Magnificent Century Quotes

that your power of command with simple language was one of the magnificent things of our century. (from the poem: result)

For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.

Let no one reduce to tears or reproach This statement of the mastery of God, Who, with magnificent irony, gave Me at once both books and night Of this city of books He pronounced rulers These lightless eyes, who can only Peruse in libraries of dreams The insensible paragraphs that yield With every new dawn. Vainly does the day Lavish on them its infinite books, Arduous as the arduous manuscripts Which at Alexandria did perish. Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story tells us) Dies a king amidst fountains and gardens; I aimlessly weary at the confines Of this tall and deep blind library. Encyclopedias, atlases, the East And the West, centuries, dynasties Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies Do walls proffer, but pointlessly. Slow in my shadow, I the hollow shade Explore with my indecisive cane; To think I had imagined Paradise In the form of such a library. Something, certainly not termed Fate, rules on such things; Another had received in blurry Afternoons both books and shadow. Wandering through these slow corridors I often feel with a vague and sacred dread That I am another, the dead one, who must Have trodden the same steps at the same time. Which of the two is now writing this poem Of a plural I and of a single shadow? How important is the word that names me If the anathema is one and indivisible? Groussac or Borges, I see this darling World deform and extinguish To a pale, uncertain ash Resembling sleep and oblivion

The last centuries saw the most magnificent material progress in history, and the present century is set to produce the greatest progress in mental and spiritual power.

Merlin: "Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free of this?" Arthur: "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents." Merlin: "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not. Our readers of that time (...) have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. (...)

So, how’s school? How’s everything going?” “Can Gio hear us?” … “Yes” “Oh, well then, it’s going magnificently. I’m so fortunate to have a knowledgeable and patient teacher like my uncle, who is imparting his centuries of wisdom into my eager young mind.

The Royal Navy had not built its magnificent reputation over the centuries by avoiding battle.

It has been said that life has no guarantees and with that I disagree. Life gives us two great assurances and the first is that we have our personal allocation of time. For some it is only a minute and for others a century or more. Like a great inheritance of calendars and clocks, we are measured a portion of time to have as our own. The rhythm of your heart is your concert of life and no others. The impressions and thoughts of daily events are independent of any other person. We are magnificently autonomous and gifted with a liberation waiting to happen.

As I walked over the loose fragments of stone, which lay scattered and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural association of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendor, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, and when they resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since swept from earth. "Thus," said I, "shall the present generation - he who now sink in misery - and he who now swim in pleasure, alike pass away and be forgotten.

Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with "work for all," the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen, demanded unemployment for everybody.

I have provided a possible explanation for Antiochus's insane foolhardiness when left in command of the Athenian Fleet, because Thucidides's bald account is so unbelievable (unless one assumes that both Antiochus and Alkibiades were mentally defective) that any explanation seems more likely than none. Alkibiades himself is an enigma. Even allowing that no man is all black and all white, few men can ever have been more wildly and magnificently piebald. Like another strange and contradictory character Sir Walter Raleigh, he casts a glamour that comes clean down the centuries, a dazzle of personal magnetism that makes it hard to see the man behind it. I have tried to see. I have tried to fit the pieces into a coherent whole; I don't know whether I have been successful or not; but I do not think that I have anywhere falsified the portrait.

The Southern whites are not yet living quite in the present age; many of their general ideas hark back to a former century, some of them to the Dark Ages. In the light of other days they are sometimes magnificent. Today they are often cruel and ludicrous.

So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.” “You’re right. That’s magnificent.” “Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.

We debate sometimes what is to be the future of this nation when we think that in a few years public affairs may be in the hands of the fin-de-siecle gilded youths we see about us during the Christmas holidays. Such foppery, such luxury, such insolence,was surely never practiced by the scented, overbearing patricians of the Palatine, even in Rome's most decadent epoch. In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom.

The poets have been right in all these centuries, darling; even in its astounding imperfection this earth of ours is magnificent. But oh this human race!

It was just a magnificent, India-ink night of moonlit clouds below and glimpses of the shimmering sea. What century are you in? he longed to ask her.

What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the culture's knowledge and language don't go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures where people still live within the kinship circles of animals and human beings there is a connection with animals, not only as food, but as 'powers,' a word which can be taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities. I've found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge that is held deep and strong, knowledge about the natural laws of Earth, from the beginning of creation, and the magnificent terrestrial intelligence still at work, an intelligence now newly called ecology by the Western science that tells us what our oldest tribal stories maintain--the human animal is a relatively new creation here; animal and plant presences were here before us; and we are truly the younger sisters and brothers of the other animal species, not quite as well developed as we thought we were. It is through our relationships with animals and plants that we maintain a way of living, a cultural ethics shaped from an ancient understanding of the world, and this is remembered in stories that are the deepest reflections of our shared lives on Earth. That we held, and still hold, treaties with the animals and plant species is a known part of tribal culture. The relationship between human people and animals is still alive and resonant in the world, the ancient tellings carried on by a constellation of stories, songs, and ceremonies, all shaped by lived knowledge of the world and its many interwoven, unending relationships. These stories and ceremonies keep open the bridge between one kind of intelligence and another, one species and another. (from her essay "First People")

Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It's chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can't quite make sense of, though we know it's there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night's hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell's wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodeled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he know all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances--which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork--were of the right measure.

We're pupils of the religions—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish . . . Well, the Christian religions. Those who directed French education down through the centuries were the Jesuits. They taught us how to make sentences translated from the Latin, well balanced, with a verb, a subject, a complement, a rhythm. In short—here a speech, there a preach, everywhere a sermon! They say of an author, “He knits a nice sentence!” Me, I say, “It's unreadable.” They say, “What magnificent theatrical language!” I look, I listen. It's flat, it's nothing, it's nil. Me, I've slipped the spoken word into print. In one sole shot.

Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.... I never see a great garden, (even in my mind's eye, which is the best place to see great gardens around here), but I think of the calamities that have visited it, unsuspected by the delighted gardener who supposes, "It must be nice to garden there." It is not nice to garden anywhere. Everywhere there are startling winds, once in every five centuries floods.... Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that, even as his pain increases with each loss, he comprehends, truly knows, that where there was a garden once there can be again.

You think I hate men. I guess I do, although some of my best friends...I don't like this position. I mistrust generalized hatred. I feel like one of those twelfth century monks raving on about how evil women are and how they must cover themselves up completely when they go out lest they lead men into evil thoughts. The assumption that the men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underrunning that ever we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn't question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St.Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift...well, you understand. For years I didn't take it personally. So now it is difficult for me to call others bigots when I am one myself. I tell people at once, to warn them, that I suffer from deformation of character. But the truth is I am sick unto death of four thousand years of males telling me how rotten my sex is. Especially it makes me sick when I look around and see such rotten men and such magnificent women, all of whom have a sneaking suspicion that the four thousand years of remarks are correct. These days I feel like an outlaw, a criminal. Maybe that's what the people perceive who look at me so strangely as I walk the beach. I feel like an outlaw not only because I think that men are rotten and women are great, but because I have come to believe that oppressed people have the right to use criminal means to survive. Criminal means being, of course, defying the laws passed by the oppressors to keep the oppressed in line. Such a position takes you scarily close to advocating oppression itself, though. We are bound in by the terms of the sentence. Subject-verb-object. The best we can do is turn it around. and that's no answer, is it?

Up until the mid twentieth century the mountain gorilla was considered a myth. Oddly enough, a legend not unlike bigfoot or the loch ness monster. The chance of actually seeing/experiencing this elusive shadow was as likely as finding ones soulmate. Rare. Precious. Even once discovered they seemed unapproachable. The only way to get close to this magnificent creature was to become empathetic. Abandon all pretense and preconceptions. To bare an open throat. To collapse into the arms of vulnerability. All but extinct, these beings/moments are threatened by the black hearted. The cold and oblivious. The empty eyed profit seekers that overlook these rare precious moments.

Love studies not to be scanty in its measures, but how to abound and overflow with benefits. He that pinches and studieth to spare is a pitiful lover, unless it be for other's sakes Love studieth to be pleasing, magnificent and noble, and would in all things be glorious and divine unto its object. Its whole being is to its object, and its whole felicity in its object, and it hath no other thing to take care for. It doth good to its own soul while it doth good for another.

The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at the beginning of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology of the Faculty of Paris, Abbe of Simore, who had been Bishop of D—— in 1712. This palace was a genuine seignorial residence. Everything about it had a grand air,—the apartments of the Bishop, the drawing-rooms, the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince

When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. Consequently—as a life-saving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element—other uses had sprung up around it. All of Katherine’s life, radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation…anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them.

Steve Jobs said creativity is “just connecting things.” Salvador Dali said “those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Picasso said “good artists copy but great artists steal.” Mark Twain said “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” No magnificent product of the imagination—whether a machine, painting, or philosophy—was created in a complete vacuum. The invention of the telegraph took the efforts of a thousand, but the last man, who added that final inspired touch, got the credit. When you start viewing

The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning. It was neither an assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt led along in procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor an entry of “our much dread lord, monsieur the king,” nor even a pretty hanging of male and female thieves by the courts of Paris. Neither was it the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some plumed and bedizened embassy. It was barely two days since the last cavalcade of that nature, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with concluding the marriage between the dauphin and Marguerite of Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of M. lé Cardinal de Bourbon, who, for the sake of pleasing the king, had been obliged to assume an amiable mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and to regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very “pretty morality, allegorical satire, and farce,” while a driving rain drenched the magnificent tapestries at his door.

June 1st, 1925, Mediterranean Sea. The Empress Medina drifted on a sea of glass; a sea so calm and tranquil. The Greek sailors observed the magnificent passenger liner as their colleagues prepared to board. Little did they know that they were in attendance of one of the nautical mysteries of the twentieth century.

It was the Church, they told me, that had kept alive the Latin and Greek of the classical world in the benighted Middle Ages, until it could be picked up again by the wider world in the Renaissance. On holidays, we would visit museums and libraries where the same point was made. As a young child, I looked at the glowing gold of the illuminated manuscripts and believed in a more metaphorical illumination in ages of intellectual darkness. And, in a way, my parents were right to believe this, for it is true. Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge. But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and mutilated. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was leveled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off, and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

Desires" Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old and they shut them, with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum, with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet — that is how desires look that have passed without fulfillment; without one of them having achieved a night of sensual delight, or a moonlit morn.

We are late, Alexandra,” said the dowager duchess as she stood in Alex’s drawing room idly examining a magnificent fourteenth-century sculpture reposing on a satinwood table. “And I don’t mind telling you, now that the time is upon us, I have a worse feeling about this now than I did earlier. And my instincts are never wrong.

We have done much in the last few years to destroy the severe limitations of Victorian delicacy, and all of us, from princesses and prime-ministers' wives downward, talk of topics that would have been considered quite gravely improper in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, some topics have, if anything, become more indelicate than they were, and this is especially true of the discussion of income, of any discussion that tends, however remotely, to inquire, Who is it at the base of everything who really pays in blood and muscle and involuntary submissions for your freedom and magnificence? This, indeed, is almost the ultimate surviving indecency.

In her famous proclamation of 1858, Queen Victoria declared that it was the will of the crown saying, “Our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to the offices in our service.” But by 1870, only one Indian became an ICS officer. Higher services remained the exclusive preserve of the Europeans.

There was the whole collection of Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc’s Lupin series, and every translated work that the publishers Hakubunkan and Heibonsha had ever released. Then there was the Japanese section: it began with nineteenth-century novels by Ruiko Kuroiwa, and also featured Edogawa Ranpo, Fuboku Kozakai, Saburo Koga, Udaru Oshita, Takataro Kigi, Juza Unno, Mushitaro Oguri all crammed in together. And then as well as Japanese translations of Western novels, there were the original, untranslated works of Ellery Queen, Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts and Agatha Christie, etc. etc. etc. It was a magnificent sight: an entire library of detective novels.

Now we can see what makes mathematics unique. Only in mathematics is there no significant correction-only extension. Once the Greeks had developed the deductive method, they were correct in what they did, correct for all time. Euclid was incomplete and his work has been extended enormously, but it has not had to be corrected. His theorems are, every one of them, valid to this day. Ptolemy may have developed an erroneous picture of the planetary system, but the system of trigonometry he worked out to help him with his calculations remains correct forever. Each great mathematician adds to what came previously, but nothing needs to be uprooted. Consequently, when we read a book like A History of Mathematics, we get the picture of a mounting structure, ever taller and broader and more beautiful and magnificent and with a foundation, moreover, that is as untainted and as functional now as it was when Thales worked out the first geometrical theorems nearly 26 centuries ago. Nothing pertaining to humanity becomes us so well as mathematics. There, and only there, do we touch the human mind at its peak.

On the one hand, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment (that’s a metaphor, by the way) correctly “enlightened” us on the necessity of observation and experimentation in the physical sciences and the value of reason and debate, proof and repetition in science and technology. In that process, the dead hand of inquisitional power and the cold gaze of ecclesiastical control were removed from spheres about which they knew too little and claimed too much. That was a magnificent achievement and must always be appreciated as such. On the other hand, the Enlightenment also dramatically “endarkened” us on metaphor and symbol, myth and parable, especially in religion and theology. We judge, for example, that the ancients took their religious stories literally, but that we are now sophisticated enough to recognize their delusions. What, however, if those ancients intended and accepted their stories as metaphors or parables, and we are the mistaken ones? What if those pre-Enlightenment minds were quite capable of hearing a metaphor, grasping its meaning immediately and its content correctly, and never worrying about the question: Is this literal or metaphorical? Or, better, what if they knew how to take their foundational metaphors and stories programmatically, functionally, and seriously without asking too closely about literal and metaphorical distinctions? We have, in other words, great post-Enlightenment gain, but also great post-Enlightenment loss.

It was magnificent,” he said, as he took his seat. “Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.

Once upon a time a castle stood here. That’s how it has to be said: Here it stood, and here it was swallowed up by the Danish revolution. And nothing is left of it. Hirschholm Castle was situated on an island. The castle was surrounded by water, it stood in the middle of a lake, and at night the water was covered with the sleeping birds she loved so much, especially when they slept wrapped in their dreams. It took half a century to build the castle, and it wasn’t actually completed until 1746. It was magnificent and beautiful, a Nordic Versailles, but the same thing happened to the castle as happens to very brief dreams: it lasted only one summer, the summer of 1771. After that the dream was over, and the castle stood alone and deserted and slowly sank into decay. It

Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways. When they have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly affects their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place. Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant village, inhabited only by a few abandoned ruffians, but by degrees it rose to a stupendous height, and excelled in arts and arms all the nations that preceded it. But the demolition of Carthage (what one should think should have established is in supreme dominion) by removing all danger, suffered it to sink into debauchery, and made it at length an easy prey to Barbarians. England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe. Soon after the reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people according to exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men from each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each others' influence and keep the country in equilibrio. Be not surprised that I am turned into politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.

For the sultan Wilhelm II had brought the latest German rifle, but when he tried to present it Abdul Hamid at first shrank away in terror thinking he was about to be assassinated. The heir to Suleiman the Magnificent who had made Europe tremble nearly four centuries earlier was a miserable despot so fearful of plots that he kept a eunuch near him whose sole duty was to take the first puff on each of his cigarettes.

Thank you, for creating this vast and flexible playground. Thank you for creating one of the twentieth century's most popular myths, a gift that has brought billions of happy viewing hours at a critical time in world history, a time when perhaps, we need more than ever to blieve in honor, sacrifice, heart, and that special magic called life itself. As long as I live I will never forget The Moment when Luke Skywalker flew so desperately into the Death Star's trench, John William's score soaring magnificently, and the audience overwhelmed by Industrial Light and Magic's mind-bending inaugural. At that pulse-pounding moment, a moment when it seemed the individual human being could have no point or purpose, no meaning in a universe so vast and cybernetic, we heard Obi-Wan Kenobi whisper that we should trust our feelings. The Force flows through us. It controls us. We control it. Life creates it. It is more powerful than any Death Star. Hundreds of millions of people said yes, and sighed, and applauded, and went home or turned off their videos feeling just a little more empowered than they did before the lights went down and the Twentieth Century-Fox fanfare came up. No small feat. May the Force be with you, Mr. Lucas. And with us all. Always".

But Rousseau — to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" — that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea — Goethe. Goethe — not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.

Mankind has often enforced a savage dominance over the horse, and for that he should apologize. These magnificent beasts toiled mightily over the centuries to help us tame the wilds, plow and harvest our fields, transport our possessions, even die in our wars; and sometimes under the cruelest of masters. I am proud to say that i never participated in their abject slavery. Even so, i humbly request forgiveness from every horse that has crossed my path, for they are TRULY God's noblest creatures.

astonishment, it made the girls themselves gleam. Katherine, like many before her, was entranced by it. It wasn’t just the glow—it was radium’s all-powerful reputation. Almost from the start, the new element had been championed as “the greatest find of history.”7 When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. Consequently—as a life-saving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element—other uses had sprung up around it. All of Katherine’s life, radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation…anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them. People hailed its coming as predicted in the Bible: “The sun of righteousness [shall] arise with healing in his wings, and ye shall go forth and gambol as calves of the stall.”8

From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered this city, our minds were filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more than a century and a half before. It was here that Charles I. had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join the standard of parliament and liberty. The memory of that unfortunate king, and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent Goring, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city which they might be supposed to have inhabited. The spirit of elder days found a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps. If these feelings had not found an imaginary gratification, the appearance of the city had yet in itself sufficient beauty to obtain our admiration. The colleges are ancient and picturesque; the streets are almost magnificent; and the lovely Isis, which flows beside it through meadows of exquisite verdure, is spread forth into a placid expanse of waters, which reflects its majestic assemblage of towers, and spires, and domes, embosomed among aged trees.

He got carried away as he developed his idea: 'The aesthetic quality of towns is essential. If, as has been said, every landscape is a frame of mind, then it is even more true of a townscape. The way the inhabitants think and feel corresponds to the town they live in. An analogous phenomenon can be observed in certain women who, during their pregnancy, surround themselves with harmonious objects, calm statues, bright gardens, delicate curios, so that their child-to-be, under their influence, will be beautiful. In the same way one cannot imagine a genius coming from other than a magnificent town. Goethe was born in Frankfurt, a noble city where the Main flows between venerable palaces, between walls where the ancient heart of Germany lives on. Hoffmann explains Nuremberg - his soul performs acrobatics on the gables like a gnome on the decorated face of an old German clock. In France there is Rouen, with its rich accumulation of architectural monuments, its. cathedral like an oasis of stone, which produced Corneille and then Flaubert, two pure geniuses shaking hands across the centuries. There is no doubt about it, beautiful towns make beautiful souls.

In a way, it’s odd that the greatest sympathy for evolutionism is found among scholars who study the distant past. For events of this century, and especially of the last few decades, suggest that the arrow of history identified by some social scientists of the nineteenth century is roughly on target. Lewis Morgan’s essential point was right: the endless impetus of cultural evolution has pushed society through several thresholds over the past 20,000 years. And now it is pushing society through another one. A magnificent new social structure—our future home—is being built before our eyes.

Thus it can be said that, until the fifteenth century, Black Africa never lost its civilization. Frobenius reports: Not that the first European navigators at the end of the Middle Ages failed to make some very remarkable observations. When they reached the Bay of Guinea and alighted at Vaida, the captains were astonished to find well-planned streets bordered for several leagues by two rows of trees; for days they traversed a countryside covered by magnificent fields, inhabited by men in colorful attire that they had woven themselves! More to the south, in the Kingdom of the Congo, a teeming crowd clad in silk and velvet, large States, well ordered down to the smallest detail, powerful rulers, prosperous industries. Civilized to the marrow of their bones! Entirely similar was the condition of the lands on the east coast, Mozambique, for example. The revelations of the navigators from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries provide positive proof that Black Africa, which extended south of the desert zone of the Sahara, was still in full bloom, in all the splendor of harmonious, well-organized civilizations. This flowering the European conquistadors destroyed as they advanced.

As data analytics, superfast computers, digital technology, and other breakthroughs enabled by science play a bigger and bigger role in informing medical decision-making, science has carved out a new and powerful role as the steadfast partner of the business of medicine—which is also enjoying a new day in the sun. It may surprise some people to learn that the business of medicine is not a twenty-first-century invention. Health care has always been a business, as far back as the days when Hippocrates and his peers practiced medicine. Whether it was three goats, a gold coin, or a bank note, some type of payment was typically exchanged for medical services, and institutions of government or learning funded research. However, since the 1970s, business has been the major force directing the practice of medicine. Together, the business and science of medicine are the new kids on the block—the bright, shiny new things. Ideally, as I’ve suggested, the art, science, and business of medicine would work together in a harmonious partnership, each upholding the other and contributing all it has to offer to the whole. And sometimes (as we’ll find in later chapters) this partnership works well. When it does, the results are magnificent for patients and doctors, not to mention for scientists and investors.

American Indians share a magnificent history — rich in its astounding diversity, its integrity, its spirituality, its ongoing unique culture and dynamic tradition. It's also rich, I'm saddened to say, in tragedy, deceit, and genocide. Our sovereignty, our nationhood, our very identity — along with our sacred lands — have been stolen from us in one of the great thefts of human history. And I am referring not just to the thefts of previous centuries but to the great thefts that are still being perpetrated upon us today, at this very moment. Our human rights as indigenous peoples are being violated every day of our lives — and by the very same people who loudly and sanctimoniously proclaim to other nations the moral necessity of such rights. Over the centuries our sacred lands have been repeatedly and routinely stolen from us by the governments and peoples of the United States and Canada. They callously pushed us onto remote reservations on what they thought was worthless wasteland, trying to sweep us under the rug of history. But today, that so-called wasteland has surprisingly become enormously valuable as the relentless technology of white society continues its determined assault on Mother Earth. White society would now like to terminate us as peoples and push us off our reservations so they can steal our remaining mineral and oil resources. It's nothing new for them to steal from nonwhite peoples. When the oppressors succeed with their illegal thefts and depredations, it's called colonialism. When their efforts to colonize indigenous peoples are met with resistance or anything but abject surrender, it's called war. When the colonized peoples attempt to resist their oppression and defend themselves, we're called criminals. I write this book to bring about a greater understanding of what being an Indian means, of who we are as human beings. We're not quaint curiosities or stereotypical figures in a movie, but ordinary — and, yes, at times, extraordinary — human beings. Just like you. We feel. We bleed. We are born. We die. We aren't stuffed dummies in front of a souvenir shop; we aren't sports mascots for teams like the Redskins or the Indians or the Braves or a thousand others who steal and distort and ridicule our likeness. Imagine if they called their teams the Washington Whiteskins or the Washington Blackskins! Then you'd see a protest! With all else that's been taken from us, we ask that you leave us our name, our self-respect, our sense of belonging to the great human family of which we are all part. Our voice, our collective voice, our eagle's cry, is just beginning to be heard. We call out to all of humanity. Hear us!

This then is Borgia Rome: a city where a traveler entering the gates must still cross acres of country before he reaches the center, where animals still outnumber citizens, goats and cattle grazing the imperial ruins, their insistent teeth pulling weeds—and mortar—from between the stones of history. A city still struggling with a chasm of hardship between rich and poor, still ripped apart by gross family violence. But also a place of growing magnificence and confidence where, for the first time in centuries, the future no longer looks bleaker than the past, and where the new Pope has chosen for himself a name designed to foster a belief in magnificence again. Alexander

The gnarled pine, I would have said, touch it. This is China. Horticulturalists around the world have come to study it. Yet no one has ever been able to explain why it grows like a corkscrew, just as no one can adequately explain China. But like that tree, there it is, old, resilient, and oddly magnificent. Within that tree are the elements in nature that have inspired Chinese artists for centuries: gesture over geometry, subtlety over symmetry, constant flow over static form. And the temples, walk and touch them. This is China. Don't merely stare at these murals and statues. Fly up to the crossbeams, get down on your hands and knees, and press your head to the floor tiles. Hide behind that pillar and come eye to eye with its flecks of paint. Imagine that you are the interior decorator who is a thousand years in age. Start with a bit of Tibetan Buddhism, plus a dash each of animism and Taoism. A hodgepodge, you say? No, what is in those temples is an amalgam that is pure Chinese, a lovely shabby elegance, a glorious new motley that makes China infinitely intriguing. Nothing is ever completely thrown away and replaced. If one period of influence falls out of favor, it is patched over. The old views still exist, one chipped layer beneath, ready to pop through with the slightest abrasion. That is the Chinese aesthetic and also its spirit. Those are the traces that have affected all who have traveled along China's roads.

At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And when he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could he also see that his employers were bearing their share; he is, I say, bewildered and (to use his own word) "aggravated" to see that all goes on just as usual with the millowners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners' and weavers' cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food--of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?

Your Sunny decided to show off for you?” Axel asked with a laugh. “She doesn’t know I’m here,” he grated, keeping the binoculars trained on her. His heart raced. He’d known she enjoyed fighting demons, but he’d never seen her wage war. Despite fear for her safety, his chest puffed with pride. The woman had skill, boundless grace and lethal precision. She was an angel of death, wielding a spear, toppling demons three by three. Magnificent. Of course, he hardened at the sight of her. Not just hardened. Burned. For the first time in centuries, William felt truly demonic. Watching his female lay waste to the enemy, his every savage instinct clambered for attention. Sunny’s companions paused to cheer her on, and a glorious smile lit her face. Killing demons, having fun. “What is she?” Axel asked, sounding awed. What else? “My greatest torment.

Scrooge has some interesting literary ancestors. Pact-makers with the Devil didn’t start out as misers, quite the reverse. Christopher Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus sells his body and soul to Mephistopheles with a loan document signed in blood, collection due in twenty-four years, but he doesn’t do it cheaply. He has a magnificent wish list, which contains just about everything you can read about today in luxury magazines for gentlemen. Faust wants to travel; he wants to be very, very rich; he wants knowledge; he wants power; he wants to get back at his enemies; and he wants sex with a facsimile of Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy isn’t called that in the luxury men’s magazines, she has other names, but it’s the same sort of thing: a woman so beautiful she doesn’t exist, or, worse, may be a demon in disguise. Very hot though, as they say.

century. The most visible legacy of the wealth and splendor generated by the medieval spice trade still dazzles the eye today in Venice, whose grand palazzi and magnificent public architecture were built largely on profits from pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves. A hundred pounds of nutmeg, purchased in medieval Alexandria for ten ducats, might easily go for thirty or fifty ducats on the wharves of Venice. Even after payments for shipping, insurance, and customs duties at both ends, profits well in excess of 100 percent were routine; a typical Venetian galley carried one to three hundred tons between Egypt and Italy and earned vast fortunes for the imaginative and the lucky. During the medieval period, a corpulent Croesus was called a “pepper sack,” not a thoroughgoing insult, since the price of a bag of pepper was usually higher than that of a human being.

Finally, the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a pantheist. Of course Einstein is best known for his theory of relativity, but he frequently pronounced on political and ethical questions. Einstein made it plain that he did not believe in any kind of personal humanlike God who would work miracles and answer prayers in defiance of the laws of nature, and reward and punish us in the afterlife. For Einstein God was the order and harmony and law of the universe itself, and science was in that sense a religious quest. "I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

This had been a very productive morning, he thought. He had not accomplished so much in weeks. Looking at the Big Chief tablets that made a rug of Indian headdresses around the bed, Ignatius thought smugly that on their yellowed pages and wide-ruled lines were the seeds of a magnificent study in comparative history. Very disordered, of course. But one day he would assume the task of editing these fragments of his mentality into a jigsaw puzzle of a very grand design; the completed puzzle would show to literate men the disaster course that history had been taking for the past four centuries. In the five years that he had dedicated to this work, he had produced an average of only six paragraphs monthly. He could not even remember what he had written in some of the tablets, and he realized that several were filled principally with doodling. However, Ignatius thought calmly, Rome was not built in a day.

I was strong in English, and thankful for it. I knew the great Dr. Johnson from his friend Mr. Boswell. There is a friend for you. To sit down and rack the brain to remember every word, and then the glad toil to write it all down. I am thankful to Mr. Boswell for many a peaceful hour, indeed. There is a marvel, hundreds of years after the spirit has gone to new life, that men will bless a name that once had flesh, and laughed, and had good food, and loved to hear good talk. But the great Dr. Johnson was one in a century, and I count myself honoured to have tasted the wine of his speech, even though put to my mouth through the goodness of his friend. For that Englishman is not to be read with the eyes alone, but read out, as with the Word, with a good voice, and a rolling of the tongue, so that the rich taste of magnificent English may come to the ears and go to the head, like the perfumes of the Magi, or like the best of beer, home brewed and long in the cask.

Pitt was one of the marvels of the century, a leader who dazzled sober politicians and the crowd alike. He drew his peculiar appeal from some inner quality of temperament as well as mind, a quality which allowed, indeed drove, him to disregard both conventional wisdom and opposition and to push through to what he wanted. He was an “original” in an age suspicious of the original. He got away with being what he was, scorning the commonplace and the expected and explaining himself in a magnificent oratorical flow that inspired as much as it informed. Pitt’s powers of concentration shone from his fierce eyes, as did his belief in himself; in the crisis of war he said, “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.” He was obsessed even more by a vision of English greatness, a vision that fed on hatred of France and contempt for Spain. Pitt had despised the fumbling efforts of his predecessors to cope with the French on the Continent, and he was impatient with the incompetence of English generals in America.

Half a century of digging among the ruins of the past had made me painfully familiar with the feet of clay which were buried deeply in the sands of time and which only too often supported the magnificent superstructure of some of the statues erected to our departed gods and half-gods. But, on the other hand, where would we have been—yes, where would we be today—unless occasionally there had been feet of granite, willing and able to carry their owners into the realm of the unknown and find new roads toward progress? The answer was—nowhere at all. We needed those voortrekkers, as our South African cousins used to call them. We needed a few stout hearts to do the pioneering. Without those men and women who trekked ahead of the rest of the crowd and either found new grazing fields or died in the attempt, no one of us would ever have gotten very far. We would have been obliged to stick to the swampy coastal regions, where we had lived and died until then, since the beginning of time, and we would never have known what lay hidden beyond the distant mountain ranges.

If we had no other knowledge of what the Greeks were like, if nothing were left of Greek art and literature, the fact that they were in love with play and played magnificently would be proof enough of how they lived and how they looked at life. Wretched people, toiling people, do not play. Nothing like the Greek games is conceivable in Egypt or Mesopotamia. The life of the Egyptian lies spread out in the mural paintings down to the minutest detail. If fun and sport had played any real part they would be there in some form for us to see. But the Egyptian did not play. “Solon, Solon, you Greeks are all children,” said the Egyptian priest to the great Athenian. At any rate, children or not, they enjoyed themselves. They had physical vigor and high spirits and time, too, for fun. The witness of the games is conclusive. And when Greece died and her reading of the great enigma was buried with her statues, play, too, died out of the world. The brutal, bloody Roman games had nothing to do with the spirit of play. They were fathered by the Orient, not by Greece. Play died when Greece died and many and many a century passed before it was resurrected. To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful

Remember a blue hill, a crowd, a cross? Some up on the hill, sprinkled with blood, are busy nailing a body to the cross; others below, sprinkled with tears, are gazing upward. Does it not occur to you that the part which those above must play is the more difficult, the more important part? If it were not for them, how could that magnificent tragedy ever have been staged? True, they were hissed at by the dark crowd, but for that the author of the tragedy, God, should have remunerated them the more liberally, should He not? And the most clement, Christian God himself, who burned all the infidels on a slow fire, is He not an executioner? Was the number of those burned by the Christians less than the number of burned Christians? Yet (you must understand this!), yet this God was for centuries glorified as the God of love! Absurd? Oh, no. Just the contrary. It is instead a testament to the imperishable wisdom of man, written in blood. Even at the time when he still was wild and hairy, man knew that real, algebraic love for humanity must inevitably be inhuman, and that the inevitable mark of truth is cruelty—just as the inevitable mark of fire is its property of causing the sensation of burning. Could you show me a fire that would not hurt?

...the prose tradition had died two centuries before and the recreation of a full canon of all-purpose Scots was beyond even Scott's skill, nor did he attempt it, except, perhaps in the magnificent Wandering Willie's Tale. He took the only course open to him, of writing his narrative in English and using Scots only for those who, given their social class, would still be speaking it: daft Davie Gellatley in Waverley, the gypsies and Dandie Dinmont in Guy Mannering, the Headriggs in Old Mortality, Edie Ochiltree and the fisher-folk of Musselcrag in The Antiquary, Andrew Fairservice in Rob Roy, the Deanses in The Heart of Midlothian, Meg Dods in St. Ronan's Well, and so on. The procedure gave reality to the Scots characters whose ways and ethos it was Scott's main purpose to portray, and the author in his best English, which lumbered along rather badly at times, did little more than lay out the setting for the action and act as impressario for the characters as they played their roles... ...Scott's felicity in conveying character and action through their Scots speech inspired his imitators for the next hundred years - Susan Ferrier, Hogg, Macdonald, Stevenson, Barrie, Crockett, Alexander, George Douglas, and John Buchan. The tradition of narrative in standard English and dialogue in various degrees of dialect has been the usual procedure since.

In the Brhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad7 the first form of the doctrine of transmigration is given. The souls of those who have lived lives of sacrifice, charity and austerity, after certain obscure peregrinations, pass to the World of the Fathers, the paradise of Yama; thence, after a period of bliss, they go to the moon; from the moon they go to empty space, whence they pass to the air, and descend to earth in the rain. There they “become food,… and are offered again in the altar fire which is man, to be born again in the fire of woman”, while the unrighteous are reincarnated as worms, birds or insects. This doctrine, which seems to rest on a primitive belief that conception occurred through the eating by one of the parents of a fruit or vegetable containing the latent soul of the offspring, is put forward as a rare and new one, and was not universally held at the time of the composition of the Upaniṣad. Even in the days of the Buddha, transmigration may not have been believed in by everyone, but it seems to have gained ground very rapidly in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. Thus the magnificently logical Indian doctrines of saṃsāra, or transmigration, and karma, the result of the deeds of one life affecting the next, had humble beginnings in a soul theory of quite primitive type; but even at this early period they had an ethical content, and had attained some degree of elaboration. In

... man is generous with the word "fool" and is ready to serve it up to his neighbor twenty times a day. It is enough to have one stupid side out of ten to be accounted a fool, aside from the nine good ones ... in the world chronicle of mankind there are many whole centuries which, it would seem, should be crossed out and abolished as unnecessary. There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, even a child would not make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it, like the road leading to a magnificent dwelling meant for a king's mansions! Broader and more splendid than all other roads it is, lit by the sun and illumined all night by lamps, yet people have flowed past it in the blind darkness. So many times already, though guided by a sense come down from heaven, they have managed to waver and go astray, have managed in broad daylight to get again into an impassable wilderness, have managed again to blow a blinding fog into each other's eyes, and, dragging themselves after marsh-lights, have managed finally to reach the abyss, only to ask one another in horror: where is the way out, where is the path? The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere

The concentrated structure of musical form, based on dramatic climaxes, gradually breaks up in romanticism and gives way again to the cumulative composition of the older music. Sonata form falls to pieces and is replaced more and more often by other, less severe and less schematically moulded forms—by small-scale lyrical and descriptive genres, such as the Fantasy and the Rhapsody, the Arabesque and the Étude, the Intermezzo and the Impromptu, the Improvisation and the Variation. Even extensive works are often made up of such miniature forms, which no longer constitute, from the structural point of view, the acts of a drama, but the scenes of a revue. A classical sonata or symphony was the world in parvo: a microcosm. A succession of musical pictures, such as Schumann’s Carnaval or Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, is like a painter’s sketch-book; it may contain magnificent lyrical-impressionistic details, but it abandons the attempt to create a total impression and an organic unity from the very beginning. [...] This change of form is accompanied by the literary inclinations of the composers and their bias towards programme music. The intermingling of forms also makes itself felt in music and is expressed most conspicuously in the fact that the romantic composers are often very gifted and important writers. In the painting and poetry of the period the disintegration of form does not proceed anything like so quickly, nor is it so far-reaching as in music. The explanation of the difference is partly that the cyclical ‘medieval’ structure had long since been overcome in the other arts, whereas it remained predominant in music until the middle of the eighteenth century, and only began to yield to formal unity after the death of Bach. In music it was therefore much easier to revert to it than, for example, in painting where it was completely out of date. The romantics’ historical interest in old music and the revival of Bach’s prestige had, however, only a subordinate part in the dissolution of strict sonata form, the real reason is to be sought in a change of taste which was in essentials sociologically conditioned.

But why, an impatient critic will immediately object, should our forgiveness depend on Christ’s death? Why does God not simply forgive us, without the necessity of the cross? ‘God will pardon me’, Heinrich Heine protested. ‘That’s his métier [his job, his speciality].’4 After all, the objector might continue, if we sin against each other, we are required to forgive each other. So why should God not practise what he preaches? Why should he not be as generous as he expects us to be? Two answers need to be given to these questions. The first was given at the end of the eleventh century by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote in his magnificent book Why God Became Man: ‘You have not yet considered the seriousness of sin.’5 The second answer might be: ‘You have not yet considered the majesty of God.’ To draw an analogy between our forgiveness of each other and God’s forgiveness of us is very superficial. We are not God but private individuals, while he is the maker of heaven and earth, Creator of the very laws we break. Our sins are not purely personal injuries but a wilful rebellion against him. It is when we begin to see the gravity of sin and the majesty of God that our questions change. No longer do we ask why God finds it difficult to forgive sins, but how he finds it possible. As one writer has put it, ‘forgiveness is to man the plainest of duties; to God it is the profoundest of problems’.6 Why may forgiveness be described as a ‘problem’ to God? Because of who he is in his innermost being. Of course he is love (1 John 4:8, 16), but his love is not sentimental love; it is holy love. How then could God punish sin (as in justice he must) without contradicting his love? Or how could God pardon sin (as in love he yearned to do) without compromising his justice? How, confronted by human evil, could God be true to himself as holy love? How could he act simultaneously to express his holiness and his love? This is the divine dilemma that God resolved on the cross. For on the cross, when Jesus died, God himself in Christ bore the judgment we deserved, in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. The full penalty of sin was borne – not, however, by us, but by God in Christ. On the cross divine love and justice were reconciled.

Tell me you didn’t,” she groaned, knowing it would not be the truth. “Please tell me you didn’t take advantage of these poor people.” “I didn’t,” he chirped. “Liar.” With an irritated sigh he tried to convince her. “Amora, you’re not seeing things from an immortal perspective. The people who built this temple…” “Temple?” she cried, cutting him off. “You forced these people to build you a temple? Why? Because all of a sudden you’re God now?” Perturbed by her interruption, he raised a warning finger. “No, no, Amora, not God. But from their viewpoint I may seem a bit…..god-like.” She rolled her eyes in an exaggerated manner. “If you would let me finish,” he went on, “these particular individuals had no part in the construction of that monument; it was their ancestors who erected it. And I must say, they did a fine job. My likeness has weathered the centuries quite well.” “You’re despicable.” He frowned at the insult. “Nobody was forced to build us a temple, Amora. They chose to do so.” “You were that impressive to them, huh?” “Apparently.” His eyes twinkled at the memory. He took a few steps toward the distant city, pulling Eena along. “Come on, let’s go have some fun.” “No way.” She planted her feet, refusing. Surprisingly it put a stop to him. “And why not?” “Because your sudden appearance will upset them! No doubt you’ll want to show off with some shockingly grand entrance. I’m not going to take part in a game of deceit.” “I’m not deceiving anyone,” Edgar disputed. “I can’t help it if they happen to think I’m perfectly magnificent.” His pompous view of himself earned a nasty look as well as a lecture. “I can’t believe you’re okay with selling people lies that affect the way they live and think! You’re not even close to being a god, Edgar, and yet you allow them to accept you as some sort of deity because of your unusual abilities. For centuries now you’ve abandoned this world and a population who probably looked to you and your lousy sisters for help. It’s all a big, disgusting sham!” Edgar pouted like a child. “Fine—spoil all my fun. We’ll go do something else. Something that doesn’t include your poor, fragile, stupid mortals.” “They’re not stupid.” “They think I’m a god,” he snapped. That was a pretty good argument.

Archaic societies have lasted so long because they know nothing of the desire to innovate, to grovel before ever-new simulacra. If you change images with each generation, you cannot anticipate historical longevity. Classical Greece and modern Europe typify civilisations stricken by a precocious death, following a greed for metamorphosis and an excessive consumption of gods, and of the surrogates for gods. Ancient China and Egypt wallowed for millennia in a magnificent sclerosis. As did African societies, before contact with the West. They too are threatened, because they have adopted another rhythm. Having lost the monopoly on stagnation, they grow increasingly frantic and will inevitably topple like their models, like those feverish civilisations incapable of lasting more than a dozen centuries. In the future, the peoples who accede to hegemony will enjoy it even less: history in slow motion has inexorably been replaced by history out of breath. Who can help regretting the pharaohs and their Chinese colleagues? Institutions, societies, civilisations differ in duration and significance, yet all are subject to one and the same law, which decrees that the invincible impulse, the factor of their rise, must sag and settle after a certain time, this decadence corresponding to a slackening of that energiser which is . . . delirium. Compared with periods of expansion, of dementia really, those of decline seem sane and are so, are too much so—which makes them almost as deadly as the others. A nation that has fulfilled itself, that has expended its talents and exploited the last resources of its genius, expiates such success by producing nothing thereafter. It has done its duty, it aspires to vegetate, but to its cost it will not have the latitude to do so. When the Romans—or what remained of them—sought repose, the Barbarians got under way, en masse. We read in a history of the invasions that the German tribes serving in the Empire’s army and administration assumed Latin names until the middle of the fifth century. After which, Germanic names became a requirement. Exhausted, in retreat on every front, the masters were no longer feared, no longer respected. What was the use of bearing their names? “A fatal somnolence reigned everywhere,” observed Salvian, bittersweet censor of the ancient deliquescence in its final stages.

In 1910 Leroux had his greatest literary success with Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera). This is both a detective story and a dark romantic melodrama and was inspired by Leroux’s passion for and obsession with the Paris Opera House. And there is no mystery as to why he found the building so fascinating because it is one of the architectural wonders of the nineteenth century. The opulent design and the fantastically luxurious furnishings added to its glory, making it the most famous and prestigious opera house in all Europe. The structure comprises seventeen floors, including five deep and vast cellars and sub cellars beneath the building. The size of the Paris Opera House is difficult to conceive. According to an article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1879, just after it first opened to the public, the Opera House contained 2,531 doors with 7,593 keys. There were nine vast reservoirs, with two tanks holding a total of 22,222 gallons of water. At the time there were fourteen furnaces used to provide the heating, and dressing-rooms for five hundred performers. There was a stable for a dozen or so horses which were used in the more ambitious productions. In essence then the Paris Opera House was like a very small magnificent city. During a visit there, Leroux heard the legend of a bizarre figure, thought by many to be a ghost, who had lived secretly in the cavernous labyrinth of the Opera cellars and who, apparently, engineered some terrible accidents within the theatre as though he bore it a tremendous grudge. These stories whetted Leroux’s journalistic appetite. Convinced that there was some truth behind these weird tales, he investigated further and acquired a series of accounts relating to the mysterious ‘ghost’. It was then that he decided to turn these titillating titbits of theatre gossip into a novel. The building is ideal for a dark, fantastic Grand Guignol scenario. It is believed that during the construction of the Opera House it became necessary to pump underground water away from the foundation pit of the building, thus creating a huge subterranean lake which inspired Leroux to use it as one of his settings, the lair, in fact, of the Phantom. With its extraordinary maze-like structure, the various stage devices primed for magical stage effects and that remarkable subterranean lake, the Opera House is not only the ideal backdrop for this romantic fantasy but it also emerges as one of the main characters of this compelling tale. In using the real Opera House as its setting, Leroux was able to enhance the overall sense of realism in his novel.

Unfortunately, America has trouble repairing its magnificent trails, so that collapsed bridges and washed-out sections are sometimes left unrepaired. We were rich enough to construct many of these trails during the Great Depression, yet we’re apparently too poor in the 21st century even to sustain them. The attraction of wilderness has something to do with continuity. I may now have a GPS device that I couldn’t have imagined when I first hiked, but essential patterns on the trail are unchanging: the exhaustion, the mosquitoes, the blisters, and also the exhilaration at reaching a mountain pass, the lustrous reds and blues of alpine wildflowers, the deliciousness of a snow cone made on a sweltering day from a permanent snowfield and Kool-Aid mix. The trails are a reminder of our insignificance. We come and go, but nature is forever. It puts us in our place, underscoring that we are not lords of the universe but components of it.

Phil Klay’s collection of 21st century war tales resonates in Redeployment (Penguin Press, March). For more commercial debuts, there is Naomi Wood in a cross between The Paris Wife and The Women with Mrs. Hemingway (Penguin, June), while Australian Samantha Hayes tackles turbo-charged domestic suspense in Until You’re Mine (Crown, April), and Shane Kuhn looks at the homicidal side of office work in The Intern’s Handbook (S&S, April). Finally, debut novels from well-known personalities include one by Ruth Reichl, the memoirist and former Gourmet editor-in-chief, moving to fiction for the first time with Delicious! (Random House, May). Musician and former soap opera star Rick Springfield also tries his hand at fiction with Magnificent Vibration (Touchstone, May).

There is something magnificent in the performance and the inexorability of ceremony. However tired, however long the journey, he walks with dignity and, when all is said and done, majesty. So it will be here, entering by the Gate of the Sun between the trumpets and the troops, the prefect at his side, the guard and the priests accompanying him: he will enter his city, coming like a bridegroom to an unfamiliar bride. He will see her with the certainty of possession, she him with wonder, curiosity and fear. So Hadrian will walk up the dizzying white steps to the temple, slowly but without pausing for breath, always standing forward of his retinue so that the crowds may see him – not so far forward that they may reach him, but near enough that they feel they could.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Englishmen began building houses on the east coast of this warm land of curious life and unknown vastness. They had selected, more by luck than exploration, the banks of a magnificent harbour, a place which posterity generally recognized as one of the best sites in the world.

Alexandria’s buildings reflected the breadth of its intellectual life. Here were the magnificent library and the Mouseion – in effect a great academy, unequalled throughout the empire, with its four faculties of medicine, literature, astronomy and mathematics; the obtaining of dining rights here was a fiercely contested honour. Among the presidents of the Mouseion had been Julia Balbilla’s grandfather, Claudius Balbillus. The library contained half a million books and at its zenith it was said that it held a copy of every available manuscript in the world.

the grand Cross of Lothair, an ornate tenth-century golden cross richly encrusted with jewels and still being used to lead sacred processions like the one he had attended. But the strange thing was that a magnificent cameo of the Emperor Augustus with a crown and holding the royal Roman eagle scepter, reportedly carved during the time of Christ, graced the center of this holy cross. When he asked his Jesuit superior about the riddle of a Roman emperor honored in this way, the response had shocked and confused him. "The cameo of Augustus on the cross was without doubt meant to indicate that the emperor was the earthly representative of the almighty power of God.

Picture, for example, in 1077, the humbled Henry IV, supreme head of the Holy Roman Empire and heir to Charlemagne (whom Pope Leo III had crowned emperor in 800), crossing the Alps and forced to wait, in penitence, barefoot in a haircloth shirt in the snow outside the castle at Canossa to make his peace with Gregory VII! Claiming to be "King of kings," Gregory, because of a quarrel with Henry, had declared: "On the part of God omnipotent, I forbid Henry to govern the kingdoms of Italy and Germany. I absolve all subjects from every oath they have taken and I excommunicate every person who shall serve him as king." Henry had no defense against that superweapon of the popes. Thus was established that magnificent "whore" portrayed by John in Revelation 17—headquartered in a city located upon seven hills (verse 9) and which "reigneth over the kings of the earth" (verse 18). One eighteenth-century

The year 1453, therefore, marks the end of the Roman Empire. No one can fail to be amazed by the almost constant successes of the Ottoman armies, which developed in less than two centuries from a small group of fighters who waged war around their gazi in Eastern Anatolia into a force whose power reached the shores of the Bosphorus and the palace of Justinian’s successors. How

On the other side of the lot, beyond the corroding replica of “David” that fronted the piazza named after his creator, lay the city of Florence, a spooned circle of terra cotta and stone and pastel, split horizontally by the nearby River Arno and surrounded by verdant hills like a lush hood framing the face of a movie star. Jacoby felt wonder rise through his sternum and out his nose. It seemed like a model, a tiny replica of plastic pieces, of a make believe place, not a real place in real size made by the hands of men many centuries ago. A city of domes and towers and palaces, of ceramic tiles and stone, of four bridges that spanned the Arno, including the famous Ponte Vecchio, lined with shops of pastel facades. From high above, Jacoby wandered through the tourists who snapped pictures and pointed. He stood atop the paved slope that led down the hill toward the magnificent city, but he held still, fighting the current of enticement, the beckoning, savoring the feeling of anticipation like a child has atop a long water slide above an enormous pool.

Tridentine Creed and the Tridentine Mass (from Tridentum, the Latin name for Trent), which remained in use for the next four centuries;

All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to change... If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways... England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe. Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people, according to the exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us... Keep us in distinct colonies... Be not surprised that I am turned politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.

FLORENCE DURING THE Renaissance was not green and airy; it was crowded and noisy. Oxcarts, mules, and passersby pushed their way through narrow, foul-smelling streets, which were as dark as tunnels, because many of the householders had added oriel windows to the upper floors. Buildings were going up everywhere. Workmen pulled down old, cramped dwellings and carted in building materials for palaces until these became a scarce commodity. Many of these new houses were as big as castles. One could lose one’s way for hours in their suites of brightly painted rooms. During the fifteenth century rich Florentines grew even richer, while the poor became even poorer. 1 Wealthy families also cut themselves off from the city. Where their palazzi would once have opened on to the city with a loggia, they now looked inward over magnificent interior courtyards where social events took place.

This country was the only country in history born, not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man’s mind. This country was built on the supremacy of reason—and, for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world. It will have to do so again.

It would be some while yet before the sea became, as it is today, a thing of great romance- the archetype of the sublime, that philosophical quality of natural creations that manages to combine the magnificent and the horrific at the same time. Mountain chains with their jaggedly vicious peaks and sheer cliffs, and the dangers of rockfalls and avalanches and lashing storms, are classic examples of the sublime, presenting an aesthetic that inspires awe and reverence. The sea eventually came to be seen as much the same- a thing possessed of an awesome mightiness, a lethal beauty, of which one might be fearful and respective and overcome by, all at the same instant. Come the end of the eighteenth century and the sea was not longer an inconvenience to be overlooked…it was a thing to be honored and even embraced, though always warily, for the sea could always strike back, and with irresistible force and power.

At the end of the first century of Christian rule, the Colosseum still dominated Rome and the Parthenon towered above Athens. Yet when writers of this period discuss architecture, these aren’t the buildings that impress them. Instead, their admiration is drawn by another structure in Egypt. This building was so fabulous that writers in the ancient world struggled to find ways to convey its beauty. ‘Its splendour is such that mere words can only do it an injustice,’ wrote the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. It was, another writer thought, ‘one of the most unique and uncommon sights in the world. For nowhere else on earth can one find such a building.’ Its great halls, its columns, its astonishing statues and its art all made it, outside Rome, ‘the most magnificent building in the whole world’. Everyone had heard of it. No one has heard of it now. While tourists still toil up to the Parthenon, or look in awe at the Colosseum, outside academia few people know of the temple of Serapis. That is because in AD 392 a bishop, supported by a band of fanatical Christians, reduced it to rubble.

Chinul, the twelfth-century Korean Ch’an master, expresses this freedom magnificently in his treatise Secrets of Cultivating the Mind:

In the seventeenth century, Turkish concubines devised a secret method of communication with flowers by attaching a meaning to each blossom or plant. The fascination swept Europe and reached its zenith of popularity in Victorian England. In the language of flowers, the red rose symbolizes love, while the calla lily signifies a magnificent beauty. Together, a stunning marriage to the perfumer. - DB

There is no love we can experience in our lives more magnificent than the love God has for us.

In its full splendour, before centuries of spoliation stripped it of its treasures, the interior of Holy Wisdom was a magnificent tumult of gold, silver, porphyry, lapislazuli and polychromatic marbles. It was adorned with immense mosaic icons (added in many cases long after Justinian’s time), and with inlays of semi-precious stone. One of its most remarkable features, however, was the quality of the light that filled the enormous central space of the building – a light not infrequently described as ‘ethereal’ or ‘celestial’ or ‘mystical’. The peculiar quality of this light resulted from the single most impressive architectural feature of the edifice: the gigantic dome that seemed to ‘hover’ above the nave. The appearance of weightlessness was achieved by constructing a continuous arcade of 40 windows at the base of the dome, above the main oblong structure of the building, making it appear that the dome floated above the church on a ring of light. In fact, the great weight of the dome was supported by four large and elegantly tapered pendentives resting on four large piers and creating four enormous arches. To the east and west of the central dome, lesser semi-domes descend in a kind of cascade.

No magnificent product of the imagination—whether a machine, painting, or philosophy—was created in a complete vacuum. The invention of the telegraph took the efforts of a thousand, but the last man, who added that final inspired touch, got the

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future. —W. E. B. DU BOIS, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935

Skardu was a predominantly Buddhist region in fifth century India. Faxian mentions a magnificent Stupa that held the relics of Buddha. He mentions a tooth relic and a spittoon which were kept in the Stupa. The Stupa had an order of more than a thousand monks and their disciples, practiced Hinayana Buddhism. Sadly, today there are no Stupas standing in Skardu, which would remind us of its Buddhist heritage. Most of them being lost to iconoclasm. As recently as June 2020, Buddhist rock carvings were vandalised in Chilas region of Gilgit-Baltistan.

This country was the only country in history born, not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man’s mind. This country was built on the supremacy of reason—and, for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world.

with outward cordiality, and

All about Yoga Beauty Health.Yoga is a gathering of physical, mental, and otherworldly practices or teaches which started in antiquated India. There is a wide assortment of Yoga schools, practices, and objectives in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Among the most surely understood sorts of yoga are Hatha yoga and Rāja yoga. The birthplaces of yoga have been theorized to go back to pre-Vedic Indian conventions; it is said in the Rigveda however in all probability created around the 6th and fifth hundreds of years BCE,in antiquated India's parsimonious and śramaṇa developments. The order of most punctual writings depicting yoga-practices is indistinct, varyingly credited to Hindu Upanishads. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali date from the main portion of the first thousand years CE, however just picked up noticeable quality in the West in the twentieth century. Hatha yoga writings risen around the eleventh century with sources in tantra Yoga masters from India later acquainted yoga with the west after the accomplishment of Swami Vivekananda in the late nineteenth and mid twentieth century. In the 1980s, yoga wound up noticeably well known as an arrangement of physical exercise over the Western world.Yoga in Indian conventions, be that as it may, is more than physical exercise; it has a reflective and otherworldly center. One of the six noteworthy standard schools of Hinduism is likewise called Yoga, which has its own epistemology and transcendentalism, and is firmly identified with Hindu Samkhya reasoning. Beauty is a normal for a creature, thought, protest, individual or place that gives a perceptual ordeal of delight or fulfillment. Magnificence is examined as a major aspect of style, culture, social brain research, theory and human science. A "perfect delight" is an element which is respected, or has includes broadly ascribed to excellence in a specific culture, for flawlessness. Grotesqueness is thought to be the inverse of excellence. The experience of "magnificence" regularly includes a translation of some substance as being in adjust and amicability with nature, which may prompt sentiments of fascination and passionate prosperity. Since this can be a subjective ordeal, it is frequently said that "excellence is entirely subjective. Health is the level of practical and metabolic proficiency of a living being. In people it is the capacity of people or groups to adjust and self-oversee when confronting physical, mental, mental and social changes with condition. The World Health Organization (WHO) characterized wellbeing in its more extensive sense in its 1948 constitution as "a condition of finish physical, mental, and social prosperity and not simply the nonappearance of sickness or ailment. This definition has been liable to contention, specifically as lacking operational esteem, the uncertainty in creating durable wellbeing procedures, and on account of the issue made by utilization of "finish". Different definitions have been proposed, among which a current definition that associates wellbeing and individual fulfillment. Order frameworks, for example, the WHO Family of International Classifications, including the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), are usually used to characterize and measure the parts of wellbeing. yogabeautyhealth.com

And to say that the citizens of those rival domains did not always see eye to eye was a bit of an understatement, because each represented the antithesis of the other’s deepest values. To the engineers and the technicians who belonged to the world of the dam, Glen was no dead monolith but, rather, a living and breathing thing, a creature that pulsed with energy and dynamism. Perhaps even more important, the dam was also a triumphant capstone of human ingenuity, the culmination of a civil-engineering lineage that had seen its first florescence in the irrigation canals of ancient Mesopotamia and China, then shot like a bold arrow through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution to reach its zenith here in the sun-scorched wastelands of the American Southwest. Glen embodied the glittering inspiration and the tenacious drive of the American century—a spirit that in other contexts had been responsible for harnessing the atom and putting men on the moon. As impressive as those other accomplishments may have been, nothing excelled the nobility of transforming one of the harshest deserts on earth into a vibrant garden. In the minds of its engineers and its managers, Glen affirmed everything that was right about America. To Kenton Grua and the river folk who inhabited the world of the canyon, however, the dam was an offense against nature. Thanks to Glen and a host of similar Reclamation projects along the Colorado, one of the greatest rivers in the West, had been reduced to little more than a giant plumbing system, a network of pipes and faucets and catchment tubs whose chief purpose lay in the dubious goal of bringing golf courses to Phoenix, swimming pools to Tucson, and air-conditioned shopping malls to Vegas. A magnificent waterway had been sacrificed on the altar of a technology that enabled people to prosper without limits, without balance, without any connection to the environment in which they lived—and in the process, fostered the delusion that the desert had been conquered. But in the eyes of the river folk, even that wasn’t the real cost. To

The "Garcilaso" mentioned by Markham is the chronicler Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, a heritage that gave him unique access to genuine Inca traditions, particularly since he was born and brought up in Cuzco and spoke Quechua, the language of the Incas, as his mother tongue. Had the megalithic elements of Sacsayhuaman been recent work, done in the century before Garcilaso's birth, there should have been fresh and clear memories, even eye-witness accounts, of so magnificent an achievement. But Garcilaso reports nothing of the sort and instead can only offer magic as an explanation for what he describes as 'an ever greater enigma than the seven wonders of the world.