Moving Container Quotes

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.

I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

...now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow - moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going

When I moved my hands down away from the window I caught sight of my reflection in the glass, bright against the black morning beyond. I couldn’t contain the audible gasp that sounded in my throat. I had expected to see the slightly translucent representation of my face mirrored on the pane, but instead I saw an ivory haze where my features should have been.

Ah, well, then you've never stood on a beach as the waves came crashing in, the water stretching out from you until it's beyond sight, moving and blue and alive and so much bigger than even the black beyond seems because the ocean hides what it contains.

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God. But let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.

Letting go of attachments to material possessions, relationships, or past experiences that stifle or no longer serve us can be liberating and allow us to move forward with our lives. When we contain our 'loss aversion,' we learn to bounce back from setbacks and master the qualities for navigating life's challenges. We can convert the terror of loss aversion into a mindset leading to greater freedom and personal empowerment. (“Paper Boats Forever »)

Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves.

If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.

After Kellan begged me for a final kiss, Griffin murmured, “Your wedding day is Thanksgiving. That’s convenient.” He pointed at Kellan. “You probably won’t forget your anniversary.” He looked over at Anna. “We shoulda done that. I already forgot ours.” Anna smirked at Griffin while Kellan’s lip twitched. “Uh, it won’t always be on Thanksgiving, Griff.” He looked horribly confused. “Huh? Yeah, it will.” “Kellan bit his lip. I could tell he was trying really hard not to laugh, since laughing hurt. “Thanksgiving isn’t on the same day every year. It moves around.” Griffin glared at Kellan. “Don’t even try fucking with me, Kell.” He tapped his finger to his head. “I’m on to you.” I heard Matt and Evan snigger with Justin and Denny. My dad stared at the ceiling as he shook his head. I couldn’t contain my giggle; poor Kellan had to take long, slow exhales so he didn’t laugh with everyone else. “Griff, I’m not . . .

Behind her, Jace moved out into the water with a contained grace that barely rippled the surface. Simon behind him, was splashing and cursing.

I am a Christian…so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory. (Letter #195)

The fewer moving parts, the better." "Exactly. No truer words were ever spoken in the context of engineering.

Your job then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn't become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite." But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed ... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? That's me in the corner, in other words. That's me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.

On your track to success, never forget that you are crossing many rivers. Yes you are! And each of those rivers contain crocodiles that may attempt to intimidate you. Never be afraid; sail on and you will get there.

You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end - at least as far as others are concerned - your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

A man who seeks only the light, while shirking his responsibilities, will never find illumination. And one who keep his eyes fixed upon the sun ends up blind..." "It doesn't matter what others think -because that's what they will think, in any case. So, relax. Let the universe move about. Discover the joy of surprising yourself." "The master says: “Make use of every blessing that God gave you today. A blessing cannot be saved. There is no bank where we can deposit blessings received, to use them when we see fit. If you do not use them, they will be irretrievably lost. God knows that we are creative artists when it comes to our lives. On one day, he gives us clay for sculpting, on another, brushes and canvas, or a pen. But we can never use clay on our canvas, nor pens in sculpture. Each day has its own miracle. Accept the blessings, work, and create your minor works of art today. Tomorrow you will receive others.” “You are together because a forest is always stronger than a solitary tree,” the master answered. "The forest conserves humidity, resists the hurricane and helps the soil to be fertile. But what makes a tree strong is its roots. And the roots of a plant cannot help another plant to grow. To be joined together in the same purpose is to allow each person to grow in his own fashion, and that is the path of those who wish to commune with God.” “If you must cry, cry like a child. You were once a child, and one of the first things you learned in life was to cry, because crying is a part of life. Never forget that you are free, and that to show your emotions is not shameful. Scream, sob loudly, make as much noise as you like. Because that is how children cry, and they know the fastest way to put their hearts at ease. Have you ever noticed how children stop crying? They stop because something distracts them. Something calls them to the next adventure. Children stop crying very quickly. And that's how it will be for you. But only if you can cry as children do.” “If you are traveling the road of your dreams, be committed to it. Do not leave an open door to be used as an excuse such as, 'Well, this isn't exactly what I wanted. ' Therein are contained the seeds of defeat. “Walk your path. Even if your steps have to be uncertain, even if you know that you could be doing it better. If you accept your possibilities in the present, there is no doubt that you will improve in the future. But if you deny that you have limitations, you will never be rid of them. “Confront your path with courage, and don't be afraid of the criticism of others. And, above all, don't allow yourself to become paralyzed by self-criticism. “God will be with you on your sleepless nights, and will dry your tears with His love. God is for the valiant.” "Certain things in life simply have to be experienced -and never explained. Love is such a thing." "There is a moment in every day when it is difficult to see clearly: evening time. Light and darkness blend, and nothing is completely clear nor completely dark." "But it's not important what we think, or what we do or what we believe in: each of us will die one day. Better to do as the old Yaqui Indians did: regard death as an advisor. Always ask: 'Since I'm going to die, what should I be doing now?'” "When we follow our dreams, we may give the impression to others that we are miserable and unhappy. But what others think is not important. What is important is the joy in our heart.” “There is a work of art each of us was destined to create. That is the central point of our life, and -no matter how we try to deceive ourselves -we know how important it is to our happiness. Usually, that work of art is covered by years of fears, guilt and indecision. But, if we decide to remove those things that do not belong, if we have no doubt as to our capability, we are capable of going forward with the mission that is our destiny. That is the only way to live with honor.

She had a way of moving that moved him as much as music, which was what moved him most of all. Surely the spirit animating that pearless body must be unusual too? Why would nature make a vessel like that, if not to contain something still more valuable?

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!

GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…

We used numbers and rigid systems to fit time into containers we could understand. But like Nexa said, it was immeasurable. A fluid river no logical structure could hold. A moment could have the power of years. And years could pass in a moment. The only thing that forever remained true about time was it never stopped moving forward.

Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. - "The Life of Pi

Our archives are treasure troves - a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.

We lived loud and hard against a neighborhood built to contain us. We moved like the earth pushing its way through cement sidewalks.

... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

I’ve often thought of the forest as a living cathedral, but this might diminish what it truly is. If I have understood Koyukon teachings, the forest is not merely an expression or representation of sacredness, nor a place to invoke the sacred; the forest is sacredness itself. Nature is not merely created by God; nature is God. Whoever moves within the forest can partake directly of sacredness, experience sacredness with his entire body, breathe sacredness and contain it within himself, drink the sacred water as a living communion, bury his feet in sacredness, touch the living branch and feel the sacredness, open his eyes and witness the burning beauty of sacredness

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm

He groans, no longer able to contain it, a sound that he releases maybe without even realizing it himself; he moves me tremendously. As I've said, nothing in life moves me more than these moments of pure abandon, of self-oblivion.

I was her daughter, but more. I was Karen, Cheryl, Leif. Karen Cheryl Leif. KarenCherylLeif. Our names blurred into one in my mother’s mouth all my life. She whispered it and hollered it, hissed it and crooned it. We were her kids, her comrades, the end of her and the beginning. We took turns riding shotgun with her in the car. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask us, holding her hands six inches apart. “No,” we’d say, with sly smiles. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. (I) What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. (I) Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. (I) At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is... At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. (II) All is always now. Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered. (II) Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. (V) Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Will not stay still. (V) Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. (V)

Steam in an open space would just simply scatter in different directions. Steam contained in an engine can move a whole train. Success comes from One-pointedness and Constancy of Aim and Effort.

Ah, well, then you've never stood on a beach as the waves came crashing in, the water stretching out from you until it's beyond sight, moving and blue and alive and so much bigger than even the black beyond seems because the ocean hides what it contains." She shakes her head in a happy way. "If you ever want to see how small you are in the plan of God, just stand at the edge of an ocean.

A Blessing Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt makingcreatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness. I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman, Neither woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I feel a lack. I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets. See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm…

You are on this boat floating on an endless ocean. These baskets contain wishes, desires...forces that drive your will to move forward. However, if you stay here just staring at them...sooner or later...they're all going to sink.

What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning.

Lacey was just as happy alone as with company. When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized. Alone, she was self-contained, her tightly spinning magnetic energy oscillating around her. When in company, she had invisible tethers to anyone in the room: as they moved away, she pulled them in.

God is not glorified when we keep for ourselves (no matter how thankfully) what we ought to be using to alleviate the misery of unevangelized, uneducated, unmedicated, and unfed millions. The evidence that many professing Christians have been deceived by this doctrine is how little they give and how much they own. God has prospered them. And by an almost irresistible law of consumer culture (baptized by a doctrine of health, wealth, and prosperity) they have bought bigger (and more) houses, newer (and more) cars, fancier (and more) clothes, better (and more) meat, and all manner of trinkets and gadgets and containers and devices and equipment to make life more fun. They will object: Does not the Old Testament promise that God will prosper his people? Indeed! God increases our yield, so that by giving we can prove our yield is not our god. God does not prosper a man's business so that he can move from a Ford to a Cadillac. God prospers a business so that 17,000 unreached people can be reached with the gospel. He prospers the business so that 12 percent of the world's population can move a step back from the precipice of starvation.

Grandma Baker shook her head. “More lies. What’s wrong with milk? Milk is healthy and great for your bones.” “Yes, raw cow’s milk is very healthy. It’s been drunk for centuries the world over because of its health benefits. That’s exactly why we had to poison it. Like the idiotic fluoride lie about cavities, we informed the public that raw milk contains harmful bacteria and needs to be pasteurized and homogenized to ensure people’s health. After milk is pasteurized and homogenized, it’s not only not healthy anymore, it’s very unhealthy and has the same rap sheet as the other culprits we’ve talked about.” Mrs. Baker shook her head. “Again with the lies. There’s evidence that shows unpasteurized milk may contain bacteria and pathogens that could make people ill. That’s why it’s pasteurized.” “You’re not wrong there, just misinformed on how to correctly fix the problem. Milk being unpasteurized wasn’t the problem, like I said, people safely drank raw milk for centuries. Livestock being subjected to unsanitary and poor hygiene practices in the modern age was the reason milk started containing bacteria and pathogens. To correct this, you fix the livestock issue, the source of the problem. You don’t put healthy raw milk through a process that eliminates possible pathogens by pasteurizing and homogenizing it so it becomes unhealthy and slowly kills you over time. That’s obviously not an intelligent move.” Karver laughed. “But again, thank you for illustrating how effective the great design is at keeping humans weak and brainwashed. The only reason I’m telling you all this is because I’m going to kill you anyway. I’m merely letting you know how stupid you and your species are before I do you in.

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil.

Imagine you’ve been unable to move for years because your fist is clenched inside a container, and to manage to pull your hand out, to free yourself, you just need to let go of what you’re clutching in your clenched fist . . . You open up your hand, you lose what’s inside it, it falls to the bottom of the container, but you are free.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

Elizabeth move" Darcy's voice was steady yet it contained a hint of desperation

Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe. The visible carries all the invisible on its back. Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses, what touches me As though I didn’t exist? What is it that keeps on moving, a tiny pillar of smoke Erect on its hind legs, loose in the hollow grasses? A word I don’t know yet, a little word, containing infinity, Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass.

My husband claims I have an unhealthy obsession with secondhand bookshops. That I spend too much time daydreaming altogether. But either you intrinsically understand the attraction of searching for hidden treasure amongst rows of dusty shelves or you don't; it's a passion, bordering on a spiritual illness, which cannot be explained to the unaffected. True, they're not for the faint of heart. Wild and chaotic, capricious and frustrating, there are certain physical laws that govern secondhand bookstores and like gravity, they're pretty much nonnegotiable. Paperback editions of D. H. Lawrence must constitute no less than 55 percent of all stock in any shop. Natural law also dictates that the remaining 45 percent consist of at least two shelves worth of literary criticism on Paradise Lost and there should always be an entire room in the basement devoted to military history which, by sheer coincidence, will be haunted by a man in his seventies. (Personal studies prove it's the same man. No matter how quickly you move from one bookshop to the next, he's always there. He's forgotten something about the war that no book can contain, but like a figure in Greek mythology, is doomed to spend his days wandering from basement room to basement room, searching through memoirs of the best/worst days of his life.) Modern booksellers can't really compare with these eccentric charms. They keep regular hours, have central heating, and are staffed by freshly scrubbed young people in black T-shirts. They're devoid of both basement rooms and fallen Greek heroes in smelly tweeds. You'll find no dogs or cats curled up next to ancient space heathers like familiars nor the intoxicating smell of mold and mildew that could emanate equally from the unevenly stacked volumes or from the owner himself. People visit Waterstone's and leave. But secondhand bookshops have pilgrims. The words out of print are a call to arms for those who seek a Holy Grail made of paper and ink.

We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.

The nature of a letter can also be revealed within its numeric value. All letters and numbers behave in a certain but recognizable way, from which we can deduce its nature. The number two is the only even prime. There is an inherent mathematical dilemma with, “one.” No matter how many times you multiply it, by itself, you still can’t get past “one” (1 x 1 x 1 x 1 = 1). So, how does “one” move beyond itself? How does the same, produce the different? Mathematically, “one” is forced to divide itself and work from that duality. Therein, hides the divine puzzle of bet (b). To become “two,” the second must revolt from wholeness—a separation. Yet, the second could not have existed without the benefit of the original wholeness. Also, the first wanted the second to exist, but the first doesn’t know what the second will become. Again, two contains potential badness, to a Hebrew. (Ge 25:24)

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.

One of the great jokes of life is that by the time you're old enough to recognize how little you know, all you can do is mop up the aftermath, dump it in a giant personal hazmat container and move on.

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.

For with love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction and salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same impulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created it is the human heart that sheds the brightest light and, alas, the blackest despair.

our Earth is taking part in a fantastic cosmic ballet. First, it pulls us through space at a speed of nearly twenty miles per second during its annual journey around the Sun. The Sun then drags the Earth with it during its voyage through the Milky Way at a speed of 140 miles per second. The Milky Way is falling in turn at approximately fifty-five miles per second toward Andromeda. And there's more to come. The Local Group that contains our galaxy and Andromeda is falling at about 375 miles per second toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies, which is in turn moving toward a large complex of galaxies called the Great Attractor.

How Smart Is a Rock? To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat, consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 1025 (ten trillion trillion) atoms in a kilogram of matter are actually extremely active. Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized. We’ve already shown that atoms can store information at a density of greater than one bit per atom, such as in computing systems built from nuclear magnetic-resonance devices. University of Oklahoma researchers stored 1,024 bits in the magnetic interactions of the protons of a single molecule containing nineteen hydrogen atoms.51 Thus, the state of the rock at any one moment represents at least 1027 bits of memory.

This may or may not appeal to you—this moving, this nomadic existence, and this nonattached life. I am not suggesting we all leave our relationships and homes and children. Not at all. I am proposing that we reconceive the dream. That we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. That we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.

Margrethe watched them paralyzed by the intensity of the emotions moving through her. So much pain and euphoria, a sense that even though her own heart was broken, the world could contain such beauty and magic she almost could not bear it? What did her own pain matter, in the face of that?

A writer needs to be read. I want to move people's hearts. I want my books in stores all over the world. I couldn't stand to be like Mom or Rory, living their little and self-contained lives with no great projects or prospects to propel them from one chapter to the next. I want the world to wait with bated breath for what I will say next. I want my words to last forever. I want to be eternal, permanent; when I'm gone, I want to leave behind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and she told us what was on her mind.

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in a strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.

He saw all of the light and colour and history it contained and carried in its slow-moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going.

They want time to move fast so they can paint their nails a provocative red and wear high heels that crack walnuts and make people jump. He wants time to slow down so he can prolong the enjoyment of walking among them, of being next to this self-contained beauty.

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the as**sembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

Lying spread-eagled in the silky water, gazing into the sky, only moving my hands and feet slightly to keep afloat, I was looking at the Milky Way stretched like a chiffon scarf across the sky and wondering how many stars it contained. I could hear the voices of the others, laughing and talking on the beach, echoing over the water

When I want to move, I remember death, how it is ultimate and inevitable, and pure. Then I am free to move properly in life. It's like a man who wants to think, going and standing in front of a window. The space purifys ones' soul. And death is a window to me, with the darkness outside. And when I stand there, looking out, then the world and its active life seems only like a roomful of racket and light behind me, where I am taking part for a time, but not staying for long. It does not contain me and confine me. When I stand peacefully looking out on death, what is true in my soul disengages itself and is free and clear and untrammeled, I know what to do, I am sure, and free, and glad. Then I can turn into the world again"... "When one stands in front of the darkness, and knows that one's own life will pass away there also, into the darkness...then, in the peace that accompanies this knowledge, one can declare simply that the existing world of man is base and wrong, and must go, we know that our lives contain the inception of a new earth.." ..."Remembering death, I know the life of the world as it is now is not living, it is a bad process of dying. And what we must live for is a new world of life. It doesn't matter when we die, so long as we live fulfilling the deepest desire that is in us. And a life which is a denial of the deepest desire is much worse than any death, it is a sheer lie." "If one accepts death and knows that nothing can take us away from that, one has the freedom and strength to live in truth, putting down the lies that pretend they own our living. But one must have the pure knowledge of death behind one, before one has really faith to tackle life and falsity. Being sure in death I am strong in life. And so, in life, and in all the world of man, I have no master, save the deepest desire of my own soul, in which death and life are one.

Maybe what River had meant was that time itself was like a river, moving steadily forward, and you got to be in a new river every day, every hour. All my life I'd felt like a lake. A lake where everyhting was contained, forever. All my experiences, all the different people I'd been, everything I'd had, everything I'd lost...I carried them around with me, all the time

We were her kids, her comrades, the end of her and the beginning. We took turns riding shotgun with her in the car. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask us, holding her hands farther apart. “No,” we’d say, with sly smiles. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve….She was optimistic and serene, except a few times when she lost her temper and spanked us with a wooden spoon. Or the one time when she screamed FUCK and broke down crying because we wouldn’t clean our room. She was kindhearted and forgiving, generous and naïve. She dated men with names like Killer and Doobie and Motercycle Dan…

Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective identity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, defecate.

Is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity; whatever became of the countries on the other side? If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.

Suddenly I know just what I’m going to do. Something that will blow anything Peeta did right out of the water. I go over to the knot-tying station and get a length of rope. I start to manipulate it, but it’s hard because I’ve never made this actual knot myself. I’ve only watched Finnick’s clever fingers, and they moved so fast. After about ten minutes, I’ve come up with a respectable noose. I drag one of the target dummies out into the middle of the room and, using some chinning bars, hang it so it dangles by the neck. Tying its hands behind its back would be a nice touch, but I think I might be running out of time. I hurry over to the camouflage station, where some of the other tributes, undoubtedly the morphlings, have made a colossal mess. But I find a partial container of bloodred berry juice that will serve my needs. The flesh-colored fabric of the dummy’s skin makes a good, absorbent canvas. I carefully finger paint the words on its body, concealing them from view. Then I step away quickly to watch the reaction on the Gamemakers’ faces as they read the name on the dummy. *SENECA CRANE.*

Can I ask about that pencil in your hair?” Roth tried again. “Of course,” she said. “It’s a number-two pencil. ‘Two’ signifies the lead hardness, although pencils don’t actually contain lead. They contain graphite, which is a carbon allotrope.” “No, I meant why a—” “A pencil instead of a pen? Because unlike ink, graphite is erasable. People make mistakes, Mr. Roth. A pencil allows one to clear the mistake and move on. Scientists expect mistakes, and because of it, we embrace failure.” Then she eyed his pen disapprovingly.

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog’s wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It’s like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

Our life’s work is far greater than any individual container. The works we do are at most chapters. There will always be a new chapter, and another after that. Though some might be better than others, that is not our concern. Our objective is to be free to close one chapter and move on to the next, and to continue that process for as long as it pleases us.

Containment—an old actors’ trick. Arms by your sides. Put all that energy into your voice and eyes. Don’t move a muscle.

By far the biggest expense in this process was shifting the cargo from land transport to ship at the port of departure and moving it back to truck

Travel is the physical move from point A to point B that could be very expensive and it could contain a questionable experience.

that all good stories, never mind how radical or traditional their mode of telling, had to contain relationships that are important to us; that move us, amuse us, anger us, surprise us.

Xaden's head snaps in my direction. 'Violence?' I take a step and then another, holding my frame upright with muscle memory I didn't have last year, and begin to cross. Xaden swings his legs up and then fucking jumps to his feet. 'Turn around right now!' he shouts. 'Come with me,' I call over the wind, bracing myself as gust whips my skirt against my legs. 'Should have gone with the pants,' I mutter and keep walking. He's already coming my way, his strides just as long and confident as if he was on solid ground, eating up the distance between us as I move forward slowly until we meet. 'What the fuck are you doing out here?' he asks, locking his hands on my waist. He's in riding leathers, not a dress uniform, and he's never looked better. What am I doing out here? I'm risking everything to reach him. And if he rejects me... No. There's no room for fear on the parapet. 'I could ask you the same thing.' His eyes widen. 'You could have fallen and died!' 'I could say the same thing.' I smile, but it's shaky. The look in his eyes is wild, like he's been driven past the point where he can contain himself in the neat, apathetic façade he usually wears in public. It doesn't scare me. I like him better when he's real with me, anyway. 'And did you stop to think that if you fall and die, then I can die?' He leans in and my pulse jumps. 'Again,' I say softly, resting my hands on his firm chest, right above his heartbeat, 'I could say the same thing.' Even if Xaden's death wouldn't kill Sgaeyl, I'm not sure I could survive it.' Shadows rise, darker than the night that surrounds us. 'You're forgetting that I wield shadows, Violence. I'm just as safe out here as I am in the courtyard. Are you going to wield lightning to break your fall?' Fine. That's a good point. 'I... perhaps did not think that part through as thoroughly as you,' I admit. I wanted to be close to him, so I got close, parapet be damned.' 'You're seriously going to be the death of me.' His fingers flex at my waist. 'Go back.' It's not a rejection, not with the way he's looking at me. We've been sparring emotionally for the past month, hell, even longer than that, and one of us has to expose our jugular. I finally trust him enough to know he won't go for the kill. 'Only if you do. I want to be whereever you are.' And I mean it. Everyone else- everything else in the world can fall away and I won't care as long as I'm with him.

Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward. I was tipped backward and wobbly, my balance was off, and this made sense to me. A life seemed so long, I couldn't see how anyone proceeded under the accumulated weight of it.

It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are trying to stop everyone who's moving forward, and a few are marching backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes make a great leap, find what we didn't know we were looking for, and yet continue to contain contradictions for generations. (Pandora's Box and the Volunteer Police Force)

He held me as if my bones were made of glass, as if my skin would tear beneath his lips if he applied too much pressure. When his lips pressed against the pulse at the base of my throat, I wondered if he could feel the power in my pulse, the power he was solely responsible for. As if in answer, his hand moved from my neck to my chest, resting over the space that contained my heart. There was something beautiful and intentional about that gesture, like he was acknowledging the mortal part of me that reacted so restlessly to his touch.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

At first it had slashed up the little silk pockets of her purse. Then she found part of an old thermometer container that slipped over the head of the scalpel, capping it like a fountain pen. It was this cap she removed when the soldier moved into the seat beside her and stretched his arm along the armrest they were (absurdly) meant to share.

He and the second wife must have made a very close, self-contained unit--two people moving through life as if in a thinly membraned bubble, venturing out separately for practical purposes but neither of them whole unless they were together. People who didn't need many friends or outside activities, who found complete fulfillment in each other.

By Me the whole vast Universe of things Is spread abroad;—by Me, the Unmanifest! In Me are all existences contained; Not I in them! Yet they are not contained, Those visible things! Receive and strive to embrace The mystery majestical! My Being— Creating all, sustaining all—still dwells Outside of all! See! as the shoreless airs Move in the measureless space, but are not space, [And space were space without the moving airs]; So all things are in Me, but are not I.

As is Man to the Universe, so was the mind of Mr. Wilcox to the minds of some men — a concentrated light upon a tiny spot, a little Ten Minutes moving self-contained through its appointed years. No Pagan he, who lives for the Now, and may be wiser than all philosophers. He lived for the five minutes that have past, and the five to come; he had the business mind.

So many of the properties of matter, especially when in the gaseous form, can be deduced from the hypothesis that their minute parts are in rapid motion, the velocity increasing with the temperature, that the precise nature of this motion becomes a subject of rational curiosity. Daniel Bernoulli, John Herapath, Joule, Krönig, Clausius, &c., have shewn that the relations between pressure, temperature and density in a perfect gas can be explained by supposing the particles move with uniform velocity in straight lines, striking against the sides of the containing vessel and thus producing pressure. (1860)

The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change. But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many thing that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

The immediate thing that strikes you when you see the inside of the hand is its compactness. The ball of your thumb, the thenar eminence, contains four different muscles. Twiddle your thumb and tilt your hand: ten different muscles and at least six different bones work in unison. Inside the wrist are at least eight small bones bones that move against one another. Bend your wrist, and you are using a number of muscles that begin in your forearm, extending into tendons as they travel down your arm to end at your hand. Even the simplest motion involves a complex interplay among many parts packed in a small space.

All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit. Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep.

Until that moment, I’d carried my life like a handkerchief knapsack at the end of a broom handle, something small and containable I could pick up and move at the drop of a hat. And I never knew what it was I was running from, or to, until he said it. Home. The word stoked an ember in my chest. Here was the permanence I’d been waiting for. A place that would belong to us.

My name is CRPS, or so they say But I actually go by; a few different names. I was once called causalgia, nearly 150 years ago And then I had a new name It was RSD, apparently so. I went by that name because the burn lived inside of me. Now I am called CRPS, because I have so much to say I struggle to be free. I don't have one symptom and this is where I change, I attack the home of where I live; with shooting/burning pains. Depression fills the mind of the body I belong, it starts to speak harsh to self, negativity growing strong. Then I start to annoy them; with the issues with sensitivity, You'd think the pain enough; but no, it wants to make you aware of its trembling disability. I silently make my move; but the screams are loud and clear, Because I enter your physical reality and you can't disappear. I confuse your thoughts; I contain apart of your memory, I cover your perspective, the fog makes it sometimes unbearable to see. I play with your temperature levels, I make you nervous all the time - I take away your independance and take away your pride. I stay with you by the day & I remind you by the night, I am an awful journey and you will struggle with this fight. Then there's a side to me; not many understand, I have the ability to heal and you can be my friend. Help yourself find the strength to fight me with all you have, because eventually I'll get tired of making you grow mad. It will take some time; remember I mainly live inside your brain, Curing me is hard work but I promise you, You can beat me if you feed love to my pain. Find the strength to carry on and feed the fears with light; hold on to the seat because, like I said, it's going to be a fight. But I hope to meet you, when your healthy and healed, & you will silenty say to me - I did this, I am cured is this real? That day could possibly come; closer than I want- After all I am a disease and im fighting for my spot. I won't deny from my medical angle, I am close to losing the " incurable " battle.

The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics.

She began to sing, but I could not make out the words. It must have been a love song, to judge from the slightly pained expression on her face, and the way she tightly gripped the microphone. I noticed a flash of white skin on her neck. As she reached the climax of the song, her eyes half closed and her shoulders thrown back, a shudder passed through her body. She moved her arm across her chest to cradle her heart, as though consoling it, afraid it might burst. I wondered what would happen if I held her tight in my arms, in a lovers’ embrace, melting into one another, bone on bone… her heart would be crushed. The membrane would split, the veins tear free, the heart itself explode into bits of flesh, and then my desire would contain hers - it was all so painful and yet so utterly beautiful to imagine.

She communicated in what ways she could – sweet whines of happiness and wet kisses. She knew him. She knew him. He knelt in the grass, still pouring his attention onto her. She received every ounce of it in a way only a dog can, its unconditional love contained in every breath and every heartbeat. And Luke was struck precisely at that moment at his capacity to feel so moved by the simple act of affection for this sweet animal. He swallowed hard. It wasn’t easy to let himself feel it, the gentle tug from a place deeply buried. And in the grass on his knees, he found himself releasing the sadness long held hostage in that deep place. Tears spilled over, finally uncontained. The dog stretched its snout through the rails and found his wet cheeks with its tongue. He did not retreat, but let her clean the tears from his face.

One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else's sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.

A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore--one that's only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like "this bit is a self-contained sub loop" or "Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit." The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders. My mother named me well.

The machine seemed to understand time and space, but it didn’t, not as we do. We are analog, fluid, swimming in a flowing sea of events, where one moment contains the next, is the next, since the notion of “moment” itself is the illusion. The machine—it—is digital, and digital is the decision to forget the idea of the infinitely moving wave, and just take snapshots, convincing yourself that if you take enough pictures, it won’t matter that you’ve left out the flowing, continuous aspect of things. You take the mimic for the thing mimicked and say, Good enough. But now I knew that between one pixel and the next—no matter how densely together you packed them—the world still existed, down to the finest grain of the stuff of the universe. And no matter how frequently that mouse located itself, sample after sample, snapshot after snapshot—here, now here, now here—something was always happening between the here’s. The mouse was still moving—was somewhere, but where? It couldn’t say. Time, invisible, was slipping through its digital now’s.

It was like looking into a dream. An imagination of what seduction in its purest form would look like. This woman was so intense, so deep and utterly sensual, the music flowed right out of her onto the cello and the process moved her so much, she couldn’t contain it. It was passion and it pulled him in.

With love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction and salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same impulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created it is the human heart that sheds the brightest light, and, alas, the blackest despair.

One afternoon, Reeves and a colleague were having lunch in Central Park. On the way back to their Madison Avenue office, they encountered a man sitting in the park, begging for money. He had a cup for donations and beside it was a sign, handwritten on cardboard, that read: I AM BLIND. Unfortunately for the man, the cup contained only a few coins. His attempts to move others to donate money were coming up short. Reeves thought he knew why. He told his colleague something to the effect of: “I bet I can dramatically increase the amount of money that guy is raising simply by adding four words to his sign.” Reeves’s skeptical friend took him up on the wager. Reeves then introduced himself to the beleaguered man, explained that he knew something about advertising, and offered to change the sign ever so slightly to increase donations. The man agreed. Reeves took a marker and added his four words, and he and his friend stepped back to watch. Almost immediately, a few people dropped coins into the man’s cup. Other people soon stopped, talked to the man, and plucked dollar bills from their wallets. Before long, the cup was running over with cash, and the once sad-looking blind man, feeling his bounty, beamed. What four words did Reeves add?   It is springtime and   The sign now read:   It is springtime and I am blind.   Reeves won his bet. And we learned a lesson. Clarity depends on contrast.

Perhaps hell is a tiny place, a single flame, Clod thought now. The thought moved him, and he imagined the pureness of the flame as he gazed through the darkness at the candelabra. Just one flame could contain all the evil that has come and gone. What if it were that easy to snuff it out? Would he do it? No. He would never interfere. Just the image of the white light, the way it swayed in the slow breeze floating through the manor, that was what mattered to him. If he could draw that, he thought, and make the picture move somehow, that would be interesting. He could suspend the drawing from a string and let the wind push it to and fro. Strange, he thought next, that fire hurts to the touch. Fire gives light. Shouldn’t the darkness hurt instead? Hell ought to be pure darkness. Nothingness. The thought chilled him. There was nothing to see there. He shrugged and pulled his back away from the wall, feeling his shirt stick to his skin with sweat.

I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper. Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work. The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.

And even though these words are moving into you through a visual medium—the printed words on this page—as you became immersed in this book, you no longer saw the words as a visual input. You’d left that surface orientation behind. You began, then, to work with, and experience, the meanings that these words are only the containers for.

Were he now still among the living, Dr. Incandenza would now describe tennis in the paradoxical terms of what’s now called ‘Extra-Linear Dynamics.’ And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to a pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n² responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.

I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness. I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman, Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I feel a lack. I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets. See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

No, I did not understand. But I nodded silently. I was dissolved, I was infinitely small, I was a point... There is, after all, a logic of its own (today's logic) in this condition: a point contains more unknowns than anything else; it need but stir, move, and it may turn into thousands of curves, thousands of bodies. I was afraid to stir: what would I turn into?

Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.

Move toward the people who expand your perimeter of possibility, who believe in your potential just a little bit more than your reality. Move toward the people who remind you of the person you know you’re meant to be, the ones who stretch your soul and make you feel something real. Move toward the people who remind you of what you contain, who help you fall a little more in love with life. Move toward the people who energize you more than they drain you. These little signs are not so little—they are the markers of our soulmates, in all the forms they come.

In 1966, after arriving in New York, I read two of Luria's books, Higher Cortical Functions in Man and Human Brain and Psychological Processes. The latter, which contained very full case histories of patients with frontal lobe damage, filled me with admiration [4]. [Footnote 4]. And fear, for as I read it, I thought, what place is there for me in the world? Luria has already seen, said, written, and thought anything I can ever say, or write, or think. I was so upset that I tore the book in two (I had to buy a new copy for the library, as well as a copy for myself).

You don't understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one's neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man's heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable-- namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice.

We often forget that we are as we are until we're not. We are the same until we're changed. We can move that a bit further by putting into place healthy habits and to show up to our lives in a way that fosters growth, but we can't game timing. Timing is the one thing that we often forget to surrender to. Things are dark until they're not. Most of our unhappiness stems from the belief that our lives should be different than they are. We believe we have control -- and our self-loathing and self-hatred comes from this idea that we should be able to change our circumstances, that we should be richer or hotter or better or happier. While self-responsibility is empowering, it can often lead to this resentment and bitterness that none of us need to be holding within us. We have to put in our best efforts and then give ourselves permission to let whatever happens to happen--and to not feel so directly and vulnerably tied to outcomes. Opportunities often don't show up in the way we think they will. You don't need more motivation or inspiration to create the life you want. You need less shame around the idea that you're not doing your best. You need to stop listening to people who are in vastly different life circumstances and life stages than you tell you that you're just not doing or being enough. You need to let timing do what it needs to do. You need to see lessons where you see barriers. You need to understand that what's right now becomes inspiration later. You need to see that wherever you are now is what becomes your identity later. Sometimes we're not yet the people we need to be in order to contain the desires we have. Sometimes we have to let ourselves evolve into the place where we can allow what we want to transpire.

Social media, by bombarding users with fast-moving social stimuli, pushed them to rely on quick-twitch social intuition over deliberative reason. All people contain the capacity for both, as well as the potential for the former to overwhelm the latter, which is often how misinformation spreads. And platforms compound the effect by framing all news and information within high-stakes social contexts.

In the absence of this depth of community, the safe container is difficult to find. By default, we become the container ourselves, and when this happens, we cannot drop into the well of grief in which we can fully let go of the sorrows we carry. We recycle our grief, moving into it and then pulling it back into our bodies unreleased. Frequently in my practice patients tell me that they often cry in private. I ask them whether, at some point in this process, they ever allow their grief to be witnessed and shared with others. There is usually a quick retort of “No, I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to be a burden to anyone else.” When I push it a little further and ask them how it would feel if a friend came to them with his or her sorrows and pain, they respond that they would feel honored to sit with their friend and offer support. This disconnection between what we would offer others and what we feel we can ask for is extreme. We need to recover our right to ask for help in grief, otherwise it will continue to recycle perpetually. Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.

I Knew a Woman" I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain! Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek). How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand; She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin; I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand; She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, Coming behind her for her pretty sake (But what prodigious mowing we did make). Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize; She played it quick, she played it light and loose; My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees; Her several parts could keep a pure repose, Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose (She moved in circles, and those circles moved). Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I’m martyr to a motion not my own; What’s freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways).

You know, I used to think of myself as a tiny drop in the ocean of life. But I’ve come to see that I am not a drop in the ocean: I’m an entire ocean in one tiny drop. There is no answer to your question, Zoe. Some things are impossible to move on from – instead, you have to find a way to live with them. The secret is to open your heart, even as it breaks. Because that’s when you discover that you have the capacity to contain it all – the pain and the love, the dark and the light. Just like the ocean. Finding the strength to do so can be quite a challenge, and it takes time. But, in the end, it’s facing up to the truth that will set you free.

Within the fair’s buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison’s Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla’s body. They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon. Visitors also encountered the latest and arguably most important organizational invention of the century, the vertical file, created by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. Sprinkled among these exhibits were novelties of all kinds. A locomotive made of spooled silk. A suspension bridge built out of Kirk’s Soap. A giant map of the United States made of pickles. Prune makers sent along a full-scale knight on horseback sculpted out of prunes, and the Avery Salt Mines of Louisiana displayed a copy of the Statue of Liberty carved from a block of salt. Visitors dubbed it “Lot’s Wife.

Lift Not the Painted Veil Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear. I knew one who had lifted it—he sought, For his lost heart was tender, things to love, But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he could approve. Through the unheeding many he did move, A splendour among shadows, a bright blot Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us: “Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime is filled with you . . . " — what does it matter? they can’t contain us, we vanish inside them and around them. (Denn wir, wo wir fühlen, verflüchtigen; ach wir atmen uns aus und dahin; von Holzglut zu Holzglut geben wir schwachern Geruch. Da sagt uns wohl einer: ja, du gehst mir ins Blut, dieses Zimmer, der Frühling füllt sich mit dir . . . Was hilfts, er kann uns nicht halten, wir schwinden inihm und um ihn.)

They zoom in on the one visible sex difference that is found throughout the animal kingdom: male movements tend to be more brusque and resolute than those of females, which are more flowing and supple. We don’t even need to see whole bodies to make this distinction. When scientists attached little lights to the arms, legs, and pelvis of people and filmed them walking, they found that these dots alone contain all the information we need to distinguish gender.2 From watching just a few moving white specks against a dark background, subjects can tell right away if they are looking at a man or a woman. The walking pattern even varies with the stage of a woman’s ovulatory cycle.

I wonder, sometimes, at the pathways in his mind, at the way his thoughts move, so disciplined and linear. His world is contained, finite. He understands what I say literally - a word has a meaning and a meaning has a word. But I imagine other possibilities and see the heaviness of speech. If I draw a line from a point X to all its other connections, I find myself at the center of something I cannot plot my way out of, There is so much to misinterpret.

What I find appalling—and really dangerous—is the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest. It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult, implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unless they are manipulated. It forcibly suggests that the Southern attitude toward the Negro is also, essentially, the national attitude. When the South has trouble with its Negroes—when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place”—it blames “outside” agitators and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin. And this, by no means incidentally, is a very dangerous thing to do. We thus give credit to the Communists for attitudes and victories which are not theirs. We make of them the champions of the oppressed, and they could not, of course, be more delighted.

We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being along in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over the hood of the car, dusty black, and said Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said, You're feeling things, that's good. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some. Awww, you're perfect. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring.

An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.

Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives. A spiritual life allows us to move beyond the ego into something more universal. Religious experience carries us outside of clock time into eternal time. We open ourselves into something more complete and beautiful. This bigger vista is perhaps the most magnificent aspect of a religious experience. There is a sense in which Karl Marx was correct when he said that religion is the opiate of the people. However, he was wrong to scoff at this. Religion can give us skills for climbing up on onto a ledge above our suffering and looking down at it with a kind and open mind. This helps us calm down and connect to all of the world's sufferers. Since the beginning of human time, we have yearned for peace in the face of death, loss, anger and fear. In fact, it is often trauma that turns us toward the sacred, and it is the sacred that saves us.

I leave entry for the first day of the tenth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls This morning I fetched the small cardboard box with the word AQUARIUM and the picture of an octopus on it. It is the box that originally contained the shoes Dr Ketterley gave me. When Dr Ketterley told me to hide Myself from 16, I took the ornaments out of my hair and placed them in the box. But now, wanting to look my best when I enter the New World, I spent two or three hours putting them back in, all the pretty things that I have found or made: seashells, coral beads, pearls, tiny pebbles and interesting fishbones. When Raphael arrived, she seemed rather astonished at my pleasant appearance. I took my messenger bag with all my Journals and my favourite pens and we walked towards the two Minotaurs in the South-Eastern Corner. The shadows between them shimmered slightly. The shadows suggested the shape of a corridor or alleyway with dim walls and, at the end of it, lights, flashes of moving colour that my eye could not interpret. I took one last look at the Eternal House. I shivered. Raphael took my hand. Then, together, we walked into the corridor.

I turned and moved fast, focusing swiftly on a wave I had selected for no reason. There was whiteness and grenyess in it and a sort of blue and green. It was a line. It did not toss, nor did it stay still. It was all movement, all spillage, but it was pure containment as well, utterly focused just as I was watching it. It had an elemental hold; it was something coming towards us as though to save us but it did nothing instead, it withdrew in a shurgging irony, as if to suggest that this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing on a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy.

Your False Self is who you think you are. Your thinking does not make it true. Your False Self is almost entirely a social construct to get you started on your life journey. It is a set of agreements between your childhood and your parents, your family, your neighbors, your school chums, your partner or spouse, and your religion. It is your “container” for your separate self. 4 Jesus would call it your “wineskin,” which he points out usually cannot hold any new wine (Mark 2: 21–22). Your ego container likes to stay “contained” and hates change. Your False Self is how you define yourself outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After you have spent many years laboriously building this separate self, with all its labels and preoccupations, you are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t you be? It’s what you know and all you know. To move beyond it will always feel like losing or dying. Perhaps you have noticed that master teachers like Jesus and the Buddha, St. Francis, all the “Teresas” (Avila, Lisieux, and Calcutta), Hafiz, Kabir, and Rumi talk about dying much more than we are comfortable with. They all know that if you do not learn the art of dying and letting go early, you will hold onto your False Self far too long, until it kills you anyway.

Why? Why wouldn’t revenge make things better? I think I saw then the difference between my anger toward my father and my anger toward Kera. It was like watching two icebergs separate, after moving together for a very long time. One was enormous, the size of an island; so enormous that I’d been standing atop it my entire life and never realized it was dragging me away from myself. The other was a regular iceberg. Not small, because icebergs aren’t small; but not bottomless either. Contained within a definable space. Able to be seen all at once, if I was willing to dive into the cold, and look at it from below. Was I willing to dive? What would that mean? Could I look at one anger, without being overwhelmed by all the others? I wonder if angers can connect to each other, if you’re not careful. I wonder if they combine, and feed one another, strengthen each other, make each individual anger bigger than it’s supposed to be? That seems dangerous. It seems like something to look out for, in a life of perils.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.

Furthermore, the universe consists of bodies in the void. That bodies do exist, our senses attest to; they also permit us to reason about what is beyond our perception. If there were nothing like the void, the empty space, a realm beyond what we can touch, then there would not be any room to locate bodies, to have them move the way we see them moving...Also the universe does not limit the amount of atoms it contains on the expanse of the Void...And what is more, there is an infinite number of Worlds, whether they resemble ours or not.

They caught up their horses and turned back. Nothing moved in that high wilderness save the wind. They did not speak. They were men of another time for all that they bore christian names and they had lived all their lives in a wilderness as had their fathers before them. They'd learnt war by warring, the generations driven from the eastern shore across a continent, from the ashes at Gnadenhutten onto the prairies and across the outlet to the bloodlands of the west. If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

I grabbed a cloud-shaped oven mitt, opened the oven door, and took out the apricot bars. The smell of warm fruit, sugar, and melted butter filled the kitchen, along with a blast of heat. A combination I never grew tired of, especially on a cold, gray night like this one. I grabbed another oven mitt, set it on the table, then put the pan on top of it. Finn’s fingers crept toward the edge of the container, but I smacked his hand away. “I’m not done with them yet,” I said. “Come on, Gin,” he whined. “I just want a taste.” “And you’re just going to have to wait, like the rest of us.” Jo-Jo chuckled, amused by our squabbling. I moved over to the cabinets and got out four bowls, some spoons, and a couple of knives. I also grabbed a gallon of vanilla bean ice cream out of the freezer. After the apricot bars had cooled enough so they wouldn’t immediately fall apart, I cut out big chunks of the bars, dumped them in the bowls, and topped them all with two scoops of the ice cream. My own version of a quick homemade cobbler. Jo-Jo swallowed a mouthful of the confection and sighed. “Heaven, pure, sweet heaven.

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young servant-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

Some thirty-six years after the death of Leonidas, King Agesilaus of Sparta, as Plutarch recounts, showed that the essential Spartan spirit, which distinguished her citizens from all others in Greece, still had not changed. At that time there was a war between a coalition led by Athens against Sparta and her allies. The latter had been complaining to Agesilaus that it was they who provided the bulk of the army. Agesilaus, accordingly, called a council meeting at which all the Spartan allies sat down on one side and the Spartans on the other. The king then told a herald to proclaim that all the potters among the allies and the Spartans should stand up. After this the herald called on the blacksmiths, the masons, and the carpenters to do likewise; and so he went on through all the crafts and trades. By the end of the herald’s recital almost every single man among the allies had risen to his feet. But not a Spartan had moved. The laws of Lycurgus still obtained. The king laughed and turned to his allies, remarking: ‘You see, my friends, how many more soldiers we send out than you do.’ The whole Spartan attitude is contained in those words.

Nothing truly beautiful without its element of strangeness, nothing whole without its own incongruity, these (Jacksonville-area pioneer house) ruins sand up from the earth in sacred conjunction. These ruins conjoin the earth and the manmade, moving from one to the other and back again. The Browards built their house out of shell and limestone, and limestone forms naturally from the shells and skeletons of miniscule sea creatures over great periods of time. The Browards shaped the earth upright toward the sky. THey shaped it with doorframes and windows and chimneys. THey shaped the earth up around them as a shelter. But shaped earth was always the earth. Now the walls fall back down and join once again the ground, taken over by roots of ferns and weeds and small trees. The house was always the ground, only contained in an upward suspension. The house was always the earth, but brought up into architecture, and now the house that was always the earth crumbles back into the earth and nourishes new green things -- dog fennel and morning glories and palmettoes and cabbage palms and cedars. A true symbol of sacredness of the earth is earth's reclaiming of human ingenuity.

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy… An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks. The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot. And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site. I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive… Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck… I swear before God that this is the absolute truth.47

That done, a second list began to sketch itself from memory. Food, water, containers, blankets... I set three piles aside, starting with the blankets, then took what pillowcases I could find. They always made useful bags for carrying things when backpacks weren't available. One small pot for boiling, one small pan for cooking or additional self-defense. Knives, always good. One fork and a spoon for each of us. More than that, and they'd clatter inside our bags, keeping us from moving silently. No batteries. One flashlight that seemed to be working for now, even if the beam wasn't strong. The real coup would have been canned food or toilet paper, but those were truly one-in-a-million finds. "Did you forget to tell us that you're taking us camping?" I'm all four roughing it as long as that entails air-conditioning and a nice view." ... "Sorry," I muttered, forcing myself onto my feet. "Old habits.

The majority of the children were on their feet, some moving between boxes. Over at the rear wall, three boys were seated on the modular sofa, and even though they were sitting apart, their heads had been placed together inside a single box, while the outstretched leg of the boy nearest the window extended not only across the neighboring box, but right into the one beyond. There was an unpleasant tint on the three boxes containing the boys on the sofa – a sickly yellow – and an anxiety passed through my mind. Then other people moved across my view of them, and I began to attend instead to the voices around me.

Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed how sexually charged bookstores are?” She smiles, and I see the challenge in it. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” “All that stroking of the covers, the fingering of the pages. The intimacy of reading. The idea that there are infinite possibilities contained inside the books, that anything could happen. People indulging all of their fantasies, secrets, and imaginations in the only way they can. It’s sexy.” I watch her blush and subconsciously move her body even closer toward me. “I can’t say I’ve ever thought of books like that before.” “Then you must not be reading the right kinds of books.

Kerényi was as aware as anybody today of the territorial limits of Greek myths and of the non-importability of Hermes. He writes: “In his ‘such-ness,’ he is an historical fact that cannot, by strict and honest historical means, be reduced to something else: neither to a concept, to a ‘power,’ nor to a ‘spirit’ – a gravestone or signpost spirit – not even to an idea that would not contain in a nutshell everything that Hermes’ ‘such-ness’ constitutes.” … Working more in Hermes’ own sleight of hand way, Kerényi is soon saying things like this: “If a god is ‘idea’ and ‘world,’ he remains nonetheless in connection with the world that contains all such ‘worlds’; he can only be an ‘aspect of the world,’ while the world of which he is an aspect possesses such idea-aspects.” Now, if you will let Kerényi get away with a statement like that – and I hope you will – you will end up owning the Brooklyn Bridge. … Kerényi’s Hermes is the only one that is going to rob you or enrich you, enlighten you or screw you. … “Guide of Souls” is the usual translation given to the Hermes-epithet “Psychopompos” and it refers to his role as the god who leads souls into the underworld when they die. But πομπóς (still present in every French funeral store’s “Pompes funèbres” description of itself) is more than guide, and even more than guide to the underworld. It means to lead, but Hermes as leader is not quite right either. It means something more like to lead on. Hermes is the god who “leads you on.” … This means he is deceiving you, taking advantage of your gullibility, “taking you for a ride.” That, however, is how Hermes works, and how he gets your soul to move anywhere, how he gets you to budge even a hair off whatever you’re in … . … Go ahead and buy the Brooklyn Bridge from this man. Be had. Be incorrect. Be foolish. You pay with your soul for this kind of reading. And Hermes does not take plastic.

The words “be filled” in Ephesians have no connection to a bottle or a vessel being filled.The Greek present tense is used to tell you that the filling of the Spirit is not a once-and-for-all experience. It’s a continuing experience. Have you ever spent a day on a sailboat? It’s a great thrill.What happens to the boat when the sails are filled? The ship begins to move.That’s what Paul is telling you. He wants you to be filled, not like a container that has no action but like a sail that continues to be filled with wind. Over and over again. He wants you to move forward with the never-ending breeze of the Spirit filling your spiritual sails.

The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe (Beowulf) The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area - the monster Grendel - and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it. It starts with a mention of 'olden days', looking back, as many stories do, to an indefinite past ('once upon a time'), in which fact blends with fiction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture - as is the theme of transience and mortality. ................ Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance. Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, and of the need to resolve and bring to fruition a proper human order, against the enemy - whatever it be - here symbolised by a monster and a dragon, among literature's earliest 'outsiders'. ....... Beowulf has always attracted readers, and perhaps never more than in the 1990s when at least two major poets, the Scot Edwin Morgan and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, retranslated it into modern English. Heaney's version became a worldwide bestseller, and won many awards, taking one of the earliest texts of English literature to a vast new audience.

But creativity, she doesn’t fit in a box. She’s a wild, fluid, uncontrollable energy that spreads out sensuously from a curious, wide open mind in large expanses of aimless time on dreamy liminal train journeys or in subtle moments between waking and sleep. She can’t be pushed, or coughed up, or beaten into submission by a brutal and unmerciful regime. She needs light, and breath, and space and then, maybe, if the mood takes her, she’ll unfurl her wings and let her colors run into the atmosphere. And this energy, this wild, fun, unpredictable magic that I’d played with so happily as a child, that had flowed through me like it was my very life force up until this point; I didn’t understand it anymore. Creativity was this swirling wild mysterious language, but now I lived in a colorless angular world that promised me a certainty I valued above all else. And where before, I was just scribbling, writing, moving for the mere joy of it, now I tried to commodify my creativity. I tried to squeeze it out and make it do something worthwhile, be special, be important, be good. I could no longer see the point of art if it wasn’t good. But that’s the tricky thing about art, it’s never strictly good or bad, it’s just expression, or excretion. It couldn’t be measure by scales or charts, or contained in small manageable segments in the day. It was always, by its very nature, so imperfect. And the imperfections drove me mad. The anxiety and frustration with my creative endeavors turned into an actual fear of blank pages and pallets of paint. There was too much potential and too much room to fail so day by day, I chose perfection over creativity. I chose no more creativity, and no more mistakes. There are things that eating disorders takes from you that are more important, much greater and more profound a loss, and much much more difficult to recover and restore completely than body fat. And that reckless urge to create, just for the pure, senseless joy of it, would become the one I missed the most.

Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse. As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error.… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.

After those four years, he returned to the Midwest. He'd turned twenty-five, the Age of Unfolding, and it was time to write a novel, the way his hero had. He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book's very first one, and its last unwritten one, and ever sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him.

The intellect being developed to the comprehension of a certain definite and specific form, and the will to a love commensurate with such comprehension; the intellect does not stop there, but by its own light it is prompted to think of this: that it contains within itself the germ of everything intelligible and desirable, until it comes to comprehend with the intellect the depth of the fountain of ideas, the ocean of every truth and goodness. So that it happens, that whatever conception is presented to the mind, and becomes understood by it, from that which is so presented and comprehended it judges, that above it, is other greater and greater, and finds itself ever in a certain way discoursing and moving with it.

At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I propose that egoism belongs to the nature of a noble soul, I mean that unshakable faith that to a being such as 'we are' other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without any question mark, without a feeling that it might contain hardness, constraint, or caprice, but rather as something that may be founded in the primordial law of things: if it sought a name for this fact it would say ‘it is justice itself.’ Perhaps it admits under certain circumstances, which, at first, make it hesitate, that there are some who have rights equal to its own; as soon as this matter of rank is settled, it moves among these equals, with their equal privileges, showing the same sureness of modesty and delicate reverence that characterize its relations with itself – in accordance with an innate heavenly mechanism, understood by all stars. It is merely another aspect of its egoism, this refinement and self-limitation in its relations with its equals – every star is such an egoist – it honors itself in them, and in the rights it cedes to them; it does not doubt that the exchange of honors and rights is of the nature of all social relations, and thus also belongs to the natural condition of things. The noble soul gives as it takes from that passionate and irritable instinct of repayment that lies in its depth. The concept of grace has no meaning or good odor inter pares; there may be a sublime way to let presents from above happen to one, as it were, and to drink them up thirstily, like drops, but for this art and gesture the noble soul has no aptitude. Its egoism hinders it: quite generally it does not like to look 'up,' but either ahead , horizontally and slowly, or down: it knows itself to be at a height.

They were in the middle of a garden with trees shaped as animals. There were gorillas and camels and lions. Rosie felt like she was in some strange storybook circus. Any minute the gorillas would start talking and the lions would charge towards her. "What are we doing here?" Rosie's eyes went wide. "Just follow me." Josh grinned. Rosie followed him through a maze of gardens, each more elaborate than the last. There was a Japanese garden bursting with pink and white blossoms. They passed a water garden with floating lilies, and a tropical garden with birds of paradise and purple irises. Finally they entered a small garden with low-lying plants. A butterfly rested on almost every leaf. Rosie had never seen so many butterflies. She stood still as a statue, afraid if she moved they'd fly away. "This is my favorite," Josh said as if he created the garden. "It's called the butterfly garden. All the flowers contain food attractive to butterflies. The butterflies lay their eggs and feast for days before they fly away." "They're like kaleidoscopes." Rosie peered at a butterfly with gold-and-turquoise wings.

Men presumably always have looked at flowers and been moved by their beauty and their smell: but only since the last century has it been possible to take a flower in your hand and know that you have between your fingers a complex association of organic compounds containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and a great many other elements, in a complex structure of cells, all of which have evolved from a single cell; and to know something of the internal structure of these cells, and the processes by which they evolved, and the genetic process by which this flower was begun, and will produce other flowers; to know in detail how the light from it is reflected to your eye; and to know the details of those workings of your eye, and your nose, and your neurophysiological system, which enable you to see and smell and touch the flower. These inexhaustible and almost incredible realities which are all around us and within us are recent discoveries which are still being explored, while similar new discoveries continue to be made; and we have before us an endless vista of such new possibilities stretching into the future, all of it beyond man’s wildest dreams until almost the age we ourselves are living in. Popper’s ever present and vivid sense of this, and of the fact that every discovering opens up new problems for us, informs his theoretical methodology. He knows that our ignorance grows with our knowledge, and that we shall therefore always have more questions than answers.

The sun rises in a clear sky that moves from black to gray to white to deep, pure crystal blue. One in Georgia packs his things he’s going to take a bus. Four in Mexico walk across scorched earth water in packs on their back. Two in Indiana best friends coming together they pack their best clothes while their parents wait to take them to the airport. One in Canada drives south. Sixty from China in a cargo container sail east. Four in New York pool their cash and buy a car and drop out of school and drive west. Sixteen cars of a passenger train crossing the Mojave only one stop left. One in Miami doesn’t know how she’s going to get there. Three in Montana have a truck none of them have any idea what they’re going to do once they arrive. A plane from Brazil sold out landing at LAX. Six in Chicago dreaming on shared stages they rented a van they’ll see if any of them can make it. Two from Arizona hitchhiking. Four more just crossed in Texas walking. Another one in Ohio with a motorcycle and a dream. All of them with their dreams. It calls to them and they believe it and they cannot say no to it, they cannot say no. It calls to them. It calls. Calls.

As I continue to sip at the chest-warming liquor, entering ever-deeper states of inebriation, a mauldin thought begins to take shape in my whiskey-addled skull. My notion is this: We are each of us our own container ship, transporting our various cargoes through the ocean of life. At ports along the way, we may stop and pick up a new lover, a spouse, a child. At other ports we unload precious items - friends move away, relationships end, parents die. Even when we’re lost in the deepest fog, we must try to keep our watch, not be the cause of any tragic collisions, and to do what we can to keep our cargo safe. In the end, of course, your ship rusts out and is not longer seaworthy. So, I suppose, in this analogy, the afterlife equates to being bought by a Greek shipping line.

I do not know what inspires the image of a fish but it comes to me, wide eyed, open mouthed and gaping, glimmering, swimming towards me as though a creature of the darkness come to claim me. I imagine it in a twinkling blue pool. It swims through the dark currents of the sea, gliding above sea weed, beneath sunlight, augmenting and shying away from the surface. It belongs to this element between land and sky, sifts through it, a creature of the deep. My mind drifts, fades, but then comes back to the fish: its glimmering scales, its strange beady eyes. Its body is contained within the water. It opens its mouth, moving it open and closed as though it’s trying to speak a language I never learned. I think about the fish’s lungs, full of water. Is not the sea contained within the fish, too?

The Blood of Jesus is a battle-weapon; through it, you can achieve the following: 1. Cleansing: the Blood of Jesus possesses cleansing power. If there is any form of dirt of filth in your life or environment, the Blood of Jesus will cleanse them. 2. Sanitisation: the Blood of Jesus could serve as disinfectant. Anything that wants to pollute, will not be able to get in. You should sanitise your life, your body, house, shop, etc. In fact, before you move into a new apartment or house, you should sanitise it and the surroundings, with the Blood of Jesus. The foundations of many houses were laid with sacrifices of all kinds. Houses that were built thirty or forty years ago, have things buried in them, by the owners and such things work negatively on the inhabitants of such houses, especially if they are not born again. 3. Deliverance: when you call the Blood of Jesus into operation, it causes the enemy to flee, because it contains the life of God. It sets people free from bondage. 4. Healing: It can heal all forms of infirmity. When you plead the Blood of Jesus, things begin to happen. 5. Protection. 6. Life-giving power: to revive anyone or anything that is dead. It could be marriage, finances, business, etc.

that smallest point of light was a thought, just floating out there. And the thought was: “I.” And when I turned and looked at the thought, all I had to do was become interested in it, in any way interested, and this little point of light would move closer and closer and closer. It was like moving close to a knothole in a fence—when you get your eye right up to it, you don’t see the fence anymore; you see what’s on the other side. So as this little point of “I” came closer, I started to perceive through this point called “me.” And I found that in that point called “me” was the whole world. The whole world was contained within that “I,” within that little point called “me.” There wasn’t really an I, but an emptiness that could go into and out of that point, in and out of it, and it’s like the whole world could flicker on and off, and on and off, and on and off.

Do you remember our conversation? Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? The bindery was our access, the point in space that contains all other points, and that night you were a boy unbound, a tiny astronaut, taking your first leap into an infinite and unknowable universe. For the first time you could see the voices of the things you'd been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention. With your supernatural ears, you were able to perceive, with absolute clarity, the sinuous shapes and contours of the sounds that matter makes as it moves through space and time and mind. Some of these sounds were so beautiful they made you laugh out loud and clap your hands with delight, and others were so sad they made tears run down your face. And, oh, the visions we had! Container ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. The plundered moon and all its craters; globes and stars and asteroids; a jet black crow with a diamond tiara; a flock of rubber duckies, spinning through the Pacific gyres. At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. Fires rage as the redwoods burn; and in the deep ocean, a pilot whale carries her dead baby on her nose, while sea turtles weep briny tears onto nets of plastic.

What am I busy doing at lunch?” I asked. “Did you want to go pick out some more paint? Because I thought you were still working on the GTO and the SS.” “No,” he answered, not moving an inch, but instead, just watching me. “I brought you fucking lunch.” He brought me—did he just say lunch? “There’s a thing in the fridge with your name on it,” Rip kept going, watching me steadily. “I could use your help later if you’ve got time.” All I heard was something about him needing my help if I had time, but what I really focused on was the container in the fridge with my name on it. “Come get me if you do,” he said, taking a step back like he hadn’t just surprised the crap out of me. But I could still get a few thoughts together, at least enough to call out, “What am I going to be doing tomorrow?” He was still walking backward as he told me, “I’m bringing you lunch tomorrow too.” What was happening? What was happening? “You don’t have to bribe me to be your friend! I’ve been waiting for this for years, Rip,” I hollered after him, ignoring the way my stomach had just felt like we’d started a descent from a steep roller-coaster ride. I’d swear I heard a chuckle as he answered, “Get to fucking work and come get me if you’ve got time to help me out.” We were friends. We were. Favor or not, you didn’t bring someone food who you weren’t fond of. I really didn’t want to smile, but I couldn’t freaking help it as he walked back out of the room.

You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons. First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation. Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract. Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made. So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home. What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit. By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.

My ideal was contained within the word beauty, so difficult to define despite all the evidence of our senses. I felt responsible for sustaining and increasing the beauty of the world. I wanted the cities to be splendid, spacious and airy, their streets sprayed with clean water, their inhabitants all human beings whose bodies were neither degraded by marks of misery and servitude nor bloated by vulgar riches; I desired that the schoolboys should recite correctly some useful lessons; that the women presiding in their households should move with maternal dignity, expressing both vigor and calm; that the gymnasiums should be used by youths not unversed in arts and in sports; that the orchards should bear the finest fruits and the fields the richest harvests. I desired that the might and majesty of the Roman Peace should extend to all, insensibly present like the music of the revolving skies; that the most humble traveller might wander from one country, or one continent, to another without vexatious formalities, and without danger, assured everywhere of a minimum of legal protection and culture; that our soldiers should continue their eternal pyrrhic dance on the frontiers; that everything should go smoothly, whether workshops or temples; that the sea should be furrowed by brave ships, and the roads resounding to frequent carriages; that, in a world well ordered, the philosophers should have their place, and the dancers also. This ideal, modest on the whole, would be often enough approached if men would devote to it one part of the energy which they expend on stupid or cruel activities; great good fortune has allowed me a partial realization of my aims during the last quarter of a century. Arrian of Nicomedia, one of the best minds of our time, likes to recall to me the beautiful lines of ancient Terpander, defining in three words the Spartan ideal (that perfect mode of life to which Lacedaemon aspired without ever attaining it): Strength, Justice, the Muses. Strength was the basis, discipline without which there is no beauty, and firmness without which there is no justice. Justice was the balance of the parts, that whole so harmoniously composed which no excess should be permitted to endanger. Strength and justice together were but one instrument, well tuned, in the hands of the Muses. All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.

September 10, 1965 Dear Francesca, Enclosed are two photographs. One is the shot I took of you in the pasture at sunrise. I hope you like it as much as I do. The other is of Roseman Bridge before I removed your note tacked to it. I sit here trolling the gray areas of my mind for every detail, every moment, of our time together. I ask myself over and over, “What happened to me in Madison County, Iowa?” And I struggle to bring it together. That’s why I wrote the little piece, “Falling from Dimension Z,” I have enclosed, as a way of trying to sift through my confusion. I look down the barrel of a lens, and you’re at the end of it. I begin work on an article, and I’m writing about you. I’m not even sure how I got back here from Iowa. Somehow the old truck brought me home, yet I barely remember the miles going by. A few weeks ago, I felt self-contained, reasonably content. Maybe not profoundly happy, maybe a little lonely, but at least content. All of that has changed. It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty humming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable—it could not have been any other way—a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable. So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity. Somehow, we must see each other again. Any place, anytime. Call me if you ever need anything or simply want to see me. I’ll be there, pronto. Let me know if you can come out here sometime—anytime. I can arrange plane fare, if that’s a problem. I’m off to southeast India next week, but I’ll be back in late October. I Love You, Robert P. S., The photo project in Madison County turned out fine. Look for it in NG next year. Or tell me if you want me to send a copy of the issue when it’s published. Francesca Johnson set her brandy glass on the wide oak windowsill and stared at an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of herself.

Vladimir Nabokov “... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian 35 continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self. ‘You

Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the very first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is-a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)-a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

I am very often asked why, at the age of eighty-five, I continue to practice. Tip number eighty-five (sheer coincidence that I am now eighty-five years old) begins with a simple declaration: my work with patients enriches my life in that it provides meaning in life. Rarely do I hear therapists complain of a lack of meaning. We live lives of service in which we fix our gaze on the needs of others. We take pleasure not only in helping our patients change, but also in hoping their changes will ripple beyond them toward others. We are also privileged by our role as cradlers of secrets. Every day patients grace us with their secrets, often never before shared. The secrets provide a backstage view of the human condition without social frills, role-playing, bravado, or stage posturing. Being entrusted with such secrets is a privilege given to very few. Sometimes the secrets scorch me and I go home and hold my wife and count my blessings. Moreover, our work provides the opportunity to transcend ourselves and to envision the true and tragic knowledge of the human condition. But we are offered even more. We become explorers immersed in the grandest of pursuits—the development and maintenance of the human mind. Hand in hand with patients, we savor the pleasure of discovery—the “aha” experience when disparate ideational fragments suddenly slide smoothly together into a coherent whole. Sometimes I feel like a guide escorting others through the rooms of their own house. What a treat it is to watch them open doors to rooms never before entered, discover unopened wings of their house containing beautiful and creative pieces of identity. Recently I attended a Christmas service at the Stanford Chapel to hear a sermon by Rev. Jane Shaw that underscored the vital importance of love and compassion. I was moved by her call to put such sentiments into practice whenever we can. Acts of caring and generosity can enrich any environment in which we find ourselves. Her words motivated me to reconsider the role of love in my own profession. I became aware that I have never, not once, used the word love or compassion in my discussions of the practice of psychotherapy. It is a huge omission, which I wish now to correct, for I know that I regularly experience love and compassion in my work as a therapist and do all I can to help patients liberate their love and generosity toward others. If I do not experience these feelings for a particular patient, then it is unlikely I will be of much help. Hence I try to remain alert to my loving feelings or absence of such feelings for my patients.

Answers were sought by transplanting the blastema to other positions on the animal. The experiments only made matters worse. If the blastema was moved within live to seven days after it first appeared, and grafted near the hind leg, it grew into a second hind leg, even though it came from an amputated foreleg. Well, that was okay. The body could be divided into "spheres of influence" or "organizational territories,"each of which contained information on the local anatomy. A blastema into a hind-limb territory naturally became a hind limb. This was an attractive theory, but unfounded. Exactly what did this territory consist of? No one knew. To make matters worse, it was then found that transplantation of a slightly older blastema from a foreleg stump to a hind-limb area produced a foreleg. The young blastema knew where it was; the older one knew where it had been! Somehow this pinhead of primitive cells with absolutely no distinguishing characteristics contained enough information to build a complete foreleg, no matter where it was placed. How? We still don't know.

Before she could say anything more, Sabella swung around at the sound of Noah’s Harley purring to life behind the garage. God. He was dressed in snug jeans and riding chaps. A snug dark T-shirt covered his upper body, conformed to it. And he was riding her way. “Is there anything sexier than a man in riding chaps riding a Harley?” Kira asked behind her. “It makes a woman simply want to melt.” And Sabella was melting. She watched as he pulled around the side of the garage then took the gravel road that led to the back of the house. The sound of the Harley purred closer, throbbing, building the excitement inside her. “I think it’s time for me to leave,” Kira said with a light laugh. “Don’t bother to see me out.” Sabella didn’t. She listened as the Harley drew into the graveled lot behind the house and moved to the back door. She opened it, stepping out on the back deck as he swung his legs over the cycle and strode toward her. That long-legged lean walk. It made her mouth water. Made her heart throb in her throat as hunger began to race through her. “The spa treated you well,” he announced as he paused at the bottom of the steps and stared back at her. “Feel like messing your hair up and going out this evening? We could have dinner in town. Ride around a little bit.” She hadn’t ridden on a motorcycle since she was a teenager. She glanced at the cycle, then back to Noah. “I’d need to change clothes.” His gaze flickered over her short jeans skirt, her T-shirt. “That would be a damned shame too,” he stated. “I have to say, Ms. Malone, you have some beautiful legs there.” No one had ever been as charming as Nathan. She remembered when they were dating, how he would just show up, out of the blue, driving that monster pickup of his and grinning like a rogue when he picked her up. He’d been the epitome of a bad boy, and he had been all hers. He was still all hers. “Bare legs and motorcycles don’t exactly go together,” she pointed out. He nodded soberly, though his eyes had a wicked glint to them. “This is a fact, beautiful. And pretty legs like that, we wouldn’t want to risk.” She leaned against the porch post and stared back at him. “I have a pickup, you know.” She propped one hand on her hip and stared back at him. “Really?” Was that avarice she saw glinting in his eyes, or for just the slightest second, pure, unadulterated joy at the mention of that damned pickup? He looked around. “I haven’t seen a pickup.” “It’s in the garage,” she told him carelessly. “A big black monster with bench seats. Four-by-four gas-guzzling alpha-male steel and chrome.” He grinned. He was so proud of that damned pickup. “Where did something so little come up with a truck that big?” he teased her then. She shrugged. “It belonged to my husband. Now, it belongs to me.” That last statement had his gaze sharpening. “You drive it?” “All the time,” she lied, tormenting him. “I don’t have to worry about pinging it now that my husband is gone. He didn’t like pings.” Did he swallow tighter? “It’s pinged then?” She snorted. “Not hardly. Do you want to drive the monster or question me about it? Or I could change into jeans and we could ride your cycle. Which is it?” Which was it? Noah stared back at her, barely able to contain his shock that she had kept the pickup. He knew for a fact there were times the payments on the house and garage had gone unpaid—his “death” benefits hadn’t been nearly enough—almost risking her loss of both during those first months of his “death.” Knowing she had held on to that damned truck filled him with more pleasure than he could express. Knowing she was going to let someone who wasn’t her husband drive it filled him with horror. The contradictor feelings clashed inside him, and he promised himself he was going to spank her for this.

First, there is hardly an innocent app; if it’s not tracking you now, it may be doing so in the next week or month: “There is an entire industry based upon these trackers, and apps identified as ‘clean’ today may contain trackers that have not yet been identified. Tracker code may also be added by developers to new versions of apps in the future.” Second is that even the most innocent-seeming applications such as weather, flashlights, ride sharing, and dating apps are “infested” with dozens of tracking programs that rely on increasingly bizarre, aggressive, and illegible tactics to collect massive amounts of behavioral surplus ultimately directed at ad targeting. For example, the ad tracker FidZup developed “communication between a sonic emitter and a mobile phone. . . .” It can detect the presence of mobile phones and therefore their owners by diffusing a tone, inaudible to the human ear, inside a building: “Users installing ‘Bottin Gourmand,’ a guide to restaurants and hotels in France, would thus have their physical location tracked via retail outlet speakers as they move around Paris.

Yes, yes—we have all heard that we are God’s children; we are sons and daughters. The curse of familiarity with the words has dulled us to the staggering truth they contain. The reality of it has not penetrated our hearts, not deeply enough. We still act and pray like orphans or slaves. A slave feels reluctant to pray; they feel they have no right to ask, and so their prayers are modest and respectful. They spend more time asking forgiveness than they do praying for abundance. They view the relationship with reverence, maybe more like fear, but not with the tenderness of love. Of being loved. There is no intimacy in the language or their feelings. Sanctified unworthiness colors their view of prayer. These are often “good servants of the Lord.” An orphan is not reluctant to pray; they feel desperate. But their prayers feel more like begging than anything else. Orphans feel a great chasm between themselves and the One to whom they speak. Abundance is a foreign concept; a poverty mentality permeates their prayer lives. They ask for scraps; they expect scraps. But not sons; sons know who they are.

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick. The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15). Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own. We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us. The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution. We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time. The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts. We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence. We are indeed in relationship to all that is.

She was a hunchback with a sweet smile. She smiled sweetly at anything; she couldn't help it; the trees, me, the grass, anything. The basket pulled her down, dragging her toward the ground. She was such a tiny woman, with a hurt face, as if slapped forever. She wore a funny old hat, an absurd hat, a maddening hat, a hat to make me cry, a hat with faded red berries on the brim. And there she was, smiling at everything, struggling across the carpet with a heavy basket containing Lord knew what, wearing a plumed hat with red berries. I got up. It was so mysterious. There I was, like magic, standing up, my two feet on the ground, my eyes drenched. I said, "Let me help." She smiled again and gave me the basket. We began to walk. She led the way. Beyond the trees it was stifling. And she smiled. It was so sweet it nearly tore my head off. She talked, she told me things I never remembered. It didn't matter. In a« dream she held me, in a dream I followed under the blinding sun. For blocks we went forward. I hoped it would never end. Always she talked in a low voice made of human music. What words! What she said! I remembered nothing. I was only happy. But in my heart I was dying. It should have been so. We stepped from so many curbs, I wondered why she did not sit upon one and hold my head while I drifted away. It was the chance that never came again. That old woman with the bent back! Old woman, I feel so joyfully your pain. Ask me a favor, you old woman you! Anything. To die is easy. Make it that. To cry is easy, lift your skirt and let me cry and let my tears wash your feet to let you know I know what life has been for you, because my back is bent too, but my heart is whole, my tears are delicious, my love is yours, to give you joy where God has failed. To die is so easy and you may have my life if you wish it, you old woman, you hurt me so, you did, I will do anything for you, to die for you, the blood of my eighteen years flowing in the gutters of Wilmington and down to the sea for you, for you that you might find such joy as is now mine and stand erect without the horror of that twist. I left the old woman at her door. The trees shimmered. The clouds laughed. The blue sky took me up. Where am I? Is this Wilmington, California? Haven't I been here before? A melody moved my feet. The air soared with Arturo in it, puffing him in and out and making him something and nothing. My heart laughed and laughed. Goodbye to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and all of you, you fools, I am much greater than all of you! Through my veins ran music of blood. Would it last? It could not last. I must hurry. But where? And I ran toward home. Now I am home. I left the book in the park. To hell with it. No more books for me. I kissed my mother. I clung to her passionately. On my knees I fell at her feet to kiss her feet and cling to her ankles until it must have hurt her and amazed her that it was I.

We crossed the street and turned left into one of the side streets, which was only slightly less wide. Here the traffic was lighter. To the left and slightly in front of us, two men walked shoulder to shoulder. The first wore leather pants, a white shirt with wide sleeves, and a leather vest over it. A wide leather bracer enclosed his left forearm. His hair, a rare blond shade, almost gold, hung in a ponytail down his back. He moved with a casual aristocratic elegance, perfectly balanced. Watching him, you had a feeling that if the road suddenly became a tightrope, he would just keep on walking without breaking a stride. My father moved like that. I sped up a little. We drew even and I saw a slender sword on his waist. That's what I thought. An expert swordsman. I glanced at his face and blinked. He was remarkably handsome. The man to his left was larger, his shoulders broader, his body emanating contained aggression. He didn't walk, he stalked, and you could tell by the way he moved that he would be very strong. His auburn hair looked like he'd rolled out of bed, dragged his hand through it, and gone on about his day. He wore dark pants and a black leather jacket that was more doublet than motorcycle. A ragged scar crossed his left cheek and when he turned his head, his eyes shone with yellow. Interesting. "It's always work with you," the russet-haired man said. "Some of us have to mind the safety of the realm," the blond said. A narrow smile curled his lips. "I've given the realm eight years of my life. It can bite me," his stocky companion retorted. "How far is it?" The slim man raised his left arm. A hawk dropped out of the sky and landed on his bracer. "We're almost there. Two blocks left." "Good. Let's get this crap and go home." They turned into the side street. "That bird smelled dead," Sean said.

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, 40 Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.   II   Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars. The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars Ascend to summer in the tree We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below, the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before 60 But reconciled among the stars.   At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor

She instantly lowered her face, staring at her lap, so that nothing was visible of her beyond the clusters of sunflower curls that framed the netted bun on top of her head. Intrigued by the curve of one plump cheek, he lifted her chin and made her look toward him, ignoring her flinch as he touched her. His first impression was of green eyes, wide as a baby owl's and just as solemn. Dumpling cheeks, a straight nose, and a firm little mouth- all ordinary, and all in common female proportion. There was nothing notably strange about her features- and yet it was an odd face, the kind of face that looked out of burrows and tree-knots and hedgerows, unblinking, innocent and as old as time. If she'd had whiskers to twitch it wouldn't have surprised him, so strong was the impression of a small, prudent wild creature with dark brows like furry markings. Strangely, she made him want to smile, as if he'd just pulled aside a branch and discovered a nightingale staring gravely back at him from its nest. He found himself reacting in the same way, consciously containing his moves and his voice, as if he might startle her away. "Hullo," he said softly, giving her a light, suggestive chuck beneath her plump chin as he let her go.

So far from a political ideology being the quasi-divine parent of political activity, it turns out to be its earthly stepchild. Instead of an independently premeditated scheme of ends to be pursued, it is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies. The pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics. In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after; and the understanding of politics we are investigating has the disadvantage of being, in the strict sense, preposterous. Let us consider the matter first in relation to scientific hypothesis, which I have taken to play a role in scientific activity in some respects similar to that of an ideology in politics. If a scientific hypothesis were a self-generated bright idea which owed nothing to scientific activity, then empiricism governed by hypothesis could be considered to compose a self-contained manner of activity; but this certainly is not its character. The truth is that only a man who is already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis; that is, an hypothesis is not an independent invention capable of guiding scientific inquiry, but a dependent supposition which arises as an abstraction from within already existing scientific activity. Moreover, even when the specific hypothesis has in this manner been formulated, it is inoperative as a guide to research without constant reference to the traditions of scientific inquiry from which it was abstracted. The concrete situation does not appear until the specific hypothesis, which is the occasion of empiricism being set to work, is recognized as itself the creature of owing how to conduct a scientific inquiry. Or consider the example of cookery. It might be supposed that an ignorant man, some edible materials, and a cookery book compose together the necessities of a self-moved (or concrete) activity called cooking. But nothing is further from the truth. The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cooking can spring; it is nothing more than an abstract of somebody's knowledge of how to cook: it is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity. The book, in its tum, may help to set a man on to dressing a dinner, but if it were his sole guide he could never, in fact, begin: the book speaks only to those who know already the kind of thing to expect from it and consequently bow to interpret it. Now, just as a cookery book presupposes somebody who knows how to cook, and its use presupposes somebody who already knows how to use it, and just as a scientific hypothesis springs from a knowledge of how to conduct a scientific investigation and separated from that knowledge is powerless to set empiricism profitably to work, so a political ideology must be understood, not as an independently premeditated beginning for political activity, but as knowledge (abstract and generalized) of a concrete manner of attending to the arrangements of a society. The catechism which sets out the purposes to be pursued merely abridges a concrete manner of behaviour in which those purposes are already hidden. It does not exist in advance of political activity, and by itself it is always an insufficient guide. Political enterprises, the ends to be pursued, the arrangements to be established (all the normal ingredients of a political ideology), cannot be premeditated in advance of a manner of attending to the arrangements of a society; what we do, and moreover what we want to do, is the creature of how we are accustomed to conduct our affairs. Indeed, it often reflects no more than a dis­covered ability to do something which is then translated into an authority to do it.

This is why, rather than go on talking, I felt the need to transform the things to be said into a cone of light hurled at a hundred miles an hour, to transform myself into this cone of light moving over the superhighway, because it is certain that such a signal can be received and understood by her without being lost in the ambiguous disorder of secondary vibrations, just as I, to receive and understand the things she has to say to me, would like them to be only (rather, I would like her to be only) this cone of light I see advancing on the superhighway at a speed (I'm guessing, at a glance) of eighty or ninety. What counts is communicating the indispensable, skipping all the superfluous, reducing ourselves to essential communication, to a luminous signal that moves in a given direction, abolishing the complexity of our personalities and situations and facial expressions, leaving them in the shadowy container that the headlights carry behind them and conceal. The Y I love is really that moving band of luminous rays, and all the rest of her can remain implicit; and the me that she can love, the me that has the power of entering that circuit of exaltation which is her affective life, in the flashing of this pass which, through love of her and with a certain risk, I am now attempting.

Pleasure Principles What you pay attention to grows. This will be familiar to those who have read Emergent Strategy. Actually, all the emergent strategy principles also apply here! (Insert eggplant emoji). Tune into happiness, what satisfies you, what brings you joy. We become what we practice. I learned this through studying somatics! In his book The Leadership Dojo, Richard Strozzi-Heckler shares that “300 repetitions produce body memory … [and] 3,000 repetitions creates embodiment.”12 Yes is the way. When it was time to move to Detroit, when it was time to leave my last job, when it was time to pick up a meditation practice, time to swim, time to eat healthier, I knew because it gave me pleasure when I made and lived into the decision. Now I am letting that guide my choices for how I organize and for what I am aiming toward with my work—pleasure in the processes of my existence and states of my being. Yes is a future. When I feel pleasure, I know I am on the right track. Puerto Rican pleasure elder Idelisse Malave shared with me that her pleasure principle is “If it pleases me, I will.” When I am happy, it is good for the world.13 The deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment.14 Commit yourself fully to the process, the journey, to bringing the best you can bring. Detach yourself from ego and outcomes. Make justice and liberation feel good. Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice. Moderation is key.15 The idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is. Related: pleasure is not money. Pleasure is not even related to money, at least not in a positive way. Having resources to buy unlimited amounts of pleasure leads to excess, and excess totally destroys the spiritual experience of pleasure.

From Bourcet he learnt the principle of calculated dispersion to induce the enemy to disperse their own concentration preparatory to the swift reuniting of his own forces. Also, the value of a 'plan with several branches', and of operating in a line which threatened alternative objectives. Moreover, the very plan which Napoleon executed in his first campaign was based on one that Bourcet had designed half a century earlier. Form Guibert he acquired an idea of the supreme value of mobility and fluidity of force, and of the potentialities inherent in the new distribution of an army in self-contained divisions. Guibert had defined the Napoleonic method when he wrote, a generation earlier: 'The art is to extend forces without exposing them, to embrace the enemy without being disunited, to link up the moves or the attacks to take the enemy in flank without exposing one's own flank.' And Guibert's prescription for the rear attack, as the means of upsetting the enemy's balance, became Napoleon's practice. To the same source can be traced Napoleon's method of concentrating his mobile artillery to shatter, and make a breach at, a key point in the enemy's front. Moreover, it was the practical reforms achieved by Guibert in the French army shortly before the Revolution which fashioned the instrument that Napoleon applied. Above all, it was Guibert's vision of a coming revolution in warfare, carried out by a man who would arise from a revolutionary state, that kindled the youthful Napoleon's imagination and ambition. While Napoleon added little to the ideas he had imbibed, he gave them fulfilment. Without his dynamic application the new mobility might have remained merely a theory. Because his education coincided with his instincts, and because these in turn were given scope by his circumstances, he was able to exploit the full possibilities of the new 'divisional' system. In developing the wider range of strategic combinations thus possible Napoleon made his chief contribution to strategy.

This was a war of attrition...A mug's game! A mug's game as far as killing men was concerned, but not an uninteresting occupation if you considered it as a struggle of various minds spread all over the broad landscape in the sunlight. They did not kill many men and they expended an infinite number of missiles and a vast amount of thought. If you took six million men armed with loaded canes and stockings containing bricks or knives and set them against another six million men similarly armed, at the end of three hours four million on the one side and the entire six million on the other would be dead. So, as far as killing went, it really was a mug's game. That was what happened if you let yourself get into the hands of the applied scientist. For all these things were the products not of the soldier but of hirsute bespectacled creatures who peer through magnifying glasses. Or of course, on our side, they would be shaven-cheeked and less abstracted. They were efficient as slaughterers in that they enabled the millions of men to be moved. When you had only knives you could not move very fast. On the other hand, your knife killed at every stroke: you would set a million men firing at each other with rifles from eighteen hundred yards. But few rifles ever registered a hit. So the invention was relatively inefficient. And it dragged things out! And suddenly it had become boring.

The air was steeped with the heady fragrance of roses, as if the entire hall had been rinsed with expensive perfume. "Good Lord!" she exclaimed, stopping short at the sight of massive bunches of flowers being brought in from a cart outside. Mountains of white roses, some of them tightly furled buds, some in glorious full bloom. Two footmen had been recruited to assist the driver of the cart, and the three of them kept going outside to fetch bouquet after bouquet wrapped in stiff white lace paper. "Fifteen dozen of them," Marcus said brusquely. "I doubt there's a single white rose left in London." Aline could not believe how fast her heart was beating. Slowly she moved forward and drew a single rose from one of the bouquets. Cupping the delicate bowl of the blossom with her fingers, she bent her head to inhale its lavish perfume. Its petals were a cool brush of silk against her cheek. "There's something else," Marcus said. Following his gaze, Aline saw the butler directing yet another footman to pry open a huge crate filled with brick-sized parcels wrapped in brown paper. "What are they, Salter?" "With your permission, my lady, I will find out." The elderly butler unwrapped one of the parcels with great care. He spread the waxed brown paper open to reveal a damply fragrant loaf of gingerbread, its spice adding a pungent note to the smell of the roses. Aline put her hand over her mouth to contain a bubbling laugh, while some undefinable emotion caused her entire body to tremble. The offering worried her terribly, and at the same time, she was insanely pleased by the extravagance of it. "Gingerbread?" Marcus asked incredulously. "Why the hell would McKenna send you an entire crate of gingerbread?" "Because I like it," came Aline's breathless reply. "How do you know this is from McKenna?" Marcus gave her a speaking look, as if only an imbecile would suppose otherwise. Fumbling a little with the envelope, Aline extracted a folded sheet of paper. It was covered in a bold scrawl, the penmanship serviceable and without flourishes. No miles of level desert, no jagged mountain heights, no sea of endless blue Neither words nor tears, nor silent fears will keep me from coming back to you. There was no signature... none was necessary. Aline closed her eyes, while her nose stung and hot tears squeezed from beneath her lashes. She pressed her lips briefly to the letter, not caring what Marcus thought. "It's a poem," she said unsteadily. "A terrible one." It was the loveliest thing she had ever read. She held it to her cheek, then used her sleeve to blot her eyes. "Let me see it." Immediately Aline tucked the poem into her bodice. "No, it's private." She swallowed against the tightness of her throat, willing the surge of unruly emotion to recede. "McKenna," she whispered, "how you devastate me.

Make a List (or lists) • Make a list of all the things that you can look at and think: Why did we even bother to move that the last time? Now will be your last and best chance to give or throw away unwanted items until your next move (5-7 years on average). Give unwanted clothes, furniture, kitchen items, etc. to a charity that allows you to use your donation as a tax write-off. Yard sales are another option. • Make a list (and/or get one online) of household hazardous materials. These are common items in your home that are not or might not be safe to transport: flammables like propane tanks (even empty ones), gasoline or kerosene, aerosols or compressed gases (hair spray, spray paint), cleaning fluids in plastic containers (bleach, ammonia) and pesticides (bug spray) and herbicides (weed killer) and caustics like lye or pool acid. There is more likely to be damage caused by leakage of cleaning fluids-- like bleach--than there is by damage caused by a violent explosion or fire in your truck. The problem lies in the fact that any leaking fluid is going to drip its way to the floor and spread out--even in the short time span of your move and more so if you are going up and down hills. Aerosols can explode in the summer heat as can propane BBQ tanks. Gasoline from lawnmowers and pesticide vapors expand in the heat and can permeate everything in the truck. Plastic containers that have been opened can expand and contract with a change in temperature and altitude and crack.

One experience that led Jung to this conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the sun's penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow. At the time Jung viewed the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it's as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds.

Matt’s housekeeper let him in with a grimace. “I’m harmless today,” Tate assured the woman as she led the way to where Matt Holden was standing just outside the study door. “Right. You and two odd species of cobra,” Matt murmured sarcastically, glaring at his son from a tanned face. “What do you want, a bruise to match the other one?” Tate held up both hands. “Don’t start,” he said. Matt moved out of the way with reluctance and closed the study door behind them. “Your mother’s gone shopping,” he said. “Good. I don’t want to talk to her just yet.” Matt’s eyebrows levered up. “Oh?” Tate dropped into the wing chair across from the senator’s bulky armchair. “I need some advice.” Matt felt his forehead. “I didn’t think a single malt whiskey was enough to make me hallucinate,” he said to himself. Tate glowered at him. “You’re not one of my favorite people, but you know Cecily a little better than I seem to lately.” “Cecily loves you,” Matt said shortly, dropping into his chair. “That’s not the problem,” Tate said. He leaned forward, his hands clasped loosely between his splayed knees. “Although I seem to have done everything in my power to make her stop.” The older man didn’t speak for a minute or two. “Love doesn’t die that easily,” he said. “Your mother and I are a case in point. We hadn’t seen each other for thirty-six years, but the instant we met again, the years fell away. We were young again, in love again.” “I can’t wait thirty-six years,” Tate stated. He stared at his hands, then he drew in a long breath. “Cecily’s pregnant.” The other man was quiet for so long that Tate lifted his eyes, only to be met with barely contained rage in the older man’s face. “Is it yours?” Matt asked curtly. Tate glowered at him. “What kind of woman do you think Cecily is? Of course it’s mine!” Matt chuckled. He leaned back in the easy chair and indulged the need to look at his son, to find all the differences and all the similarities in that younger version of his face. It pleased him to find so many familiar things. “We look alike,” Tate said, reading the intent scrutiny he was getting. “Funny that I never noticed that before.” Matt smiled. “We didn’t get along very well.” “Both too stubborn and inflexible,” Tate pointed out. “And arrogant.” Tate chuckled dryly. “Maybe.

Moving on, while he wondered, the dark through which Mr. Lecky's light cut grew more beautiful with scents. Particles of solid matter so minute, gases so subtle, that they filtered through stopping and sealing, hung on the unstirred air. Drawn in with Mr. Lecky's breath came impalpable dews cooked out of disintegrating coal. Distilled, chemically split and reformed, they ended in flawless simulation of the aromas of gums, the scent of woods and the world's flowers. The chemists who made them could do more than that. Loose on the gloom were perfumes of flowers which might possibly have bloomed but never had, and the strong-smelling saps of trees either lost or not yet evolved. Mixed in the mucus of the pituitary membrane, these volatile essences meant more than synthetic chemistry to Mr. Lecky. Their microscopic slime coated the bushed-out ends of the olfactory nerve; their presence was signaled to the anterior of the brain's temporal lobe. At once, thought waited on them, tossing down from the great storehouse of old images, neglected ideas - sandalwood and roses, musk and lavender. Mr. Lecky stood still, wrung by pangs as insistent and unanswerable as hunger. He was prodded by the unrest of things desired, not had; the surfeit of things had, not desired. More than anything he could see, or words, or sounds, these odors made him stupidly aware of the past. Unable to remember it, whence he was, or where he had previously been, all that was sweet, impermanent and gone came back not spoiled by too much truth or exact memory. Volatile as the perfumes, the past stirred him with longing for what was not - the only beloved beauty which you will have to see but which you may not keep. Mr. Lecky's beam of light went through glass top and side of a counter, displayed bottles of colored liquid - straw, amber, topaz - threw shadows behind their diverse shapes. He had no use for perfume. All the distraction, all the sense of loss and implausible sweetness which he felt was in memory of women. Behind the counter, Mr. Lecky, curious, took out bottles, sniffed them, examined their elaborately varied forms - transparent squares, triangles, cones, flattened ovals. Some were opaque, jet or blue, rough with embedded metals in intricate design. This great and needless decoration of the flasks which contained it was one strange way to express the inexpressible. Another way was tried in the names put on the bottles. Here words ran the suggestive or symbolic gamut of idealized passion, or festive night, of desired caresses, or of abstractions of the painful allure yet farther fetched. Not even in the hopeful, miracle-raving fancy of those who used the perfumes could a bottle of liquid have any actual magic. Since the buyers at the counters must be human beings, nine of every ten were beyond this or other help. Women, young, but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfume. But they were not. Mr. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while, aware of the tenth woman.

Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political and religious upheavals of the 1680s, and the specifically literary questions of neoclassicism opposed to more modern trends. He was Poet Laureate from 1668, but lost this position in 1688 on the overthrow of James II. Dryden had become Catholic in 1685, and his allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther (1687) discusses the complex issues of religion and politics in an attempt to reconcile bitterly opposed factions. This contains a well-known line which anticipates Wordsworth more than a century later: 'By education most have been misled … / And thus the child imposes on the man'. The poem shows an awareness of change as one grows older, and the impossibility of holding one view for a lifetime: My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires, My manhood, long misled by wandering fires, Followed false lights… After 1688, Dryden returned to the theatre, which had given him many of his early successes in tragedy, tragi-comedy, and comedy, as well as with adaptations of Shakespeare. ...... Dryden was an innovator, leading the move from heroic couplets to blank verse in drama, and at the centre of the intellectual debates of the Augustan age. He experimented with verse forms throughout his writing life until Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which brings together critical, translated, and original works, in a fitting conclusion to a varied career.

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

A house can have integrity, just like a person," said Roark, "and just as seldom." "In what way?" "Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it - and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis on the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, mouldings, false arches, false windows. You've seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a facade cut up into floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience." "Do you know that that's what I've felt in a way? I've felt that when I move into this house, I'll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can't quite define. Don't be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I'll have to live up to that house." "I intended that," said Roark. "And, incidentally, thank you for all the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There are so many things I notice that had never occurred to me before, but you've planned them as if you knew all my needs. For instance, my study is the room I'll need most and you've given it the dominant spot - and, incidentally, I see where you've made it the dominant mass from the outside, too. And then the way it connects with the library, and the living room well out of my way, and the guest rooms where I won't hear too much of them - and all that. You were very considerate of me." "You know," said Roark, "I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house." He added: "Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you.

Although Daisy was the mildest-tempered of all the Bowmans, she was by no means a coward. And she would not accept defeat without a fight. “You’re forcing me to take desperate measures,” she said. His reply was very soft. “There’s nothing you can do.” He had left her no choice. Daisy turned the key in the lock and carefully withdrew it. The decisive click was abnormally loud in the silence of the room. Calmly Daisy tugged the top edge of her bodice away from her chest. She held the key above the narrow gap. Matthew’s eyes widened as he understood what she intended. “You wouldn’t.” As he started around the dresser, Daisy dropped the key into her bodice, making certain it slipped beneath her corset. She sucked in her stomach and midriff until she felt the cold metal slide to her navel. “Damn it!” Matthew reached her with startling speed. He reached out to touch her, then jerked his hands back as if he had just encountered open flame. “Take it out,” he commanded, his face dark with outrage. “I can’t.” “I mean it, Daisy!” “It’s fallen too far down. I’ll have to take my dress off.” It was obvious he wanted to kill her. But she could also feel the force of his longing. His lungs were working like bellows, and scorching heat radiated from his body. His whisper contained the ferocity of a roar. “Don’t do this to me.” Daisy waited patiently. The next move was his. He turned his back to her, the seams of his coat straining over bunched muscles. His fists clenched as he struggled to master himself. He took a shuddering breath, and another, and when he spoke his voice sounded thick, as if he had just awakened from a heavy sleep. “Take off your gown.” Trying not to antagonize him any more than was necessary, Daisy replied in an apologetic tone. “I can’t do it by myself. It buttons up the back.” Matthew said something in a muffled voice that sounded very foul. After an eternity of silence he turned to face her. His jaw could have been cast in iron. “I’m not going to fall apart that easily. I can resist you, Daisy. I’ve had years of practice. Turn around.” Daisy obeyed. As she bent her head forward, she could actually feel his gaze travel over the endless row of pearl buttons. “How do you ever get undressed?” he muttered. “I’ve never seen so many blasted buttons on one garment.” “It’s fashionable.” “It’s ridiculous.” “You can send a letter of protest to Godey’s Lady’s Book,” she suggested. Giving a scornful snort, Matthew began on the top button. He tried to unfasten it while avoiding contact with her body. “It helps if you slide your fingers beneath the placket,” Daisy said. “And then you can pop the button through the—” “Quiet,” he snapped. She closed her mouth.

The Papacy was not happy when Columbus relentlessly began petitioning the royals of Spain and England for their favor, seeking funds for Western expeditions. At first they tried to dissuade him but later, fearing he would find patronage and proceed with his venture, they conceded and financially backed his journey of discovery, making sure to put henchmen all about him to watch his every move. They knew, all too well, that America had already been colonized by Scots-Irish mariners and that the far away country contained Irish Stellar temples and Megalithic sites filled with treasure. They had their minds set on pillaging this wealth and making sure the relics of Ireland’s presence in the New World would be attributed to, and regarded as, yet another “unsolvable mystery.” Nowadays, however, when underground chambers of places such as Ohio’s “Serpent Mound” are excavated, all manner of Irish artifacts are brought out. The aboriginal tribes of South and North America were initially elated to see men such as Columbus and Pizarro. They erroneously believed them to be the godmen of old returning to their shores. They could not imagine, not even in their wildest dreams or visions, what kind of mayhem and destruction these particular “gods” were preparing to unleash upon them. According to Conor MacDari, there are thousands of Megalithic sites throughout America of Irish origin. In the state of Ohio there are over five thousand such mounds while in Michigan and Wisconsin there exists over ten thousand sites. None of these sites are of Native Indian origin and, therefore, little academic attention is paid to them. The Native Indians admit that in all cases except two, tribes understood a common language known as Algonquin. This word is Gaelic and means “noble family” or “noble ones.” Hubert Howe Bancroft, in his book Native Races mentions an Indian chief who said his tribe taught their children but one language until they reached eleven years of age, and that language was Irish Gaelic.

He concluded the speech with an irritated motion of his hands. Unfortunately, Evie had been conditioned by too many encounters with Uncle Peregrine to discern between angry gestures and the beginnings of a physical attack. She flinched instinctively, her own arms flying up to shield her head. When the expected pain of a blow did not come, she let out a breath and tentatively lowered her arms to find Sebastian staring at her with blank astonishment. Then his face went dark. “Evie,” he said, his voice containing a bladelike ferocity that frightened her. “Did you think I was about to…Christ. Someone hit you. Someone hit you in the past—who the hell was it?” He reached for her suddenly—too suddenly—and she stumbled backward, coming up hard against the wall. Sebastian went very still. “Goddamn,” he whispered. Appearing to struggle with some powerful emotion, he stared at her intently. After a long moment, he spoke softly. “I would never strike a woman. I would never harm you. You know that, don’t you?” Transfixed by the light, glittering eyes that held hers with such intensity, Evie couldn’t move or make a sound. She started as he approached her slowly. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “Let me come to you. It’s all right. Easy.” One of his arms slid around her, while he used his free hand to smooth her hair, and then she was breathing, sighing, as relief flowed through her. Sebastian brought her closer against him, his mouth brushing her temple. “Who was it?” he asked. “M-my uncle,” she managed to say. The motion of his hand on her back paused as he heard her stammer. “Maybrick?” he asked patiently. “No, th-the other one.” “Stubbins.” “Yes.” Evie closed her eyes in pleasure as his other arm slid around her. Clasped against Sebastian’s hard chest, with her cheek tucked against his shoulder, she inhaled the scent of clean male skin, and the subtle touch of sandalwood cologne. “How often?” she heard him ask. “More than once?” “I…i-it’s not important now.” “How often, Evie?” Realizing that he was going to persist until she answered, Evie muttered, “Not t-terribly often, but…sometimes when I displeased him, or Aunt Fl-Florence, he would lose his temper. The l-last time I tr-tried to run away, he blackened my eye and spl-split my lip.” “Did he?” Sebastian was silent for a long moment, and then he spoke with chilling softness. “I’m going to tear him limb from limb.” “I don’t want that,” Evie said earnestly. “I-I just want to be safe from him. From all of them.” Sebastian drew his head back to look down into her flushed face. “You are safe,” he said in a low voice. He lifted one of his hands to her face, caressing the plane of her cheekbone, letting his fingertip follow the trail of pale golden freckles across the bridge of her nose. As her lashes fluttered downward, he stroked the slender arcs of her brows, and cradled the side of her face in his palm. “Evie,” he murmured. “I swear on my life, you will never feel pain from my hands. I may prove a devil of a husband in every other regard…but I wouldn’t hurt you that way. You must believe that.

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head—useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there—in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.

My dear, dear ladies,” Sir Francis effused as he hastened forward, “what a long-awaited delight this is!” Courtesy demanded that he acknowledge the older lady first, and so he turned to her. Picking up Berta’s limp hand from her side, he presed his lips to it and said, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Sir Francis Belhaven.” Lady Berta curtsied, her fear-widened eyes fastened on his face, and continued to press her handkerchief to her lips. To his astonishment, she did not acknowledge him at all; she did not say she was charmed to meet him or inquire after his health. Instead, the woman curtsied again. And once again. “There’s hardly a need for all that,” he said, covering his puzzlement with forced jovially. “I’m only a knight, you know. Not a duke or even an earl.” Lady Berta curtsied again, and Elizabeth nudged her sharply with her elbow. “How do!” burst out the plump lady. “My aunt is a trifle-er-shy with strangers,” Elizabeth managed weakly. The sound of Elizabeth Cameron’s soft, musical voice made Sir Francis’s blood sing. He turned with unhidden eagerness to his future bride and realized that it was a bust of himself that Elizabeth was clutching so protectively, so very affectionately to her bosom. He could scarcely contain his delight. “I knew it would be this way between us-no pretense, no maidenly shyness,” he burst out, beaming at her blank, wary expression as he gently took the bust of himself from Elizabeth’s arms. “But, my lovely, there’s no need for you to caress a hunk of clay when I am here in the flesh.” Momentarily struck dumb, Elizabeth gaped at the bust she’d been holding as he first set it gently upon its stand, then turned expectantly to her, leaving her with the horrifying-and accurate-thought that he now expected her to reach out and draw his balding head to her bosom. She stared at him, her mind in paralyzed chaos. “I-I would ask a favor of you, Sir Francis,” she burst out finally. “Anything, my dear,” he said huskily. “I would like to-to rest before supper.” He stepped back, looking disappointed, but then he recalled his manners and reluctantly nodded. “We don’t keep country hours. Supper is at eight-thirty.” For the first time he took a moment to really look at her. His memories of her exquisite face and delicious body had been so strong, so clear, that until then he’d been seeing the Lady Elizabeth Cameron he’d met long ago. Now he belatedly registered the stark, unattractive gown she wore and the severe way her hair was dressed. His gaze dropped to the ugly iron cross that hung about her neck, and he recoiled in shock. “Oh, and my dear, I’ve invited a few guests,” he added pointedly, his eyes on her unattractive gown. “I thought you would want to know, in order to attire yourself more appropriately.” Elizabeth suffered that insult with the same numb paralysis she’d felt since she set eyes on him. Not until the door closed behind him did she feel able to move. “Berta,” she burst out, flopping disconsolately onto the chair beside her, “how could you curtsy like that-he’ll know you for a lady’s maid before the night is out! We’ll never pull this off.” “Well!” Berta exclaimed, hurt and indignant. “Twasn’t I who was clutching his head to my bosom when he came in.” “We’ll do better after this,” Elizabeth vowed with an apologetic glance over her shoulder, and the trepidation was gone from her voice, replaced by steely determination and urgency. “We have to do better. I want us both out of here tomorrow. The day after at the very latest.” “The butler stared at my bosom,” Berta complained. “I saw him!” Elizabeth sent her a wry, mirthless smile. “The footman stared at mine. No woman is safe in this place. We only had a bit of-of stage fright just now. We’re new to playacting, but tonight I’ll carry it off. You’ll see. No matter what if takes, I’ll do it.

Beyond a fence, they came to the swimming pool, which spilled over into a series of waterfalls and smaller rocky pools. The area was planted with huge ferns. “Isn’t this extraordinary?” Ed Regis said. “Especially on a misty day, these plants really contribute to the prehistoric atmosphere. These are authentic Jurassic ferns, of course.” Ellie paused to look more closely at the ferns. Yes, it was just as he said: Serenna veriformans, a plant found abundantly in fossils more than two hundred million years old, now common only in the wetlands of Brazil and Colombia. But whoever had decided to place this particular fern at poolside obviously didn’t know that the spores of veriformans contained a deadly beta-carboline alkaloid. Even touching the attractive green fronds could make you sick, and if a child were to take a mouthful, he would almost certainly die—the toxin was fifty times more poisonous than oleander. People were so naïve about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction—and defense. But Ellie knew that, in the earth’s history, plants had evolved as competitively as animals, and in some ways more fiercely. The poison in Serenna veriformans was a minor example of the elaborate chemical arsenal of weapons that plants had evolved. There were terpenes, which plants spread to poison the soil around them and inhibit competitors; alkaloids, which made them unpalatable to insects and predators (and children); and pheromones, used for communication. When a Douglas fir tree was attacked by beetles, it produced an anti-feedant chemical—and so did other Douglas firs in distant parts of the forest. It happened in response to a warning alleochemical secreted by the trees that were under attack. People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds. It was a complex, dynamic process which she never ceased to find fascinating. And which she knew most people simply didn’t understand. But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

A shudder went through me at the thought of what I should still learn in this hour. How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible? And what would remain when I also learned about myself, about my own character and history from the knowledge stored in these archives? I must be prepared for anything. Suddenly I could bear the uncertainty and suspense no longer. I hastened to the section Chattorum res gestas, looked for my sub-division and number and stood in front of the part marked with my name. This was a niche, and when I drew the thin curtains aside I saw that it contained nothing written. It contained nothing but a figure, an old and worn-looking model made from wood or wax, in pale colours. It appeared to be a kind of deity or barbaric idol. At first glance it was entirely incomprehensible to me. It was a figure that really consisted of two; it had a common back. I stared at it for a while, disappointed and surprised. Then I noticed a candle in a metal candlestick fixed to the wall of the niche. A match-box lay there. I lit the candle and the strange double figure was now brightly illuminated. Only slowly did it dawn upon me. Only slowly and gradually did I begin to suspect and then perceive what it was intended to represent. It represented a figure which was myself, and this likeness of myself was unpleasantly weak and half-real; it had blurred features, and in its whole expression there was something unstable, weak, dying or wishing to die, and looked rather like a piece of sculpture which could be called "Transitoriness" or "Decay," or something similar. On the other hand, the other figure which was joined to mine to make one, was strong in colour and form, and just as I began to realise whom it resembled, namely, the servant and President Leo, I discovered a second candle in the wall and lit this also. I now saw the double figure representing Leo and myself, not only becoming clearer and each image more alike, but I also saw that the surface of the figures was transparent and that one could look inside as one can look through the glass of a bottle or vase. Inside the figures I saw something moving, slowly, extremely slowly, in the same way that a snake moves which has fallen asleep. Something was taking place there, something like a very slow, smooth but continuous flowing or melting; indeed, something melted or poured across from my image to that of Leo's. I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo's, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear. As I stood there and looked and tried to understand what I saw, I recalled a short conversation that I had once had with Leo during the festive days at Bremgarten. We had talked about the creations of poetry being more vivid and real than the poets themselves. The candles burned low and went out. I was overcome by an infinite weariness and desire to sleep, and I turned away to find a place where I could lie down and sleep.

I'm unaccustomed to being cooped up all day-I really must insist that you permit me to enjoy a short walk." "Not on your life," Fletcher growled. From the sound, Breckenridge realized the group had moved closer to the tap. "You don't need to think you're going to give us the slip so easily," Fletcher said again. "My dear good man"-Heather with her nose in the air; Breckenridge could tell by her tone-"just where in this landscape of empty fields do you imagine I'm going to slip to?" Cobbins opined that she might try to steal a horse and ride off. "Oh,yes-in a round gown and evening slippers," Heather jeered. "But I wasn't suggesting you let me ramble on my own-Martha can come with me." That was Martha's cue to enter the fray, but Heather stuck to her guns, refusing to back down through the ensuing, increasingly heated verbal stoush. Until Fletcher intervened, aggravated frustration resonating in his voice. "Look you-we're under strict orders to keep you safe, not to let you wander off to fall prey to the first shiftless rake who rides past and takes a fancy to you." Silence reigned for half a minute, then Heather audibly sniffed. "I'll have you know that shiftless rakes know better than to take a fancy to me." Not true, Breckenridge thought, but that wasn't the startling information contained in Fletcher's outburst. "Come on, Heather-follow up." As if she'd heard his muttered exhortation, she blithely swept on. "But if rather than standing there arguing, you instead treated me like a sensible adult and told me what your so strict orders with respect to me were, I might see my way to complying-or at least to helping you comply with them." Breckenridge blinked as he sorted through that pronouncement; he could almost feel for Fletcher when he hissed out a sigh. "All right," Fletcher's frustration had reached breaking point. "If you must know, we're to keep you safe from all harm. We're not to let a bloody pigeon pluck so much as a hair from your head. We're to deliver you up in prime condition, exactly as you were when he grabbed you." From the change in Fletcher's tone, Breckenridge could visualize him moving closer to tower over Heather to intimidate her into backing down; he could have told him it wouldn't work. "So now you see," Fletcher went on, voice low and forceful, "that it's entirely out of the question for you to go out for any ramble." "Hmm." Heather's tone was tellingly mild. Fletcher was about to get floored by an uppercut. For once not being on the receiving end, Breckenridge grinned and waited for it to land. "If, as you say, your orders are to-do correct me if I'm wrong-keep me in my customary excellent health until you hand me over to your employer, then, my dear Fletcher, that will absolutely necessitate me going for a walk. Being cooped up all day in a carriage has never agreed with me-if you don't wish me to weaken or develop some unhealthy affliction, I will require fresh air and gentle exercise to recoup." She paused, then went on, her tone one of utmost reasonableness, "A short excursion along the river at the rear of the inn, and back, should restore my constitution." Breckenridge was certain he could hear Fletcher breathing in and out through clenched teeth. A fraught moment passed on, then, "Oh, very well! Martha-go with her. Twenty minutes, do you hear? Not a minute more." "Thank you, Fletcher. Come, Martha-we don't want to waste the light." Breckenridge heard Heather, with the rather slower Martha, leave the inn by the main door. He sipped his ale, waited. Eventually, Fletcher and Cobbins climbed the stairs, Cobbins grumbling, Fletcher ominously silent. The instant they passed out of hearing, Breckenridge stood, stretched, then walked out of the tap and into the foyer. Seconds later, he slipped out of the front door.

Quote from "The Dish Keepers of Honest House" ....TO TWIST THE COLD is easy when its only water you want. Tapping of the toothbrush echoes into Ella's mind like footsteps clacking a cobbled street on a bitter, dry, cold morning. Her mind pushes through sleep her body craves. It catches her head falling into a warm, soft pillow. "Go back to bed," she tells herself. "You're still asleep," Ella mumbles, pushes the blanket off, and sits up. The urgency to move persuades her to keep routines. Water from the faucet runs through paste foam like a miniature waterfall. Ella rubs sleep-deprieved eyes, then the bridge of her nose and glances into the sink. Ella's eyes astutely fixate for one, brief millisecond. Water becomes the burgundy of soldiers exiting the drain. Her mouth drops in shock. The flow turns green. It is like the bubbling fungus of flockless, fishless, stagnating ponds. Within the iridescent glimmer of her thinking -- like a brain losing blood flow, Ella's focus is the flickering flashing of gray, white dust, coal-black shadows and crows lifting from the ground. A half minute or two trails off before her mind returns to reality. Ella grasps a toothbrush between thumb and index finger. She rests the outer palm against the sink's edge, breathes in and then exhales. Tension in the brow subsides, and her chest and shoulders drop; she sighs. Ella stares at pasty foam. It exits the drain as if in a race to clear the sink of negativity -- of all germs, slimy spit, the burgundy of imagined soldiers and oppressive plaque. GRASPING THE SILKY STRAND between her fingers, Ella tucks, pulls and slides the floss gently through her teeth. Her breath is an inch or so of the mirror. Inspections leave her demeanor more alert. Clouding steam of the image tugs her conscience. She gazes into silver glass. Bits of hair loosen from the bun piled at her head's posterior. What transforms is what she imagines. The mirror becomes a window. The window possesses her Soul and Spirit. These two become concerned -- much like they did when dishonest housekeepers disrupted Ella's world in another story. Before her is a glorious bird -- shining-dark-as-coal, shimmering in hues of purple-black and black-greens. It is likened unto The Raven in Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem of 1845. Instead of interrupting a cold December night with tapping on a chamber door, it rests its claws in the decorative, carved handle of a backrest on a stiff dining chair. It projects an air of humor and concern. It moves its head to and fro while seeking a clearer understanding. Ella studies the bird. It is surrounded in lofty bends and stretches of leafless, acorn-less, nearly lifeless, oak trees. Like fingers and arms these branches reach below. [Perhaps they are reaching for us? Rest assured; if they had designs on us, I would be someplace else, writing about something more pleasant and less frightening. Of course, you would be asleep.] Balanced in the branches is a chair. It is from Ella's childhood home. The chair sways. Ella imagines modern-day pilgrims of a distant shore. Each step is as if Mother Nature will position them upright like dolls, blown from the stability of their plastic, flat, toe-less feet. These pilgrims take fate by the hand. LIFTING A TOWEL and patting her mouth and hands, Ella pulls the towel through the rack. She walks to the bedroom, sits and picks up the newspaper. Thumbing through pages that leave fingertips black, she reads headlines: "Former Dentist Guilty of Health Care Fraud." She flips the page, pinches the tip of her nose and brushes the edge of her chin -- smearing both with ink. In the middle fold directly affront her eyes is another headline: "Dentist Punished for Misconduct." She turns the page. There is yet another: "Dentist guilty of urinating in surgery sink and using contaminated dental instruments on patients." This world contains those who are simply insane! Every profession has those who stray from goals....