Longer Movie Quotes

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...

How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void. We are back in the Byzantine situation, where idolatry calls on a plethora of images to conceal from itself the fact that God no longer exists. That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of a presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.

If someone called me chubby, it would no longer be something that kept me up late at night. Being called fat is not like being called stupid or unfunny, which is the worst thing you could ever say to me. Do I envy Jennifer Hudson for being able to lose all that weight and look smokin’ hot? Of course, yes. Do I sometimes look at Gisele Bundchen and wonder how awesome life would be if I never had to wear Spanx? Duh, of course. That’s kind of the point of Gisele Bundchen. And maybe I will, once or twice, for a very short period of time. But on the list of things I want to do in my lifetime, that’s not near the top. I mean, it’s not near the bottom either. I’d say it’s right above “Learn to drive a vespa,” but several notches below “film a chase scene for a movie.

Please let me faint right now, because if I faint I will no longer be here, in this moment. It will be like in movies when a girl passes out from the horror of it all and the fighting happens while she is asleep and she wakes up in a hospital bed with a bruise or two, but she's missed all the bad stuff. I wish that was my life instead of this.

I keep waiting for that movie moment when Reed runs out of the house, screaming for me to come back. But it never happens. There’s no rain-filled reunion and the only moisture are the tears I can’t hold back any longer.

There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parent and his sister had gone. No reaction.He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him. He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it, He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every “Bogart” movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out.

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

He said, “I know somebody you could kiss.” “Who?” She realized his eyes were amused. “Oh, wait.” He shrugged. He was maybe the only person Blue knew who could preserve the integrity of a shrug while lying down. “It’s not like you’re going to kill me. I mean, if you were curious.” She hadn’t thought she was curious. It hadn’t been an option, after all. Not being able to kiss someone was a lot like being poor. She tried not to dwell on the things she couldn’t have. But now— “Okay,” she said. “What?” “I said okay.” He blushed. Or rather, because he was dead, he became normal colored. “Uh.” He propped himself on an elbow. “Well.” She unburied her face from the pillow. “Just, like—” He leaned toward her. Blue felt a thrill for a half a second. No, more like a quarter second. Because after that she felt the too-firm pucker of his tense lips. His mouth mashed her lips until it met teeth. The entire thing was at once slimy and ticklish and hilarious. They both gasped an embarrassed laugh. Noah said, “Bah!” Blue considered wiping her mouth, but felt that would be rude. It was all fairly underwhelming. She said, “Well.” “Wait,” Noah replied, “waitwaitwait.” He pulled one of Blue’s hairs out of his mouth. “I wasn’t ready.” He shook out his hands as if Blue’s lips were a sporting event and cramping was a very real possibility. “Go,” Blue said. This time they only got within a breath of each other’s lips when they both began to laugh. She closed the distance and was rewarded with another kiss that felt a lot like kissing a dishwasher. “I’m doing something wrong?” she suggested. “Sometimes it’s better with tongue,” he replied dubiously. They regarded each other. Blue squinted, “Are you sure you’ve done this before?” “Hey!” he protested. “It’s weird for me, ‘cause it’s you.” “Well, it’s weird for me because it’s you.” “We can stop.” “Maybe we should.” Noah pushed himself up farther on his elbow and gazed at the ceiling vaguely. Finally, he dropped his eyes back to her. “You’ve seen, like, movies. Of kisses, right? Your lips need to be, like, wanting to be kissed.” Blue touched her mouth. “What are they doing now?” “Like, bracing themselves.” She pursed and unpursed her lips. She saw his point. “So imagine one of those,” Noah suggested. She sighed and sifted through her memories until she found one that would do. It wasn’t a movie kiss, however. It was the kiss the dreaming tree had showed her in Cabeswater. Her first and only kiss with Gansey, right before he died. She thought about his nice mouth when he smiled. About his pleasant eyes when he laughed. She closed her eyes. Placing an elbow on the other side of her head, Noah leaned close and kissed her once more. This time, it was more of a thought than a feeling, a soft heat that began at her mouth and unfurled through the rest of her. One of his cold hands slid behind her neck and he kissed her again, lips parted. It was not just a touch, an action. It was a simplification of both of them: They were no longer Noah Czerny and Blue Sargent. They were now just him and her. Not even that. They were only the time that they held between them.

I do need that time, though, for Naoko's face to appear. And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute-like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand-ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time is appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. At the Hamburg airport, though, the kicks were longer and harder than usual. Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began. In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed. Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simply humanity to get us through. We are the humbugs now.

catalyst, n. It surprised me — surprises me still — that you were the first one to say it. I was innocent, in a way, expecting those three words to appear boldface with music. But instead, it was such an ordinary moment: The movie was over, and I stood up to turn off the TV. A few minutes had passed from the end of the final credits, and we’d been sitting there on the couch, your legs over mine, the side of your hand touching the side of my hand. The video stopped and the screen turned blue. “I’ll get it,” I said, and was halfway to the television when you said, “I love you.” I never asked, but I’ll always wonder: What was it about that moment that made you realize it? Or, if you’d known it for awhile, what compelled you to say it then? It was welcome, so welcome, and in my rush to say that I loved you, too, I left the television on, I let that light bathe us for a little longer, as I returned to the couch, to you. We held there for awhile, not really sure what would happen next.

Possibilities I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here to many things I've also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.

Films are no longer concerned with the silence of God, but with the chattering of men.

I drop on my back on the bed, panting and sweating. How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?

Her voice was trained, supple as leather, precise as a knife thrower's blade. Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying 'grand.' Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn't mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passe. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven.

It had not occured to me to mourn losing those things until now. I had done each of those things, somewhere along the way, for a last time - without realizing it was the last time. And even after I knew that I was no longer a child, somehow I'd assumed those things could have come back to me. Or that I could have gone back to them. But watching the movies on this day, I became aware of infinite losses.

I tried to cheer her up. We watched movies in bed. I sang to her even — though I sang like shit. And when she was too tired to read… I read to her. Her stupid historical romance books. About dukes and London and far away kingdoms that no longer existed in society. She loved it. So I loved it.

But when it gets dark, I’m off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I’m free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not have gotten done because the time for getting something done is over until tomorrow.

The good things aren’t a movie. There isn’t enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching? The highway's edges may not be postcard perfect. But for a century, children's early understanding of how cities and nature fit together was gained from the backseat: the empty farmhouse at the edge of the subdivision; the variety of architecture, here and there; the woods and fields and water beyond the seamy edges--all that was and still is available to the eye. This was the landscape that we watched as children. It was our drive-by movie.

Did you notice?” “Notice what?” “How small she is? Even her hands are tiny, but her fingers are long. I don’t even know how that’s possible.” He was still making that face. "I mean, I guess it’s her fingers. They’re longer than her palms, so it gives the illusion that they’re long in general. Pretty sure one of her hands would fit on my palm. Like in Beauty and the Beast when he holds her hand and it’s just a wrist disappearing into his big, hairy fist.” He added blinking to the face. “Did you just compare yourself to a Disney movie?

A creator used to create' You got me young... You told what to want; you showed me in your movies and your shows. And I faithfully did your work. I created... I willingly clipped my wings and built myself a golden cage and you smiled and said, "well done." I let your fear tactics rule my actions until I could no longer hear my heart song. I took your medication and I ate your poison until my body was too sick to fight back. Ah, but I'm onto your game. I see it now and my only regret is that I didn't see it sooner. I made a life for myself only to realize it's never really what I wanted. My soul didn't want this hectic, materialistic life- your greed and your thirst for power wanted this. I don't belong here, but you've always known that, haven't you? You figured if you kept me caged long enough, kept me sick enough, kept me scared enough that I would eventually forget what I am. You slipped up with this one. So, hear me now. You had your fun with me, but I've had about enough of your bullshit for one lifetime. Watch me fly.

IF YOUR OVERALL SITUATION IS UNSATISFACTORY or unpleasant, separate out this instant and surrender to what is. That's the flashlight cutting through the fog. Your state of consciousness then ceases to be controlled by external conditions. You are no longer coming from reaction and resistance. Then look at the specifics of the situation. Ask yourself, “Is there anything I can do to change the situation, improve it, or remove myself from it?” If so, take appropriate action. Focus not on the hundred things that you will or may have to do at some future time but on the one thing that you can do now. This doesn't mean you should not do any planning. It may well be that planning is the one thing you can do now. But make sure you don't keep running “mental movies” that continually project yourself into the future, and so lose the Now. Any action you take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does — do not resist what is.

..I want quiet nights, too, where we talk about nonsense while watching bad movies." I want us to have history, something longer than the small window of time we're actually sharing, with an even longer future, but the dying elephant in the room crushes me.

Destiny is never clear when it arrives. Sometimes we just refuse to do what we no longer feel good about doing. These moments are mysteries in our lives, but we know everything will change.

Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.

There is an amazing number of questions that fly through a person's head when the person she's just made out with tells her that the reason he can no longer make out is that he has to go do homework. At midnight. On a Saturday. The main one is just "What?" Some of the others are "How did I get here, to this place in my life?", "Can someone sweet me out of here with a cane like in the old movies?", and "What am I going to eat when I get home that could help make up for this?

Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry.

With the last of the sun fading, he could see the reflection of the green lights on the docks across the way and the stars twinkling in the river like small diamonds. What a show. This was better than any movie he had ever seen, and it was different every night. It was so wonderful at times he felt he wanted to do something about it, to try and stop time, make it last longer, but he didn’t know what to do.

The Gap Instinct The gap instinct is very strong. The first time I lectured to the staff of the World Bank was in 1999. I told them the labels “developing” and “developed” were no longer valid and I swallowed my sword. It took the World Bank 17 years and 14 more of my lectures before it finally announced publicly that it was dropping the terms “developing” and “developed” and would from now on divide the world into four income groups. The UN and most other global organizations have still not made this change. So why is the misconception of a gap between the rich and the poor so hard to change? I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time. Journalists know this. They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people, views, or groups. They prefer stories of extreme poverty and billionaires to stories about the vast majority of people slowly dragging themselves toward better lives. Journalists are storytellers. So are people who produce documentaries and movies.

England no longer existed. He’d got that—somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother. He

I'm just sorry. Sorry that there won't be any more camping trips for kids or rock bands or even new books to read. No more movies or fresh bags of popcorn. It really sucks when you think about it. Of course, there is the possibility that we might be able to win this war, but not for a very long time. Probably longer than you and I will ever exist in this world." "I try not to think about it." "Sometimes it's all I ever think about.

These diseases are not really there, are they? A: They can be if people choose to allow those energies to enter into their body. But for the most part, they are only in the energetic fields. And like anything else that is talked about, or thought about, it can become reality in the physical. D: Yes, if enough people accept it as their reality. A: But the diseases are extremely blown out of proportion, and they are not epidemics as they are portrayed to be. The media and the movies are showing you their desperation as they insist in presenting to the masses information that is completely negative and fear-based. Subject matter such as murder, death and betrayal, attacks and such that keep the consciousness focused on these matters, as opposed to portraying in the media images of hope and inspiration. But nevertheless, there are enough of those positive messages being broadcast at this time, that like a domino effect, they are no longer stoppable. D: Another fear the government is trying to promote is terrorism. A: Yes. It is just another tool, like the diseases, to find excuses to give people a reason to be afraid and not unify, but to trust that the government will solve their problems. They are imaginary problems, and in the subconscious, many people are becoming aware of this. They are no longer believing, although many are in the masses. But on their subconscious level, they are beginning to awaken, and the power knows this. That is the reason they are resorting to ridiculous stories that only those who wish to believe, believe in them because anybody with a logical and reasonable mind could not believe them.

Wrapped in Maddy’s red coat, she feels almost possessed by all the tough women she’s admired in movies. Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai. Crawford in, well, everything. The kind of women men don’t know if they want to kiss or kill. Women who claw and scrape through life because they have to. Now it’s Charlie’s turn. She’s no longer the scared, self-loathing girl she was when she left campus. She’s something else. A fucking femme fatale.

Straining to hear, I can make out something acoustic. Coming from...the backyard? I glance down from my bedroom window and feel my jaw fall open. Matt Finch is standing below my window, guitar strapped across his chest. I pull my window up, and I expect the song from that old movie - the one about a guy with a trench coat and the big radio and his heart on his sleeve. But it's not that. It's not anything I recognise, and I strain to make out the lyrics: Stop being ridiculous, stop being ridiculous, Reagan. What an asshole. The mesh screen and two floors between us don't seem like enough to protect him from my anger. "Nice apology," I call down to him. "I've apologised thirteen times," he yells back, "and so far you haven't called me back." I open my mouth to say it doesn't matter, but he's already redirecting the song. "Now I'm gonna stand here until you forgive me," he sings loudly, "or at least until you hear me out, la-la, oh-la-la. I drove seven hours overnight, and I won't leave until you come out here." (...) "This is private property!" My throat feel coarse from how loudly I'm yelling. "And that doesn't even rhyme!" The guitar chord continues as he sings, "Then call the cops, call the cops, call the cops..." I storm downstairs, my feet pounding against the staircase. When I turn the corner, my dad looks almost amused from his seat in the recliner. Noticing my expression, he stares back at his newspaper, as if I won't notice him. (...) "Dad. How did Matt know which window was mine?" "Well..." he peeks over the sports section. "I reckon I told him." "You talked to him?" My voice is no longer a voice. It's a shriek. "God, Dad!" He juts out his chin, defensive. "How was I supposed to know you had some sort of drama with him? He shows up, lookin' to serenade my daughter. Thought it seemed innocent enough. Sweet, even. Old-fashioned." "It's not any of those things! I hate him!

I think it is cruel to expect the constant presence of any one family member (to tend to the ill). Just as we have to breathe in and breathe out, people have to "recharge their batteries" outside the sickroom at times, live a normal life from time to time; we cannot function efficiently in the constant awareness of illness. I have heard many relatives complain that members of the family went on pleasure trips over weekends or continued to go to the theater or movie. They blamed them for enjoying things while someone at home was terminally ill. I think it is more meaningful for the patient and his family to see that the illness does not totally disrupt a household or completely deprive all members of any pleasurable activities; rather, the illness may allow for a gradual adjustment and change toward the kind of home it is going to be when the patient is no longer around...The family too has a need to deny or avoid the sad realities at times in order to face them better when their presence is really needed.

SANSHO THE BAILIFF (1954) 'Without compassion a man is no longer human.' So states Taira.

It makes me happy to imagine them drinking tea or going to the movies together, still connected to each other by the invisible chain of a family that no longer exists.

It’s true that the world is overrun with terrorists. It’s true that the mother no longer goes to movies in theaters, and she scans for the exits in restaurants. Deeper, worse, the death everywhere, the surgical strikes, the eyes in the sky. Aleppo in the beautiful before, the ravaged after. She puts these thoughts away. If she could, she’d spend the entire day in bed.

Apathy? I see something taking place in the Church all over the world today that grieves God’s heart: a widespread apathy toward sin. God’s people are no longer outraged about the filth and evil bombarding their lives and homes. On the contrary, millions of believers sit by passively and let their minds become saturated with sensual movies, videos, television, the Internet, magazines and other media. It is unbelievable how these Christians willingly allow their lusts to be fed as their imaginations are filled with deep roots of evil. If you think I am focusing too much on the secret sins of Christians, then I say you are out of touch with what is happening in the world today. You must know nothing of how widespread the infection of sin is among God’s people. I cite to you, for example, the scores of Christians who flock to movie theaters each week and hear the name of Christ used as a curse word. I have never understood how anyone who fears almighty God and wishes to walk righteously before Him can sit by idly as the Lord’s name is being damned. That is simply beyond my comprehension. Yet multitudes of believers are doing just that. Little by little, they are drifting deeper into pits of secret, hidden sin. Slowly but surely, their sense of conviction is being drained out of them. They do not realize it, but their minds are being corrupted by what they are allowing their eyes to feast on.

Like the atomic bomb, it’s there; like the bomb, the temptation will always exist to use it.There can no longer be a world without the atomic bomb; there can no longer be a world without violent movies.

Because I live in south Florida I store cans of black beans and gallons of water in my closet in preparation for hurricane season. I throw a hurricane party in January. You’re my only guest. We play Marco Polo in bed. The sheets are wet like the roof caved in. There’s a million of me in you. You try to count me as I taste the sweat on the back of your neck. I call you Sexy Sexy, and we do everything twice. After, still sweating, we drink Crystal Light out of plastic water bottles. We discuss the pros and cons of vasectomies. It’s not invasive you say. I wrap the bedsheet around my waist. Minor surgery you say. You slur the word surgery, like it’s a garnish on a dish you just prepared. I eat your hair until you agree to no longer talk about vasectomies. We agree to have children someday, and that they will be beautiful even if they’re not. As I watch your eyes grow heavy like soggy clothes, I tell you When I grow up I’m going to be a famous writer. When I’m famous I’ll sign autographs on Etch-A-Sketches. I’ll write poems about writing other poems, so other poets will get me. You open your eyes long enough to tell me that when you grow up, you’re going to be a steamboat operator. Your pores can never be too clean you say. I say I like your pores just fine. I say Your pores are tops. I kiss you with my whole mouth, and you fall asleep next to my molars. In the morning, we eat french toast with powdered sugar. I wear the sugar like a mustache. You wear earmuffs and pretend we’re in a silent movie. I mouth Olive juice, but I really do love you. This is an awesome hurricane party you say, but it comes out as a yell because you can’t gauge your own volume with the earmuffs on. You yell I want to make something cute with you. I say Let me kiss the insides of your arms. You have no idea what I just said, but you like the way I smile.

Things happen in life to get our attention, to make us wake up. What does it say that I had to lose so much before I had to break down enough to rebuild? I think it says that the thing that got me here—this incredible toughness—was almost the thing that did me in. I got to a place where I could no longer just muscle through; I could either bend, or break. I got here because I needed all of this to become who I am now. I had been holding on to so many misconceptions about myself all my life: that I wasn't valuable, that I didn't deserve to be anywhere good, whether that meant in a loving relationship on my own terms, or in a great film with actors I respected who knew what they were doing. The narrative I believed was that I was unworthy and contaminated. And it wasn't true. There are two reasons I wanted to tell this story, the story of how I learned to surrender. First, because it's mine. It doesn't belong to the tabloids, or my mom, or the men I've married, or the people who've loved or hated my movies, or even my children. My story is mine alone. I'm the only one who was there for all of it, and I decided to claim the power to tell it on my own terms. The second reason is that even though it's mine, maybe some part of this story is yours too. I've had extraordinary luck in this life, both bad and good. Putting it all down in writing makes me realize how crazy a lot of it has been, how improbable. But we all suffer and we all triumph and we all get to choose how we hold both.

The emancipation of women was destined to follow that of the slaves and the glorification of people without a caste and without traditions, namely, the pariah. In a society that no longer understands the figure of the ascetic and of the warrior; in which the hands of the latest aristocrats seem better fit to hold tennis rackets or shakers for cocktail mixes than swords or scepters; in which the archetype of the virile man is represented by a boxer or by a movie star if not by the dull wimp represented by the intellectual, the college professor, the narcissistic puppet of the artist, or the busy and dirty money-making banker and the politician—in such a society it was only a matter of time before women rose up and claimed for themselves a 'personality' and a 'freedom' according to the anarchist and individualist meaning usually associated with these words.

This isn’t the movies. Or a romance book. It’s real, and it’s going to hurt. You see, love will become boring, after you’ve been together for years. Every relationship will hit that phase, where the ‘spark’ is gone for a brief moment in time. And that’s where most love stories perish, or where few love stories flourish. It’s exactly, in that moment, where you’re supposed to fight harder. Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a commitment. You don’t quit when it’s no longer fun. You don’t turn your back on it when it gets ugly. No, love is everything messy and everything beautiful. You fight. You love. You live. And that’s exactly what Brad showed me,

decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.

It made it easier that they both believed in the simplest kind of afterlife - that my father could say to her, even in those last days, joking but without irony, 'You're going to get tired of hearing from me. I'll be asking you for this that and the other thing twenty-four hours a day. JESUS, you'll be saying, here comes another prayer from Dennis.' And my mother would reply, her voice hoarse with pain, 'Jesus might advise you to take in a movie once in a while. Give your poor wife a rest. She's in heaven, after all.' It was a joke, but they believed it, and they believed, too, I think, that their love, their loyalty to one another, was no longer a matter of chance or happenstance, but a condition of their existence no more voluntary or escapable than the pace of their blood, the influx of perception...There was, in their anticipation of what was to come, a queer self-satisfaction. It was clear now that they would love each other until the last moment of her life - hadn't that been the goal from the beginning? They would love each other even beyond the days they had lived together; was there any greater triumph?

We could begin to allow the history of science to curb scientific awe by imposing a rating system, like those used with movies and television. Any scientific claim that lasts longer than a millennium, we'll rate "GC" for "Getting Close." For claims that stand for five hundred years, we'll rate "KP," for "Kinda Probable;" for a century, "PF" for Probably False;" for fifty years, "ACF" for "Almost Certainly False;" for twenty years and less, "TLA," for "Treat Like Astrology.

It’s interesting to observe the fascination children have with fear. Whether it’s movies, books, or Halloween, part of them wants to be scared at the same time another part doesn’t. It’s like being tickled. There’s delight in fright. Perhaps it’s their way of learning about fear, of gradually coming to know the difference between what’s real and imagined. It’s a knack that takes continual practice. But as we mature, society convinces us that fear is a weakness, and we stop exploring it. Sure, we may still go to horror movies and read Stephen King novels, but we no longer engage fear like we used to. And as a result, we lose our perspective. Instead of flinching when someone says, “Boo!” we slide further into our cocoons.

No longer a star in my own movie, I can take my place in this gift exchange. The gifts that I have are not only for my private use, but for me to pass along to others. And the weaknesses I have are important because they make me more dependent on others.

I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art…which were one in the same. She charted and walked her own path each step of the way, she and her camera. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s—every image, every cut… What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching…and alive. I saw her for the last time a couple of months ago. She knew that she didn’t have much longer, and she made every second count: she didn’t want to miss a thing. I feel so lucky to have known her. And to all young filmmakers: you need to watch Agnès Varda’s pictures.

Mexican Loneliness" And I am an unhappy stranger grooking in the streets of Mexico- My friends have died on me, my lovers disappeared, my whores banned, my bed rocked and heaved by earthquake - and no holy weed to get high by candlelight and dream - only fumes of buses, dust storms, and maids peeking at me thru a hole in the door secretly drilled to watch masturbators fuck pillows - I am the Gargoyle of Our Lady dreaming in space gray mist dreams -- My face is pointed towards Napoleon ------ I have no form ------ My address book is full of RIP's I have no value in the void, at home without honor, - My only friend is an old fag without a typewriter Who, if he's my friend, I'll be buggered. I have some mayonnaise left, a whole unwanted bottle of oil, peasants washing my sky light, a nut clearing his throat in the bathroom next to mine a hundred times a day sharing my common ceiling - If I get drunk I get thirsty - if I walk my foot breaks down - if I smile my mask's a farce - if I cry I'm just a child - - if I remember I'm a liar - if I write the writing's done - - if I die the dying's over - - if I live the dying's just begun - - if I wait the waiting's longer - if I go the going's gone if I sleep the bliss is heavy the bliss is heavy on my lids - if I go to cheap movies the bedbugs get me - Expensive movies I can't afford - if I do nothing nothing does

Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they’re still nothing more than video games. Hiro’s not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It’s owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deal. But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

Tate practically raised you from what I hear. You love him, don’t you?” Her face closed up. “For all the good it will ever do me, yes,” she said softly. “He won’t have the excuse of pure Lakota blood much longer,” he advised. “I’m not holding out for miracles anymore,” she vowed. “I’m going to stop wanting what I can never have. From now on, I’ll take what I can get from life and be satisfied with it. Tate will have to find his own way.” “That’s sour grapes,” he observed. “You bet it is. What do you want me to do to help?” “It’s dangerous,” he pointed out, hesitating as he considered her youth. “I don’t know…” “I’m a card-carrying archeologist,” she reminded him. “Haven’t you ever watched an Indiana Jones movies? We’re all like that,” she told him with a wicked grin. “Mild-mannered on the outside and veritable world-tamers inside. I can get a whip and a fedora, too, if you like,” she added.

If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well. But her eroticism no longer revolves around her husband. Instead, it’s been channeled to her children. There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks. This brings me to another point. Stephanie gets tremendous physical pleasure from her children. Let me be perfectly clear here: she knows the difference between adult sexuality and the sensuousness of caring for small children. She, like most mothers, would never dream of seeking sexual gratification from her children. But, in a sense, a certain replacement has occurred. The sensuality that women experience with their children is, in some ways, much more in keeping with female sexuality in general. For women, much more than for men, sexuality exists along what the Italian historian Francesco Alberoni calls a “principle of continuity.” Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion. In the physicality between mother and child lie a multitude of sensuous experiences. We caress their silky skin, we kiss, we cradle, we rock. We nibble their toes, they touch our faces, we lick their fingers, let them bite us when they’re teething. We are captivated by them and can stare at them for hours. When they devour us with those big eyes, we are besotted, and so are they. This blissful fusion bears a striking resemblance to the physical connection between lovers. In fact, when Stephanie describes the early rapture of her relationship with Warren—lingering gazes, weekends in bed, baby talk, toe-nibbling—the echoes are unmistakable. When she says, “At the end of the day, I have nothing left to give,” I believe her. But I also have come to believe that at the end of the day, there may be nothing more she needs. All this play activity and intimate involvement with her children’s development, all this fleshy connection, has captured Stephanie’s erotic potency to the detriment of the couple’s intimacy and sexuality. This is eros redirected. Her sublimated energy is displaced onto the children, who become the centerpiece of her emotional gratification.

Real labor doesn’t happen like it does in the movies. For one thing, it takes so much longer than you think it will. You don’t rush to the hospital the moment you feel your first contraction, already pushing, screaming for drugs while an angry nurse tells you it’s too late, the baby’s already coming. That’s all fiction.

The best way to avoid being confused about Bruce Jenner is get your head out of his bedroom and closet, and then think about all of the things you've been hiding and been miserable about. So what he made his announcement via media. Books, music, movies, business launches are announced in the same manner. Just focus on the feeling of finally disclosing something that enables you to be free and to live as authentically as possible. And then imagine what it's like to own your truth, tell it your way, thus taking away anyone else's ability to spin it their way or use it against you. If you can do any of the above, you will no longer be confused.

MOMENTS I saw you first You looked exactly The same as before Tall and awkward and shy I walked towards you My hands clammy I felt cold inside My insides were shaking Cant run This is it. U saw me Your face brightened A smile painted on your face I missed it Your smile It brought back the past You walked I walked Nearer It feels like in the Movies Two people A boy and a girl Meeting halfway Hoping for a happy Ever after I stopped Right before I reached you I realized This isn't like the movies I turned I told myself Don’t smile You reached me Close So close I felt the urge To touch you Hug you And maybe Kiss you There weren't Hellos Only silent prayers Smiling You reached for my hand Giving me something You knew I love It was awkward You standing there Me standing there So close Too close Yet so far I looked up to you I tried to ask myself Are you for real? You smiled wider Shy but happy You left as fast As you came back It was for a second I hated time I wished it was A little bit longer With that, I knew I still want you.

Some people find illeism annoying (although it doesn’t bother Daniel Pink). But its existence as a style of speech and narration exemplifies the final step in the regret-reckoning process. Talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call “self-distancing.” When we’re beset by negative emotions, including regret, one response is to immerse ourselves in them, to face the negativity by getting up close and personal. But immersion can catch us in an undertow of rumination. A better, more effective, and longer-lasting approach is to move in the opposite direction—not to plunge in, but to zoom out and gaze upon our situation as a detached observer, much as a movie director pulls back the camera. After self-disclosure relieves the burden of carrying a regret, and self-compassion reframes the regret as a human imperfection rather than an incapacitating flaw, self-distancing helps you analyze and strategize—to examine the regret dispassionately without shame or rancor and to extract from it a lesson that can guide your future behavior.

-Of course movies today no longer require film. They are recorded and held in digital suspension as ones and zeroes. And so at the moment the last remaining piece of the world is lit and shot for a movie, there will be another Big Bang... and the multitudes of ones and zeroes will be strewn through the universe as particles that act like waves... until, shaken by borealic winds or ignited by solar flares or otherwise galvanized by this or that heavenly signal, they compose themselves into brilliant constellations that shine in full color across the night sky of a remote planet... where a reverent, unrecognizable form of life will look up from its rooftops at the faces of Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, George Brent, Linda Darnell... to name just a few of the stars.

From the recent Balkan Wars, journalist Slavenka Drakulic observed that “someone is always a Jew. Once the concept of ‘otherness’ takes root, the unimaginable becomes possible.”8 She continues, “Once excluded, [people] become aliens. Not-me. Not-us. You still feel responsible but in a different way, as towards beggars. . . . The feeling of human solidarity turns into an issue of my personal ethics. . . . You are no longer obliged to do something for their sake.”9 This is true of anyone we place in special categories—refugees, veterans, victims, and survivors, as well as enemies—even though they may be our neighbors. In the British movie Pretty Dirty Things, one migrant shouts at another, “I’m a certified refugee. You’re an illegal. You have nothing. You are nothing.

continued. “The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. “‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ teaches us the value of a good reputation and the power of honesty. ‘Cinderella’ shows us the rewards of having a good heart. ‘The Ugly Duckling’ teaches us the meaning of inner beauty.” Alex’s eyes were wide, and she nodded in agreement. She was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair that was always kept neatly out of her face with a headband. The way the other students stared at their teacher, as if the lesson being taught were in another language, was something Mrs. Peters had never grown accustomed to. So, Mrs. Peters would often direct entire lessons to the front row, where Alex sat. Mrs. Peters was a tall, thin woman who always wore dresses that resembled old, patterned sofas. Her hair was dark and curly and sat perfectly on the top of her head like a hat (and her students often thought it was). Through a pair of thick glasses, her eyes were permanently squinted from all the judgmental looks she had given her classes over the years. “Sadly, these timeless tales are no longer relevant in our society,” Mrs. Peters said. “We have traded their brilliant teachings for small-minded entertainment like television and video games. Parents now let obnoxious cartoons and violent movies influence their children. “The only exposure to the tales some children acquire are versions bastardized by film companies. Fairy

I decided to ask eight Vietnam combat veterans if they would be willing to take a standard pain test while they watched scenes from a number of movies. The first clip we showed was from Oliver Stone’s graphically violent Platoon (1986), and while it ran we measured how long the veterans could keep their right hands in a bucket of ice water. We then repeated this process with a peaceful (and long-forgotten) movie clip. Seven of the eight veterans kept their hands in the painfully cold water 30 percent longer during Platoon. We then calculated that the amount of analgesia produced by watching fifteen minutes of a combat movie was equivalent to that produced by being injected with eight milligrams of morphine, about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room for crushing chest pain.

I didn't understand why he had brought his foot on mine. Was it a pass, or a well-meaning gesture of solidarity and comradeship, like his chummy hug-massage, a lighthearted nudge between lovers who are no longer sleeping together but have decided to remain friends and occasionally go to the movies? Did it mean, I haven't forgotten, it'll always remain between us, even though nothing will come of it?,

And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved. Exactly a year from now, I vowed, I would sit outside at night wherever I was, somewhere in Europe, or in America, and turn my face to Egypt, as Moslems do when they pray and face Mecca, and remember this very night, and how I had thought these things and made this vow. You're beginning to sound like Elsa and her silly seders, I said to myself, mimicking my father's humour. On my way home I thought of what the others were doing. I wanted to walk in, find the smaller living room still lit, the Beethoven still playing, with Abdou still cleaning the dining room, and, on closing the front door, suddenly hear someone say, "We were just waiting for you, we're thinking of going to the Royal." "But we've already seen that film," I would say. "What difference does it make. We'll see it again." And before we had time to argue, we would all rush downstairs, where my father would be waiting in a car that was no longer really ours, and, feeling the slight chill of a late April night, would huddle together with the windows shut, bicker as usual about who got to sit where, rub our hands, turn the radio to a French broadcast, and then speed to the Corniche, thinking that all this was as it always was, that nothing ever really changed, that the people enjoying their first stroll on the Corniche after fasting, or the woman selling tickets at the Royal, or the man who would watch our car in the side alley outside the theatre, or our neighbours across the hall, or the drizzle that was sure to greet us after the movie at midnight would never, ever know, nor even guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.

What about television?" a young man asked. "It's an octopus. It's no longer just a little box, it's the Love Machine." "Why the Love Machine?" a reporter asked. "Because it sells love. It creates love. Presidents are chosen by their appeal on that little box. It's turned politicians into movie stars and movie stars into politicians. It can you engaged if you use a certain mouthwash. It claims you'll have women hanging on your coattails if you use a certain hair cream. It tells the kids to eat their cereal if they want to be like their baseball idol. But like all great lovers, the Love Machine is a fickle bastard. It has great magnetism--but it has no heart. In place of a heart beats a Nielsen rating. And when the Nielsen falters, the program dies. It's the pulse and heart of the twentieth century--The Love Machine.

The mortals no longer want you.' Wren shook her head, because that couldn't be true. Her mother and father loved her. Her mother cut the crusts off her sandwiches and kissed her on the tip of her nose to make her giggle. Her father cuddled up with her to watch movies and then carried her to bed when she fell asleep on the couch. She knew they loved her. And yet the certainty with which Lord Jarel spoke plucked at her terror

But I wouldn’t be alive. Not really. I would be wasting oxygen, space, and resources, going back to not-so-secretly wishing I’d die. The realization dawned on me like a cold shower. I didn’t want to die when I was with Grace. I wanted to live. To laugh. To love. To date her and nibble on her neck and listen to her talking about plays and nineties movies and defending fanny packs vehemently. I’d been relishing life—actively enjoying it, even—for months, and I didn’t even realize it. I didn’t want to die anymore. Somewhere along the road, the idea of veering my bike off the road when I picked up speed stopped appealing to me. I no longer imagined what it would feel like to hurl myself off a cliff. I stopped walking into the ring wanting the asshole in front of me to throw a punch that would send me into cardiac arrest. And it was all because of Grace ‘Texas’ Shaw.

Sometimes your gaze alone scares me. Sometimes I've never seen you before. I no longer know what you're doing here, in this popular seaside resort, in this dull, crowded season, where you are even more alone than in your regional capital. The better to kill you, perhaps, or to drive you away, I don't know. I sometimes manage to feel I've never seen you before. That I don't know you, to the point of horror. That I have no idea why you're here, what you want from me, or what will become of you. Becoming is the only subject we never, ever broach. You must not know what you're doing here either, with this woman who is already old, mad with writing. Maybe this is just normal, maybe it's the same all over; it's nothing, you came simply because you were desperate, as you are every day of your life. And also during certain summers at certain times of day or night when the sun quits the sky and slips into the sea, every evening, always, you cannot help wanting to die. This I know. I see the two of us lost in similar natures. I can sometimes be overwhelmed by tenderness for the kind of people we are. Unstable, they say, a bit nutty. 'People who never go to the movies, or the theater, or parties.' Leftists are like that, you know, they have no clue how to enjoy life. Cannes makes them sick and so do the grand hotels of Morocco. Movies and theaters, it's all the same.

Leaving him and going out into the paint-fuming air I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me. Like the servant about whom I'd read in psychology class who, during a trance, had recited pages of Greek philosophy which she had overheard one day while she worked. It was as though I were acting out a scene from some crazy movie. Or perhaps I was catching up with myself and had put into words feelings which I had hitherto suppressed. Or was it, I thought, starting up the walk, that I was no longer afraid? I stopped, looking at the buildings down the bright street slanting with sun and shade. I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid. Was that it? I felt light-headed, my ears were ringing. I went on.

catalyst, n. It surprised me - surprises me still - that you were the first one to say it. I was innocent, in a way, expecting those three words to appear boldface with music. But instead, it was such an ordinary moment: The movie was over, and I stood up to turn off the TV. A few minutes had passed from the end of the final credits, and we'd been sitting there on the couch, your legs over mine, the side of your hand touching the side of my hand. The video stopped and the screen turned blue. "I'll get it," I said, and was halfway to the television when you said, "I love you." I never asked, but I'll always wonder: What was it about that moment that made you realize it? Or, if you'd known it for awhile, what compelled you to say it then? It was welcome, so welcome, and in my rush to say that I loved you, too, I left the television on, I let that light bathe us for a little longer, as I returned to the couch, to you. We held there for awhile, not really sure what would happen next.

A poll when Blair left said that 69 per cent of people reckoned Blair’s legacy would be the Iraq War. I think that ignores his real record of achievement in dismantling the Labour movement. It’s amazing to think that the huge effort he went to creating a massive cash-for-honours scandal will be overshadowed. Blair was said to be saddened that he hasn’t managed to serve for as many years as Thatcher. Instead he will have to content himself with having killed more women and children than Genghis Khan. Ironically, for a man who is so obsessed with legacy, his memory will live on longer than most politicians—as a ghost story that Iraqi mothers use to frighten their children. That said, I do think that Blair stands a good chance of success in his new role of Peace Envoy. There’s a real chance that all those different groups in the Middle East will join together to try and kill him. In six months time he could be putting an end to years of suffering as he is sacrificed on an altar in the centre of Baghdad while everyone celebrates like it’s the end of a Star Wars movie.

How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all these time. Everyday, every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn, families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside their hearts are ripping to shreds, for years, for their whole lives. I don't believe time heals, I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't it mean I've accepted the world without her?

There are good kissers and bad kissers. Good kisser: Tony. Sweet, passionate, and his lips make every nerve in your body stand up and go, “Hey, what’s this? What’s going on, and can we make it go on longer?” And then there are your bad kissers. Case in point: Tyler Kendrick. My mouth thought it was being attacked by a squid. Big, freaky tongue forcing its way into my mouth like the villain in a Western movie coming through the saloon doors with a swagger. Too much saliva, and in all the wrong places. Honestly, during a kiss your cheeks should remain relatively dry.

When they stopped to pick up Mike, Violet started to get out so she could climb in back with Chelsea, giving Mike’s longer legs the front seat, but Jay reached out and caught her wrist. “What are you doing? I want you to sit with me.” His fingers moved to lace through hers as he drew her back inside. “Mike can sit in back.” Violet felt herself blush with satisfaction. Mike came out of his house and jumped down the porch without ever touching the steps. Behind the darkened curtains, the television flickered. “Here he comes!” Chelsea squealed, sounding like a little girl as she bounced up and down in the backseat, shaking the entire car. She clapped her hands with excitement. Violet pulled her seat as far forward as she could to give Mike some extra room. He’d need it if he was going to be confined back there with Chelsea. “Heeyyy, Mike.” Chelsea managed to drawl the two words into several long syllables as Mike slid into the car. The syrupiness of it sounded so foreign oozing from Chelsea’s mouth. “Hey,” Mike said back to her. One word, one syllable. “So I guess it’s just the four of us tonight,” she purred. “Really? I thought we were meeting a buncha people.” “Nope. Just us. Everyone else bailed.” Violet smiled to herself as she listened to Chelsea’s account, amazed that her words came out sounding so…sincere. But Violet knew better. And she realized from the look Jay flashed her that he knew too. Mike, on the other hand, was too new to understand the disturbing way that Chelsea’s mind worked. There was a brief pause, and then Violet swore she could hear a smile in his voice when he answered, “That’s cool.” He might rethink that later, Violet thought, when Chelsea stops holding back and decides to assault him right in the middle of a crowded movie theater. Unless he’s into that kind of thing. She grinned wickedly to herself. And then she wondered if Jay would attack her. She hoped so.

Real love isn’t conditional. It’s seeing somebody for everything they are and accepting all of them. It’s knowing you’re friends first and lovers second, understanding that arguments are opportunities to know each other deeper. It’s dinner waiting in the microwave, lights left on to welcome you home safely. It’s showering together so you can kiss a little longer. It’s two a.m. secrets spilled while you’re wrapped up in each other, dancing in the kitchen, Disney movies on the couch while crying your heart out. It’s supporting dreams, growing together, and growing separately. Because when you can stand strong on your own, you can stand strong together.

The trees soon revealed startling secrets. I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy and wisdom that can no longer be denied. I conducted hundreds of experiments, with one discovery leading to the next, and through this quest I uncovered the lessons of tree-to-tree communication, of the relationships that create a forest society. The evidence was at first highly controversial, but the science is now known to be rigorous, peer-reviewed, and widely published. It is no fairy tale, no flight of fancy, no magical unicorn, and no fiction in a Hollywood movie.

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony. This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They are not flawed protagonists either, but are driven at least as much by their unsavory characteristics as by any moral sense. They aren't flawed figures who try to do the right thing; they don't necessarily learn from their mistakes; and we aren't asked to like them in spite of their obvious faults. Though they usually aren't interested in making good, they do set themselves some kind of mission--Anderson's films are mostly quest movies in an age that no longer believes in quests, and this gives them both an old-fashioned flavor and an air of disillusionment and futility.

I'm trying to stitch these scenes from a life together, I am trying to master the art of cinematic collage, but I find the material has become amorphous. I can no longer tell what is true apart from what I want to be tru anymore. It's like a movie I watched when I was high. The images shimmer somewhere in the mirky depths, I know I have watched this film before, but I can't pull up anything I would trust as real, true detail, because everything has been embellished by these years of grief, guilt and remorse. The celluloid has tarnished, it wasn't ever deemed to be worth much, it wasn't stored properly, so now the writer can't even decipher the director's name on the film can. I can no longer separate what happened on screen from the stoner wisecracks I made whilst watching it.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

I begin this chapter with President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech on January 11, 1989. President Reagan encouraged the rising generation to “let ’em know and nail ’em on it”—that is, to push back against teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, and others in the governing generation who manipulate and deceive them: An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties. But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection]. So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.1

The instruments of murder are as manifold as the unlimited human imagination. Apart from the obvious—shotguns, rifles, pistols, knives, hatchets and axes—I have seen meat cleavers, machetes, ice picks, bayonets, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, crowbars, pry bars, two-by-fours, tree limbs, jack handles (which are not “tire irons;” nobody carries tire irons anymore), building blocks, crutches, artificial legs, brass bedposts, pipes, bricks, belts, neckties, pantyhose, ropes, bootlaces, towels and chains—all these things and more, used by human beings to dispatch their fellow human beings into eternity. I have never seen a butler use a candelabrum. I have never seen anyone use a candelabrum! Such recherché elegance is apparently confined to England. I did see a pair of sneakers used to kill a woman, and they left distinctive tread marks where the murderer stepped on her throat and crushed the life from her. I have not seen an icicle used to stab someone, though it is said to be the perfect weapon, because it melts afterward. But I do know of a case in which a man was bludgeoned to death with a frozen ham. Murderers generally do not enjoy heavy lifting—though of course they end up doing quite a bit of it after the fact, when it is necessary to dispose of the body—so the weapons they use tend to be light and maneuverable. You would be surprised how frequently glass bottles are used to beat people to death. Unlike the “candy-glass” props used in the movies, real glass bottles stand up very well to blows. Long-necked beer bottles, along with the heavy old Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottles, make formidable weapons, powerful enough to leave a dent in a wooden two-by-four without breaking. I recall one case in which a woman was beaten to death with a Pepsi bottle, and the distinctive spiral fluting of the bottle was still visible on the broken margins of her skull. The proverbial “lead pipe” is a thing of the past, as a murder weapon. Lead is no longer used to make pipes.

SPIEGEL: You have a lot of respect for the Dalai Lama, you even rewrote some Buddhist writings for him. Are you a religious person? Cleese: I certainly don't think much of organized religion. I am not committed to anything except the vague feeling that there is something more going on than the materialist reductionist people think. I think you can reduce suffering a little bit, like the Buddhists say, that is one of the few things I take seriously. But the idea that you can run this planet in a rational and kind way -- I think it's not possible. There will always be these sociopaths at the top -- selfish people, power-seekers who want to spend their whole lives seeking it. Robin Skynner, the psychiatrist that I wrote two books with, said to me that you could begin to enjoy life when you realized how bad the planet is, how hopeless everything is. I reached that point these last two or three years when I saw that our existence here is absolutely hopeless. I see the rich people have got a stranglehold on us. If somebody had said that to me when I was 20, I would have regarded him as a left-wing loony. SPIEGEL: You may not have been a left-wing loony, but you were happy to attack and ridicule the church. The "Life of Brian," the story of a young man in Judea who isn't Jesus Christ, but is nevertheless followed like a savior and crucified afterwards, was regarded as blasphemy when it was released in 1979. Cleese: Well there was a small number of people in country towns, all very conservative, who got upset and said, "You can't show the film." So people hired a coach and drove 15 miles to the next town and went to see the film there. But a lot of Christians said, "We got it, we know that the joke is not about religion, but about the way people follow religion." If Jesus saw the Spanish Inquisition I think he would have said, "What are you doing there?" SPIEGEL: These days Muslims and Islam are risky subjects. Do you think they are good issues for satire? Cleese: For sure. In 1982, Graham Chapman and I wrote a number of scenes for "The Meaning of Life" movie which had an ayatollah in them. This ayatollah was raging against all the evil inventions of the West, you know, like toilet paper. These scenes were never included in the film, although I thought they were much better than many other scenes that were included. And that's why I didn't do any more Python films: I didn't want to be outvoted any longer. But I wouldn't have made fun of the prophet. SPIEGEL: Why not? Cleese: How could you? How could you make fun of Jesus or Saint Francis of Assisi? They were wonderful human beings. People are only funny when they behave inappropriately, when they've been taken over by some egotistical emotion which they can't control and they become less human. SPIEGEL: Is there a difference between making fun of our side, so to speak, the Western, Christian side, and Islam? Cleese: There shouldn't be a difference. [SPIEGEL Interview with John Cleese: 'Satire Makes People Think' - 2015]

What are you doing?” “Coming to pick you up in a little bit,” he said. I loved it when he took charge. It made my heart skip a beat, made me feel flushed and excited and thrilled. After four years with J, I was sick and tired of the surfer mentality. Laid-back, I’d discovered, was no longer something I wanted in a man. And when it came to his affection for me, Marlboro Man was anything but that. “I’ll be there at five.” Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir. I’ll be ready. With bells on. I started getting ready at three. I showered, shaved, powdered, perfumed, brushed, curled, and primped for two whole hours--throwing on a light pink shirt and my favorite jeans--all in an effort to appear as if I’d simply thrown myself together at the last minute. It worked. “Man,” Marlboro Man said when I opened the door. “You look great.” I couldn’t focus very long on his compliment, though--I was way too distracted by the way he looked. God, he was gorgeous. At a time of year when most people are still milky white, his long days of working cattle had afforded him a beautiful, golden, late-spring tan. And his typical denim button-down shirts had been replaced by a more fitted dark gray polo, the kind of shirt that perfectly emphasizes biceps born not from working out in a gym, but from tough, gritty, hands-on labor. And his prematurely gray hair, very short, was just the icing on the cake. I could eat this man with a spoon. “You do, too,” I replied, trying to will away my spiking hormones. He opened the door to his white diesel pickup, and I climbed right in. I didn’t even ask him where we were going; I didn’t even care. But when we turned west on the highway and headed out of town, I knew exactly where he was taking me: to his ranch…to his turf…to his home on the range. Though I didn’t expect or require a ride from him, I secretly loved that he drove over an hour to fetch me. It was a throwback to a different time, a burst of chivalry and courtship in this very modern world. As we drove we talked and talked--about our friends, about our families, about movies and books and horses and cattle.

He looked up at her and saw that she wore the face of Everyone. It was the face of the two women who talked in the seat behind him on the bus; it was the face of Mrs. Leslie, saying to him, "Some of us are going to organize a Pretentionist Club ..." It was the face of those who did not dare sit down and talk with themselves, the people who could not be alone a minute, the people who were tired without knowing they were tired and afraid without knowing that they were afraid. And, yes, it was the face of Mrs. Leslie's husband, crowding drink and women into a barren life. It was the grinding anxiety that had become commonplace, that sent people fleeing for psychological shelters against the bombs of uncertainty. Gaiety no longer was sufficient, cynicism had run out, and flippancy had never been more than a temporary shield. So now the people fled to the drug of pretense, identifying themselves with another life and another time and place--at the movie theater or on the television screen or in the Pretentionist movement. For so long as you were someone else you need not be yourself. Clifford D. Simak. Ring Around the Sun (Kindle Locations 1207-1215). Avon. Kindle Edition.

the law. Even in Boston, she sometimes saw disapproval in the eyes of the passersby. Her hair was no longer the white-blond of her childhood, but it was still light enough to catch attention when bent toward James’s inky black head in movie theaters, on a park bench, at the counter at the Waldorf Cafeteria. A gaggle of Radcliffe girls came down the stairs, one hovering nearby to wait for the phone, the others crowding around the hall mirror to apply powder to their noses. One of them, just a week before, had heard about Marilyn’s marriage and came by her room “to see if it was really true.” Marilyn squeezed the receiver and pressed one palm to her belly and kept her voice sweet. “I don’t know, Mother,” she said. “Why don’t you ask him when you meet him?” So her mother came in from Virginia, the first time she’d ever left the state. Standing at the station with James hours after his graduation, waiting for her mother’s train, Marilyn told herself: she would have come anyway, even if I’d told her. Her mother stepped onto the platform and spotted Marilyn and a smile flashed across her face—spontaneous, proud—and for that instant, Marilyn believed it completely. Of course she would have. Then the smile flickered

This is a perfect example of how a control drama interferes,” he said. “You were so aloof you didn’t allow an important coincidence to take place.” I must have appeared defensive. “It’s all right,” he said, “everyone plays a drama of one kind or another. At least now you understand how yours works.” “I don’t understand!” I said. “What exactly am I doing?” “Your way of controlling people and situations,” he explained, “in order to get energy coming your way, is to create this drama in your mind during which you withdraw and look mysterious and secretive. You tell yourself that you’re being cautious but what you’re really doing is hoping someone will be pulled into this drama and will try to figure out what’s going on with you. When someone does, you remain vague, forcing them to struggle and dig and try to discern your true feelings. “As they do so, they give you their full attention and that sends their energy to you. The longer you can keep them interested and mystified, the more energy you receive. Unfortunately, when you play aloof, your life tends to evolve very slowly because you’re repeating this same scene over and over again. If you had opened up to Rolando, your life movie would have taken off in a new and meaningful direction.

The same song was playing the second I met my ex–best friend and the moment I realized I’d lost her. I met my best friend at a neighborhood cookout the year we would both turn twelve. It was one of those hot Brooklyn afternoons that always made me feel like I'd stepped out of my life and onto a movie set because the hydrants were open, splashing water all over the hot asphalt. There wasn't a cloud in the flawless blue sky. And pretty black and brown people were everywhere. I was crying. ‘What a Wonderful World’ was playing through a speaker someone had brought with them to the park, and it reminded me too much of my Granny Georgina. I was cupping the last snow globe she’d ever given me in my small, sweaty hands and despite the heat, I couldn’t help imagining myself inside the tiny, perfect, snow-filled world. I was telling myself a story about what it might be like to live in London, a place that was unimaginably far and sitting in the palm of my hands all at once. But it wasn't working. When Gigi had told me stories, they'd felt like miracles. But she was gone and I didn't know if I'd ever be okay again. I heard a small voice behind me, asking if I was okay. I had noticed a girl watching me, but it took her a long time to come over, and even longer to say anything. She asked the question quietly. I had never met anyone who…spoke the way that she did, and I thought that her speech might have been why she waited so long to speak to me. While I expected her to say ‘What’s wrong?’—a question I didn’t want to have to answer—she asked ‘What are you doing?’ instead, and I was glad. “I was kind of a weird kid, so when I answered, I said ‘Spinning stories,’ calling it what Gigi had always called it when I got lost in my own head, but my voice cracked on the phrase and another tear slipped down my cheek. To this day I don’t know why I picked that moment to be so honest. Usually when kids I didn't know came up to me, I clamped my mouth shut like the heavy cover of an old book falling closed. Because time and taught me that kids weren't kind to girls like me: Girls who were dreamy and moony-eyed and a little too nice. Girls who wore rose-tonted glasses. And actual, really thick glasses. Girls who thought the world was beautiful, and who read too many books, and who never saw cruelty coming. But something about this girl felt safe. Something about the way she was smiling as she stuttered out the question helped me know I needn't bother with being shy, because she was being so brave. I thought that maybe kids weren't nice to girls like her either. The cookout was crowded, and none of the other kids were talking to me because, like I said, I was the neighborhood weirdo. I carried around snow globesbecause I was in love with every place I’d never been. I often recited Shakespeare from memory because of my dad, who is a librarian. I lost myself in books because they were friends who never letme down, and I didn’t hide enough of myself the way everyone else did, so people didn’t ‘get’ me. I was lonely a lot. Unless I was with my Gigi. The girl, she asked me if it was making me feel better, spinning the stories. And I shook my head. Before I could say what I was thinking—a line from Hamlet about sorrow coming in battalions that would have surely killed any potential I had of making friends with her. The girl tossed her wavy black hair over her shoulder and grinned. She closed her eyes and said 'Music helps me. And I love this song.' When she started singing, her voice was so unexpected—so bright and clear—that I stopped crying and stared at her. She told me her name and hooked her arm through mine like we’d known each other forever, and when the next song started, she pulled me up and we spun in a slow circle together until we were both dizzy and giggling.

Then something changed. My life no longer seemed like a movie to me. Ivan was still in the movie, but had left me behind. Nothing extraordinary was happening anymore, or would ever happen again. I was just there with my relatives, living pointless, shapeless days that weren’t bringing me any closer to anything. It seemed to me that this state of affairs was a relief to my mother. From her perspective, I thought, the past weeks had been a perilous, temporary adventure, something to be endured, and now things were back to normal. It was painful to feel at such cross-purposes with her. Almost everything that was interesting or meaningful in my story was, in her story, a pointless hazard or annoyance. This was even more true with my aunts. They didn’t take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn’t challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn’t know how to do anything real. I didn’t know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn’t just a self-improvement project. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn’t say what you were supposed to do.

When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel and steam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in the back of the mind. My spine is a track with cold black steel racing on it, a trail of steam and dust following behind, ghost like. It feels like my whole life is holding its breath. By the time she leaves the room I am surprised that she can’t see the train. It has jumped the track of my spine and landed in my mothers’ living room. A cold dark thing, black steel and redwood paneling. It is the old type, from the western movies I loved as a kid. He throws open the doors to the outside world, to the dark ocean. I feel a breeze tugging at me, a slender finger of wind that catches at my shirt. Pulling. Grabbing. I can feel the panic build in me, the need to scream or cry rising in my throat. And then I am out the door, running, tumbling down the steps falling out into the darkened world, falling out into the lifeless ocean. Out into the blackness. Out among the stars and shadows. And underneath my skin, in the back of my head and down the back of my spine I can feel the desperation and I can feel the noise. I can feel the deep and ancient ache of loudness that litters across my bones. It’s like an old lover, comfortable and well known, but unwelcome and inappropriate with her stories of our frolicking. And then she’s gone and the Conductor is closing the door. The darkness swells around us, enveloping us in a cocoon, pressing flat against the train like a storm. I wonder, what is this place? Those had been heady days, full and intense. It’s funny. I remember the problems, the confusions and the fears of life we all dealt with. But, that all seems to fade. It all seems to be replaced by images of the days when it was all just okay. We all had plans back then, patterns in which we expected the world to fit, how it was to be deciphered. Eventually you just can’t carry yourself any longer, can’t keep your eyelids open, and can’t focus on anything but the flickering light of the stars. Hours pass, at first slowly like a river and then all in a rush, a climax and I am home in the dorm, waking up to the ringing of the telephone. When she is gone the apartment is silent, empty, almost like a person sleeping, waiting to wake up. When she is gone, and I am alone, I curl up on the bed, wait for the house to eject me from its dying corpse. Crazy thoughts cross through my head, like slants of light in an attic. The Boston 395 rocks a bit, a creaking noise spilling in from the undercarriage. I have decided that whatever this place is, all these noises, sensations - all the train-ness of this place - is a fabrication. It lulls you into a sense of security, allows you to feel as if it’s a familiar place. But whatever it is, it’s not a train, or at least not just a train. The air, heightened, tense against the glass. I can hear the squeak of shoes on linoleum, I can hear the soft rattle of a dying man’s breathing. Men in white uniforms, sharp pressed lines, run past, rolling gurneys down florescent hallways.

I’m the living dead. I feel no connection to any other human. I have no friends and I don’t really care much about my family any longer. I feel no love for them. I can feel no joy. I’m incapable of feeling physical pleasure. There’s nothing to ever look forward to as a result. I don’t miss anyone or anything. I eat because I feel hunger pangs, but no food tastes like anything I like. I wear a mask when I’m with other people but it’s been slipping lately. I can’t find the energy to hide the heavy weight of survival and its effect on me. I’m exhausted all the time from the effort of just making it through the day. This depression has made a mockery of my memory. It’s in tatters. I have no good memories to sustain me. My past is gone. My present is horrid. My future looks like more of the same. In a way, I’m a man without time. Certainly, there’s no meaning in my life. What meaning can there be without even a millisecond of joy? Ah, scratch that. Let’s even put aside joy and shoot for lower. How about a moment of being content? Nope. Not a chance. I see other people, normal people, who can enjoy themselves. I hear people laughing at something on TV. It makes me cock my head and wonder what that’s like. I’m sure at sometime in my past, I had to have had a wonderful belly laugh. I must have laughed so hard once or twice that my face hurt. Those memories are gone though. Now, the whole concept of “funny” is dead. I stopped going to movies a long time ago. Sitting in a theater crowded with people, every one of them having a better time than you, is incredibly damaging. I wasn’t able to focus for that long anyway. Probably for the best. Sometimes I fear the thought of being normal again. I think I wouldn’t know how to act. How would I handle being able to feel? Gosh it would be nice to feel again. Anything but this terrible, suffocating pain. The sorrow and the misery is so visceral, I find myself clenching my jaw. It physically hurts me. Then I realize that it’s silly to worry about that. You see, in spite of all the meds, the ketamine infusions and other treatments, I’m not getting better. I’m getting worse. I was diagnosed 7 years ago but I’m sure I was suffering for longer. Of course, I can’t remember that, but depression is something that crept up on me. It’s silent and oppressive. I don’t even remember what made me think about going to see someone. But I did and it was a pretty clear diagnosis. So, now what? I keep waking up every morning unfortunately. I don’t fear death any more. That’s for sure. I’ve made some money for the couple of decades I’ve been working and put it away in retirement accounts. I think about how if I was dead that others I once cared for would get that money. Maybe it could at least help them. I don’t know that I’ll ever need it. Even if I don’t end it myself, depression takes a toll on the body. My life expectancy is estimated to be 14 years lower as a result according to the NIH. It won’t be fast enough though. I’m just an empty biological machine that doesn’t know that my soul is gone. My humanity is no more

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

For the first five or six days I didn’t suffer at all, carried along by the change of scene and the sense of a progression. This was the next step in the story. Ivan was in Tokyo and I was here. It was like when two characters in a movie went to two different places. Then something changed. My life no longer seemed like a movie to me. Ivan was still in the movie, but had left me behind. Nothing extraordinary was happening anymore, or would ever happen again. I was just there with my relatives, living pointless, shapeless days that weren’t bringing me any closer to anything. It seemed to me that this state of affairs was a relief to my mother. From her perspective, I thought, the past weeks had been a perilous, temporary adventure, something to be endured, and now things were back to normal. It was painful to feel at such cross-purposes with her. Almost everything that was interesting or meaningful in my story was, in her story, a pointless hazard or annoyance. This was even more true with my aunts. They didn’t take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn’t challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn’t know how to do anything real. I didn’t know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn’t just a self-improvement project. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn’t say what you were supposed to do.

I wondered why nobody realized what a crazy experience we all were having. I'd be lying in bed, or walking down a hallway in college, and the realization that I was alive would startle me, as though it had come up from behind and slammed two books together. I suddenly realized I was breathing air and stuck to the planet and temporary. And that realization felt as though I had come from some other existence and was experiencing this magical life for the first time. If you think about it, we get robbed of the mystery of being alive. It's a fairly amazing thing, you know. Even if you believe life is an accident, that we are all here by accident, it's still an amazing thing. It might even be a more amazing thing if we are really here by accident. What are the chances, honestly? Still, I think we get robbed of the glory of it, because we don't remember how we got here. When you get born, you wake up slowly to everything. Your brain doesn't stop growing until you turn 26, you know. So from birth to 26, God is slowly turning on the lights, and you are groggy and pointing at things and saying ‘circle’ and ‘blue’ and ‘car,’ and then ‘sex’ and ‘job’ and ‘healthcare.’ The experience is so slow, you can easily come to believe life isn't that big a deal, that life isn't staggering. What I'm saying is, I think life IS staggering, and we are just too used to it. We are all of us like spoiled children, no longer impressed with the gifts we are being given. It’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving over the mountains, just another child being born, just another funeral. When I was writing myself into a movie, I felt the way God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets, placing tiny people in tiny wombs. If I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me specifically into the story. And He put us in with the sunsets and the rainstorms as though to say, ‘Enjoy your place in My story. The very beauty of it means it’s not about you, and in time, that will give you comfort.

As we round the corner for our third lap, I catch Peter Kavinsky looking at me. I thought I was imagining it at first, him staring in my direction, but this is the third time. He’s playing ultimate Frisbee with some of the guys. When we pass them, Peter jogs over to us and says, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Chris and I look at each other. “Her or me?” she asks. “Lara Jean.” Chris puts her arm around my shoulder protectively. “Go ahead. We’re listening.” Peter rolls his eyes. “I want to talk to her in private.” “Fine,” she snaps, and she flounces away. Over her shoulder she looks back at me with wide eyes, like What? I shrug back, like I have no idea! In a low, quiet voice, Peter says, “Just so you know, I don’t have any STDs.” What in the world? I stare at him, my mouth open. “I never said you had an STD!” His voice is still low but actually furious. “I also don’t always take the last piece of pizza.” “What are you talking about?” “That’s what you said. In your letter. How I’m an egotistical guy who goes around giving girls STDs. Remember?” “What letter? I never wrote you any letter!” Wait. Yes I did. I did write him a letter, about a million years ago. But that’s not the letter he’s talking about. It couldn’t be. “Yes. You. Did. It was addressed to me, from you.” Oh, God. No. No. This isn’t happening. This isn’t reality. I’m dreaming. I’m in my room and I’m dreaming and Peter Kavinsky is in my dream, glaring at me. I close my eyes. Am I dreaming? Is this real? “Lara Jean?” I open my eyes. I’m not dreaming, and this is real. This is a nightmare. Peter Kavinsky is holding my letter in his hand. It’s my handwriting, my envelope, my everything. “How--how did you get that?” “It came in the mail yesterday.” Peter sighs. Gruffly he says, “Listen, it’s no big deal; I just hope you’re not going around telling people--” “It came in the mail? To your house?” “Yeah.” I feel faint. I actually feel faint. Please let me faint right now, because if I faint I will no longer be here, in this moment. It will be like in movies when a girl passes out from the horror of it all and the fighting happens while she is asleep and she wakes up in a hospital bed with a bruise or two, but she’s missed all the bad stuff. I wish that was my life instead of this.

I have come to think of the UFO problem in terms of three distinct levels. The first level is physical. We now know that the UFO behaves like a region of space, of small dimensions (about ten meters), within which a very large amount of energy is stored. This energy is manifested by pulsed light phenomena of intense colors and by other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The second level is biological. Reports of UFOs show all kinds of psychophysiological effects on the witnesses. Exposure to the phenomenon causes visions, hallucinations, space and time disorientation, physiological reactions (including temporary blindness, paralysis, sleep cycle changes), and long-term personality changes. The third level is social. Belief in the reality of UFOs is spreading rapidly at all levels of society throughout the world. Books on the subject continue to accumulate. Documentaries and major films are being made by men and women who grew up with flying-saucer stories. Expectations about life in the universe have been revolutionized. Many modern themes in our culture can be traced back to the "messages from space" coming from UFO contactees of the forties and fifties. The experience of a close encounter with a UFO is a shattering physical and mental ordeal. The trauma has effects that go far beyond what the witnesses recall consciously. New types of behavior are conditioned, and new types of beliefs are promoted. Aside from any scientific consideration, the social, political, and religious consequences of the experience are enormous if they are considered over the timespan of a generation. Faced with the new wave of experiences of UFO contact that are described in books like Communion and Intruders and in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, our religions seem obsolete. Our idea of the church as a social entity working within rational structures is obviously challenged by the claim of a direct communication in modern times with visible beings who seem endowed with supernatural powers. This idea can shake our society to the very roots of its culture. Witnesses are no longer afraid to come forward with personal stories of abductions, of spiritual exchanges with aliens, even of sexual interaction with them. Such reports are folklore in the making. I have discovered that they form a striking parallel to the tales of meetings with elves and jinn of medieval times, with the denizens of "Magonia," the land beyond the clouds of ancient chronicles. But they are something else, too: a portent of important things to come.

There was only one thing in the room that was different. For a moment or so he couldn't see what the one thing that was different was, because it too was covered in a film of disgusting dust. Then his eyes caught it and stopped. It was next to a battered old television on which it was only possible to watch Open University Study Courses, because if it tried to show anything more exciting it would break down. It was a box. Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at it. It was a grey box, with a kind of dull lustre to it. It was a cubic grey box, just over a foot on a side. It was tied with a single grey ribbon, knotted into a neat bow on the top. He got up, walked over and touched it in surprise. Whatever it was was clearly gift-wrapped, neatly and beautifully, and was waiting for him to open it. Cautiously, he picked it up and carried it back to the bed. He brushed the dust off the top and loosened the ribbon. The top of the box was a lid, with a flap tucked into the body of the box. He untucked it and looked into the box. In it was a glass globe, nestling in fine grey tissue paper. He drew it out, carefully. It wasn't a proper globe because it was open at the bottom, or, as Arthur realized turning it over, at the top, with a thick rim. It was a bowl. A fish bowl. It was made of the most wonderful glass perfectly transparent, yet with an extraordinary silver-grey quality as if crystal and slate had gone into its making. Arthur slowly turned it over and over in his hands. It was one of the most beautiful objects he had ever seen, but he was entirely perplexed by it. He looked into the box, but other than the tissue paper there was nothing. On the outside of the box there was nothing. He turned the bowl round again. It was wonderful. It was exquisite. But it was a fish bowl. He tapped it with his thumbnail and it rang with a deep and glorious chime which was sustained for longer than seemed possible, and when at last it faded seemed not to die away but to drift off into other worlds, as into a deep sea dream. Entranced, Arthur turned it round yet again, and this time the light from the dusty little bedside lamp caught it at a different angle and glittered on some fine abrasions on the fish bowl's surface. He held it up, adjusting the angle to the light, and suddenly saw clearly the finely engraved shapes of words shadowed on the glass. "So Long," they said, "and Thanks ..." And that was all. He blinked, and understood nothing. For fully five more minutes he turned the object round and around, held it to the light at different angles, tapped it for its mesmerizing chime and pondered on the meaning of the shadowy letters but could find none. Finally he stood up, filled the bowl with water from the tap and put it back on the table next to the television. He shook the little Babel fish from his ear and dropped it, wriggling, into the bowl. He wouldn't be needing it any more, except for watching foreign movies

Democracy, the apple of the eye of modern western society, flies the flag of equality, tolerance, and the right of its weaker members to defense and protection. The flag bearers for children's rights adhere to these same values. But should democracy bring about the invalidation of parental authority? Does democracy mean total freedom for children? Is it possible that in the name of democracy, parents are no longer allowed to say no to their children or to punish them? The belief that punishment is harmful to children has long been a part of our culture. It affects each and every one of us and penetrates our awareness via the movies we see and the books we read. It is a concept that has become a kingpin of modern society and helps form the media's attitudes toward parenting, as well as influencing legislation and courtroom decisions. In recent years, the children's rights movement has enjoyed enormous momentum and among the current generation, this movement has become pivotal and is stronger than ever before. Educational systems are embracing psychological concepts in which stern approaches and firm discipline during childhood are said to create emotional problems in adulthood, and liberal concepts have become the order of the day. To prevent parents from abusing their children, the public is constantly being bombarded by messages of clemency and boundless consideration; effectively, children should be forgiven, parents should be understanding, and punishment should be avoided. Out of a desire to protect children from all hardship and unpleasantness, parental authority has become enfeebled and boundaries have been blurred. Nonetheless, at the same time society has seen a worrying rise in violence, from domestic violence to violence at school and on the streets. Sweden, a pioneer in enacting legislation that limits parental authority, is now experiencing a dramatic rise in child and youth violence. The country's lawyers and academics, who have established a committee for human rights, are now protesting that while Swedish children are protected against light physical punishment from their parents (e.g., being spanked on the bottom), they are exposed to much more serious violence from their peers. The committee's position is supported by statistics that indicate a dramatic rise in attacks on children and youths by their peers over the years since the law went into effect (9-1). Is it conceivable, therefore, that a connection exists between legislation that forbids across-the-board physical punishment and a rise in youth violence? We believe so! In Israel, where physical punishment has been forbidden since 2000 (9-2), there has also been a steady and sharp rise in youth violence, which bears an obvious connection to reduced parental authority. Children and adults are subjected to vicious beatings and even murder at the hands of violent youths, while parents, who should by nature be responsible for setting boundaries for their children, are denied the right to do so properly, as they are weakened by the authority of the law. Parents are constantly under suspicion, and the fear that they may act in a punitive manner toward their wayward children has paralyzed them and led to the almost complete transfer of their power into the hands of law-enforcement authorities. Is this what we had hoped for? Are the indifferent and hesitant law-enforcement authorities a suitable substitute for concerned and caring parents? We are well aware of the fact that law-enforcement authorities are not always able to effectively do their jobs, which, in turn, leads to the crumbling of society.