moldavsky (Kill the Boy Band)
       
        
          “
          We’ll need a new navigator. Someone who can track and knows the lands and waters well.”
Niridia nods.
A crazy thought comes to me. “I know just the man.”
“Man?” Niridia asks. “Didn’t you swear after Ralin that you’d never take on another man for the crew so long as we already had one?”
“Oh, don’t remind me about Ralin. Couldn’t keep his hands off the crew, that one. Despicable creature.”
“He was a bit more bearable once you cut them off.”
“Yes, shame he decided to leave our employ after that. Can’t imagine what that was about.”
Niridia smiles. “Some men don’t have the stomach for being pirates.”
“This one, if he’s willing, should be well cut out for the job. He’s more interested in his drink than in the girls. And he’s so slow, he wouldn’t be able to catch any of the women.”
“Sounds like a fine specimen. How could we turn down such an able-bodied man?”
I laugh. “I missed you, Niridia.”
“Missed you, too, Captain.
          ”
          ”
         
        Tricia Levenseller (Daughter of the Pirate King (Daughter of the Pirate King, #1))
       
        
          “
          Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbulbs and candles send them astray; they fly into the heat or the flame and die. For these creatures, to arrive is a calamity. When activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate Earth by, they burn themselves out, or they set up a totalitarian utopia in which others are burned in the flames. Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it. After all those millennia of poetry about the moon, nothing was more prosaic than the guys in space suits stomping around on the moon with their flags and golf clubs thirty-something years ago. The moon is profound except when we land on it. Paradise
          ”
          ”
         
        Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities)
       
        
          “
          I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.
          ”
          ”
         
        Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus)
       
        
          “
          There’s something else about this list that really jumps out. Take another look at the top five attributes listed there—the key characteristics defining a world-class sales experience: Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes. Each of these attributes speaks directly to an urgent need of the customer not to buy something, but to learn something. They’re looking to suppliers to help them identify new opportunities to cut costs, increase revenue, penetrate new markets, and mitigate risk in ways they themselves have not yet recognized. Essentially this is the customer—or 5,000 of them at least, all over the world—saying rather emphatically, “Stop wasting my time. Challenge me. Teach me something new.
          ”
          ”
         
        Matthew Dixon (The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation)
       
        
          “
          & if a heart has topography,
I know none of these boys know the coordinates 
to navigate & survive mine's rough terrain.
In other words, these boys would be no distraction.
          ”
          ”
         
        Elizabeth Acevedo (Clap When You Land)
       
        
          “
          The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land.
          ”
          ”
         
        Walter Lippmann (The Phantom Public (The Library of Conservative Thought))
       
        
          “
          Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.
          ”
          ”
         
        Plato (Timaeus)
       
        
          “
          The Nephilim (Aldebaran’s extraterrestrials in Maria’s messages) who survived the great deluge returned to Phoenicia; the Bible made reference to their return. They lived with the Phoenicians for 33 years and 33 days in Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Baalbeck. The number 33.33 represents the period of the Tana-wir or Tanwir, which means enlightenment. The number 33.33 became the most important and the most secret number in Phoenician occultism, architecture, and numerology, because it refers to their place of origin, Jabal Haramoun (Mt. Hermon in Lebanon) which is located exactly at 33.33° East and 33.33° North.)   The number 33 is equally important in the Masonic rite King Hiram created with the assistance of King Solomon. This number is closely related to the compass and square, which were given to the Phoenicians as a gift from the Anunnaki lords. This explains how and why the early Phoenicians excelled in building ships, navigation and land-seas maps making, and surpassed their neighbors in these fields, beyond belief! Worth mentioning here, that the Egyptian Sphinx was built some 11,000 years ago, before the Biblical Great Flood by the early Phoenicians, the Nephilim and an army of Djinns created by the Anunnaki.
          ”
          ”
         
        Maximillien de Lafayette (Volume I. UFOs: MARIA ORSIC, THE WOMAN WHO ORIGINATED AND CREATED EARTH’S FIRST UFOS (Extraterrestrial and Man-Made UFOs & Flying Saucers Book 1))
       
        
          “
          With apologies to the folks in Redmond, I’ll end on another Microsoft joke because it makes the point well (a point that applies everywhere, not just at Microsoft): A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when a malfunction disabled all of its electronic navigation and communications equipment. The clouds were so thick that the pilot couldn’t tell where he was. Finally, the pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said WHERE AM I? in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drawing their own large sign: YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER. The pilot smiled, looked at his map, determined the route to Sea-Tac Airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it. “I knew it had to be the Microsoft building,” he said, “because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.
          ”
          ”
         
        William Poundstone (Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?)
       
        
          “
          As a twenty-one-year-old college student, Daisy Richmond’s answer to the question “If you knew you were going to die in one month, what would you do?” was full of adventure and travel to exotic lands. As a twenty-seven-year-old woman who is faced with a recurrence of breast cancer, her answer is very different. Before I Go is the poignant story of Daisy’s journey to navigate the unexpected twists and turns of life, and the painful process of letting go of everything but love.
          ”
          ”
         
        Colleen Oakley (Before I Go)
       
        
          “
          Do we allow unlimited visitation, or do we restrict numbers to protect a delicate ecosystem? Do we heavily advertise the park, enticing paying visitors, generating needed money for Idaho's park department, or do we sacrifice financial benefits to better preserve natural ones? Do we log diseased trees, interfering with nature, or do we allow trees to rot and fall, possibly endangering lives? Do we inexpensively repair historic structures, or do we meticulously restore them? Do we maintain this park as closely as possible to the condition in which Idaho received it, or do we develop it for multiple uses; allow overnight visitors; permit all-terrain vehicles; provide paths for those unable to navigate unpaved trails?
          ”
          ”
         
        Mary E. Reed (Harriman: From Railroad Ranch to State Park)
       
        
          “
          —
If love wants you; if you’ve been melted
down to stars, you will love 
with lungs and gills, with warm blood
and cold. With feathers and scales. 
Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy 
you’ll want to breathe with the spiral
calls of birds, while your lashing tail 
still gropes for the waes. You’ll try
to haul your weight from simple sea
to gravity of land. Caught by the tide,
in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments
suffocating in both water and air. 
If love wants you, suddently your past is 
obsolete science. Old maps,
disproved theories, a diorama.
The moment our bodies are set to spring open.
The immanence that reassembles matter 
passes through us then disperses
into time and place:
the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons.
The mother who hears her child crying upstairs
and suddenly feels her dress 
wet with milk.
Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog
tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew
before we were loved there,
the places left fallow when we’re born,
waiting for experience to find its way
into us. The night crossing, on deck
in the dark car. On the beach wehre 
night reshaped your face.
In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet,
moss like velvet spread over splintered forms.
The instant spray freezes
in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. 
We rise, hearing our names
called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon
an escutcheon on the shield of sky.
The current that passes through us, radio waves,
electric lick. The billions of photons that pass
through film emulsion every second, the single 
submicroscopic crystal struck 
that becomes the phograph.
We look and suddenly the world 
looks back. 
A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky.
—
But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate 
by the rear-view mirror
of the moon; if we continue to reach
both for salt and for the sweet white
nibs of grass growing closest to earth;
if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also
driving through the canyon at night, 
all around us the hidden glow of limestone
erased by darkness; if still we sish 
we’d waited for morning,
we will know ourselves
nowhere.
Not in the mirrors of waves
or in the corrading stream,
not in the wavering 
glass of an apartment building,
not in the looming light of night lobbies
or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen
or in the motel where we watched meteors
from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open,
turned stars to rain.
We will become
indigestible. Afraid 
of choking on fur
and armour, animals
will refuse the divided longings
in our foreing blue flesh.
—
In your hands, all you’ve lost,
all you’ve touched. 
In the angle of your head,
every vow and
broken vow. In your skin,
every time you were disregarded,
every time you were received.
Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field,
mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem.
The branch that’s released when the bird lifts
or lands. In a summer kitchen. 
On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.
          ”
          ”
         
        Anne  Michaels
       
        
          “
          Of all the passers-through, the species that means most to me, even more than geese and cranes, is the upland plover, the drab plump grassland bird that used to remind my gentle hunting uncle of the way things once had been, as it still reminds me. It flies from the far Northern prairies to the pampas of Argentina and then back again in spring, a miracle of navigation and a tremendous journey for six or eight ounces of flesh and feathers and entrails and hollow bones, fueled with bug meat. I see them sometimes in our pastures, standing still or dashing after prey in the grass, but mainly I know their presence through the mournful yet eager quavering whistles they cast down from the night sky in passing, and it makes me think of what the whistling must have been like when the American plains were virgin and their plover came through in millions. To grow up among tradition-minded people leads one often into backward yearnings and regrets, unprofitable feelings of which I was granted my share in youth-not having been born in time to get killed fighting Yankees, for one, or not having ridden up the cattle trails. But the only such regret that has strongly endured is not to have known the land when when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh, and the plover that whet one's edge every spring and every fall. In recent decades it has become customary- and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight- to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon. What I myself seem to damn mainly, though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight, I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most of those who loved it best. But God, to have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine and call at night in the sky.
          ”
          ”
         
        John Graves
       
        
          “
          It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveler respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of land-marks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by: the impossibility of doing without them, being common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in particular: but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always must remain, without drawing any general conclusions from the experience of human life, is as high a pitch, I think, as absurdity has ever reached in philosophical controversy.
          ”
          ”
         
        John Stuart Mill (Utilitarianism)
       
        
          “
          Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.
          ”
          ”
         
        Patrick Modiano (In the Café of Lost Youth)
       
        
          “
          knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn’t a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.
          ”
          ”
         
        Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
       
        
          “
          God's blessings are often on individuals, rather than on places, or even churches. However, such individuals need to navigate the storms of life, until they reach safety. And always remember, although you may go through lean time, scripture still holds true, "I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed out begging for bread," Psalm 37:25. So just because, like Abram, you are going through a famine, this does not mean that God has abandoned, or forsaken you. Keep putting your trust in God. It may very well be that the famine you are going through is a famine on the land. And this may have nothing to do with you, but it may have more or do with the world. Always remember that God will make a way for you, where there seems to be no way.
          ”
          ”
         
        Christopher  Roberts (365 Days With God: A Daily Devotional)
       
        
          “
          During forced exercise one day, Louie fell into step with William Harris, a twenty-five-year-old marine officer, the son of marine general Field Harris. Tall and dignified, with a face cut in hard lines, Harris had been captured in the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942. With another American,* he had escaped and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-hour swim across Manila Bay, kicking through a downpour in darkness as fish bit him. Dragging himself ashore on the Japanese-occupied Bataan Peninsula, he had begun a run for China, hiking through jungles and over mountains, navigating the coast in boats donated by sympathetic Filipinos, hitching rides on burros, and surviving in part by eating ants. He had joined a Filipino guerrilla band, but when he had heard of the American landing at Guadalcanal, the marine in him had called. Making a dash by boat toward Australia in hopes of rejoining his unit, he had gotten as far as the Indonesian island of Morotai before his journey ended. Civilians had turned him in to the Japanese, who had discovered that he was a general’s son and sent him to Ofuna. Even here, he was itching to escape.
          ”
          ”
         
        Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption)
       
        
          “
          There was another world below—this was the problem. Another world below that had volume but no form. By day the sea was blue surface and whitecaps, a realistic navigational challenge, and the problem could be overlooked. By night, though, the mind went forth and dove down through the yielding—the violently lonely—nothingness on which the heavy steel ship traveled, and in every moving swell you saw a travesty of grids, you saw how truly and forever lost a man would be six fathoms under. Dry land lacked this z-axis. Dry land was like being awake. Even in chartless desert you could drop to your knees and pound land with your fist and land didn’t give. Of course the ocean, too, had a skin of wakefulness. But every point on this skin was a point where you could sink and by sinking disappear.
          ”
          ”
         
        Jonathan Franzen
       
        
          “
          We are the Diviners. We have been and we will be. It is a power that comes from the great energy of the land and its people, a realm shared for a spell, for as long as is needed. We see the dead. We speak to restless spirits. We walk in dreams. We read meaning from every held thing. The future unfolds for us like the navigator’s map, showing seas we have yet to travel.
The Diviners must stand, or all shall fall.
          ”
          ”
         
        Libba Bray (The Diviners (The Diviners, #1))
       
        
          “
          From Preach’s time as a prison chaplain, before he joined the Atlanta PD, he knew the true horror of incarceration was not the loss of freedom, but the daily choices one was forced to make to survive. Navigating the jungle without becoming one of the animals. Most people that landed behind bars—not all, but most—had disadvantaged upbringings and poor choices to blame. It was prison that turned them into criminals.
          ”
          ”
         
        Layton Green (A Shattered Lens (Detective Preach Everson #2))
       
        
          “
          I used to have a crow named Albert. Bertie, when I got to know him better. I got him when he was just a little guy and had him for years. A young crow doesn't navigate well and they'll sometimes crash-land. They're called branchers at that age-that's about all they can do, lumber awkwardly from branch to branch. Sometimes they get stuck and they wail like babies until you get 'em down. Bertie must have bitten off a bit more than he could chew and he'd tumbled to the ground. I had a cat named Little John who brought him in, squawking hellishly. LJ and I had a tussle to see who was going to take possession. Fortunately for Bertie, I won the contest. He and the cat became friends later, but it was touch-and-go for a while there. LJ was pissed off because he thought this was Thanksgiving dinner and I was getting in his way (Dietz)
          ”
          ”
         
        Sue Grafton (G is for Gumshoe (Kinsey Millhone, #7))
       
        
          “
          Ziggy is in front of the tube, as if nothing much has been happening in his day, watching Scooby Goes Latin! (1990). Maxine after a quick visit to the bathroom to reformat, knowing better than to start in with the Q&A, comes in and sits down next to him about the time it breaks for a commercial. “Hi, Mom.” She wants to enfold him forever. Instead lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellín, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost—what else—of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan.
          ”
          ”
         
        Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge)
       
        
          “
          The scientific principles that man employs to obtain the foreknowledge of an eclipse, or of anything else relating to the motion of the heavenly bodies, are contained chiefly in that part of science which is called trigonometry, or the properties of a triangle, which, when applied to the study of the heavenly bodies, is called astronomy; when applied to direct the course of a ship on the ocean, it is called navigation; when applied to the construction of figures drawn by rule and compass, it is called geometry; when applied to the construction of plans or edifices, it is called architecture; when applied to the measurement of any portion of the surface of the earth, it is called land surveying. In fine, it is the soul of science; it is an eternal truth; it contains the mathematical demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses is unknown.
          ”
          ”
         
        Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
       
        
          “
          Last night, I spoke at one of the Circle Meetings of the Baptist Church. Afterward, a Kenyan friend, Wangari Waigwa-Stone, and I spoke about darkness and stars. “I was raised under an African sky,” she said. “Darkness was never something I was afraid of. The clarity, definition, and profusion of stars became maps as to how one navigates at night. I always knew where I was simply by looking up.” She paused. “My sons do not have these guides. They have no relationship to darkness, nothing in their imagination tells them there are pathways in the night they can move through.” “I have a Norwegian friend who says, ‘City lights are a conspiracy against higher thought,’ ” I added. “Indeed,” Wangari said, smiling, her rich, deep voice resonating. “I am Kikuyu. My people believe if you are close to the Earth, you are close to people.” “How so?” I asked. “What an African woman nurtures in the soil will eventually feed her family. Likewise, what she nurtures in her relations will ultimately nurture her community. It is a matter of living the circle. “Because we have forgotten our kinship with the land,” she continued, “our kinship with each other has become pale. We shy away from accountability and involvement. We choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged. In America, time is money. In Kenya, time is relationship. We look at investments differently.
          ”
          ”
         
        Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place)
       
        
          “
          In the past two hundred years, human numbers grew to over seven billion, and our species began to transform the oceans, the land, and the air. Human-built roads, canals, and railways snaked across the continents, linking thousands of human-built cities with populations in the millions. Vast ships navigated the oceans, and planes ferried goods and people through the air and across the continents. Just a hundred years ago, in glowing filaments and patches, Earth started lighting up at night.
          ”
          ”
         
        David Christian (Origin Story: A Big History of Everything)
       
        
          “
          So, Cheers! Cheers to you, my friend! Here’s to the girl who can proudly cherish 
her ethnicity and traditions, while simultaneously embracing the great American 
spirit of independence and strength. Here’s to you, the girl who can navigate 
through sheer madness, and in the end appreciate her blessings. And here’s to 
you, the girl who can dance in that ancient land with as much grace as she can 
glide on that thin piece of ice called America. You are truly amazing!" -From Veils to Thongs
          ”
          ”
         
        Dalel B. Khalil
       
        
          “
          In America, they have this thing called a story cycle. When they're at war, they start doing fantasy and war-style entertainment. When fantasy gets big, they go through a recession, and horror starts gaining popularity. When horror gets popular, mystery starts gaining popularity. Then when mystery reaches its peak, science fiction starts gaining popularity. Then things get rough again, and we go back to Fantasy". This quote was taken from an interview from The Myth of Cthulhu: Dark Navigation.
          ”
          ”
         
        Freddy Sakazaki (Land of the Rising Dead: A Tokyo School Girl's Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse)
       
        
          “
          James Cook was not the first explorer to think this way. The Portuguese and Spanish voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries already did. Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama explored the coasts of Africa and, while doing so, seized control of islands and harbours. Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America and immediately claimed sovereignty over the new lands for the kings of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan found a way around the world, and simultaneously laid the foundation for the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.
          ”
          ”
         
        Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
       
        
          “
          She’s a ship captain’s daughter and there was never any question of her choosing a life on land: from the start she had learned too much about ships to turn away from the sea. She belongs to water the way others are proud of their distant origins. There was never any reason to break with or reject it. She chose navigation, this quintessentially human knowledge; she chose ancient artisanship and modern machines, numbers and sensations, cosmic abstractions and the sun on her face. And all of this gave her a certain maturity and density.
          ”
          ”
         
        Mariette Navarro (Ultramarins)
       
        
          “
          He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way. PSALM 25:9 JUNE 22 After a speaking engagement in Florida, my hosts assigned a Navy captain to fly me home. En route, the captain told me that there was a very heavy overcast in New York. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “we’ll have to go in on instruments.” We went down, down, down. And finally, I saw the lights of the runway and we came right up to the ramp. It was a beautiful landing. The captain said, “The primary ingredient for a good landing is faith. I have to have faith in these instruments. If I didn’t, I might think, ‘Well, maybe this instrument isn’t exactly right, so I’ll make this adjustment.’ And that could have tragic consequences.” Your religious education is your instrument panel for safe navigation through the long flight of the years. When clouds gather, storms develop, and trouble looms, if you lose faith in your instruments, you can be lost. But if you have faith in the teachings of the Bible, in prayer, in the church, in goodness, love, and hope, your instruments will bring you through.
          ”
          ”
         
        Norman Vincent Peale (Positive Living Day by Day)
       
        
          “
          This stubborn Enlightenment faith in firsthand observation, rather than in received opinion, extended to everything Cook did. As a navigator, he remained unswayed by “expert” theories about the existence of a southern continent. So, too, as an observer of strange lands, he suspended judgment about cannibalistic Maori or naked Aborigines whom men of superior education and social standing regarded as “brutes.” Also, having experienced class prejudice, Cook may have seen value in a life undisturbed “by the Inequality of Condition” in a way that Banks could not.
          ”
          ”
         
        Tony Horwitz (Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before)
       
        
          “
          Jess Pepper's review of the Avalon Strings:
'In a land so very civilized and modern as ours, it is unpopular to suggest that the mystical isle of Avalon ever truly existed. But I believe I have found proof of it right here in Manhattan.
To understand my reasoning, you must recall first that enchanting tale of a mist-enshrouded isle where medieval women--descended from the gods--spawned heroic men. Most notable among these was the young King Arthur. In their most secret confessions, these mystic heroes acknowledged Avalon, and particularly the music of its maidens, as the source of their power.
Many a school boy has wept reading of Young King Arthur standing silent on the shore as the magical isle disappears from view, shrouded in mist.
The boy longs as Arthur did to leap the bank and pilot his canoe to the distant, singing atoll. To rejoin nymphs who guard in the depths of their water caves the meaning of life. To feel again the power that burns within. 
But knowledge fades and memory dims, and schoolboys grow up. As the legend goes, the way became unknown to mortal man. Only woman could navigate the treacherous blanket of white that dipped and swirled at the surface of the water.
And with its fading went also the music of the fabled isle.
Harps and strings that heralded the dawn and incited robed maidens to dance evaporated into the mists of time, and silence ruled.
But I tell you, Kind Reader, that the music of Avalon lives. The spirit that enchanted knights in chain mail long eons ago is reborn in our fair city, in our own small band of fair maids who tap that legendary spirit to make music as the Avalon Strings.
Theirs is no common gift. Theirs is no ordinary sound. It is driven by a fire from within, borne on fingers bloodied by repetition. Minds tormented by a thirst for perfection.
And most startling of all is the voice that rises above, the stunning virtuoso whose example leads her small company to higher planes.
Could any other collection of musicians achieve the heights of this illustrious few? I think not.
I believe, Friends of the City, that when we witnes their performance, as we may almost nightly at the Warwick Hotel, we witness history's gift to this moment in time. And for a few brief moments in the presence of these maids, we witness the fiery spirit that endured and escaped the obliterating mists of Avalon.
          ”
          ”
         
        Bailey Bristol (The Devil's Dime (The Samaritan Files #1))
       
        
          “
          Thus it can be said that, until the fifteenth century, Black Africa never lost its civilization. Frobenius reports: Not that the first European navigators at the end of the Middle Ages failed to make some very remarkable observations. When they reached the Bay of Guinea and alighted at Vaida, the captains were astonished to find well-planned streets bordered for several leagues by two rows of trees; for days they traversed a countryside covered by magnificent fields, inhabited by men in colorful attire that they had woven themselves! More to the south, in the Kingdom of the Congo, a teeming crowd clad in silk and velvet, large States, well ordered down to the smallest detail, powerful rulers, prosperous industries. Civilized to the marrow of their bones! Entirely similar was the condition of the lands on the east coast, Mozambique, for example. The revelations of the navigators from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries provide positive proof that Black Africa, which extended south of the desert zone of the Sahara, was still in full bloom, in all the splendor of harmonious, well-organized civilizations. This flowering the European conquistadors destroyed as they advanced.
          ”
          ”
         
        Cheikh Anta Diop (The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality)
       
        
          “
          ...those are the boys I switch my hips at.
Not because they're cute or interesting---
they're often obnoxious & only want a taste
of my gutter-slick tongue & brownness;
they act as if they could elevate my life with a 
taste of their powder-milk-tinged pomp.
No, I date those boys because they are safe.
They can't dance bachata or sing Juan Luis Guerra,
can't recite Salomé Ureńa or even name the forefathers;
they wrap their flag around their shoulders like a safety blanket,
& if a heart has topography,
I know none of those boys know the coordinates
to navigate & survive mine's rough terrain.
In other words, these boys would be no distraction.
          ”
          ”
         
        Elizabeth Acevedo (Clap When You Land)
       
        
          “
          It can be too sad here. We so often lose our way. It is easy to sense and embrace meaning when life is on track. When there is a feeling of fullness—having love, goodness, family, work, maybe God as parts of life—it’s easier to navigate around the sadness that you inevitably stumble across. Life holds beauty, magic and anguish. Sometimes sorrow is unavoidable, even when your kids are little, when the marvels of your children, and your parental amazement, are all the meaning you need to sustain you, or when you have landed the job and salary for which you’ve always longed, or the mate. And then the phone rings, the mail comes, or you turn on the TV.
          ”
          ”
         
        Anne Lamott (Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair)
       
        
          “
          My nostrils flared. I’m merely trying to navigate this utter disaster without alerting the Captain of the Destriers to the fact that I’ve got a five-hundred-year-old MONSTER living in my head. I think you mean “traitor to lord and land,” not “Captain.” After all, dear one, there were only two Nightmare Cards ever forged. Long have the Rowans sought one, only for it to be here—hidden neatly in the King’s castle—under his very nose. I glanced at Ravyn, who stood so still he might have been another piece of furniture in the shadowy room. We don’t know why he’s hidden his Nightmare Card from his uncle, I said. There could be a plausible reason. Plausible reasons are but a shadow at the gallows. The highwayman meets the hangman, one way or another. Ravyn
          ”
          ”
         
        Rachel Gillig (One Dark Window (The Shepherd King, #1))
       
        
          “
          And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. 9 ¶ And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day. 14 ¶ And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. 20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
          ”
          ”
         
        Anonymous (Holy Bible: Old and New Testaments - King James Version - Full Navigation)
       
        
          “
          Perhaps if this abbey exists and if we still speak of the Holy Roman Empire, we owe it to the Irish. At that time, the rest of Europe was reduced to a heap of ruins; one day they declared invalid all baptisms imparted by certain priests in Gaul because they baptized 'in nomine patris et filae' [In the name of the Father and of the Daughter]--and not because they practiced a new heresy and considered Jesus a woman, but because they no longer knew any Latin.... 
Vikings from the Far North came down along the rivers to sack Rome. The pagan temples were falling into ruins, and the Christian ones did not yet exist. It was only the monks of Hibernia in their monasteries who wrote and read, read and wrote, and illuminated, and then jumped into little boats made of animal hide and navigated towards these lands and evangelized them as if you people were infidels, you understand?
          ”
          ”
         
        Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)
       
        
          “
          Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.
          ”
          ”
         
        John Lloyd (The Book of General Ignorance)
       
        
          “
          Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas.
Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor.
Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of  finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt.
Withfinocchioin fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot.
In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.
          ”
          ”
         
        Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
       
        
          “
          They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the all-father to bring them safely to land once more. A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the rime had frosted their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time. Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the West. The men said, “We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.” Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. “The all-father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?
          ”
          ”
         
        Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
       
        
          “
          She could sense the approach of land- taste when the waters changed, feel when currents turned cool or warm- but it didn't hurt to keep an eye on the shore now and then, and an ear out for boats. The slap of oars could be heard for leagues. Her father had told tales about armored seafarers in days long past, whose trireme ships had three banks of rowers to ply the waters- you could hear them clear down to Atlantica, he'd say. Any louder and they would disrupt the songs of the half-people- the dolphins and whales who used their voices to navigate the waters.
Even before her father had enacted the ban on going to the surface, it was rare that a boat would encounter a mer. If the captain kept to the old ways, he would either carefully steer away or throw her a tribute: fruit of the land, the apples and grapes merfolk treasured more than treasure. In return the mermaid might present him with fruit of the sea- gems, or a comb from her hair.
But there was always the chance of an unscrupulous crew, and nets, and the potential prize of a mermaid wife or trophy to present the king.
(Considering some of the nets that merfolk had found and freed their underwater brethren from, it was quite understandable that Triton believed humans might eat anything they found in the sea- including merfolk.)
          ”
          ”
         
        Liz Braswell (Part of Your World)
       
        
          “
          The earth is our first and most foundational relationship of nurturance, anchorage, and agency that secures livelihood forward. Earth is our first mother—the generous lifeline every human and nonhuman on this planet shares in common without exception. Our relationship with the earth is a material, unwavering truth that determines our fundamental existence on this planet. In separating us from this relationship or reconfiguring and exploiting it on the occupiers’ terms, colonialism interrupts our deeper contract as sacred living beings of a sacred living planet, and the practical ways we have evolved to navigate and mutually sustain life. It fractures our sovereignty in a multifaceted way. We are the earth. An embodied relationship with the land imbues innate reverence for life, an embedded knowledge of its inherent dignity. We understand all beings have a consciousness, and we are a fundamental part of the ecosystem. It teaches us how to steward life and land, through intimacy with its natural cycles. Our specific landscapes have sustained our bodies and provided for our societies generationally; they have also informed every aspect of our social structures, inspired our ancestral cosmologies, narrated our stories, animated our foods and agricultural practices, intonated our languages and the rhythms of our songs, revealed our gods, and inspired every aspect of our relationships, rituals, beliefs, and identities. These places have guided every aspect of our self-determined livelihoods and cultural formation, including our understanding of ourselves and each other in the universe.
          ”
          ”
         
        Layla K. Feghali (The Land in Our Bones)
       
        
          “
          Geopolitics is ultimately the study of the balance between options and limitations. A country's geography determines in large part what vulnerabilities it faces and what tools it holds.
"Countries with flat tracks of land -- think Poland or Russia -- find building infrastructure easier and so become rich faster, but also find themselves on the receiving end of invasions. This necessitates substantial standing armies, but the very act of attempting to gain a bit of security automatically triggers angst and paranoia in the neighbors.
"Countries with navigable rivers -- France and Argentina being premier examples -- start the game with some 'infrastructure' already baked in. Such ease of internal transport not only makes these countries socially unified, wealthy, and cosmopolitan, but also more than a touch self-important. They show a distressing habit of becoming overimpressed with themselves -- and so tend to overreach.
"Island nations enjoy security -- think the United Kingdom and Japan -- in part because of the physical separation from rivals, but also because they have no choice but to develop navies that help them keep others away from their shores. Armed with such tools, they find themselves actively meddling in the affairs of countries not just within arm's reach, but half a world away.
"In contrast, mountain countries -- Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, to pick a pair -- are so capital-poor they find even securing the basics difficult, making them largely subject to the whims of their less-mountainous neighbors.
"It's the balance of these restrictions and empowerments that determine both possibilities and constraints, which from my point of view makes it straightforward to predict what most countries will do:
· The Philippines' archipelagic nature gives it the physical stand-off of islands without the navy, so in the face of a threat from a superior country it will prostrate itself before any naval power that might come to its aid.
· Chile's population center is in a single valley surrounded by mountains. Breaching those mountains is so difficult that the Chileans often find it easier to turn their back on the South American continent and interact economically with nations much further afield.
· The Netherlands benefits from a huge portion of European trade because it controls the mouth of the Rhine, so it will seek to unite the Continent economically to maximize its economic gain while bringing in an external security guarantor to minimize threats to its independence.
· Uzbekistan sits in the middle of a flat, arid pancake and so will try to expand like syrup until it reaches a barrier it cannot pass. The lack of local competition combined with regional water shortages adds a sharp, brutal aspect to its foreign policy.
· New Zealand is a temperate zone country with a huge maritime frontage beyond the edge of the world, making it both wealthy and secure -- how could the Kiwis not be in a good mood every day?
"But then there is the United States. It has the fiat lands of Australia with the climate and land quality of France, the riverine characteristics of Germany with the strategic exposure of New Zealand, and the island features of Japan but with oceanic moats -- and all on a scale that is quite literally continental. Such landscapes not only make it rich and secure beyond peer, but also enable its navy to be so powerful that America dominates the global oceans.
          ”
          ”
         
        Peter Zeihan (The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America)
       
        
          “
          The extreme consolidation in the corporate world over the past three decades has produced a playing field so rigged against consumers that pursuing the basics of life can feel like navigating a never-ending series of scams. It’s as if everyone is trying to trick us in the fine print of pages and pages of terms of service agreements they know we will never read. The black box is not just the algorithms running our communication networks—almost everything is a black box, an opaque system hiding something else. The housing market isn’t about homes; it’s about hedge funds and speculators. Universities aren’t about education; they’re about turning young people into lifelong debtors. Long-term care facilities aren’t about care; they’re about draining our elders in the last years of life and real estate plays. Many news sites aren’t about news; they’re about tricking us into clicking on autoplaying ads and advertorials that eat up the bottom half of nearly every site. Nothing is as it seems. This kind of predatory, extractive capitalism necessarily breeds mistrust and paranoia. In this context, it’s not surprising that QAnon, a conspiracy theory that tells of elites harvesting the young for their lifeblood (adrenochrome), has gone viral. Elites are sucking us dry—our money, our labor, our time, our data. So dry that large parts of our planet are beginning to spontaneously combust. The Davos elite aren’t eating our children, but they are eating our children’s futures, and that is plenty bad. QAnon believers imagine secret tunnels underneath pizza parlors and Central Park, the better to traffic children. This is fantasy, but there are tunnels—literal Shadow Lands—under some major cities, and they do house and hide the poor, the sick, the drug-dependent, the discarded. Under the flashing lights of Las Vegas, hundreds or even thousands of people really do live in a sprawling network of storm tunnels.
          ”
          ”
         
        Naomi Klein (Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World)
       
        
          “
          Moreland sired some decent sons,” Rothgreb remarked. “And that’s a pretty filly they have for a sister. Not as brainless as the younger girls, either.” “Lady Sophia is very pretty.” Also kind, intelligent, sweet, and capable of enough passion to burn a man’s reason to cinders. “She’s mighty attached to the lad, though.” His uncle shot him a look unreadable in the gloom of the chilly hallways. “Women take on over babies.” “He’s a charming little fellow, but he’s a foundling. I believe she intends to foster him. Watch your step.” He took his uncle’s bony elbow at the stairs, only to have his hand shaken off. “For God’s sake, boy. I can navigate my own home unaided. So if you’re attracted to the lady, why don’t you provide for the boy? You can spare the blunt.” Vim paused at the first landing and held the candle a little closer to his uncle’s face. “What makes you say I’m attracted to Lady Sophia? And how would providing for the child endear me to her?” “Women set store by orphans, especially wee lads still in swaddling clothes. Never hurts to put yourself in a good light when you want to impress a lady.” His uncle went up the steps, leaning heavily on the banister railing. “And why would I want to impress Lady Sophia?” “You ogle her,” Rothgreb said, pausing halfway up the second flight. “I do not ogle a guest under our roof.” “You watch her, then, when you don’t think anybody’s looking. In my day, we called that ogling. You fret over her, which I can tell you as a man married for more than fifty years, is a sure sign a fellow is more than infatuated with his lady.” Vim remained silent, because he did, indeed, fret over Sophie Windham. “And you have those great, strapping brothers of hers falling all over themselves to put the two of you together.” Rothgreb paused again at the top of the steps. Vim paused too, considering his uncle’s words. “They aren’t any more strapping than I am.” Except St. Just was more muscular. Lord Val was probably quicker with his fists than Vim, and Westhaven had a calculating, scientific quality to him that suggested each of his blows would count. “They were all but dancing with each other to see that you sat next to their sister.
          ”
          ”
         
        Grace Burrowes (Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish (The Duke's Daughters, #1; Windham, #4))
       
        
          “
          Lyra stood shivering in the fo’c’sle and laughed with delight as her beloved Pantalaimon, sleek and powerful, leaped from the water with half a dozen other swift gray shapes. He had to stay close to the ship, of course, for he could never go far from her; but she sensed his desire to speed as far and as fast as he could, for pure exhilaration. She shared his pleasure, but for her it wasn’t simple pleasure, for there was pain and fear in it too. Suppose he loved being a dolphin more than he loved being with her on land? What would she do then? Her friend the able seaman was nearby, and he paused as he adjusted the canvas cover of the forward hatch to look out at the little girl’s dæmon skimming and leaping with the dolphins. His own dæmon, a seagull, had her head tucked under her wing on the capstan. He knew what Lyra was feeling. “I remember when I first went to sea, my Belisaria hadn’t settled on one form, I was that young, and she loved being a porpoise. I was afraid she’d settle like that. There was one old sailorman on my first vessel who could never go ashore at all, because his dæmon had settled as a dolphin, and he could never leave the water. He was a wonderful sailor, best navigator you ever knew; could have made a fortune at the fishing, but he wasn’t happy at it. He was never quite happy till he died and he could be buried at sea.” “Why do dæmons have to settle?” Lyra said. “I want Pantalaimon to be able to change forever. So does he.” “Ah, they always have settled, and they always will. That’s part of growing up. There’ll come a time when you’ll be tired of his changing about, and you’ll want a settled kind of form for him.” “I never will!” “Oh, you will. You’ll want to grow up like all the other girls. Anyway, there’s compensations for a settled form.” “What are they?” “Knowing what kind of person you are. Take old Belisaria. She’s a seagull, and that means I’m a kind of seagull too. I’m not grand and splendid nor beautiful, but I’m a tough old thing and I can survive anywhere and always find a bit of food and company. That’s worth knowing, that is. And when your dæmon settles, you’ll know the sort of person you are.” “But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don’t like?” “Well, then, you’re discontented, en’t you? There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they’re going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.” But it didn’t seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.
          ”
          ”
         
        Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1))
       
        
          “
          Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas.
Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor.
Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of  finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt.
With finocchio in fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot.
In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.
          ”
          ”
         
        Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
       
        
          “
          IT WAS ALMOST December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice. He had seen it both times. Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost a blur at its high speed, go past, and a second later heard the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, a moment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane. At first, he had been only fascinated. He had never seen aircraft so close, for it was against the rules for Pilots to fly over the community. Occasionally, when supplies were delivered by cargo planes to the landing field across the river, the children rode their bicycles to the riverbank and watched, intrigued, the unloading and then the takeoff directed to the west, always away from the community. But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but a needle-nosed single-pilot jet. Jonas, looking around anxiously, had seen others—adults as well as children—stop what they were doing and wait, confused, for an explanation of the frightening event. Then all of the citizens had been ordered to go into the nearest building and stay there. IMMEDIATELY, the rasping voice through the speakers had said. LEAVE YOUR BICYCLES WHERE THEY ARE. Instantly, obediently, Jonas had dropped his bike on its side on the path behind his family’s dwelling. He had run indoors and stayed there, alone. His parents were both at work, and his little sister, Lily, was at the Childcare Center where she spent her after-school hours. Looking through the front window, he had seen no people: none of the busy afternoon crew of Street Cleaners, Landscape Workers, and Food Delivery people who usually populated the community at that time of day. He saw only the abandoned bikes here and there on their sides; an upturned wheel on one was still revolving slowly. He had been frightened then. The sense of his own community silent, waiting, had made his stomach churn. He had trembled. But it had been nothing. Within minutes the speakers had crackled again, and the voice, reassuring now and less urgent, had explained that a Pilot-in-Training had misread his navigational instructions and made a wrong turn. Desperately the Pilot had been trying to make his way back before his error was noticed. NEEDLESS TO SAY, HE WILL BE RELEASED, the voice had said, followed by silence. There was an ironic tone to that final message, as if the Speaker found it amusing; and Jonas had smiled a little, though he knew what a grim statement it had been. For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.
          ”
          ”
         
        Lois Lowry (The Giver (The Giver, #1))
       
        
          “
          After nightfall, when most of the American planes had been taken aboard, a new formation of planes arrived over the task force. First, the drone of their engines could be heard above the cloud cover; then they slipped into view, at about the height of the Lexington’s masts. “These planes were in very good formation,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Stroop. They had their navigation lights on, indicating that they intended to land. But many observers on both carriers and several of the screening vessels noted that something was awry. Captain Sherman of the Lexington counted nine planes, more than could be accounted for among the American planes that were still aloft. They were flying down the Yorktown’s port side, a counterclockwise approach, the reverse of the American landing routine. They were flashing their blinker lights, but none of the Americans could decipher the signal. Electrician’s mate Peter Newberg, stationed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, noticed that the aircraft exhausts were a strange shape and color, and Stroop noted that the running lights were a peculiar shade of red and blue. The TBS (short-range radio circuit) came alive with chatter. One of the nearby destroyers asked, “Have any of our planes got rounded wingtips?” Another voice said, “Damned if those are our planes.” When the first of the strangers made his final turn, he was too low, and the Yorktown’s landing signal officer frantically signaled him to throttle up. “In the last few seconds,” Newberg recalled, “when the pilot was about to plow into the stern under the flight deck, he poured the coal to his engine and pulled up and off to port. The signal light flicked briefly on red circles painted on his wings.” One of the screening destroyers opened fire, and red tracers reached up toward the leading plane. A voice on the Lexington radioed to all ships in the task force, ordering them to hold fire, but the captain of the destroyer replied, “I know Japanese planes when I see them.” Antiaircraft gunners on ships throughout the task force opened fire, and suddenly the night sky lit up as if it was the Fourth of July. But there were friendly planes in the air as well; one of the Yorktown fighter pilots complained: “What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?” On the Yorktown, SBD pilot Harold Buell scrambled out to the port-side catwalk to see what was happening. “In the frenzy of the moment, with gunners firing at both friend and foe, some of us got caught up in the excitement and drew our .45 Colt automatics to join in, blasting away at the red meatballs as they flew past the ship—an offensive gesture about as effective as throwing rocks.” The intruders and the Americans all doused their lights and zoomed back into the cloud cover; none was shot down. It was not the last time in the war that confused Japanese pilots would attempt to land on an American carrier.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
       
        
          “
          Hillary was even better. Like many people, I’d spent the 1990s observing the Clintons from afar. I’d admired Bill’s prodigious talent and intellectual firepower. If I wasn’t always comfortable with the specifics of his so-called triangulations—signing welfare reform legislation with inadequate protections for those who couldn’t find jobs, the tough-on-crime rhetoric that would contribute to an explosion in the federal prison population—I appreciated the skill with which he had steered progressive policy making and the Democratic Party back toward electability. As for the former First Lady, I found her just as impressive, and more sympathetic. Maybe it was because in Hillary’s story I saw traces of what my mother and grandmother had gone through: all of them smart, ambitious women who had chafed under the constraints of their times, having to navigate male egos and social expectations. If Hillary had become guarded, perhaps overly scripted—who could blame her, given the attacks she’d been subjected to? In the Senate, my favorable opinion of her had been largely confirmed. In all our interactions, she came across as hardworking, personable, and always impeccably prepared. She also had a good, hearty laugh that tended to lighten the mood of everyone around her.
          ”
          ”
         
        Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
       
        
          “
          - Smoking in silence as she concentrated on navigating through the increasingly heavy morning traffic, Strike noted how much he liked making her laugh. He also recognized that he felt much happier, much more comfortable, sitting here in this ramshackle Land Rover talking inconsequential nonsense with Robin than he had felt last night at dinner with Elin.
          ”
          ”
         
        Robert Galbraith (Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike, #3))
       
        
          “
          I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration’s choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.
          ”
          ”
         
        Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
       
        
          “
          Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes.
          ”
          ”
         
        Matthew Dixon (The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation)
       
        
          “
          The word we like to use here is “reframe.” What data, information, or insight can you put in front of your customer that reframes the way they think about their business—how they operate or even how they compete? That’s what your customers are really looking for. Remember what we saw in our customer survey? Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes.
          ”
          ”
         
        Matthew Dixon (The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation)
       
        
          “
          European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects in history. Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world. The Arabs, to name one example, did not conquer Egypt, Spain or India in order to discover something they did not know. The Romans, Mongols and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth – not of knowledge. In contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories. James Cook was not the first explorer to think this way. The Portuguese and Spanish voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries already did. Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama explored the coasts of Africa and, while doing so, seized control of islands and harbours. Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America and immediately claimed sovereignty over the new lands for the kings of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan found a way around the world, and simultaneously laid the foundation for the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.
          ”
          ”
         
        Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
       
        
          “
          The Martian troops, moreover, had no control over where their ships were to land. Their ships were controlled by fully automatic pilot-navigators, and these electronic devices were set by technicians on Mars so as to make the ships land at particular points on Earth, regardless of how awful the military situation might be down there. The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin—one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.
          ”
          ”
         
        Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
       
        
          “
          NASA's Mars rover Perseverance landing guided by Swati Mohan ||
The Supreme Pontiff of Hinduism, Jagatguru Mahasannidhanam Bhagavan Nithyananda Paramashivam, on behalf of KAILASA - the Enlightened Civilizational Nation and 2 Billion Hindus worldwide congratulates and blesses Swati Mohan, an Indian MIT scientist who was responsible as guidance, navigation and controls operations lead for NASA's Mars rover Perseverance successful landing.
          ”
          ”
         
        The SPH JGM HDH Nithyananda Paramashivam, Reviver of KAILASA - the Ancient Enlightened Hindu Nation
       
        
          “
          A strange terrain, that: the dark continent. No man's land and no one woman's: a lush wilderness to be explored jointly by comrades, no barbed wire, no land mines, but a dangerous place all the same, a hot jungle where only desire could be quenched. If you did not burn, you could not go there. A small region — perhaps no larger than the fleshy plains between the hip bones. Perhaps no bigger than a bed: the sheeted moors, pillows mounded into mountain passes, quilts scooped into canyons, woman-and-man-made lakes, perilous passages only lovers could navigate. A country, but not a nation. A trackless peninsula, perpetually discovered, recovered, a land you could return to and yet remain forever lost.
          ”
          ”
         
        Laura Kalpakian (Dark Continent and Other Stories)
       
        
          “
          There’s a general trend in the media (except on Fox News) to prove that this is an irreparably racist nation in which hate crimes occur every day. And comparing it to some magical land in your head that doesn’t exist, holding it to some impossible standard, doesn’t help. If America were a quarterback in the NFL, these assholes would declare, “Every incomplete pass is unacceptable. I have zero tolerance for incompletions,” rather than focus on his 70 percent completion rate.
          ”
          ”
         
        Adam Carolla (I'm Your Emotional Support Animal: Navigating Our All Woke, No Joke Culture)
       
        
          “
          Our affordable SEO packages in Delhi provide off page SEO web 2.0 and white hat technology services. Website that is optimized for search engines focuses mainly on the relevancy as well as organic ranking. The optimization is considered best using White Hat SEO practices. We have a specialized team that focuses on white hat SEO technologies for bringing better traffic to the website. The White hat technologies of SEO packages in Delhi include backlinking, link building, keyword analysis and improve link popularity. Off page SEO packages provides visibility of website in the search engine result pages.
The goal of our SEO Packages in Delhi is to generate organic traffic and awareness for a website. We prefer using high quality content that meets the visitors’ needs and also solve their problems. Using SEO keyword research tools, we discover the most relevant keywords that is must for your site content. We try to follow best practices while creating meta descriptions for each and every page on the website. This helps search engines and users discover content appropriately. While offering SEO packages in Delhi based on white hat technologies, we make sure that the sites are easy to navigate by the users.
Online SEO promotion is the vital part of marketing, introduce now, that too within economical prices. Reach more people and improve the higher chance of success.
Optimizing your On-page SEO is imperative if you want to target leads. However, it does not mean that you would continue SEO on page optimization and neglect the other channels like the social media. In order to get the best results, one needs to target all the channels with the user landing up on your website. Having a great user-friendly website with all the relevant information is ultimately help you to reap benefits.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ezeeonline.in
       
        
          “
          And very often, seemingly incongruous elements from the realm of fable and myth lend an ironic congruence to the concrete world of men. All through history, a generous fabrication of mythology has helped politics navigate the awkward corners in which its protagonists land themselves.
          ”
          ”
         
        Manu S. Pillai (The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History)
       
        
          “
          But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments; 15 and if ye shall reject my statutes, and if your soul abhor mine ordinances, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant; 16 I also will do this unto you: I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and make the soul to pine away; and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. 17 And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be smitten before your enemies: they that hate you shall rule over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you. 18 And if ye will not yet for these things hearken unto me, then I will chastise you seven times more for your sins. 19 And I will break the pride of your power: and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass; 20 and your strength shall be spent in vain; for your land shall not yield its increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruit.
          ”
          ”
         
        Anonymous (Holy Bible: American Standard Version - New & Old Testaments: E-Reader Formatted ASV w/ Easy Navigation)
       
        
          “
          I have navigated so much of my life on autopilot, moving mechanically through the more routine parts of my day. Then, when the spiritual parts arrive—meetings, speaking, praying, writing, engagements—I ask that His Spirit fill, inhabit and lead me. That is certainly a good thing, but not His best thing. It was never God's intention for any of us to live our lives in the land of perpetually playing spiritual hokey-pokey.
          ”
          ”
         
        Kim Meeder (Encountering Our Wild God: Ways to Experience His Untamable Presence Every Day)
       
        
          “
          From the opinion of California Supreme Court Justice H. C. Murray: When Columbus first landed upon the shores of this continent… he imagined that he had accomplished the object of his expedition, and that the Island of San Salvador was one of those islands of the Chinese Sea lying near the extremity of India… Acting upon the hypothesis, he gave to the Islanders the name Indian. From that time… The American Indian and the Mongolian or Asiatic, were regarded as the same type of human species. OLDER BROTHER Murray’s reasoning here is breathtaking in its twisted audacity. The legitimacy of categorizing “Asiatics” in such a way as to justify lumping them into the clause “Blacks and Indians” (in order to deny them the right to testify against Whites) is based on the subjective state of mind of a single man (Christopher Columbus) at a particular historical moment hundreds of years ago, who happened at that moment to be spectacularly and egregiously mistaken about where on the globe he had drifted into; thus a navigational misunderstanding of the world itself becomes the justification for a legally binding category.
          ”
          ”
         
        Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown)
       
        
          “
          The mantle of progress shifted, however, in the early modern period as a result of two great maritime expeditions that took place at the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of six years in the 1490s, the foundations were laid for a major disruption to the rhythm of long-established systems of exchange. First Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, paving the way for two great land masses that were hitherto untouched to connect to Europe and beyond; then, just a few years later, Vasco da Gama successfully navigated the southern tip of Africa, sailing on to India, opening new sea routes in the process. The discoveries changed patterns of interaction and trade, and effected a remarkable change in the world’s political and economic centre of gravity. Suddenly, western Europe was transformed from its position as a regional backwater into the fulcrum of a sprawling communication, transportation and trading system: at a stroke, it became the new mid-point between east and west.
          ”
          ”
         
        Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World)
       
        
          “
          How does one enter Iliseeum if they cannot do so by land or sea?” Jasper didn’t answer for a long moment. “You know, you would’ve learned about it when you took the throne.” His gaze touched mine for a brief moment, and I knew what he meant. That Casteel would’ve learned when I took the Crown. “You don’t travel over or through the Mountains of Nyktos. You travel under them.” An icy wave of surprise scuttled through Casteel. “The tunnel system?” Jasper nodded. “The one from Evaemon leads into Iliseeum if—and that’s a big if—you know how to navigate it.” “Damn,” Kieran muttered, scrubbing a hand over his head. “All those years messing around in those tunnels and we could’ve ended up in the damn Lands of the Gods.
          ”
          ”
         
        Jennifer L. Armentrout (The Crown of Gilded Bones (Blood and Ash, #3))
       
        
          “
          When Elly had first come to the fortress the seneschal had told her she would become lost, reassuring her that there was no shame in having someone point the way. After all, she had informed her, the fortress had been visited by several delegations from human lands, and all of them had been hopeless at navigating its courtyards and balconies. Everyone understood that a half-elf would need additional help; they all expected her to require assistance.
At that moment, Elly had sworn to herself she would never, ever ask for directions.
          ”
          ”
         
        L. J. Amber (Song of the Wild Knight – Part One: Song of the Squire)
       
        
          “
          Many pick-up artist guides written by middle-aged men are like trail guides to a location that has since been sown with land mines that focus on all the types of pretty birds you will see on your hike If you actually care to navigate the region, first and foremost, you need a guide to how to not step on mines because those things will screw you up.
          ”
          ”
         
        Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships)
       
        
          “
          Ally Pyx is a writer from Tijuana, México. A place for brave people who are full of passion. To survive these lands, you must live beyond the heart. And this author is an expert at that. 
Ally can navigate the most fantastic universes, while depicting the most human emotions. A beautiful portrait of our inner self through magic and unexplored worlds. She has many talents that identify her as a visual artist, writer, photographer, journalist and creative director. And is always urging us to open our hearts, senses and spirits. 
Because above all, Ally’s mission is to connect with something deep. And to show how the world looks through her eyes.” 
-Paul Martín del Campo.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ally Pyx (The Omen Coven: Fiery Heart)
       
        
          “
          And he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.
          ”
          ”
         
        Anonymous (Holy Bible: American Standard Version - New & Old Testaments: E-Reader Formatted ASV w/ Easy Navigation)
       
        
          “
          Israel in Egypt God called Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) for a land that his descendants would receive as their own. Why, then, did God multiply Israel into a nation of two million in Egypt rather than Canaan? There seem to be at least five reasons: First, it was necessary that Israel be formed as a nation in circumstances that kept her distinct and unique. In Canaan, Jacob’s family was almost absorbed by the existing population (see Genesis 34). In Egypt, on the other hand, Israel never risked assimilation; the Egyptians took care to segregate the Hebrews because they scorned shepherds (see Genesis 46:28–47:6). Second, in Egypt, God preserved Israel from the moral corruption that was so rife in Canaan. While the Egyptians were pagans, their religious and social practices were not as debauched (the Canaanites practiced child sacrifice and ritual prostitution). Third, Israel would be God’s instrument of judgment against the wicked Canaanites. God was waiting until “the sin of the Amorites [the Canaanites] . . . reached its full measure” (Genesis 15:16). Then He would bring His people in to annihilate them. Fourth, Israel had to learn to trust God rather than men. As long as there was a pharaoh who remembered Joseph, the Hebrews were treated with respect. But when a pharaoh arose who did not “know” Joseph, they fell quickly from favor. Clearly, dependence on God rather than political alliances was the only way for Israel to survive. Finally, God desired to birth Israel in circumstances that would display His power and glory. As Israel multiplied even under oppression, it became evident to everyone that God’s blessing was upon His people.
          ”
          ”
         
        The Navigators (Exodus (LifeChange Book 14))
       
        
          “
          Now therefore fear Jehovah, and serve him in sincerity and in truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River, and in Egypt; and serve ye Jehovah. 15 And if it seem evil unto you to serve Jehovah, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve Jehovah.
          ”
          ”
         
        Anonymous (Holy Bible: American Standard Version - New & Old Testaments: E-Reader Formatted ASV w/ Easy Navigation)
       
        
          “
          and call it an ‘About us’ page. After this, mention all your contact details in a different page, mention contact time if required. Name it the ‘Contact’ page. Besides these primary pages you can add more pages depending on your requirements. But make it sure each and every page should be logical and appropriate. Unnecessary page creation can make your website more complicated, confusing and less user friendly. After creating the pages you need to focus on the navigation section of your website. After landing on your home page you have to guide your visitor how and where to go and make his tour complete and well-informed. For doing this, create a common header and footer section for all pages and put links of all pages on it. This will give an identical navigation bar to the visitor. He can move easily from one page to another. If he is on the upper section of a particular page he doesn’t need to scroll down to the footer to go another page; he can use the header section of it. And if he is on the lower
          ”
          ”
         
        Shirsendu Sengupta (Online Marketing Mantra - Open Secrets)
       
        
          “
          The biggest revolution of the past 50,000 years of human history was not the advent of the Internet, the growth of the industrial age out of the seeds of the Enlightenment, or the development of modern methods of long-distance navigation. Rather, it was when a few people living in several locations around the world decided to stop gathering from the land, abiding by limits set in place by nature, and started growing their food.
          ”
          ”
         
        Spencer Wells (Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization)
       
        
          “
          During the first century ravens or crows were often taken on board “Viking Knarr’s,” to be released thinking that they would fly in the direction of land. The lookout would observe the direction the birds flew in, so that the navigator could follow their course. Since the crow's nest is high from the vessel’s center of gravity it is subject to violent motion in relatively calm or moderate seas. Any amount of movement of the ship is amplified, causing even seasoned sailors to become sea-sick. Therefore, being sent to the crow's nest was certainly not for everyone.
More recently but still prior to the advent of radar, when the visibility from the bridge of the ship was inhibited by fog, heavy seas or limited night vision lookouts were posted on the bow or high on a mast, above the low lying sea fog. By tradition the protected structure fitted to the foremast high above the deck was named the crow’s nest in deference to the earlier Viking traditions. During the 19th century this vantage point was simply made out of a barrel lashed to the highest mast that allowed the lookout to look ahead for land, other ships, flotsam or other obstructions. In later years the crow’s nest was sometimes enclosed and even electrically heated.
As a young midshipman I was assigned to the bow as lookout. Peering into the dark of night I suddenly saw a bright light on the horizon. Sighting this light was a thrill and an experience that validated my usefulness! Excited with my find and without a moment’s hesitation I hurried back to where I was within shouting distance from the ships bridge and loudly announced the light as being 2 points on the starboard bow. Proud of my announced discovery, I returned to my station at the bow only to discover that what I had reported was now obviously the tip of a Sickle Moon rising in the east. At the time everyone had a good laugh but I was told that I did the right thing. It took a while but eventually I lived it down and now it makes for a good “Sea Story!”!
          ”
          ”
         
        Hank Bracker
       
        
          “
          Dr. Ginochio Gyves would have been the first man on the moon except for a trifling error of navigation. He lands. He sees a wild landscape, small pseudo-horses, and little brown people. But they are little Mexican people and little Mexican donkeys or burros, and he is in Mexico rather than on the moon. I always get those two places confused myself.
          ”
          ”
         
        R.A. Lafferty
       
        
          “
          There is evidence to support claims that 962 years prior to Columbus setting foot in the Bahamas, Saint Brendan, an Irish monastic priest known as “Saint Brendan the Navigator,” looked for the “Isle of the Blessed.” What island he found has been lost to history and is still unknown; however, legend names it “Saint Brendan’s Island.” Many believe that in his journeys across the Atlantic Ocean he actually landed in America in 1150, or 342 years prior to Columbus’ discovery.”
Note: Saint Patrick ’s Day was the day of my parent’s anniversary.
          ”
          ”
         
        Hank Bracker
       
        
          “
          It is a curious mystery [...] that the exact same notions of the Seven Sages as the bringers of civilization in the remotest antiquity, and of the preservation and repromulgation of “writings on stones from before the flood,” turn up in the supposedly completely distinct and unrelated culture of Ancient Egypt.
Of the greatest interest, at any rate, is the [Temple of Horus]’s idea of itself expressed in the acres of enigmatic inscriptions that cover its walls. These inscriptions, the so-called Edfu Building Texts, take us back to a very remote period called the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods”--and these gods, it transpired, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the “Homeland of the Primeval Ones,” in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, a terrible disaster--a true cataclysm of flood and fire [...]-- overtook this island, where “the earliest mansions of the gods” had been founded, destroying it utterly, inundating all its holy places and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these gods of the early primeval age were navigators) to “wander” the world.
[...] Of particular interest is a passage at Edfu in which we read of a circular, water-filled “channel” surrounding the original sacred domain that lay at the heart of the island of the Primeval Ones--a ring of water that was intended to fortify and protect that domain. In this there is, of course, a direct parallel to Atlantis, where the sacred domain on which stood the temple and palace of the god, whom Plato names as “Poseidon,” was likewise surrounded by a ring of water, itself placed in the midst of further such concentric rings separated by rings of land, again with the purpose of fortification and protection.
Intriguingly, Plato also hints at the immediate cause of the earthquakes and floods that destroyed Atlantis. In the Timaeus, as a prelude to his account of the lost civilization and its demise, he reports that the Egyptian priests from whom Solon received the story began by speaking of a celestial cataclysm: “There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them being by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means. Your own [i.e. the Greeks’] story of how Phaeton, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burned up things on earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on earth.
          ”
          ”
         
        Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
       
        
          “
          The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends... are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land.
          ”
          ”
         
        Saul D. Alinsky (Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals)
       
        
          “
          calls to adventure are puzzles waiting to be solved. Anyone can apply, but the price of admission is paid in imagination. As journeys unfold, new challenges arise and pressures mount. These successive tolls must too be paid in creativity and ingenuity, as they were by history’s most imaginative minds. The only way that Jason can claim his rightful place as ruler of Iolcus, Greece, is by retrieving the fabled Golden Fleece from distant lands. The problem? Everyone considers the task impossible, fraught with terrifying perils certain to kill any man. Jason isn’t so sure. He assembles a mighty team of warriors—the Argonauts—and builds the largest ship ever constructed. He then figures out how to successfully navigate the legendary maze of crushing rocks known as the Symplegades, yoke fire-breathing, bronze-hoofed oxen, trick a mighty army guarding the Fleece into ravaging itself to pieces, and drug a sleepless dragon into its first slumber. Four months after departing, Jason
          ”
          ”
         
        Sean Patrick (Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century)
       
        
          “
          Many calls to adventure are puzzles waiting to be solved. Anyone can apply, but the price of admission is paid in imagination. As journeys unfold, new challenges arise and pressures mount. These successive tolls must too be paid in creativity and ingenuity, as they were by history’s most imaginative minds. The only way that Jason can claim his rightful place as ruler of Iolcus, Greece, is by retrieving the fabled Golden Fleece from distant lands. The problem? Everyone considers the task impossible, fraught with terrifying perils certain to kill any man. Jason isn’t so sure. He assembles a mighty team of warriors—the Argonauts—and builds the largest ship ever constructed. He then figures out how to successfully navigate the legendary maze of crushing rocks known as the Symplegades, yoke fire-breathing, bronze-hoofed oxen, trick a mighty army guarding the Fleece into ravaging itself to pieces, and drug a sleepless
          ”
          ”
         
        Sean Patrick (Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century)
       
        
          “
          When Jayne Juvan, a partner at the law firm Roetzel & Andress in Cleveland, Ohio, started using social media, very, very few lawyers used these tools. Because her profession is so conservative, many of the attorneys she interacted with didn't see the opportunity. After only a few months of blogging, Crain's Cleveland Business interviewed Juvan on the use of social media by lawyers. In her first year of practice, she landed a client via social media. That was a game changer, because her colleagues began to see her as an owner, not just an employee. When she started to land wins, it became harder to navigate her profession because the legal industry was quite competitive. But, as she shares, "I didn't back off, because I now knew how powerful social media was." Good thing. When she was a third- and fourth-year associate, in 2007 to 2008, the economy collapsed. Her class experienced deep layoffs across the industry, which she sidestepped, in part because of her social media efforts. Most of the accolades she has received can be traced to social media. When she was considered for promotion to partner, the fact that she was being followed by prominent professionals on Twitter bolstered her case in a major way, as the CEO saw the potential of these relationships. According to Catalyst, only 20 percent of partners in law firms are women, and only 16 percent of them have $500,000 worth of business or more.6 Jayne Juvan made partner at age thirty-two, and at thirty-four, her billing reports placed her in the small percentage of women with $500,000-plus of business. Once Juvan had acquired the basic competencies involved in practicing law, social media became her distinctive strength, propelling her into the partnership ranks at her law firm.
          ”
          ”
         
        Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
       
        
          “
          As I get older and navigate the ups and downs of life, I’m constantly rendered speechless when I think about the sacrifices my parents made. My father came to the United States to help my grandmother; he knew nothing about this new land and had to start his life all over. He used to share stories of those first few months in the states, and there are a couple I always remember when I’m confronted with moments of confusion and uncertainty.
          ”
          ”
         
        Diana R. A. Morris (Lachesis' Allotment: A Short Collection of Notes, Observations, Questions, and Thoughts)