Months Mind Mass Quotes

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But that wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake. The incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me—their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the dinner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

Such a weird thing, isn't it.... to walk around for days every month bleeding. As girls, to just accept that a certain amount of our time will be spent cleaning up gore expelled from our own bodies, part of our income spent buying mass-produced bits of cotton wool to soak it up, part of our minds spent tracking, remembering and planning so that no one ever notices we're temporarily transformed into victims of satanic possession, blood gushing out of our uninjured bodies.... waking up at night with stuff of life smeared all over sheets, like you're in the middle of a fucking crime scene... Oh it's fine, it's normal. Jesus! No wonder men back away in fear.

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But that wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake. The incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me—their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the diner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

Until Americans can overcome this idealization of law, until they begin to see that law is, like other institutions and actions, to be measured against moral principles, against human needs, we will remain a static society in a world of change, a society deaf to the rising cries for justice- and therefore,a society in serious trouble.” Added a quotation: “The realities of american politics, it turns out, are different than as described in old civic textbooks, which tell us how fortunate we are to have the ballot. The major nominees for president are not chosen by the ballot, but are picked for us by a quadrennial political convention which is half farce, half circus, most of whose delegates have not been instructed by popular vote. For months before the convention, the public has been conditioned by the mass media on who is who, so that it will not be temped to think beyond that list which the party regulars have approved.” Added a quotation: “I do not think civil disobedience is enough; it is a way of protest, but in itself it does not construct a new society. There are many other things that citizens should do to begin to build a new way of life in the midst of the old, to live the way human beings should live- enjoying the fruits of the earth, the warmth of nature and of one another-without hostility, without the artificial separation of religion, or race, or nationalism. Further, not all forms of civil disobedience are moral; not all are effective.” Added a quotation: “It is very hard, in the comfortable environment of middle-class America, to discard the notion that everything will be better if we don't have the disturbance of civil disobedience, if we confine ourselves to voting, writing letters to our congressmen, speaking our minds politely.....somehow we must transcend our own tight, air-conditioned chambers and begin to feel their plight, their needs. It may become evident that, despite out wealth, we can have no real peace until they do. We might then join them in battering at the complacency of those who guard a false "order," with that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.

Until Americans can overcome this idealization of law, until they begin to see that law is, like other institutions and actions, to be measured against moral principles, against human needs, we will remain a static society in a world of change, a society deaf to the rising cries for justice- and therefore,a society in serious trouble.” “The realities of american politics, it turns out, are different than as described in old civic textbooks, which tell us how fortunate we are to have the ballot. The major nominees for president are not chosen by the ballot, but are picked for us by a quadrennial political convention which is half farce, half circus, most of whose delegates have not been instructed by popular vote. For months before the convention, the public has been conditioned by the mass media on who is who, so that it will not be temped to think beyond that list which the party regulars have approved.” “I do not think civil disobedience is enough; it is a way of protest, but in itself it does not construct a new society. There are many other things that citizens should do to begin to build a new way of life in the midst of the old, to live the way human beings should live- enjoying the fruits of the earth, the warmth of nature and of one another-without hostility, without the artificial separation of religion, or race, or nationalism. Further, not all forms of civil disobedience are moral; not all are effective.” “It is very hard, in the comfortable environment of middle-class America, to discard the notion that everything will be better if we don't have the disturbance of civil disobedience, if we confine ourselves to voting, writing letters to our congressmen, speaking our minds politely.....somehow we must transcend our own tight, air-conditioned chambers and begin to feel their plight, their needs. It may become evident that, despite out wealth, we can have no real peace until they do. We might then join them in battering at the complacency of those who guard a false "order," with that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.

No, I didn't. But I was aware that I was embarked on an epic. In the case of the Bradstreet poem, I didn't know. The situation with that poem was this. I invented the stanza in '48 and wrote the first stanza and the first three lines of the second stanza, and then I stuck. I had in mind a poem roughly the same length as another of mine, “The Statue”—about seven or eight stanzas of eight lines each. Then I stuck. I read and read and read and thought and collected notes and sketched for five years until, although I was still in the second stanza, I had a mountain of notes and draftings—no whole stanzas, but passages as long as five lines. The whole poem was written in about two months, after which I was a ruin for two years. When I finally got going, I had this incredible mass of stuff and a very good idea of the shape of the poem, with the exception of one crucial point, which was this. I'll tell you in a minute why and how I got going. The great exception was this: It did not occur to me to have a dialogue between them—to insert bodily Henry into the poem . . . Me, to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I, into the poem . . .

…the lump of glass had its place upon the mantelpiece, where it stood heavy upon a little pile of bills and letters and served not only as an excellent paper-weight, but also as a natural stopping place for the young man's eyes when they wandered from his book. Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. So John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything—china, glass, amber, rock, marble—even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there—thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece. They were useful, too, for a man who is standing for Parliament upon the brink of a brilliant career has any number of papers to keep in order—addresses to constituents, declarations of policy, appeals for subscriptions, invitations to dinner, and so on. __ from 'The Solid Object

Far more damaging to Calvin’s reputation was the case of Michael Servetus. An accomplished physician, skilled cartographer, and eclectic theologian from Spain, Servetus held maverick (and sometimes unbalanced) views on many points of Christian doctrine. In 1531, he published Seven Books on the Errors of the Trinity, enraging both Catholics and Protestants, Calvin among them. At one point, Servetus took up residence in Vienne, a suburb of Lyon about ninety miles from Geneva, where, under an assumed name, he began turning out heterodox books while also practicing medicine. His magnum opus, The Restitution of Christianity—a rebuttal of Calvin’s Institutes—rejected predestination, denied original sin, called infant baptism diabolical, and further deprecated the Trinity. Servetus imprudently sent Calvin a copy. Calvin sent back a copy of his Institutes. Servetus filled its margins with insulting comments, then returned it. A bitter exchange of letters followed, in which Servetus announced that the Archangel Michael was girding himself for Armageddon and that he, Servetus, would serve as his armor-bearer. Calvin sent Servetus’s letters to a contact in Vienne, who passed them on to Catholic inquisitors in Lyon. Servetus was promptly arrested and sent to prison, but after a few days he escaped by jumping over a prison wall. After spending three months wandering around France, he decided to seek refuge in Naples. En route, he inexplicably stopped in Geneva. Arriving on a Saturday, he attended Calvin’s lecture the next day. Though disguised, Servetus was recognized by some refugees from Lyon and immediately arrested. Calvin instructed one of his disciples to file capital charges against him with the magistrates for his various blasphemies. After a lengthy trial and multiple examinations, Servetus was condemned for writing against the Trinity and infant baptism and sentenced to death. He asked to be beheaded rather than burned, but the council refused, and on October 27, 1553, Servetus, with a copy of the Restitution tied to his arm, was sent to the stake. Shrieking in agony, he took half an hour to die. Calvin approved. “God makes clear that the false prophet is to be stoned without mercy,” he explained in Defense of the Orthodox Trinity Against the Errors of Michael Servetus. “We are to crush beneath our heel all affections of nature when his honor is involved. The father should not spare the child, nor the brother his brother, nor the husband his own wife or the friend who is dearer to him than life.

Disconnect from mass media   When striving to become one of the new rich, it is imperative that you cut off or at least limit your connection to mass information for a time. Take a moment to define how much time you lose each day browsing the web, watching TV, engaging in social media outlets and all other activities requiring you to be plugged in. For the vast majority of us this will amount to hours each day, just imagine how much time you are losing over a week, a month and a year. You might claim you are gaining valuable information from doing these things, but the reality is that it is simply attempting to justify what is ultimately a time-wasting activity. No doubt some knowledge is gained but not enough to justify the amount of time and potential profit lost by doing so. Do keep in mind that when we tell you to cut out mass media it does not mean all media. Feel free to continue to actively engage in the ones that provide relevant information specific to your line of work. Entrepreneur articles, business magazines, and other similar resources can be well worth the time spent and can remain a part of your routine.   Avoid

With these ideas in mind, I decided to create a blog, Council of European Canadians, early in the summer of 2014 ‘dedicated to the promotion and defence of the ethnic interests of European Canadians.’ I called for a strategy in which European Canadians would make use of the current policy of multiculturalism in Canada, using this policy for their own ends by asking for a seat at the table as a people concerned for the preservation of Canada’s European heritage. As part of the ‘beliefs and goals’ of the Council, I stated: We believe Canada is a nation founded by Anglo and French Europeans. In 1971, over 100 years after Confederation, the Anglo and French composition of the Canadian population stood at 44.6 percent and 28.7 percent respectively. All in all, over 96 percent of the population was European in origin. We therefore oppose all efforts to deny or weaken the European character of Canada. We believe that the pioneers and settlers who built the Canadian nation are part of the European people. Therefore we believe that Canada derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and that Canada should remain majority European in its ethnic composition and cultural character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into Canada that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority within our lifetime. In subsequent months I posted articles on a whole range of subjects. From the beginning the blog became a subject of controversy with numerous complaints filed against me to the president of the university where I was working, The University of New Brunswick, and to other members of the administration, followed by TV interviews, many articles in the mainstream media, student university papers, and radio debates. It was obvious I had hit a nerve in the Western establishment. You must not question mass immigration in the name of the ethnic interests of Europeans.

They shared the monkfish-liver pâté and the finely chopped tuna and scallions with ginger sauce. "Remember the time we had puffer fish at that restaurant in New York?" Isaac asked as he tasted the monkfish. Elliott slowly shook his head as he answered. "How can I forget? I was scared to death. Every time I have liver, no matter where it comes from, the puffer-fish liver crosses my mind. I sat there praying that the chef knew what he was doing when he cut out the poison part." "You didn't seem scared," said Isaac. "That's because I didn't want you to think I was unadventurous. We had just met then. I was trying to impress you." "Well, you did," said Isaac. "I'd been in town for only a few months, and I thought you were such a sophisticated New Yorker. I was trying not to seem like a rube." "You know," said Elliot, "I read that Japanese fish farmers are mass-producing poison-free puffer fish." Isaac shrugged. "Kinda takes the mystique away, doesn't it? I mean, where's the thrill? Where's the risk? You might as well be eating tuna.

It was now, I realized almost with a shock, October; perhaps the most beautiful month of the year in Rome. The trees had changed into a hundred shades of red and gold. Sometimes an unearthly pearly light washed the city, sharp and clear like a spring morning on the Acropolis, and in the evening that curious pinkish flush in the streets, which lasts only from dusk to darkness, seemed to be accentuated. Masses of splendid fat grapes, black and white, filled the street stalls. They reminded me that Bacchic revels made respectable by church processions—a collaboration that would not have surprised Gregory the Great—were taking place in the wine towns of the Castelli Romani, where the grape harvest had now been gathered. Some pungent whiff of this Virgilian moment seemed to enter Rome in the morning with those odd-looking wine carts and their rows of little barrels, the driver sitting up beneath a huge ribbed umbrella, in shape like the shell of some shabby and discredited Aphrodite. They trundled into Trastevere and replenished the tavern cellars with more than usual jollity and it was often in my mind to go out to Frascati and look up my friends of the wine vaults who were, I supposed, now knee deep in the new vintage: but I never did so.

After several years of channeling, [my spirit guide,] Orin told me that he wanted to teach me about the future and probably realities. For a period of several months, he gave me various preditions which came true. Several times he gave me exact newspaper headlines and dates, several months prior to their occurring. All the predictions centered around mass events. In all these events he would point out that they were already being set up, envisioned and planned by those in charge and he was only projecting events by reading the mass mind and probably outcomes. He told me that large scale event are easier to predict because they have energy lines from mass consciousness set up many months in advance. The psychic weight of these events, the mass agreement around them, the numbers of people involved, make it much harde to stop or change such events. One person can change his mind and thus change his future easily; but an event affecting many people is not usually altered by just one person changing his mind.

LOCAL SELF AS HOST FOR NONLOCAL SELF When you drop back into your daily life after meditation, you’re changed. You’ve communed with nonlocal mind for an hour, experiencing the highest possible cadence of who you are. That High Self version of you rearranges neurons in your head to create a physical structure to anchor it. You now have a brain that accommodates both the local self and the nonlocal self. My experience has been that the longer you spend in Bliss Brain, whether in or out of meditation, the greater the volume of neural tissue available to anchor that transcendent self in physical experience. Once a critical mass of neurons has wired together, a tipping point occurs. You begin to flash spontaneously into Bliss Brain throughout your day. When you’re idle for a while, like being stuck in traffic or standing in line at the grocery store, the most natural activity seems to be to go into Bliss Brain for a few moments. This reminds you, in the middle of everyday life, that the nonlocal component of your Self exists. It also brings all the enhanced creativity, productivity, and problem-solving ability of Bliss Brain to bear on your daily tasks. You become a happy, creative, and effective person. These enhanced capabilities render you much more able to cope with the challenges of life. They don’t confer exceptional luck. When everyone’s house burns down, yours does too. When the economy nosedives, it takes you with it. But because you possess resilience, and a daily experience of your nonlocal self, you take it in stride. Even when external things vanish, you still have the neural network that Bliss Brain created. No one can take that away from you. DEEPENING PRACTICES Here are practices you can do this week to integrate the information in this chapter into your life: Posttraumatic Growth Exercise 1: In your journal, write down the names of the most resilient people you’ve known personally. They can be alive or dead. They’re people who’ve gone through tragedy and come out intact. Make an appointment to spend time with at least two of the living ones in the coming month. Listen to their stories and allow inspiration to fill you. Neural Reconsolidation Exercise: This week, after a particularly deep meditation, savor the experience. Set a timer and lie down for 15 to 30 minutes. Visualize your synapses wiring together as you deliberately fire them by remembering the deliciousness of the meditation. Choices Exercise: Make 10 photocopies of illustration 7.4, the two doors. Next, analyze in what areas of your environment you often make negative choices. Maybe it’s in online meetings with an annoying colleague at work. Maybe it’s the food choices you make when you walk to the fridge. Maybe it’s the movies you watch on your TV. Tape a copy of the two doors illustration to those objects, such as the monitor, fridge, or TV. This will help you remember, when you’re under stress, that you have a choice.

Sermon of the Mounts Matthew 5 AND SEEING THE MULTITUDES, HE WENT UP INTO THE MOUNTAINS, AND WHEN HE WAS SET, HIS DISCIPLES CAME UNTO HIM. The multitudes, the masses, the crowd, is the lowest state of consciousness. It is a deep ignorance and sleep. If you want to relate and communicate with the masses, you have to come down to their level. That is why whenever you go into the masses, the crowd, you start to feel suffocated. This suffocation is physical and psychological, beacuse you relate to people, who functions from a very low state of consciousness. They pull you down and you become physically and psychologically tired and drained. That is why a need for meditation and aloneness arises. There is a practice in the life of Jesus that he noves into the crowds of people, but after a few months he goes to the mountains. He goes away from the crowd, to be with God. When you are alone, you are with God. To relate to the masses brings you down to their level of consciousness, but only in the presence of God, you can fly. With the crowd, you can not fly, you become crippled, and the masses will not tolerate if you do not live according to them, according to their level of consciousness. To be able to work with the masses, to be able to help them, you have to relate to them according to their level fo consciousness - and this is tiring and draining. Both Jesus and Buddha moved to the mounatins, to a lonely place, just to be themselves, and to be with God to regain their vitality to be able to come back to the masses where people are thristy. The montain is where Jesus do not need to think about the masses, where he can forget the mind and the body. In that moment of aloneness and meditation, one simply is. This is the inner being, the source of life. And when you are full again, you can share again. AND WHEN HE WAS SET, HIS DISCIPLES CAME UNTO HIM. To talk to the masses and to talk to disciples is two very different things. To talk to the crowd is to talk to people, who are indifferent. The crowd is resisting, defensive and argumentative. To talk to disciples means to talk to people, who have a basic thirst. It means that they are not defensive, they are open to listen to the heart of truth. AND HE OPENED HIS MOUTH, AND TAUGHT THEM, SAYING. Jesus escaped into the mountains from the crowd, but he did not escape from the disciples. He was available to the disciples. In his aloneness, Jesus is with God. And through Jesus, the disciples can feel God. The closer the disciple come to Jesus, the more they will see that Jesus is a silence and emptiness through which God can sing. And the more the disciple himself will become an emptiness, he will also be able to help other people. AND HE OPENED HIS MOUTH, AND TAUGHT THEM, SAYING. BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT, FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD. This is the most fundamental statement of Jesus. With this statement, Jesus has said everything. The "poor in spirit" is exactly what Buddha means with the term Shunyatta - "emptiness", no-self, nothingness. It is when the ego disappears, and you are a nobody, a silence. If you are a nobody, if you are nothing, you are God.

Don Fabrizio remembered a conversation with Father Pirrone some months before in the sunlit observatory. What the Jesuit had predicted had come to pass. But wasn’t it perhaps good tactics to insert himself into the new movement, make at least part use of it for a few members of his own class? The worry of his imminent interview with Don Calogero lessened. “But the rest of his family, Don Ciccio, what are they really like?” “Excellency, no one has laid eyes on Don Calogero’s wife for years, except me. She only leaves the house to go to early Mass, the five o’clock one, when it’s empty. There’s no organ-playing at that hour; but once I got up early just to see her. Donna Bastiana came in with her maid, and as I was hiding behind a confessional I could not see very much; but at the end of Mass the heat was too great for the poor woman and she took off her black veil. Word of honour, Excellency, she was lovely as the sun, one can’t blame Don Calogero, who’s a beetle of a man, for wanting to keep her away from others. But even in the best kept houses secrets come out; servants talk; and it seems Donna Bastiana is a kind of animal: she can’t read or write or tell the time by a clock, can scarcely talk; just a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth; she’s incapable even of affection for her own daughter! Good for bed and that’s all.” Don Ciccio, who, as protégé of queens and follower of princes, considered his own simple manners to be perfect, smiled with pleasure. He had found a way of getting some of his own back on the suppressor of his personality. “Anyway,” he went on, “one couldn’t expect much else. You know whose daughter Donna Bastiana is, Excellency?” He turned, rose on tiptoe, pointed to a distant group of huts which looked as if they were slithering off the edge of the hill, nailed there just by a wretched-looking bell-tower: a crucified hamlet. “She’s the daughter of one of your peasants from Runci, Peppe Giunta he was called, so filthy and so crude that everyone called him Peppe “Mmerda” . . . excuse the word, Excellency.” Satisfied, he twisted one of Teresina’s ears round a finger. “Two years after Don Calogero had eloped with Bastiana they found him dead on the path to Rampinzeri, with twelve bullets in his back. Always lucky, is Don Calogero, for the old man was getting above himself and demanding, they say.” Much of this was known to Don Fabrizio and had already been balanced up in his mind; but the nickname of Angelica’s grandfather was new to him; it opened a profound historical perspective, and made him glimpse other abysses compared to which Don Calogero himself seemed a garden flowerbed. The Prince began to feel the ground giving way under his feet; how ever could Tancredi swallow this? And what about himself? He found himself trying to work out the relationship between the Prince of Salina, uncle of the bridegroom, and the grandfather of the bride; he found none, there wasn’t any. Angelica was just Angelica, a flower of a girl, a rose merely fertilised by her grandfather’s nickname. Non olet, he repeated, non olet; in fact optime foeminam ac contuberninum olet.

Many content-oriented companies try this approach of just gathering as much content as possible and offering it at a monthly price when their members might want depth in a few key areas or access to a community of like-minded people. In many cases, it’s not the stuff people want; it’s the curation and community. If the primary benefit is supposed to be the community, there must be a critical mass to enable a network effect. This means that the group itself and the connections of members to one another is the primary benefit of joining the community

Originally there had been just two projects, which he had codenamed Bluebird and Artichoke; the bird and vegetable were among his favorites. Later had come Naomi, the name of a distant cousin. But soon there were so many projects that he had resorted to simply numbering them. By now the total number of projects stood at over 100 (they would eventually reach 149). MK-Project 94 was to investigate “remote directional control of activities in specific brain centers.” MK-Project 142 was to “study electrical brain stimulation.” In his never-ending search for information that could prove useful for the biological warfare program, Dr. Gottlieb had enlisted the support of the CIA archivists. They had turned up a box of documents which U.S. Army intelligence officers had recovered in Munich in 1945. The box was labeled: “German War Office Experiments 1934-39.” The documents still bore the German classification “Secret.” Among the experiments were those which had tracked air currents through the subway systems of Paris and London. “The tunnels would be prime targets in a future war when Londoners and Parisians sheltered in the tunnels during air raids. Using bacteria which were excellent biological tracers, the tunnels would be transformed into places for mass epidemics.” The memo had been written in July 1934, after the Nazis had come to power. Two months later on a hot summer’s day, according to another document, German agents had sprayed “billions of microbes into the Paris Metro system from cars they had driven past the subway entrances. Exhaust gasses provided a satisfactory disguise for the release of the microbes from tanks linked to the car exhausts.” A third document claimed that “six hours later, at the Place de la République Metro station, a mile and a half from the dispersal point, our agents discovered thousands of colonies of the germs.” In Berlin the findings had been eagerly studied. A memo sent to Herman Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe, from the German War Office read: “It was possible to drop a suitable biological bomb and be highly certain that the bacteria would enter the subway system.” Similar tests in London had been carried out by the Germans with “the same satisfying results.

West wandered into the master bedroom. “Back to your usual charming self, I see.” Devon grinned and let out a ragged breath, willing the raging heat of the past several minutes to retreat. Having Kathleen there, in his bed, had been the most exquisite torture imaginable. His body was a mass of aches, stabs, and cravings. He’d never felt better in his life. “Why was she angry?” West asked. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.” Picking up the bedside chair with one hand, he turned it around. “You owe me a pair of shoes.” He sat astride the chair and braced his arms on the back of it. “I owe you more than that.” A few months ago, Devon reflected, it was doubtful that West would have had the physical strength, let alone the presence of mind, to haul him out of the river. “Thank you,” he said simply, holding his brother’s gaze. “It was wholly self-serving, I assure you. I have no desire to be the Earl of Trenear.” Devon gave a short laugh. “Nor do I.

Upon the unwrapping of each package, she vows to write a thank-you letter to Aunt Tammy—a letter of the handwritten, thick-papered, thesaurus-consulted variety—but every day following, Joan “forgets.” She “forgets” for so many consecutive days that the idea of a thank-you letter begins to gain weight in her mind, becoming too heavy to lift. By the end of the first week, a mass of gratitude and shame has accumulated inside her body and grown so dense that adequately transcribing it, surely, would take a lifetime. It would bruise both writer and reader. To send a thank-you letter now, she believes by week two, would be like mailing a handwritten account of my indolence, my boorishness. I can’t. I can’t. And once Joan has decided that the opportunity to demonstrate her appreciation has expired, the gifts begin to sicken her. Even when they’re hidden, their presence fills her apartment like an odor that is also an itch. Like some toxin. Joan hides the gifts in drawers, tucks them beneath sweaters too expensive to donate but not comfortable enough to wear, twists them in plastic bags, which she then shoves in paper sacks, which she then stows in the coat closet, behind the vacuum. But it doesn’t help. She can’t eat or sleep or read or pray or watch her shows or even recite the nation’s capitals. She tears her cuticles. Her asthma worsens. At any given moment, she feels like she might cry—not because she wants to, to bespeak her sensitivity, but because she needs to, in order to proceed with her day. By the end of the month, her guilt crescendos, the odor of the unthanked gifts too foul and itchy to endure any longer, and Joan surrenders. She gathers the gifts in

I was torn into a swirling mass of uncontrollable visions, stretching out way into the future, then tomorrow, next week, a month, a year. It was a blur of everything and a thousand paths which had the potential to be followed, some of it more set in stone than others, the uncontrollable haze of fates making my mind spin wildly. I worked to focus and saw a huge stone throne made of snarling Hydra heads on long necks, all winding together into a monstrous being that almost looked alive. Blood coloured it red and in flashes I saw Fae after Fae sitting on it from the Savage King himself to each of the Councillor’s Heirs as grown men, to Lionel Acrux, to two twin girls with deep green eyes, their hands clasped in one another’s. Then the throne split apart, cut in two and crumbling to pieces as the vision shifted, making my gut clench and my heart race. Orion was older, fighting enemies I couldn’t see with a silver blade in his hand and Darius Acrux flew over him in his golden Dragon form. I saw the twins once more, bullied and broken by the Heirs. I felt their pain. I heard them suffering and saw their worlds fall to ruin before suddenly they were rising up in a roaring tower of flames which blinded me. I tried to focus, grasping onto my gifts and forcing them in the direction I wanted to go as the future kept spanning out in too many directions. I saw the world falling to ruin and death and destruction sweeping through the kingdom like a plague. I felt loss and heartache and I couldn’t tell if it was mine or the twins’, Orion’s, Darius’s, Lionel’s, or the whole world’s.