Living Through The Meantime Quotes

Don’t give up. Push through the droughts. Channel the inevitable disappointments back into your craft. Break molds. Think. Create. But most importantly, stay alive. And in the meantime, make it about others. That seems to work. Stay strong. Live on. And power to the local dreamer.

To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it’s happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will often come around again. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. In the meantime, we can deal only with what’s in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.

Throw a zombie in the middle of the ocean, and hey, it’ll get back to land eventually. But in the meantime, it’s going to fuck up some sharks, probably an octopus or two, and, damn-straight, any unlucky fisherman it gets its rotting hands on.

Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window. . .that was the moment, Maxi. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time." "And what we've always been is. . .?" "Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs. . .planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead.

Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying, in the meantime, that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move.

He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined.

It was nice to hear someone familiar. 'How have you been?' Hazel cleared her throat. 'So I need to start networking a little, as they say. Do you have the phone number of anyone who might be looking to hire some help?' 'I don't have a phone,' Liver answered. Hazel felt her pulse speed up. 'No phone? Of any kind?' Her voice was nearly cracking with excitement. 'So how do people get ahold of you? Your family? Your friends?' 'I've succumbed to neither affliction,' he answered. 'What about women?' she asked, admittedly changing her voice to be a little flirtatious. Hazel decided she'd misjudged him. Anyone getting through life without a phone had skills she wanted to acquire. Rare capabilities that attracted the new Hazel. 'I just meet women in this bar. Mainly they use me to help them reach bottom. I'm like a brick they grab onto midair. Sleeping with me helps them admit their lives have become unmanageable. They realize they want and deserve something more, and then their recovery process can begin. I get laid in the meantime. Win-win.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. Meantime,

Education about Yemen will come through customers’ engagement with the product. And in the meantime you’ll employ actual Yemeni people. And you’ll do something tangible. And you’ll make a living. And you won’t have to ask for donations. And it won’t have to be about Islam. You’re not selling Islamic coffee beans. Sell Yemeni beans. Do that, and do it well, and the rest will follow.

But the sun was shining, and some of the people in the world had been left alive, and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world—or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower: for would its kind not come up again in the spring? come up, if necessary, among, between, or out of—beastly inconvenient—the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere? And was not this something to be thankful for? And in the meantime, while people did live they would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat. They would even get up nonsense, through wars, through divorce, through evictions and jiltings and taxes. And, in the meantime, she was going to have another baby. The weather was bidding her bon voyage.

Like the Church the individual Christian will not be able to escape the deep ambiguities of this-wordly existence whether in its cultural, social, political or other aspects, and he too will inevitably be a mixture of good and evil, with a compromised life, so that he can only live eschatologically in the judgment and mercy of God, putting off the old man and putting on Christ anew each day, always aware that even when he has done all that it is his duty to do he remains an unprofitable servant, but summoned to look away from himself to Christ, remembering that he is dead through the cross of Christ but alive and risen in Him. His true being is hid with Christ in God. The whole focus of his vision and the whole perspective of his life in Christ’s name will be directed to the unveiling of that reality of his new being at the parousia, but meantime he lives day by day out of the Word and Sacraments. As one baptized into Christ he is told by God’s Word that his sins are already forgiven and forgotten by God, that he has been justified once for all, and that he does not belong to himself but to Christ who loved him and gave Himself for him. As one summoned to the Holy Table he is commanded by the Word of God to live only in such a way that he feeds upon Christ, not in such a way that he feeds upon his own activities or lives out of his own capital of alleged spirituality. He lives from week to week, by drawing his life and strength from the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, nourished by the body and blood of Christ, and in the strength of that communion he must live and work until Christ comes again. As often as he partakes of the Eucharist he partakes of the self-consecration of Jesus Christ who sanctified Himself for our sakes that we might be sanctified in reality and be presented to the Father as those whom He has redeemed and perfected (or consecrated) together with Himself in one. Here He is called to lift up his heart to the ascended Lord, and to look forward to the day when the full reality of his new being in Christ will be unveiled, making Scripture and Sacrament no longer necessary.

There are all degrees of proficiency in the use men make of this instructive world where we are boarded and schooled and apprenticed. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three degrees of progress. One class lives to the utility of the symbol, as the majority of men do, regarding health and wealth as the chief good. Another class live about this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet and artist and the sensual school in philosophy. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified and these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third spiritual perception. I see in society the neophytes of all these classes, the class especially of young men who in their best knowledge of the sign have a misgiving that there is yet an unattained substance and they grope and sigh and aspire long in dissatisfaction, the sand-blind adorers of the symbol meantime chirping and scoffing and trampling them down. I see moreover that the perfect man - one to a millennium - if so many, traverses the whole scale and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly; then also has a clear eye for its beauty; and lastly wears it lightly as a robe which he can easily throw off, for he sees the reality and divine splendor of the inmost nature bursting through each chink and cranny.

The complexity and freedom that have been thrust upon us, and that our ancestors had fought so hard to achieve, are a challenge we must find ways to master. If we do, the lives of our descendants will be infinitely more enriched than anything previously experienced on this planet. If we do not, we run the risk of frittering away our energies on contradictory, meaningless goals. But in the meantime how do we know where to invest psychic energy? There is no one out there to tell us, “Here is a goal worth spending your life on.” Because there is no absolute certainty to which to turn, each person must discover ultimate purpose on his or her own. Through trial and error, through intense cultivation, we can straighten out the tangled skein of conflicting goals, and choose the one that will give purpose to action. Self-knowledge—an ancient remedy so old that its value is easily forgotten—is the process through which one may organize conflicting options. “Know thyself” was carved over the entrance to the Delphic oracle, and ever since untold pious epigrams have extolled its virtue. The reason the advice is so often repeated is that it works. We need, however, to rediscover afresh every generation what these words mean, what the advice actually implies for each individual. And to do that it is useful to express it in terms of current knowledge, and envision a contemporary method for its application.

Mister Rogers’ constancy is what stayed with people. (This is a possible explanation for why studies have shown that children from lower-income homes, who often have to deal with inconsistency in their lives, showed a greater positive impact from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood episodes than their non-poor peers.) But for many people, that realization came only after they were able to look at Neighborhood through the lens of time; in the meantime, Fred had to resist the temptation to be something other than he was.

He hated it so very much I almost felt sorry for him. He finally resorted to standing over me while I cast the final spell, noting down every small thing I did, even the sneeze from breathing in too deep over the cinnamon, and when I was finished he tried it again himself. It was very strange watching him, like a delayed and flattering mirror: he did everything exactly the way I had done, but more gracefully, with perfect precision, enunciating every syllable I had slurred, but he wasn’t halfway through before I could tell it wasn’t working. I twitched to interrupt him. He shot me a furious look, so I gave up and let him finish working himself into a thicket, as I thought of it, and when he was done and nothing whatsoever had happened, I said, “You shouldn’t have said miko there.” “You did!” he snapped. I shrugged helplessly: I didn’t doubt that I had, though to be perfectly honest I didn’t remember. But it hadn’t been an important thing to remember. “It was all right when I did it,” I said, “but when you did it, it was wrong. As though—you were following a trail, but a tree had fallen down in the meantime, or some hedge grew up, and you insisted on continuing on anyway, instead of going around it—” “There are no hedges!” he roared. “It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.

It had been hard enough to drive past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and the terrible air, and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, I was told. Was the smell of excrement only on the periphery, from the iridescent black lake? No; that stench went right through Dharavi. Even more astonishing was to read in a Bombay magazine an article about Papu's suburb of Sion, in which the slum of Dharavi was written about almost as a bohemian feature of the place, something that added spice to humdrum middle-class life. Bombay clearly innoculated its residents in some way. I had another glimpse of Dharavi some time later, when I was going in a taxi to the domestic airport at Santa Cruz. The taxi-driver - a Muslim from Hyderabad, full of self-respect, nervous about living in Bombay, fearful of sinking, planning to go back home soon, and in the meantime nervously particular about his car and his clothes - the taxi-driver showed the apartment blocks on one side of the airport road where hutment dwellers had been rehoused. In the other direction he showed the marsh on which Dharavi had grown and, away in the distance, the low black line of the famous slum. Seen from here, Dharavi looked artificial, unnecessary even in Bombay: allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a vote-bank, and hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there. And yet people lived there, subject to this extra exploitation, because in Bombay, once you had a place to stay, you could make money.

Nature shows that survival is a practice. Sometimes it flourishes---lays on flat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey---and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn't do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. It attends to this work each and every day. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans. To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it's happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will one day be past history. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. But one things is certain: we will simply have new things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again. In the meantime, we can deal only with what's in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.

Cultivation of a Religious Mind As an example, we ought to have Christian minds. Our difficulty is that we have a secular mind and a religious mind. With the secular mind, we do most everything that we do, and then we have a little private party for what we call the religious minds. With our religious mind we try to serve the Lord the best we can. It does not work that way. The Christian should not have any secular mind at all. If you are a Christian, you should “seek the things that are above”—there should be no worldly mind in you. Some might ask, “How can I pursue my studies? How can I do my housework? How can I carry on my business?” You carry on your business, do your housework and pursue your studies by making them a part of an offering to God as certainly as the money you put in the offering plate or anything else you give openly and publicly to God. Living the crucified life precludes this divided life. A life that is partly secular, partly spiritual, partly of this world and partly of the world above is not what the New Testament teaches at all. As Christians, we can turn some of the most hopeless jobs into wonderful spiritual prayer meetings, if we will simply turn them over to God. Nicolas Herman, who was commonly known as Brother Lawrence, was a simple dishwasher in the institution where he lived. He said he did those dishes for the glory of God. When he was through with his humble work, he would fall down flat on the floor and worship God. Whatever he was told to do, he did it for [35] the crucified life: how to live out a deeper christian life the glory of God. He testified, “I wouldn’t as much as pick up a straw from the floor, but I did it for the glory of God.” One saint praised God every time he drank a glass of water. He did not make a production out of it, but in his heart, he thanked God. Every time I leave my house, I look to God, expecting Him to bless me and keep me on my way. Every time I am flying in the air, I expect Him to keep me there, land me safely and bring me back. If He wants me in heaven more than He wants me on earth, then He will answer no to that prayer and it will be all over—but I will be with Him over there. In the meantime, while He wants me here, I will thank Him every hour and every day for everything. Let us do away with our secular and worldly minds and cultivate sanctified minds. We have to do worldly jobs, but if we do them with sanctified minds, they no longer are worldly but are as much a part of our offering to God as anything else we give to Him.

In the meantime, I tried my best to acclimate to my new life in the middle of nowhere. I had to get used to the fact that I lived twenty miles from the nearest grocery store. That I couldn’t just run next door when I ran out of eggs. That there was no such thing as sushi. Not that it would matter, anyway. No cowboy on the ranch would touch it. That’s bait, they’d say, laughing at any city person who would convince themselves that such a food was tasty. And the trash truck: there wasn’t one. In this strange new land, there was no infrastructure for dealing with trash. There were cows in my yard, and they pooped everywhere--on the porch, in the yard, even on my car if they happened to be walking near it when they dropped a load. There wasn’t a yard crew to clean it up. I wanted to hire people, but there were no people. The reality of my situation grew more crystal clear every day. One morning, after I choked down a bowl of cereal, I looked outside the window and saw a mountain lion siting on the hood of my car, licking his paws--likely, I imagined, after tearing a neighboring rancher’s wife from limb to limb and eating her for breakfast. I darted to the phone and called Marlboro Man, telling him there was a mountain lion sitting on my car. My heart beat inside my chest. I had no idea mountain lions were indigenous to the area. “It’s probably just a bobcat,” Marlboro Man reassured me. I didn’t believe him. “No way--it’s huge,” I cried. “It’s seriously got to be a mountain lion!” “I’ve gotta go,” he said. Cows mooed in the background. I hung up the phone, incredulous at Marlboro Man’s lack of concern, and banged on the window with the palm of my hand, hoping to scare the wild cat away. But it only looked up and stared at me through the window, imagining me on a plate with a side of pureed trout. My courtship with Marlboro Man, filled with fizzy romance, hadn’t prepared me for any of this; not the mice I heard scratching in the wall next to my bed, not the flat tires I got from driving my car up and down the jagged gravel roads. Before I got married, I didn’t know how to use a jack or a crowbar…and I didn’t want to have to learn now. I didn’t want to know that the smell in the laundry room was a dead rodent. I’d never smelled a dead rodent in my life: why, when I was supposed to be a young, euphoric newlywed, was I being forced to smell one now? During the day, I was cranky. At night, I was a mess. I hadn’t slept through the night once since we returned from our honeymoon. Besides the nausea, whose second evil wave typically hit right at bedtime, I was downright spooked. As I lay next to Marlboro Man, who slept like a baby every night, I thought of monsters and serial killers: Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. In the utter silence of the country, every tiny sound was amplified; I was certain if I let myself go to sleep, the murderer outside our window would get me.

ceremony rehearsal, and one of the groomsmen dared to suggest that Evan might want to take a small sedative before the real wedding, which, as you can imagine, did not go over well. Oh, and Francois threatened to quit halfway through the final menu tasting.” Harmony cringed. “Yikes.” “I think if Francois would have quit, I would have too.” I sighed. “I believe it. I’ve never seen you use the coffee table as an ottoman before.” I smiled and wiggled my toes. “I don’t know why not.” “Well, as you explained to me, this here is an authentic Jason Partillo design,” Harmony replied, a lilt in her voice as she gently needled me with her elbow. I laughed softly. “Are you trying to say that those of us who live in diva houses shouldn’t throw shoes?” She barked a laugh. “No. This Evan guy sounds like he left diva in the dust a long time ago and plowed straight into narcissistic jerk land.” “Can’t argue with that.” I closed my eyes, my head leaning against the back of the sofa. “Two days and then it’s over and they won’t be my problem anymore. I have fifteen weddings between now and June. That’s going to feel like a walk in the park compared to this nonsense.” “And in the meantime, you get the rest of the night off to spend with me and your bestie!” Harmony said. “Assuming I can stay awake, that is,” I replied, peeling my eyes open. “I should have left room in the schedule for a pre-dinner nap.” Harmony laughed and sprang off the sofa to continue getting ready. “Do you think I should wear my black tights with the red sweater dress, or can I get away with jeans? Is the place we’re going fancy fancy or fancy-ish?” I smiled at my sister’s nervous musings. She wasn’t one to ask for my fashion advice, mostly because I preferred my clothes hole-free and didn’t own anything with spikes or studs on it. While she could dress up when the situation warranted, Harmony tended toward a certain grunge-chic aesthetic with colorful streaks in her otherwise bleached-blonde hair, four piercings in each ear, and a penchant for artfully torn clothing and bomber jackets. And she’d recently added a small crystal stud to her nose. “It’s fancy-adjacent,” I told her. “Go with the leggings and dress.” Harmony nodded, even as her teeth worked nervously at her lower lip. I smiled. “She’s going to love you, Harmony. Stop stressing.” Holly Boldt, my good friend and fellow witch, was coming into the Seattle Haven to speak at a potion making conference, and we’d made plans

Our days are spent trying to "get through" tasks, in order to get them "out of the way", with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we'll finally get around to what really matters - and worrying, in the meantime, that we don't measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move.

But have eternal life.” We are destined to die physically and we exist in a kind of living death in the meantime. While nothing will halt the process of decay, and nothing will prevent the end of physical life, God’s grace will not allow death to reign supreme. Evil will not have the final word. Life—eternal, incorruptible, abundant life—is offered to all who will receive it through faith.

THE GREEK word for disciple, mathetes, was a very meaningful word in the Greek world. Plato developed a form of thinking or a philosophy of life that separated the physical and spiritual realm. This disconnection between the physical and spiritual still affects our thinking today, as is apparent when we reference the secular versus the sacred. That form of thinking that Plato developed is called Platonic thought. Plato had a follower named Aristotle. Aristotle was a follower of Plato. He was a student and he studied the Platonic philosophy. Aristotle, Plato’s student, developed schools called academies, where he would train the next generation in Plato’s thinking. So Aristotle, Plato’s student, bought into the worldview of Plato, and began developing schools to train other students in this thinking of Plato. Part of this organized approach by Aristotle is known as Aristotelian logic. Aristotle systematized and organized the thinking of Plato and made it transferable. Out of these schools there were birthed men and women who now went into the marketplace with this Platonic worldview. They became doctors and lawyers and teachers, but they had this worldview. In the meantime, Rome overtook Greece. The big military machine of Rome defeated Greece and Greece was now a defeated nation and now being occupied by Roman power. But there was a problem in Rome. The folks who had been trained in Greece with the thinking of Plato and the system of Aristotle were infiltrating Roman culture. We call it the Hellenization of the Romans. Rome was being “Greek-enized,” even though it was the prominent military power. The Greek influence permeated the Roman culture because of the power of discipleship. This is the point of discipleship. When Jesus discussed discipleship, it was in the cultural context of Greek culture influencing the Roman Empire through the power of discipleship. Jesus Christ takes the concept of discipleship and intimates, “I’m looking for a generation of followers who are so saturated in My thinking, My worldview, and My orientation that when integrated into the culture in which they are situated, the culture will have to live with the influence of Jesus Christ, who permeates the culture.

Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying, in the meantime, that we don’t measure up,

Spindletop Fishtails flap and screw through earth’s cradled womb through heaving sands and ocean floors for fortunes crude and wildcat dreams for days of easy living. Earth retaliates with rotten eggs and busted drills but her resistance spent the caprock crumbles and exhales and like a newborn slapped she screams the scream which marks the birth of a spanking new-sprung era. Jubilant the fathers dance Stetson’s tossed high into the air their faces flecked with bootblack gold their hair slicked back with glistenin’ oil. Their upstart child’s a heifer to milk until it moos then trade unto the butcher’s block for meat when it goes dry. Enriched in the meantime between breakdowns rain and air turns to poison rivers flood the poor starve. We’re all wildcatters with the gleam of gold in our eyes and the spray of crude on our faces.

Political observers point out that our country has a long, raucous history of witch hunts. “In times of economic distress, people tend to be more susceptible to charlatans and demagogues telling them who to blame and who to fear,” Matthew Duss, former national security editor at the Center for American Progress, once told me for a magazine article that I once wrote on this topic. “America has been through this sort of thing before with various minority groups, but we’ve always come through it stronger in the end…. Hopefully within a few years, the idea that all American Muslims want to turn America into an Islamic state will seem as stupid as the idea that a Catholic president would take orders from the Vatican.” But in the meantime, America must sweat through a raging fever, a blaze of intolerance that puts many Muslim citizens at risk of losing their rights and, in some cases, their lives. Fear and ignorance, of course, fuel this anti-Muslim hysteria. But so does money. Because there is political capital in scapegoating Muslims.

this book I will focus on the rich potential of a telescopic view of life. There will be plenty of surprises, because a long enough view can turn conventional views of causation upside down. For instance, studied prospectively, physical health turns out to be just as important a cause of warm social supports and vigorous exercise as exercise and social supports are causes of physical health. Some readers will surely be outraged at such heresy, but as Galileo discovered, telescopes can get people into a lot of trouble. Long-term studies are as unsettling as they are enlightening. To add to the uncertainty, we don’t know how far to trust even our latest findings. Time changes everything, and it makes no exceptions for longitudinal studies. It transforms the world we live in while we’re living in it, and pulls scientific thinking forward even while making it obsolete. None of this can be helped; it’s an intrinsic hazard of long endeavors. The more powerful the telescope, the more likely it is that the light we are seeing through it is many thousands of years old. The Grant Study is only seventy-five, but that’s more than threescore years and ten, and in the context of a man’s life, a very long time. Many of the early findings of the Study are ill-conceived, out-of-date, and parochial; some of our later findings will likely prove to be so too. But some, I hope, will endure. And in the meantime, they give those of us who are curious about our own lives, and the lives of those we cherish, plenty to think about. It reminds me of my first day of medical school. “Boys,” the Dean told us (this was in 1955), “the bad news is that half of what we teach you will in time be proven wrong; and worse yet, we don’t know which half.” Still, half a century later, our class has done pretty well by its patients. So I maintain hope that

Worry about the future from next week.’ Mrs Sasaki pours the tea. ‘In the meantime, rest. You don’t so much solve problems as live through them.

be specific, then: a type in Scripture (tupos in Greek, meaning originally a die-stamp or matching impression) is an event, institution, place, object, office, or functioning person that patterns a greater reality that in some sense is of the same kind and is due to appear on history’s stage at some subsequent point. This greater reality is called the antitype. The term “type” is taken from Romans 5:14, where Adam is called a tupos(“pattern”) of Christ, the one who was to come. “Antitype” comes from 1 Peter 3:21, where baptism, understood not simply as an applying of water to the body but also, and essentially, as an outgoing of faith to God, is called the antitypethat the preserving of Noah through the flood waters by his entering the ark had prefigured. A type establishes a frame for interpreting the greater reality when it appears, and meantime, simply by existing, it inculcates the principle of which the greater reality will in fact be the supreme instance. When the greater reality arrives, it becomes the decisive factor in its own field; one way or another it transcends and supersedes the type. In space-time terms, the type is thenceforth a thing of the past, no longer determinative of what must be done or of what will happen. The biblical account of it, however, is of permanent value as providing concepts and categories for understanding the antitype. Typology thus becomes a kind of phrase book for use in theology.

Iwalked home from the office and found Meg sitting on the stairs. She was sobbing. Uncontrollably. My love, what’s happened? I thought for sure we’d lost the baby. I went to her on my knees. She choked out that she didn’t want to do this anymore. Do what? Live. I didn’t catch her meaning at first. I didn’t understand, maybe didn’t want to understand. My mind just didn’t want to process the words. It’s all so painful, she was saying. What is? To be hated like this—for what? What had she done? she asked. She really wanted to know. What sin had she committed to deserve this kind of treatment? She just wanted to make the pain stop, she said. Not only for her, for everyone. For me, for her mother. But she couldn’t make it stop, so she’d decided to disappear. Disappear? Without her, she said, all the press would go away, and then I wouldn’t have to live like this. Our unborn child would never have to live like this. It’s so clear, she kept saying, it’s so clear. Just stop breathing. Stop being. This exists because I exist. I begged her not to talk like that. I promised her we’d get through it, we’d find a way. In the meantime, we’d find her the help she needed. I asked her to be strong, hang on. Incredibly, while reassuring her, and hugging her, I couldn’t entirely stop thinking like a fucking royal. We had a Sentebale engagement that night, at the Royal Albert Hall, and I kept telling myself: We can’t be late. We cannot be late. They’ll skin us alive! And they’ll blame her. Slowly—too slowly—I realized that tardiness was the least of our problems. I said she should skip the engagement, of course. I needed to go, make a quick appearance, but I’d be home fast. No, she insisted, she didn’t trust herself to be at home alone for even an hour with such dark feelings. So we put on our best kit, and she applied dark, dark lipstick to draw attention away from her bloodshot eyes, and out of the door we went. The car pulled up outside the Royal Albert Hall, and as we stepped into the blue flashing lights of the police escort and the whiteout lights of the press’s flashbulbs, Meg reached for my hand. She gripped it tightly. As we went inside, she gripped it even tighter. I was buoyed by the tightness of that grip. She’s hanging on, I thought. Better than letting go. But when we settled into the royal box, and the lights dimmed, she let go of her emotions. She couldn’t hold back the tears. She wept silently. The music struck up, we turned and faced the front. We spent the entire length of the performance (Cirque du Soleil) squeezing each other’s hands, me promising her in a whisper: Trust me. I’ll keep you safe.

There is, also, the ritualistic exposure of the body indoors and out-of-doors. Psychologists have long taught us that much of our hearing takes place through the skin itself. After centuries of being fully clad and of being contained in uniform visual space, the electric age ushers us into a world in which we live and breathe and listen with the entire epidermis. Of course, there is much zest of novelty in this cult, and the eventual equilibrium among the senses will slough off a good deal of the new ritual, both in clothing and in housing. Meantime, in both new attire and new dwellings, our unified sensibility cavorts amidst a wide range of awareness of materials and colors which makes ours one of the greatest ages of music, poetry, painting, and architecture alike.

I hope that people will begin to understand that when the brain loses global function just before or after death, this is less “brain death” and more brain hibernation of sorts. The brain has hours yet when full function could be restored after being lost. In the meantime, through the process of disinhibition, the brain pours all of its resources into activities that will maximize its chances of staying alive—namely, getting the heart to beat again. It also activates abilities that existed merely as potential, yet dormant, states. For instance, the genes that repair any damage to fetuses but are “turned off” at birth. In death, these genes flip back on, presumably to join the brain’s battle to stay alive. In the same way, as already discussed, when people enter the ocean of death, there seems to be an inflection point of brain dysfunction, which triggers disinhibition and activates certain functions that were lying dormant in a sort of “sleep mode.” This provides access to extreme, yet otherwise hidden, capabilities in the depths of human consciousness that in turn give access to other realities that are now more relevant in preparation for this new state of being. While the doctors and nurses fight to save the individual, the dying person’s sense of their own consciousness becomes enormously vast: like the cosmos compared with the Earth. In this state of hyperexpanded and hyperlucid consciousness, people are filled with a deep and profound understanding of themselves and of life: they are liberated from their body yet have a hyperconscious awareness of all events around and beyond themselves all at once and in 360 degrees. They realize that their real self is their consciousness, not the body. In this new, expanded state, their consciousness and selfhood feels like a field of energy, analogous to an electromagnetic field, one that can penetrate the thoughts of others and objects. Yet people still feel connected to the body through a metaphorical cord of sorts. Linear time loses meaning. Instead, people experience millions of realities, almost downloading them like computer data, simultaneously. They review and judge their life based on the quality of actions and intentions. They realize that there has been a cause for everything in their lives. They recognize that they are responsible for their own actions and intentions, and they relive the downstream consequences, or domino effect, of their actions on other living beings. They relive their own actions through the eyes of the other living entity, human or animal, and deeply feel how they felt in that moment. Thus, they appreciate the positive and negative value of their actions. They also recognize that the value of their actions was determined by the intentions behind them.