“
This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.
”
”
Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)
“
She understood that the hardest times in life to go through were when you were transitioning from one version of yourself to another.
”
”
Sarah Addison Allen (Lost Lake (Lost Lake, #1))
“
Was he hungry? He'd had an enormous breakfast, but the transition from the glimpse had taken a lot out of him. Did they serve lunch in Hell? Should he have packed a snack? Why was he suddenly thinking about food?
”
”
Melissa de la Cruz (Lost in Time (Blue Bloods, #6))
“
The new is always at our doorstep when we feel most lost.
”
”
Janet Rebhan (Learn To Be Still: Select Essays on the Spiritual Life)
“
Vic closed his eyes, squeezing Hap's lifeless hand as he whispered "What do you do if you've forgotten all you know?"
PART 4
YOU START AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING
”
”
T.J. Klune (In the Lives of Puppets)
“
There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.
”
”
Book of G'Quan
“
But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I," could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.
”
”
Ayn Rand (Anthem)
“
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.
”
”
Katherine May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times)
“
The sad fact...is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value.
”
”
Rachel Cusk (Transit)
“
Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight-- and with no apparent antecedents whatever. For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC show no trace of writing. Soon after that date, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of Ancient Egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured at the outset, with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized; and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was it common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty.
”
”
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
... the transition from lost to found is never an easy one. It is never easy to be a prodigal son -- or daughter. It is never easy to say, 'I will arise and go to my father ...' (Luke 15:18, 19). This is never easy, because it is not until our situation becomes completely hopeless that we can humble ourselves to the extent of admitting that such a gross mistake was our own.
”
”
Robert L. Short (The Gospel According to Peanuts)
“
Life is a series of events and sensations. Everything else is interpretation. Much is lost in transition - and added in assumption / projection
”
”
Rasheed Ogunlaru
“
Trying what?" cried Maury fiercely. "Trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas?
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
“
Reading these stories, it's tempting to think that
the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting,
navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in the
everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive
manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged
occasions than those at hand, as though to express some
sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face
them. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival,
seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called
for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to
deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a
stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the
transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom
is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of
this journey between the near and the far goes on in
every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend,
an old letter will remind you that you are not who you
once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued
this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without
noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the
strange has become familiar and the familiar if not
strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown
garment. And some people travel far more than
others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate
or at least unquestioned sense of self and those
who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for
satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values
and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to
burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
“
media really don’t care about people’s welfare, or even particularly the truth. They’re just trying for ratings.
”
”
Jerry Boyd (Lost in Transit (Bob and Nikki, #6))
“
But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
“
War is becoming an anachronism; if we have battled in every part of the continent it was because two opposing social orders were facing each other, the one which dates from 1789, and the old regime. They could not exist together; the younger devoured the other. I know very well, that, in the final reckoning, it was war that overthrew me, me the representative of the French Revolution, and the instrument of its principles. But no matter! The battle was lost for civilization, and civilization will inevitably take its revenge. There are two systems, the past and the future. The present is only a painful transition. Which must triumph? The future, will it not? Yes indeed, the future! That is, intelligence, industry, and peace. The past was brute force, privilege, and ignorance. Each of our victories was a triumph for the ideas of the Revolution. Victories will be won, one of these days, without cannon, and without bayonets.
”
”
Napoléon Bonaparte
“
Look," Aracely said. "I know what you're going through."
"No you don't." Sam sat up. "I still have to live like this. Nothing is gonna fix me. There's no water that's gonna make me into something else."
"And I'd start from where you are if it meant what happened that night didn't have to happen," Aracely said. "We don't get to become who we are for nothing. It costs something. You're fighting for every little piece of yourself. And maybe I got all of me at once but I lost everything else. Don't you dare think there's any water in the world that makes this easy.
”
”
Anna-Marie McLemore (When the Moon Was Ours)
“
In the 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists. Thirty years later, that number has increased by an order of magnitude. Between 1998 and 2004, more than 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of House members made that career transition.
”
”
Lawrence Lessig (Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It)
“
As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.
The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.
The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.
The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.
Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”
The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.
”
”
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
“
A person, singular, can be reasonable. People, as a group, generally can’t.
”
”
Jerry Boyd (Lost in Transit (Bob and Nikki, #6))
“
We always try to be safe and boring. We’re just not very good at it.
”
”
Jerry Boyd (Lost in Transit (Bob and Nikki, #6))
“
In school you learned to write as if the reader Were in constant danger of getting lost, A problem you were taught to solve not by writing clearly But by shackling your sentences and paragraphs together. Think about transitions. Remember how it goes? Late in the paragraph you prepare for the transition to the next paragraph— The great leap over the void, across that yawning indentation. You were taught the art of the flying trapeze, But not how to write.
”
”
Verlyn Klinkenborg (Several Short Sentences About Writing)
“
Even the best national currency of the postwar period, the German mark, lost 71 percent of its value from January 1, 1949, through the end of June 1995. In the same period, the U.S. dollar lost 84 percent of its value.9 This inflation had the same effect as a tax on all who hold the currency.
”
”
James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
“
Being alive is like being a very bad time traveler. One second per second, and yet somehow you still get where you’re going too late, or too early, and the planet isn’t where it should be because you forgot to calculate for that even though it was extremely important and you left notes by the door to remind yourself, and the butterfly you stepped on when you were eight became a hurricane of everything you ever lost in your forties, and whatever wisdom you tried to pack with you has always gotten lost in transit, arriving, covered in festive stickers, a hundred years after you died.
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente (The Past Is Red)
“
The world’s people are in peril. We no doubt live in a noisy, numb, narcissistic age. The talents and attentions of the majority are not invested in personal mastery and social responsibility but squandered on games, voyeurism, and base sensationalism. We have recklessly abandoned what truly matters—the striving to be great as individuals and as a society—for the glamour and thrill of speed, convenience, and vain expression, in a kind of humanity-wide midlife crisis. Gone are the big visions; here are the quick wins and the sure things. Effort has lost out to entitlement. In the transition to our age of self-adoration and conceit, the page turned long ago on the dreams to rise as a people. Greatness is so rarely sought, and generation after generation fail to hold the line of human goodness and advancement. Why? Because
”
”
Brendon Burchard (The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power)
“
Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we're in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we're leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don't remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of the aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.
”
”
Don DeLillo (The Names)
“
Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
If her mate had been trapped inside during his transition with this woman for a month and hadn't lost his temper, he might be a saint.
”
”
Alanea Alder (My Protector (Bewitched and Bewildered, #2))
“
Much is lost, but much lasts. . .
”
”
A.K. Larkwood (The Unspoken Name (The Serpent Gates, #1))
“
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.
”
”
Katherine May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times)
“
When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.
”
”
Chuck Klosterman (But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past)
“
It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.
”
”
Rachel Cusk (Transit)
“
To tell the truth, I had reached the point with Albertine where (if everything continues in the same way, if things follow the normal course) a woman has no more interest for us except as the means of transition to another woman.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
“
Most often, a non-ADHD spouse can make this transition easily, but the ADHD spouse ends up lost; and because the non-ADHD spouse assumes that an adult should be able to make the transition, this inability to adjust is frustrating.
”
”
Melissa Orlov (The ADHD Effect on Marriage: Understand and Rebuild Your Relationship in Six Steps)
“
He had used drugs and nanonic supplements to compensate at first, then supplements became replacements, with bones exchanged for carbon-fibre struts. Electrical consumption supplanted food intake. The final transition was his skin, replacing the eczema-ridden epidermis with a smooth ochre silicon membrane. Warlow didn’t need a spacesuit to work in the vacuum, he could survive for over three weeks without a power and oxygen recharge. His facial features had become purely cosmetic, a crude mannequin-like caricature of human physiognomy, although there was an inlet valve at the back of his throat for fluid intake. There was no hair, and he certainly didn’t bother with clothes. Sex was something he lost in his fifties.
”
”
Peter F. Hamilton (The Reality Dysfunction (Night's Dawn, #1))
“
Liberalism has been degraded into liberality. Men have tried to turn "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust. But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
“
In earlier times,
decades, centuries,
even when we drove ourselves mad,
even when we lost days
or years
to drinking, drugging,
pain,
grief--
the years have always maintained their seasons:
trees shedding their leaves for new buds;
birds and insects flying away in formation
and then returning;
the luminous moon waxing and waning;
the ocean tides flowing and ebbing;
new growth, babies aborning,
as certain as trauma,
as certain as death.
All things went on
no matter the chaos inside us.
There was a childish anger
that everything just carried on,
ignored our turmoil--
our grief--
but there was also a deep and profound comfort.
We ourselves may be lost
but the road continued ever winding...
Have we disrupted that continuum?
Can we no longer count on that continuity?
Is that why our children are so afraid
but also so unwilling to swallow systemic lies
and deeply imbedded fallacies
we allowed ourselves to live by?
Because the future--
a future--
any future--
is no longer sure?
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn't life-altering, it was life-shattering.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
You have to get off that finite road that you’ve created from your transitional standpoint and onto the path of light. Onto the infinite road of eternal existence, the firm foundation of truth. This is where the crooked becomes straight, the lost get found, the blind see, and the dead live. Where the tangible reasoning of logical man loses credibility and is proven unrealistic. Where faith becomes active and the world of the supernatural becomes obvious. You have to accept Jesus. Accept it, accept Jesus.
”
”
Calvin W. Allison (Shadows Over February)
“
In a world where everybody is lost, and nowhere is home, airports are the only places that show their true colors. Airports are honest. They remind us all, once again, that we are, despite occasional illusions of stability, eternally in transit. At least that’s how I feel.
”
”
Maria Elena Sandovici (Stray Dogs and Lonely Beaches)
“
while it was to be expected that any child would lose this sparkle little by little in the inevitable transition to adulthood, Simonopio lost it suddenly, like a light going out, without giving them the opportunity to gradually get used to the new person who emerged in the blink of an eye.
”
”
Sofía Segovia (El murmullo de las abejas)
“
In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to communicate with the animals.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence)
“
I'd forgotten, I said to him, how relieving the anonymity of city life could be. People weren't forever having to explain themselves here: a city was a decipherable interface, a sort of lexicon of human behaviour that did half the work of decoding the mystery of self, so you could effectively communicate through a kind of shorthand. Where I had lived before, in the countryside, each individual was the unique, often illegible representation of their own acts and aims. So much got lost or mistaken, I said, in the process of self-explanation; so many words failed to maintain an integral meaning.
”
”
Rachel Cusk (Transit)
“
The messy middle is all about what happens when we’re in the state of in between. It involves a complicated alchemy of giving up old ways and experimenting with new ones, moving beyond what’s past and beginning to define what’s coming. In butterfly-speak, it’s cocooning; in hero-speak, it’s getting lost.
”
”
Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
“
The termination of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey forms a new epoch in the Roman History, at which a Republic, which had subsisted with unrivalled glory during a period of about four hundred and sixty years, relapsed into a state of despotism, whence it never more could emerge. So sudden a transition from prosperity to the ruin of public freedom, without the intervention of any foreign enemy, excites a reasonable conjecture, that the constitution in which it could take place, however vigorous in appearance, must have lost that soundness of political health which had enabled it to endure through so many ages.
”
”
Suetonius (De vita Caesarum)
“
Methinks, Oh! vain ill-judging Book,
I see thee cast a wishful look,
Where reputations won and lost are
In famous row called Paternoster.
Incensed to find your precious olio
Buried in unexplored port-folio,
You scorn the prudent lock and key,
And pant well bound and gilt to see
Your Volume in the window set
Of Stockdale, Hookham, or Debrett.
Go then, and pass that dangerous bourn
Whence never Book can back return:
And when you find, condemned, despised,
Neglected, blamed, and criticised,
Abuse from All who read you fall,
(If haply you be read at all
Sorely will you your folly sigh at,
And wish for me, and home, and quiet.
Assuming now a conjuror’s office, I
Thus on your future Fortune prophesy: —
Soon as your novelty is o’er,
And you are young and new no more,
In some dark dirty corner thrown,
Mouldy with damps, with cobwebs strown,
Your leaves shall be the Book-worm’s prey;
Or sent to Chandler–Shop away,
And doomed to suffer public scandal,
Shall line the trunk, or wrap the candle!
But should you meet with approbation,
And some one find an inclination
To ask, by natural transition
Respecting me and my condition;
That I am one, the enquirer teach,
Nor very poor, nor very rich;
Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
Of graceless form and dwarfish stature;
By few approved, and few approving;
Extreme in hating and in loving;
Abhorring all whom I dislike,
Adoring who my fancy strike;
In forming judgements never long,
And for the most part judging wrong;
In friendship firm, but still believing
Others are treacherous and deceiving,
And thinking in the present aera
That Friendship is a pure chimaera:
More passionate no creature living,
Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving,
But yet for those who kindness show,
Ready through fire and smoke to go.
Again, should it be asked your page,
‘Pray, what may be the author’s age?’
Your faults, no doubt, will make it clear,
I scarce have seen my twentieth year,
Which passed, kind Reader, on my word,
While England’s Throne held George the Third.
Now then your venturous course pursue:
Go, my delight! Dear Book, adieu!
”
”
Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk)
“
I had an uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get in conversation with another person, as if the fundamental part of myself had evaporated-not in the sense of being gone, but as if it has undergone a phase transition and is hovering over my actual body as a vapor. That's the best I can describe it, as if my consciousness and my physical person are suddenly separated.
”
”
Nell Freudenberger (Lost and Wanted)
“
With mortality in the balance, one of life’s most delicious activities when you’re young—imagining your future—had become a frightening, despair-inducing exercise. The future had once seemed infinite with possibility. Now it was shrouded in doom, a dark space ahead filled only with the promise of more poisonous treatments and terrifying unknowns. Thinking about the past stirred a nostalgia I preferred not to dwell on, a painful reminder of all I had lost, was losing: my friends; my youth; my fertility; my hair; the “milestone necklace” my parents had given me on my first day of chemo, which had gone missing somewhere in transit between the hospital and home; my mind, as the chemo made me cloudy and slow; my faith that I would ever make it to transplant.
”
”
Suleika Jaouad (Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted)
“
Back before all this gender shit, her body was like a good dog. Maybe it wasn't fully her, but her dog did everything she wanted: she moved so fast, pulled himself up trees, sprinted through forests and across fields, giddy and waggy. She was lucky to have gotten a dog like that. She didn't deserve such a good dog. She'd thought she'd have that dog forever - when they were both old, he would lay at her feet like a canvas duffel, loyal and obliging and charming to the last...
When Amy transitioned, she lost her dog. There was just her. She and her body were one and the same. Every sensation simply belonged to her, unmediated. It was supposed to be good. Sometimes it was. She didn't have to guess what was going on from her dog's behavior. But without a dog to hurt for her, on her behalf, her life as a woman arrived with pain; pain that had to be endured, withstood, pain that was the same as being alive, and so was without end.
As Jon bats, Ames tries to listen to his body. He has not thought about his dog in a long time. Does he still have a dog? In his detransition, he supposed he'd get his dog back, but he didn't. He has simply lost the vibrancy of both pain and pleasure. The world has receded to a tolerable distance, the colors unsaturated, while the dog stayed dead.
”
”
Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby)
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Sitting on the bench, gazing towards the setting sun, she lost her mind in the cerebral convolutions, the mysterious nooks and crannies of the memory, she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense, losing her way among the labyrinths, slowly deteriorating, dimming, noiselessly being obliterated and then fading away so gradually that it was impossible to pinpoint the transition between the flickering little flame and the shadows.
”
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Jacqueline Harpman (I Who Have Never Known Men)
“
During my crusade through self-discovery, I am continuously reminded that I am a student, and I will always be one. That is the gift even when we feel uncertain or lost in our current season. In order to grow, we, like the transition of autumn and rebirth of spring, must also prepare to shed and begin again. In pursuance of blooming, there must be rain. As we wait for the downpour to cease and new light to emerge, patience is our best and dearest friend. The sun will be on the horizon again, eventually.
”
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Alexandra Elle (After the Rain: Gentle Reminders for Healing, Courage, and Self-Love)
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It’s only natural to feel lost or alone when there is so much change surrounding you, and you can see your life changing from what it was to what it is now. Don’t overthink these emotions—understand that it’s all part of your ever-evolving journey. Understand that the way we process all of these changes is different for everyone. Understand that it’s totally normal to feel all kinds of different emotions through this transitional period. And most importantly, know that no matter how alone you feel, you have so much support behind you.
”
”
Charlotte Freeman (Everything You’ll Ever Need: You Can Find Within Yourself)
“
Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsia, had she wished to, could have disappeared awkwardly but very suddenly into these fantastic mountains, reached their centre and lain down upon an ancient couch with a picture book at her elbow and been entirely lost to view within a few moments.
”
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Mervyn Peake (The Gormenghast Novels (Gormenghast, #1-3))
“
Old friend, I am writing to you again
The infamous tale of squandered love
To have my denial broken by myself
To have accepted past for my behove
To have grown into a man of honor
To have embraced the code of chivalry
To have been reborn as a bird of myth
To have caught lies in nightly reverie
Lost myself in this chronic transition
I regret the love wasted, in-between
Who knew life can just be happy or full
If only the great men ere had foreseen
As humbled as I have become due this
I’m failing to see the point of these rhymes
So old friend, do tell me what is better
Death, endured once or a zillion times?
”
”
Zubair Ahsan
“
It’s strange territory, this desertland between maidenhood and motherhood. I suppose it was ingrained from an early age that one stage naturally and effortlessly follows the next. Yet, here I stand, longing to make that transition, both ready and eager to enter an elusive place, the door to which remains tightly shut. So, I rest on the periphery, a wandering nomadic drifter waiting my turn. I am lost in an eternal dance of emotion, shifting between hopefulness, grief, frustration and fear. Some days I feel strongly that my time is coming soon and I will be a mother. Other days I am impatient and not so sure it will ever happen for me.
”
”
Jodi Sky Rogers
“
The Maya did not emerge from the lost tribes of Israel or Atlantis. Instead, based on overwhelming evidence from linguistics, physical anthropology, and archaeology, ancestors of all New World people, including the Maya, migrated from Asia as nomadic hunters and gatherers. The debate surrounds the timing of their arrival in the Yucatan region and whether the migration across the Bering Strait occurred at about 12,000 BCE, 40,000 BCE or even earlier. Scholars continue to debate whether the Maya made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming villages in the lowland areas they occupied or if it spread into the lowlands from elsewhere.
”
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Hourly History (Mayan Civilization: A History From Beginning to End)
“
All family narratives take one of three shapes,” Marshall explained. First is the ascending family narrative: We came from nothing, we worked hard, we made it big. Next, the descending narrative: We used to have it all. Then we lost everything. “The most healthful narrative,” he continued, “is the third one.” It’s called the oscillating family narrative. We’ve had ups and downs in our family. Your grandfather was vice president of the bank, but his house burned down. Your aunt was the first girl to go to college, but she got breast cancer. Children who know that lives take all different shapes are much better equipped to face life’s inevitable disruptions.
”
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Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
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[T]he intense cathexis of longing which is concentrated on the missed or lost object (a cathexis which steadily mounts up because it cannot be appeased) creates the same economic conditions as are created by the cathexis of pain which is concentrated on the injured part of the body. [...] The transition from physical pain to mental pain corresponds to a change from narcissistic cathexis to object cathexis. An object-presentation which is highly cathected by instinctual need plays the same role as a part of the body which is cathected by an increase of stimulus. The continuous nature of the cathectic process and the impossibility of inhibiting it produce the same state of mental helplessness.
”
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Sigmund Freud (Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety)
“
All that was left was the recollection of having had a good idea, a recurrent experience of having had a good, an excellent, a most important idea, a truly fundamental idea, but one never remembered itself the idea from one moment to the next, memory was something you simply couldn’t depend on, a man’s memory set him traps he’d walk into and find himself hopelessly lost in, Konrad said, a man’s memory lured him into a trap and then deserted him; it happened over and over again that a man’s memory lured him into a trap, or several traps, thousands of traps, and then deserted him, left him all alone, alone in limitless despair because he felt drain of all thought; Konrad had come to observe this geriatric phenomenon and had begun to be more and more terrified of it, he was in fact prepared to state that a man’s youthful memory was capable of turning into an old man’s memory from one moment to the next, with no warning whatsoever, suddenly you found yourself with an old man’s memory, unprepared by such warning signals as a failure , from time to time, in trifling matters, brief lapses of omissions, the way a mental footbridge or gangplank might give a bit as one passed over it; no, old age set in from one moment to the next, many a man made this abrupt passage from youth to age quite early in life, a sudden shift from being the youngest to the oldest of men, a characteristic of so-called brain workers, who tended, basically, not to have a so-called extended youth, no gradual transitions from youth to age, with them the change occurred momentarily, without warning, suddenly, mortally, you found yourself in old age. (…) An old man needs a crutch, he needs crutches, every old man carries invisible crutches, Konrad said, all those millions and billions of old people on crutches, millions, billions, trillions of invisible crutches, my friend, no one else may see them but I see them, I am one of those who cannot help seeing those invisible billions, trillions of crutches, there’s not a moment, Konrad said, in which I do not see those billions, those trillions of crutches. Those millions of ideas, he said, that I had and lost, that I forgot from one moment to the next. Why I could populate a vast metropolis of thought with all those lost ideas of mine, I could keep it afloat, a whole world, a whole history of mankind could have lived on all the ideas that I lost. How untrustworthy my memory has become!
”
”
Thomas Bernhard (The Lime Works)
“
Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that’s lost. It makes her melancholy to imagine that she might never be here again, that these blocks, their former haunts, and their old building will outlast them; that the city is supremely indifferent to their transit through its arteries, and to their ultimate destination. For now, she wants just to be in between. She knows that later it won’t be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival.
”
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Jay McInerney (Bright, Precious Days)
“
Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you've found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It's just growing pains. One
can't jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain
transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky
adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean-anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul--only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you.
”
”
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
“
Once, traveling at night, I fell asleep in the passenger seat of a moving car, lulled by the noise and motion into an illusion of serene weightlessness. The driver of the car took a bridge too fast and lost control, and I woke from my floating dream straight into the glare of headlights and the sickening sensation of falling at high speed. That abrupt transition is as close as I can come to describing the feeling I experienced, but it falls woefully short. I could say that my field of vision contracted to a single dark spot, then disappeared altogether, leaving not darkness, but a bright void. I could say that I felt as though I were spinning, or as though I were being pulled inside out. All these things are true, yet none of them conveys the sense I had of complete disruption, of being slammed very hard against something that wasn’t there. The truth is that nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing whatever appeared to happen and yet I experienced a feeling of elemental terror so great that I lost all sense of who, or what, or where I was. I was in the heart of chaos, and no power of mind or body was of use against it. I
”
”
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
“
When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end.
Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam:
How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the race of Time, Till time stands fix'd.
But it will be a related comfort. In our world the material for an eschatology is more elusive, harder to handle. It may not be true, as the modern poet argues, that we must build it out of 'our loneliness and regret'; the past has left us stronger materials than these for our artifice of eternity. But the artifice of eternity exists only for the dying generations; and since they choose, alter the shape of time, and die, the eternal artifice must change. The golden bird will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes.
In my next talk I shall be trying to explain some of the ways in which that song changes, and talking about the relationship between apocalypse and the changing fictions of men born and dead in the middest. It is a large subject, because the instrument of change is the human imagination. It changes not only the consoling plot, but the structure of time and the world. One of the most striking things about it was said by Stevens in one of his adages; and it is with this suggestive saying that I shall mark the transition from the first to the second part of my own pattern. 'The imagination,' said this student of changing fictions, 'the imagination is always at the end of an era.' Next time we shall try to see what this means in relation to our problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.
”
”
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
“
Van Degrift’s Ski Hut in Los Angeles became Southern California’s first ski shop when it began to sell ski equipment in 1931. In 1934, Walter Mosauer, a zoology professor at the University of California–Los Angeles, considered the father of skiing here and an avid proponent of the Arlberg technique, wrote the first instructional ski book to be published in Southern California, On Skis Over Mountains. Mosauer, along with fellow German Otto Steiner, began teaching downhill skiing techniques, launching a change in focus and transition from ski jumping to alpine skiing.
”
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Ingrid P. Wicken (Lost Ski Areas of Southern California)
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The French transit visa became a grave obstacle for most. The problem became acute, since people had a passport, valid for only one year and the delays with the French transit visa and the Romanian exit visa - all this led inexorably towards the running out of the one-year validity of the passport. By the time the parents received their passports, my Father started to feel poorly. He felt nauseous, he lost appetite, he even lost the capacity to enjoy the prospect of finally leaving. The doctor, an old friend from Czernovitz, found nothing essentially wrong. He thought that after all these war years, Father was just worn out.
”
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Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
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Initial or mutual trust (the type of trust that makes us, irrationally, trust strangers) then enabled the complex planning that allowed man to transition from a tribe of hunter-gatherers whose fate depended on external factors to an agricultural society where complex, planned outcomes could be put into motion.
”
”
David Amerland (The Tribe That Discovered Trust: How Trust is Created, Propagated, Lost and Regained in Commercial Interactions)
“
Young people need to be loved, to put it as plainly as possible. They need to be engaged, challenged, mentored, and enjoyed. They, like every human being, need to be appropriately cared for, no matter how autonomous and self-sufficient they may think they are.
”
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
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many in the social sciences like to think of themselves as “value neutral.” We don’t particularly believe in that. We do believe that social science should do its best to avoid distorting biases, to prevent ideologies from skewing its findings, in order in the end to describe and explain what is true about what is real in social life. But note that that depends not on “value neutrality” but on its opposite: on value commitments to truth, scientific integrity, accountability, and so on. Those are nothing if not values driven by beliefs in what is good. Good science is thus always based not on bracketing or setting aside particular human notions of what is good, but rather on an absolute commitment to particular goods, like telling the truth, being willing to be shown to be wrong, etcetera.
”
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
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The Western transition away from tribal culture has caused us a few great losses - one of them is the concept of true community. Without community we turn to the economy to replace what we’ve lost by hiring therapists, nannies, doulas, reiki healers and housekeepers. But it’s hard to hire a mentor, to find women and men who’ve been there before us and are willing to honestly counsel us about what marriage really has in store.
”
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Jo Piazza (How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage)
“
The shift in the political waters has its own riptide. The fracture on the right, the extremism, will find its voice or voices, and will roll in; then, like a rip current, it will pull away from shore, sucking, and drowning those voices as it does—they will be lost at sea. And while it may appear that we, the party, are lost at sea, the sea level itself will be rising, and the tidal wave, initially imperceptible, will build and slowly roll in. There will be a seamless transition unfolding in the corridors of power, a slow turn to the right that no one sees coming. In the name of what it means to be an American, we will spearhead the development, within the military, and outside it, of separatist soldiers, who believe that they are following the true wishes of their leaders culminating in the erosion of civil liberties under the guise of protection. This combined with the withering of local law enforcement, economic setbacks, and failing infrastructure will become part of a picture that coincides with a period of economic, social, and political unrest; the stabilization in this country will give rise to rogue non-politicians.
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A.M. Homes (The Unfolding)
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What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.
”
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William Zinsser (On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction)
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Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. … It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger questions of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relationships with one another. It is critical, that is , to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.
”
”
David Graeber, David Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
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It was a fine line to walk—insanity and reality. The lines were not made of rich, black charcoal, but that of a nebulous gray watercolor. The transition so vaguely defined that it might as well not even be there. And when the line was so arbitrary, I found myself lost between right and wrong.
”
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Laura C. Reden (Dark Reflections (The Phantom, #2))
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I feel such stillness, the stillness of listening to a story whose end I know. I am looking at times when people had a story to enact and the streets they walked upon were narrative passages. What kind of word is infrastructure? It is a word that proves we have lost our city. Our streets are for transit. Our stories are disassembled, the skyscrapers crowding us scoff at the idea of a credible culture.
”
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E.L. Doctorow (City of God)
“
The Library of Congress, with other partners, continues to work on a new bibliographic framework (BIBFRAME). This framework will be an open-storage format based on newer technology, such as XML. A framework is merely a holder of content, and a more open framework will allow for easier access to stored metadata. While resource description and access (RDA) is a movement to rewrite cataloging rules, BIBFRAME is a movement to develop a new storage medium. The new storage framework may still use RDA as a means of describing content metadata, but it will move storage away from MARC to a new format based on standardized non-library technology. This new framework will encompass several important characteristics. It will transition storage of library metadata to an open format that is accessible for use by external systems, using standard technology employed outside of libraries. This will allow for libraries to share metadata with each other and with the rest of the Semantic Web. The new framework will also allow for the storage of both old and new metadata formats so that libraries may move forward without reworking existing records. Finally, the new framework will make use of formal metadata structure, as the benefit of named metadata fields has more power for search and discovery than the simple keyword searching employed by much of the Internet. Library metadata will become more important once its organized fields of information can be accessed by any standard non-library system. Embracing a new storage format for bibliographic metadata is much like adoption of a new computer storage format, such as moving your data storage from CD-ROM to an external USB hard drive; the metadata that libraries have created for decades will not be lost but will be converted to a new, more accessible, storage format, sustaining access to the information. Although these benefits may be seen by some, it can be expected that there may be resistance to changes in format as well. It will be no small undertaking to define how libraries will move forward and to then provide means for libraries to transition to new formats. Whatever transitions may be adopted, it will be important that libraries not abandon a structured metadata entry form in lieu of complete keyword formatting.
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Kenneth J. Varnum (The Top Technologies Every Librarian Needs to Know: A LITA Guide)
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Nations and cultures are living creatures that do not cease to exist merely because they have lost a war. They must transition – either through order or varying degrees of chaos – to another existence and another reality.
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Dave Bushy (The World Looked Away: Vietnam After the War)
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Ive’s design team had obsessed over the rounded corners of the phone and become advocates of Bézier curves, a concept from computer modeling used to eliminate the transition breaks between straight and curved surfaces. The Bézier geometry gave the iPhone rounded corners that arched like a sculpture. A standard rounded corner consists of a single-radius arch or a quarter circle, whereas their curves were mapped through a dozen points, creating a more gradual and natural transition. Meanwhile, Forstall used a standard three-point curve in the corners of iPhone apps. Each time Ive opened his iPhone, he could see the difference between the phone’s carefully crafted corners and the software’s clunky corners. He was powerless to change those features because Jobs excluded him from software design meetings. He could only look at them and fume.
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Tripp Mickle (After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul)
“
So many of the women who come to me for therapy are tormented by their own ambivalence. They want more time with the baby, but also more time alone. Their children bring them indescribable joy, but also make them crazy. They are grateful for their husbands’ calm and stability while simultaneously resenting them for being less affected by the transition to parenthood. They are crying in hopeless frustration one moment and feeling surges of love and affection deeper than they’ve ever known in the next. “I’m losing my mind,” these women say. “No, you’re not,” I respond. “You’ve lost many things now that you’re a mother, but your mind is not one of them.” In actuality, these women have found their minds; they have found crevices and corners they didn’t know existed and hadn’t planned to visit. The same is true of their hearts.
”
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Molly Millwood (To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma)
“
The rise of consciousness, synaptic pruning, hormonal shifts, and transitions in brainwave patterns, all expel the child from Eden and push it into the normal world. Adam and Eve always have to leave paradise to grow up.
”
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Rob Armstrong (Children See Dead People: Children's Spooky Powers)
“
Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. Wendat torture, in the same period of history, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to make clear that no form of physical chastisement should even be countenanced inside a community or household. Violence and care, in the Wendat case, were to be entirely separated. Seen in this light, the distinctive features of Wendat prisoner torture come into focus.
It seems to us that this connection - or better perhaps, confusion - between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely tor create ourselves by recreating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.
”
”
David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
“
the signposts for the [pellagra] disease...resulted from a vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency...linked to poverty and a corn-based diet. That indisputable truth was disputed for decades by many Southern citizens and politicians, who insisted that it was a story contrived by Northerners to denigrate Southern culture. The end result was many lost lives, much like the lost lives from COVID-19, that have resulted from inaction in many countries, coupled with an anti-science, anti-expertise mindset.
”
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Paul Cerrato (The Digital Reconstruction of Healthcare: Transitioning from Brick and Mortar to Virtual Care (HIMSS Book Series))
“
Then I walked down the Cours Belsunce. The nets were stretched out to dry. A couple of women mending them looked quite lost in the huge square. I had never seen them doing this before. I'm sure that I haven't seen most of the really important things that happen in this city. To see the things that matter, you have to feel that you want to stay. Cities shroud themselves from those who're just passing through. I picked my way carefully among the nets. The first stores were just opening, and the first newspaper boys were yelling the headlines.
The newspaper boys, the fishermen's wives on the Belsunce, the shopkeepers opening their stores, the workers going to work the early shift - they were all part of the masses who would never leave no matter what happened. The thought of leaving this place was as unlikely to occur to them as to a tree or a clump of grass.
”
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Anna Seghers (Transit)
“
It is not possible to devalue the body and value the soul. The body, cast loose from the soul, is on its own. Devalued, the body sets up a counterpart economy of its own, based also on the laws of competition, in which it devalues and exploits the spirit. These two economies maintain themselves at each other’s expense, living upon the other’s loss, collaborating without ceasing in mutual futility and absurdity. You cannot devalue the body and value the soul — or value anything else.
—Wendell Berry, quoted by Christian Smith et al
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
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-- not far beneath the surface appearance of happy, liberated emerging adult sexual adventure and pleasure lies a world of hurt, insecurity, confusion, inequality, shame, and regret.
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
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I don’t need a whole lot to be happy now. You want to have a roof over your head, to have a car, to have Internet. You need to have Internet, that’s just, there’s just no other way. Like your house is not really actually a habitable house if it doesn’t have Internet. You could live without water or trash, but not without Internet.
-- young, Emerging Adults interviewed on their lifestyle.
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
“
The major first point to understand in making sense of the moral reasoning
of emerging adults, then, is that most do not appeal to a moral philosophy, tradition, or ethic as an external guide by which to think and live in moral terms. Few emerging adults even seem aware that such external, coherent approaches or resources for moral reasoning exist. Instead, for most emerging adults, the world consists of so many individuals, and each individual decides for themselves what is and isn’t moral and immoral. Morality is ultimately a matter of personal opinion.
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
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As to the question whether this modification is opportune, the fact must not be lost sight of that the Berlin Conference never intended to fix unalterably the economic system of the Free State, which, as was already then foreseen, would undergo radical modifications under the influence of progress, nor of establishing for an indefinite period regulations which may hinder, check, and even arrest its development. Provision was wisely made for the probability of future changes, which would require a certain latitude in economic matters in order to secure their easy realization... The moment has now come when the marvellous progress made by the infant State is creating fresh needs, when it would be only in accordance with wisdom and foresight to revise an economic system primarily adapted to a creative and transitional period. Can we blame the infant State for a progress which, in its rapidity, has surpassed the most optimistic forecasts? Can we hinder and arrest this progress in refusing her the means necessary for her development? Can we condemn the Sovereign who has already made such great sacrifices to support for an indefinite period a burden which daily becomes heavier, and at the same time impose upon him new and heavy expenses necessitated by the suppression of the slave-trade? We are convinced that there will be but one answer to these questions.
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Edward Baldwin Malet (Acte général de la conférence de Berlin de 1885)
“
Another, more basic reason is that even being able to know or define in the first place what hurts or helps other people often itself requires reference to certain moral standards and understandings of what is good and bad.
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
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The crucial distinction that these emerging adults are missing is the difference between the basis or reason for some moral truth and the effects of living according to that moral truth. Right moral living should normally have certain positive, patterned effects, at least over the long run. But that does not make those effects per se the reason why those things are morally right in the first place. If they are indeed morally right, they should remain so even if they sometimes fail to have those effects.
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
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The good we advocate is not to never judge anybody or anything. The good, rather, is to carefully and reasonably judge (weigh, appraise, discern
and perhaps appropriately critique) all things in life – but always with an awareness of one's own fallibility, openness to learning and an interest in all moving closer to the truth.
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Christian Smith (Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood)
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[...] rites of passage allow us to migrate from one phase of our lives to another; they keep us from getting lost in transit. They show us a way to honor the space between no longer and not yet.
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Suleika Jaouad (Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted)
“
Right/Wrong Things To Say To A Client About Wardrobe Transition
Don’t Say… I can see you have lost your edge for dressing. It’s so sad when you see a person lose their identity.
Do Say… I am so glad you called me. I am thrilled that we get this time to work together and define your next great life adventure. Let’s get started. This is what I’m trained to do, you’re in great hands! It’s my pleasure to help you today.
”
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Cindy Ann Peterson (My Style, My Way: Top Experts Reveal How to Create Yours Today)
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Who among us hasn’t lost a friend or several? Or decided to shed one ourselves? We take turns becoming the one who leaves. We make ghosts of ourselves and the ones we once loved. Like seasons we change, we transition into the next life. We try and fail to forget. We grow, outgrow and are outgrown. But none of it ever, ever seems to hurt any less.
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Florentyna Leow (How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart)
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The minority stress model is also, conveniently, the go-to explanation for the phenomenon of detransition. A speaker at the AACAP 2022 annual meeting41 explained that when, after social transition and medical treatments, people decide to turn back and live in congruence with their sex, it does not necessarily mean they regret transitioning. “For a small minority, gender trajectories are non-linear and dynamic.” These individuals have “evolving paths.” It is simply “a shift in expression,” and “internal and external factors” must be considered, including family and society stigma. Conservative homes and the military were mentioned.
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Miriam Grossman (Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist's Guide Out of the Madness)
“
You and my destiny!
When was the last time I tried something for the first time?
I thought about it for sometime,
Then something reminded me of you,
And I recalled the days spent together with you,
The mornings were smooth, the days passed by without the unnecessary care,
Everything seemed beautiful and fair, just because you were with me everywhere,
And we did things silly and wise as well, and there were many acts we tried for the first time,
I remember that, for example climbing a mountain and staring at the forest in silence as we lost every sense of time,
It surely was first time, when I felt time was such an unwanted invention of the Universe,
Because it loses its every existential value when two hearts learn how to converse,
It was first time that I felt this when I was with you,
Hearts in conversation, when everything was silent, even I, and even you,
Yes, it was first time when I attempted many things for the first time,
The sky looked clearer and truly blue, you stared into my eyes for hours and ah the beauty of the stillness of time,
It was something I experienced first time then, but since you have left, it never happened again,
Now the time is permanently still, and for me it is like the tired pendulum of the clock oscillating to and fro again and again,
But nothing else except the pendulum moves, nothing else except the transition of days into nights takes place,
Because everything is the same, the same days, the same nights, the same pendulum and the same place,
Where nothing new happens and nothing at all for the first time happens either,
Like a flower that is frozen in time, experiences no change in seasons and it hangs there in pain, longing to wither,
So that new could seize its opportunity and seasons could render everything fresh,
Alas it is a wish that exists forever as an imagination because time is strangely still and there is nothing alive and fresh,
And when people ask me when was the last time you did something for the first time,
I simply look at them, smile at their curiosity, and I tell them, well it was when I was with her, because that was a beautiful time,
Where time hung as moments over everything, even our wishes and desires,
And the world seemed a huge projection of our wishes and our beautiful desires.
Maybe you would not understand because for you the moving pendulum represents time,
But to me the spontaneous germination of feelings, the rhythmic movement of two conversing hearts is the actual signature of time,
So you keep gazing at the oscillating pendulum of the clock on the wall,
While I dwell with her, our memories, in the time’s eternal hall,
Where it weaves moments of infinity around both of us as our hearts resume their conversation,
Because two lovers are interested in destiny and not the destination!
”
”
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
“
Love and time
It was as if time had gone on a vacation,
At least it was not there where I was now,
Because there I could not feel her sensation,
So it was a world without her beauty, thus a world without love,
Time appeared to transition from one moment to another,
But I could not feel its presence,
For a while I thought I was in a world, that was some other,
As my heart did not experience life’s romance,
In her absence time appeared to be on a vacation,
The world seemed to have come to a sudden halt,
Without her, world’s charms had lost all their traction,
And I wondered whether it was my or time’s fault,
Everything and everyone moved, and life happened just like any day,
But to me somehow time appeared to be somewhere else,
Because it felt it was not here today,
And maybe only her presence can convince me it is false,
Maybe time has drowned in the past,
Forgotten somewhere in her infinite memories,
And my mind still recreates only moments from the past,
And convinces the heart to keep beating for the sake of her old stories,
Or is it that the present is an illusion of shadows,
Shadows from the past, her and my past,
And the present only from this past borrows,
So I am in this illusion of timelessness cast,
But whatever it might be,
Whether time is here or somewhere else,
She, her memories; are intact within me,
And my every heartbeat still says, there cannot be anyone else,
So, there is no need to seek time that has vanished suddenly,
Because I have installed her memories everywhere,
And now time has left me in my peaceful corner knowingly,
So I believe, time is somewhere else, but not here, not here,
And my love Irma, let me escape with you into this corner,
Where time has no business,
And just be your lover,
And let that be my only business,
For time will then lose its pride, someday, in that somewhere, where it has fled,
And it will offer us it's rarest gift of eternity,
Because my love, a rose by its own thorn is never hurt or bled,
So instead of time, we shall live in the love’s sanity,
Where time serves no purpose,
Because everything exists for everything,
There life offers no fake pose,
It is then that love becomes a true virtue and not just a thing!
”
”
Javid Ahmad Tak
“
Love and time
It was as if time had gone on a vacation,
At least it was not there where I was now,
Because there I could not feel her sensation,
So it was a world without her beauty, thus a world without love,
Time appeared to transition from one moment to another,
But I could not feel its presence,
For a while I thought I was in a world, that was some other,
As my heart did not experience life’s romance,
In her absence time appeared to be on a vacation,
The world seemed to have come to a sudden halt,
Without her, world’s charms had lost all their traction,
And I wondered whether it was my or time’s fault,
Everything and everyone moved, and life happened just like any day,
But to me somehow time appeared to be somewhere else,
Because it felt it was not here today,
And maybe only her presence can convince me it is false,
Maybe time has drowned in the past,
Forgotten somewhere in her infinite memories,
And my mind exclusively recreates moments, only from the past,
And convinces the heart to keep beating for the sake of her old stories,
Or is it that the present is an illusion of shadows,
Shadows from the past, her and my past,
And the present only from this past borrows,
So I am in this illusion of timelessness cast,
But whatever it might be,
Whether time is here or somewhere else,
She, her memories; are intact within me,
And my every heartbeat still says, there cannot be anyone else,
So, there is no need to seek time that has vanished suddenly,
Because I have installed her memories everywhere,
And now time has left me in my peaceful corner knowingly,
So I believe, time is somewhere else, but not here, not here,
And my love Irma, let me escape with you into this corner,
Where time has no business,
And just be your lover,
And let that be my only business,
For time will then lose its pride, someday, in that somewhere, where it has fled,
And it will offer us it's rarest gift of eternity,
Because my love, a rose by its own thorn is never hurt or bled,
So instead of time, we shall live in the love’s sanity,
Where time serves no purpose,
Because everything exists for everything,
There life offers no fake pose,
It is then that love becomes a true virtue and not just a thing!
”
”
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
“
She knew enough about it—the transition pureblooded Fae, and some demi-Fae, went through once their bodies locked into immortal youth. It was a rough process, their bodies and magic needing months to adjust to the sudden freezing and reordering of their aging process. Some Fae had no control over their power—some lost it entirely during the time it took to Settle.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass)
“
merchants in Genoa began to draw up insurance contracts, which would pay out if stocks were lost in transit.
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Dan Jones (Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages)