Noisy Sayings And Quotes

Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.

If you feel . . . that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to world filled with schisms and sirens and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, 'The world is quiet here,' as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.

It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.

Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you've got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy, colorful and lively.

There’s nothing funny about war. Well, aside from this joke Orafoura told me: What did WWI say to WWII? I wish I could tell you the punch line, but the restaurant was so noisy that I didn’t hear it. But I laughed anyway, because I’ll bet it was pretty funny.

Thump “Oh, God” Thump Thump Unbelievable… I woke up faster this time, because I knew what I was hearing I sat up in bed, glaring behind me. The bed was still pulled safely away from the wall, so I felt no movement. But there sure as hell something moving over there. Then I heard ……hissing? I looked down at Clive, whose tail was at full puff. He arched his back and paced back and forth at the foot of the bed. “Hey, mister. It’s cool. We just got a noisy neighbor, that’s all,” I soothed, stretching my hand out to him. That’s when I heard it. “Meow” I cocked my head sideways, listening more intently. I studied Clive, who looked back at me as if to say “T’weren’t me”. “Meow! Oh, God. Me -Yow!” The girl next door was meowing. What in the world was my neighbor packing to make that happen? Clive, at this point, went utterly bonkers and launched himself at the wall. He was literally climbing it, trying to get where the noise was coming from, and adding his own meows to the chorus. “Oooh yes, just like that, Simon…Mmmm….Meow, meow, Meow!” Sweet Lord, there were out-of-control pussies on both sides of this wall tonight.

Just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I have nothing to say.

Another explained, “I think I’d speak for any introvert when I say if you could hear all the thoughts running through an introvert’s mind at any given moment—you’d feel like you’d just had your ear talked off for the last hour.

I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience—or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let's say 100,000 miles, their outlook would be fundamentally changed. The all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.

On the Ning Nang Nong Where the Cows go Bong! And the Monkeys all say Boo! Theres a Nang Nong Ning Where the trees go Ping! And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo On the Nong Ning Nang All the Mice go Clang! And you just cant catch em when they do! So its Ning Nang Nong! Cows go Bong! Nong Nang Ning! Trees go Ping! Nong Ning Nang! The mice go Clang! What a noisy place to belong,Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!

So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist

You say you want to get rid of the noise, but you and the noise go together. You have to be you without 'you' and all noise will stop. The real You is the formless witness within. The person, the noisy one, is only imagined. To recognize this is Freedom.

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, 'Prove that you are a good person.' Another voice says, 'You’d better be ashamed of yourself.' There also is a voice that says, 'Nobody really cares about you,' and one that says, 'Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.' But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, 'You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.' That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen. That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us 'my Beloved'.

The trouble is that when we get around to solutions, it always seems to come down to Prozac. Or Zoloft. Or Paxil. Deep clinical depression is a disease, one that not only can, but probably should, be treated with drugs. But a low-grade terminal anomie, a sense of alienation or disgust and detachment, the collective horror at a world that seems to have gone so very wrong, is not a job for antidepressants. The trouble is, the big-picture problems that have so many people down are more or less insoluble: As long as people can get divorced they will get divorced; America=s shrinking economy is not reversible; there is no cure for AIDS. So it starts to seem fairly reasonable to anesthetize ourselves in the best possible way. I would like so much to say that Prozac is preventing many people who are not clinically depressed from finding real antidotes to what Hillary Clinton refers to as 'a sleeping sickness of the soul,' but what exactly would those solutions be? I mean, universal health care coverage and a national service draft would be nice, but neither one is going to save us from ourselves. Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.

I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

I say let all the earth be alive and overwhelmingly so. Let the sky be pressed to bursting with wings, beaks, pumping hearts, and driving muscles. Let it be noisy. Let it make a mess. Then let me find my allotted space. Let me feel how I bump up against every other living thing on this earth. Let me learn to spin.

Cam scratched his nape. “You know what I don’t get? How women can spend the majority of their lives in shopping malls but still say they have nothing to wear.” Lydia snorted. “You know what I don’t get? How men can spend the majority of their lives playing sports where they’re being trampled on and listening to noisy mobs, yet they’re put off by shopping, when it’s no different.” Both males tilted their heads, conceding that.

Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always the key to her deepest distress. She must watch and guide, but he must lead, and he will always appear to be giving far more of his real attention to his comrades than he is giving to her. But that noisy, outward openness of men with each other enables them to deal with the silence and secrecy of women, that silence and secrecy which contains the truth of a man, and releases it. I suppose that the root of the resentment—a resentment which hides a bottomless terror—has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her—literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s.—Anyway, in this fucked up time and place, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you realize that women are supposed to be more imaginative than men. This is an idea dreamed up by men, and it proves exactly the contrary. The truth is that dealing with the reality of men leaves a woman very little time, or need, for imagination. And you can get very fucked up, here, once you take seriously the notion that a man who is not afraid to trust his imagination (which is all that men have ever trusted) if effeminate. It says a lot about this country, because, of course, if all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination. Or women, for that matter: or men.

The secret tugs at my sleeve. A child looking for attention. It is not a big secret. But it is not the only one either. “Strength in numbers” they say. For they are many. Many little things that – together – weigh tonnes. And take up space. And are quite noisy. The way only a lot of whispers can make noise. And they follow me. Little secrets of omission, desire, and denial. Of indulgence, hedonism, and exploration. Of peeves, passion, and deep-seated fear. Little secrets of despair and disrepair and prohibited thoroughfare.

And lying there, amid the tall, still grass and beneath the star-drunk sky, listening to the just-this-side-of-inaudible sound of her rhythmic breathing and the noisy silence of the bullfrogs, the grasshoppers, the distant cars rushing endlessly on I-65, I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words.

So I do what I do best, or what I do worst, I suppose—my greatest strength is also my greatest weakness. I break it. “I had the faucet on,” I say. “Really loud. And I pee pretty loud. I’m surprised you guys didn’t hear me, it was like Niagara Falls in here. Just really … very loud in volume. A lot of … liquids … flowing in a … noisy fashion.

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

The sign says BLIND PEOPLE’S ARBORETUM. I stand, still out of breath, dripping sweat and marveling at such a beautiful concept—in China, of all places, where disabled people are still often considered flawed and superfluous. I have never seen anything like this, even in the United States or Europe, and yet here, hidden away on the edge of a noisy, bustling, modernizing Chinese city, someone has taken the effort and expense to plant this beautiful, tree-hugging garden—an island of stop-and-rest in a sea of smash-and-grab.   5.

Tenways showed his rotten teeth. ‘Fucking make me.’ ‘I’ll give it a try.’ A man came strolling out of the dark, just his sharp jaw showing in the shadows of his hood, boots crunching heedless through the corner of the fire and sending a flurry of sparks up around his legs. Very tall, very lean and he looked like he was carved out of wood. He was chewing meat from a chicken bone in one greasy hand and in the other, held loose under the crosspiece, he had the biggest sword Beck had ever seen, shoulder-high maybe from point to pommel, its sheath scuffed as a beggar’s boot but the wire on its hilt glinting with the colours of the fire-pit. He sucked the last shred of meat off his bone with a noisy slurp, and he poked at all the drawn steel with the pommel of his sword, long grip clattering against all those blades. ‘Tell me you lot weren’t working up to a fight without me. You know how much I love killing folk. I shouldn’t, but a man has to stick to what he’s good at. So how’s this for a recipe…’ He worked the bone around between finger and thumb, then flicked it at Tenways so it bounced off his chain mail coat. ‘You go back to fucking sheep and I’ll fill the graves.’ Tenways licked his bloody top lip. ‘My fight ain’t with you, Whirrun.’ And it all came together. Beck had heard songs enough about Whirrun of Bligh, and even hummed a few himself as he fought his way through the logpile. Cracknut Whirrun. How he’d been given the Father of Swords. How he’d killed his five brothers. How he’d hunted the Shimbul Wolf in the endless winter of the utmost North, held a pass against the countless Shanka with only two boys and a woman for company, bested the sorcerer Daroum-ap-Yaught in a battle of wits and bound him to a rock for the eagles. How he’d done all the tasks worthy of a hero in the valleys, and so come south to seek his destiny on the battlefield. Songs to make the blood run hot, and cold too. Might be his was the hardest name in the whole North these days, and standing right there in front of Beck, close enough to lay a hand on. Though that probably weren’t a good idea. ‘Your fight ain’t with me?’ Whirrun glanced about like he was looking for who it might be with. ‘You sure? Fights are twisty little bastards, you draw steel it’s always hard to say where they’ll lead you. You drew on Calder, but when you drew on Calder you drew on Curnden Craw, and when you drew on Craw you drew on me, and Jolly Yon Cumber, and Wonderful there, and Flood – though he’s gone for a wee, I think, and also this lad here whose name I’ve forgotten.’ Sticking his thumb over his shoulder at Beck. ‘You should’ve seen it coming. No excuse for it, a proper War Chief fumbling about in the dark like you’ve nothing in your head but shit. So my fight ain’t with you either, Brodd Tenways, but I’ll still kill you if it’s called for, and add your name to my songs, and I’ll still laugh afterwards. So?’ ‘So what?’ ‘So shall I draw?

It's time to get healed. It's time to confess. Falling for the bait doesn't make you the worst person in the world. You were snared. You were hooked. But you don't have to stay that way. Now is the time to deal with the shackles that keep you enslaved. Today you can leave the prison that sexual immorality has created from your past mistakes. Hear your Father's voice call out to you above the noisy clamor of our culture. He says, "I love you. You're free to go now. Sexual sin has no hold on you.

I will say it again," said Dumbledore as the phoenix rose into the air and resettled itself upon the perch beside the door. "You have shown bravery beyond anything I could have expected of you tonight. Harry. You have shown bravery equal to those who died fighting Voldemort at the height of his powers. You have shouldered a grown wizard's burden and found yourself equal to it - and you have now given us all we have a right to expect. You will come with me to the hospital wing. I do not want you returning to the dormitory tonight. A Sleeping Potion, and some peace . . . Sirius, would you like to stay with him?" Sirius nodded and stood up. He transformed back into the great black dog and walked with Harry and Dumbledore out of the office, accompanying them down a flight of stairs to the hospital wing. When Dumbledore pushed open the door. Harry saw Mrs. Weasley, Bill, Ron, and Hermione grouped around a harassed-looking Madam Pomfrey. They appeared to be demanding to know where Harry was and what had happened to him. All of them whipped around as Harry, Dumbledore, and the black dog entered, and Mrs. Weasley let out a kind of muffled scream. "Harry! Oh Harry!" She started to hurry toward him, but Dumbledore moved between them. "Molly," he said, holding up a hand, "please listen to me for a moment. Harry has been through a terrible ordeal tonight. He has just had to relive it for me.What he needs now is sleep, and peace, and quiet. If he would like you all to stay with him," he added, looking around at Ron, Hermione, and Bill too, "you may do so. But I do not want you questioning him until he is ready to answer, and certainly not this evening." Mrs. Weasley nodded. She was very white. She rounded on Ron, Hermione, and Bill as though they were being noisy, and hissed, "Did you hear? He needs quiet!

You’re like tourists in Oslo who haven’t bothered to study a word of Norwegian. How can you expect anyone to care what you have to say?

Her hand just above my knee, the palm flat and soft against my jeans and her index finger making slow, lazy circles that crept toward the inside of my thigh, and with one layer between us, God I wanted her. And lying there, amid the tall, still grass and beneath the star-drunk sky, listening to the just-this-side-of-inaudible sound of her rhythmic breathing and the noisy silence of the bullfrogs, the grasshoppers, the distant cars rushing endlessly on 1-65, I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words. And I steeled myself to say them as I stared up at that starriest night, convinced myself that she felt it, too, that her hand so alive and vivid against my leg was more than playful, and fuck Lara and fuck Jake because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that and my lips parted to speak and before I could even begin to breathe out the words, she said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth.

agreed with George, and suggested that we should seek out some retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes—some half-forgotten nook, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world—some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint.

You live in a world of noise,' Nora says. 'Your work is noisy. Your home life with three kids is noisy. God speaks to us best in silence, in nooks and crannies when we're willing to ignore the cacophony.

I know how scary or intimidating it can be to disconnect, to walk in the opposite direction of all that bright, shiny, noisy distraction. I have faced that fear again and again as I have answered my own call to stillness. But no matter the size of aversion or fear, you must trust me when I say that all that will matter, all that will ever amount to anything, is the relationship you have with the world you carry around inside of you.

In the Carolinas they say "hill people" are different from "flatlands people," and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I'm inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I'd been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community ... and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice -- which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels' noisy showboating, but -- compared to their flatlands cousins -- much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse.

Q: What would you like to tell people? I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.

So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the ratling and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Phrensy are the vapours which rise from the lower Faculties, so the Chaos of the Streets reaches up even to the very Closet here and I am whirl'd about by cries of Knives to Grind and Here are your Mouse-Traps. I was last night about to enter the Shaddowe of Rest when a Watch-man, half-drunken, thumps at the Door with his Past Three-a-clock and his Rainy Wet Morning. And when at length I slipp'd into Sleep I had no sooner forgot my present Distemper than I was plunged into a worse: I dreamd my self to be lying in a small place under ground, like unto a Grave, and my Body was all broken while others sung. And there was a Face that did so terrifie me that I had like to have expired in my Dream. Well, I will say no more.

Then I met you, young, ardent, happy, and I tried to make you the man I had longed for in my noisy solitude. What I loved in you was not the man who was, but the man who was going to be. You do not accept the position, you reject it as unworthy of you; you are an ordinary lover. Do like the others; pay me, and say no more about it.

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. Luke 2:19 Mary focused on caring for her baby while she stored all she’d seen and done “like a secret treasure in her heart” (NIrV). Some women like to talk their way through experiences; others prefer the Mary approach: “weighing and pondering” (AMP), “mulling them over” (CJB), and “trying to understand them” (ERV). Sometimes the Lord does such a profound work in us and through us that sharing it with others would sound like bragging. Even if we say, “Look what God has done,” others may perceive it as “Look what I’ve done” or “Look how special I am!” God, as always, knows best. The shepherds were noisy, yet the mother of Jesus was quiet.

I wiped my face with my napkin. “What made you want to become an actor?” I was sure he was going to tell me something pompous like he was born to play the role. Or that he wanted to get all the woman. So I waited. “Me.” He bit his lip, but his eyes didn’t meet mine. “I got sick of failing and being told I would never amount to shit back home my entire life.” I rubbed the back of my neck. This wasn’t what I expected to hear. “I’ve fucked up royally and I have been fucked royally.” There was a tightness in his eyes, the emotion crawled up his entire body. “And no I don’t want your pity.” I fidgeted in my chair. I didn’t know what to say. “I understand.” Our eyes met, and for a split second Carter looked as if he was considering believing me. He blew out a noisy breath of air. “The fuck you do.

Henri Nouwen wonderfully describes the practices of silence, solitude and fasting. Within a world of words, silence allows us to hear the voice of God and ultimately gives us a liberating word for others. Solitude, as Nouwen says, is “the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter.”[5] Solitude is the place where we stand alone, naked before a holy God, and learn to accept his grace and love, which set us free. Finally, fasting allows us to enter into the sufferings of Christ and walk closer with God. As Eddie Gibbs says, “The Church in the West has got to learn to suffer. We love Easter, but we don’t like Good Friday.”[6] Fasting gives a needed break to our digestive organs and sharpens our spiritual senses. As we engage in the three practices of silence, solitude and fasting, we can overcome a noisy, overwhelming, frenzied life and connect with the heart of God. Here we find love and liberation for all, responding to the suffering and captivity in the world.

To the casual observer it may have looked like I was living a life of indolence, compared to the noisy industry with which the city to the north was ripping itself to pieces. It was true that, after a brief but regrettable entanglement with Higher Learning, I had fairly much confined my activities to the house and its environs. The simple fact of it was that I was happy there, and as I didn’t have any skills to speak of, or gifts to impart, I didn’t see why I ought to burden the world with my presence. It was not true, however, to say that I did nothing.

The editor further extols the advantages arising from the study of Homer, it making the youthful students acquainted with the earliest periods of Greek history, the manners and customs of the people, and he ends by quoting from Herbart: "Boys must first get acquainted with the noisy market-place of Ithaca and then be led to the Athens of Miltiades and Themistokles." With equal truth the American can say that the child whose patriotism is kindled by the Homeric fire will the more gladly respond to the ideals set forth in the history of a Columbus or a Washington. MARY E. BURT. PART

Michael Singer And the reason it becomes a spiritual experience is because you’ve realized you are causing the vast majority of your own problems, due to your mental reactions. So as life unfolds on a daily basis, you have the right to choose not to do that. You can still go to work, you still take care of the kids, you just lean away from this mess that the mind is doing to amplify and overemphasize or overexaggerate whatever’s going on. Oprah: And then what do we do? Lean into what that awareness is saying? Michael: What will happen is when you let go of the noisy mind, you will end up in a seat of quiet, because that’s what it is back there: quiet. Oprah: Is stillness, stillness. Michael: And my experience is that now you can look at reality and you will know what to do. Oprah: Yes. I think what we’re all ultimately seeking, even when we don’t know it, when I would ask people on the show for years, “What do you want?” everybody would say they want happiness. But aren’t we all ultimately seeking freedom? Michael: Yes. We’re seeking a state of absolute well-being, and that’s what freedom means. Right? Oprah: That’s what it means. Yeah! Michael: And what’s beautiful, is the true freedom is freedom from yourself, not freedom for yourself.

When Steve Jobs was a kid, his neighbor showed him a rock tumbler—a can that spun on a motor. The neighbor asked Steve to gather up some ordinary rocks from the yard. He took the stones, threw them into the can, added some grit, turned on the motor, and, over the racket, asked Steve to come back two days later. When Steve returned to the noisy clatter of the garage, the neighbor turned off the contraption and Steve was astounded to see how the ordinary rocks had become beautiful polished stones. Steve would later say that when a team debated, both the ideas and the people came out more beautiful—results well worth all the friction and noise.5 Your job as a boss is to turn on that “rock tumbler.

Here we’ll describe four signs that you have to disengage from your autonomous efforts and seek connection. Each of these emotions is a different form of hunger for connection—that is, they’re all different ways of feeling lonely: When you have been gaslit. When you’re asking yourself, “Am I crazy, or is there something completely unacceptable happening right now?” turn to someone who can relate; let them give you the reality check that yes, the gaslights are flickering. When you feel “not enough.” No individual can meet all the needs of the world. Humans are not built to do big things alone. We are built to do them together. When you experience the empty-handed feeling that you are just one person, unable to meet all the demands the world makes on you, helpless in the face of the endless, yawning need you see around you, recognize that emotion for what it is: a form of loneliness. ... When you’re sad. In the animated film Inside Out, the emotions in the head of a tween girl, Riley, struggle to cope with the exigencies of growing up.... When you are boiling with rage. Rage has a special place in women’s lives and a special role in the Bubble of Love. More, even, than sadness, many of us have been taught to swallow our rage, hide it even from ourselves. We have been taught to fear rage—our own, as well as others’—because its power can be used as a weapon. Can be. A chef’s knife can be used as a weapon. And it can help you prepare a feast. It’s all in how you use it. We don’t want to hurt anyone, and rage is indeed very, very powerful. Bring your rage into the Bubble with your loved ones’ permission, and complete the stress response cycle with them. If your Bubble is a rugby team, you can leverage your rage in a match or practice. If your Bubble is a knitting circle, you might need to get creative. Use your body. Jump up and down, get noisy, release all that energy, share it with others. “Yes!” say the people in your Bubble. “That was some bullshit you dealt with!” Rage gives you strength and energy and the urge to fight, and sharing that energy in the Bubble changes it from something potentially dangerous to something safe and potentially transformative.

CREEP Other people have written about war. About how one plane sweeps over and the whole place is ablaze in minutes. About how a young man may kill another young many with perfect legality. I prefer to write about less sudden things. About how we inch further away without even noticing. And then it's too late. Or is it? No it's not too late to say sorry, we were wrong, let's try again to get along. No, it's not too late to quit lying, halt the greed, stop polluting air earth and seas. I prefer to write about less noisy things. About change happening so gradually that one day you just accept the world as different. And you don't question because you're old, and you don't feel like making waves, and anyway, they'd say you were insane.......

To sit in Meditation is not the only method of practising Zazen. "We practise Dhyana in sitting, in standing, and in walking," says one of the Japanese Zenists. Lin Tsi (Rin-Zai) also says: "To concentrate one's mind, or to dislike noisy places, and seek only for stillness, is the characteristic of heterodox Dhyana." It is easy to keep self-possession in a place of tranquillity, yet it is by no means easy to keep mind undisturbed amid the bivouac of actual life. It is true Dhyana that makes our mind sunny while the storms of strife rage around us. It is true Dhyana that secures the harmony of heart, while the surges of struggle toss us violently. It is true Dhyana that makes us bloom and smile, while the winter of life covets us with frost and snow. "Idle

Seconds turn into minutes and minutes into hours. It is all still the same. Or it no longer is. If I were to ask what has changed, perhaps nothing, but conceivably everything would be the befitting reply. I no longer feel the same. Loss preceded me, alienating my soul from the body. I feel I am gliding through an alley making a journey from the known towards the unknown. There is a deep abyss inside where sometime back, my heart used to beat and a noisy, rusty old machine has replaced my mind; solitarily creating useless noise. I don’t remember what day it is and since when have I been lying here. It must have been yesterday… or was it day before. I cannot recollect anything except the dull throbbing pain inside my brain. I can see the time, almost 9: 45, difficult to say which time of the day it is. The bigger hand is soon going to overshadow the smaller hand. It looks like a game of cat and mouse; the bigger hand chasing the smaller one. Anyone stronger in terms of physical appearance, money, power, fame or name tramples upon the weak ones - that is the rule of the world. There are only two possible reasons behind it, love or hate. When you love someone you want to control everything that person does and hence, sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly you squash them like melons. While on the other hand in the case of hate, there is no need to specify the reason for walking over someone like that. Hate is a strong reason in itself. I am confused as to what crushed me, was it love or hate? I somehow don’t like the sound of it – love, it in itself smells of treachery, for love is not a pure emotion. Lust and hatred are the only pure emotions. Love is camouflaged, for needs and desires. Desires – they are magical in their own way. They can be innocent. They can be monstrous. But they exist, no matter what, and many such needs and desires make us helpless slaves of the same. We hide these desires either in the realms of our mind or in the dusty corners of our hearts for we are scared…what if someone finds out what we desire. We give them identities so as to not let the real thing show. The only thing visible on the front is a mask we wear to deceive people or that’s what I thought. For I was deceived while I believed I am the deceiver. Or was I not? I debated as my mind once again tried to enter a sleep-induced trance.

Soph?” Valentine’s voice called softly from the corridor. A moment later, a knock sounded on the door, and a moment after that, Val pushed the door open. Slowly—slowly enough she might have hastened to an innocent posture if she’d been, say, kissing the breath out of her guest. “Is the prodigy asleep yet?” “You were a prodigy,” she said, rising from the hearth. “Though now you’re just prodigiously bothersome. Lord Sindal was coming by to collect Kit for a night among you fellows.” “We fellows?” Val’s brows crashed down. “We fellows took turns the livelong freezing day, carrying that malodorous, noisy, drooling little bundle of joy inside our very coats. You should be missing him so badly you can’t let him out of your sight for at least a week of nights.” “Ignore your brother, my lady.” Vim rose off the hearth, and to Sophie’s eyes, looked very tall as he glared at Valentine. “We will be pleased to enjoy My Lord Baby’s company for the night, won’t we, Lord Valentine?” Valentine was not a stupid man, though he could be as pigheaded as any Windham male. Marriage was apparently having a salubrious effect on his manners, though. “If Sophie says I’ll be pleased to spend the night with that dratted baby, then pleased I shall be. Coming, Sindal?” And then, then, Vim kissed her. On the forehead, his eyes open and staring at Valentine the entire lingering moment of the kiss. “Sleep well, Sophie. We’ll take good care of Kit.” He lifted the cradle and departed. Sophie pushed the nappies at Valentine, ignored her brother’s puzzled, concerned, and curious looks, and pointed at the door without saying one more word. ***

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard — and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings — and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on — lived to have six children more — to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features — so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief — at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities — her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid — by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinner; so, at eight years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs. Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine's life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character! — for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.

I had the grace to say that he flattered me but let it lie when he answered that I was too modest—even though I’m not handsome now and wasn’t then and modesty has never been one of my vices. “But Noisy thought all the girls were beautiful, too—and in one case this may have been true and certainly several of them were pretty. “But he asked me what had become of Olga and added, ‘Golly, what a little beauty she was!’ “Kinfolk, Olga wasn’t even homely, she was ugly. Face like a mud pie, figure like a gunnysack—only on an outpost like Mars could she get by. What she did have was a warm and gentle voice and a sweet personality—which was enough, as a customer might pick her through Hobson’s choice on a busy night, but once he had done so, he picked her some later time on purpose. Mean to say, dears, beauty will lure a man into bed, but it won’t bring him back a second time, unless he’s awfully young or very stupid.

Her hand just above my knee, the palm flat and soft against my jeans and her index finger making slow, lazy circles that crept toward the inside of my thigh, and with one layer between us, God I wanted her. And lying there, amid the tall, still grass and beneath the star-drunk sky, listening to the just-this-side-of-inaudible sound of her rhythmic breathing and the noisy silence of the bullfrogs, the grasshoppers, the distant cars rushing endlessly on I-65, I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words. And I steeled myself to say them as I stared up at that starriest night, convinced myself that she felt it, too, that her hand so alive and vivid against my leg was more than playful, and fuck Lara and fuck Jake because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that and my lips parted to speak and before I could even begin to breathe out the words, she said, “It’s not life or death, the labyrinth.” “Um, okay. So what is it?” “Suffering,” she said. “Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. Bolívar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?” “What’s wrong?” I asked. And I felt the absence of her hand on me. “Nothing’s wrong. But there’s always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there’s a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.” I turned to her. “Oh, so maybe Dr. Hyde’s class isn’t total bullshit.” And both of us lying on our sides, she smiled, our noses almost touching, my unblinking eyes on hers, her face blushing from the wine, and I opened my mouth again but this time not to speak, and she reached up and put a finger to my lips and said, “Shh. Shh. Don’t ruin it.

Marvin thought of his bowel movements as BMs, a phrase he'd heard an army doctor mutter once. His BMs were turning against him, turning violent in a way. He and Eleanor went through the Dolomites and across Austria and nipped into the northwest corner of Hungary and the stuff came crashing out of him, noisy and remarkably dark. But mainly it was the smell that disturbed him. He was afraid Eleanor would notice. He realized this was probably a normal part of every early marriage, smelling the other's smell, getting it over and done with so you can move ahead with your lives, have children, buy a little house, remember everybody's birthday, take a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway, get sick and die. But in this case the husband had to take extreme precautions because the odor was shameful, it was intense and deeply personal and seemed to say something awful about the bearer. His smell was a secret he had to keep from his wife.

Dog Talk … I have seen Ben place his nose meticulously into the shallow dampness of a deer’s hoofprint and shut his eyes as if listening. But it is smell he is listening to. The wild, high music of smell, that we know so little about. Tonight Ben charges up the yard; Bear follows. They run into the field and are gone. A soft wind, like a belt of silk, wraps the house. I follow them to the end of the field where I hear the long-eared owl, at wood’s edge, in one of the tall pines. All night the owl will sit there inventing his catty racket, except when he opens pale wings and drifts moth-like over the grass. I have seen both dogs look up as the bird floats by, and I suppose the field mouse hears it too, in the pebble of his tiny heart. Though I hear nothing. Bear is small and white with a curly tail. He was meant to be idle and pretty but learned instead to love the world, and to romp roughly with the big dogs. The brotherliness of the two, Ben and Bear, increases with each year. They have their separate habits, their own favorite sleeping places, for example, yet each worries without letup if the other is missing. They both bark rapturously and in support of each other. They both sneeze to express plea- sure, and yawn in humorous admittance of embarrassment. In the car, when we are getting close to home and the smell of the ocean begins to surround them, they both sit bolt upright and hum. With what vigor and intention to please himself the little white dog flings himself into every puddle on the muddy road. Somethings are unchangeably wild, others are stolid tame. The tiger is wild, the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. The wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds. Ben is devoted, he hates the door between us, is afraid of separation. But he had, for a number of years, a dog friend to whom he was also loyal. Every day they and a few others gathered into a noisy gang, and some of their games were bloody. Dog is docile, and then forgets. Dog promises then forgets. Voices call him. Wolf faces appear in dreams. He finds himself running over incredible lush or barren stretches of land, nothing any of us has ever seen. Deep in the dream, his paws twitch, his lip lifts. The dreaming dog leaps through the underbrush, enters the earth through a narrow tunnel, and is home. The dog wakes and the disturbance in his eyes when you say his name is a recognizable cloud. How glad he is to see you, and he sneezes a little to tell you so. But ah! the falling-back, fading dream where he was almost there again, in the pure, rocky weather-ruled beginning. Where he was almost wild again, and knew nothing else but that life, no other possibility. A world of trees and dogs and the white moon, the nest, the breast, the heart-warming milk! The thick-mantled ferocity at the end of the tunnel, known as father, a warrior he himself would grow to be. …

People with hearing loss are hard to live with. For one thing, they’re always telling you how to talk to them. Here are some tips. • Look at them when you speak—almost all hearing-impaired people read lips. Don’t lean into their ear when you talk—they need to see your lips. • Speak in a normal voice and articulate as clearly as possible. Shouting won’t help. Sylvia, the character in Nina Raine’s play Tribes who is going deaf, describes the efforts of the well-intentioned but badly informed: “People yelling in your ear however much you explain, so you literally have to grab their face and stick it in front of you.” • If the hearing-impaired person says “What?” or “Sorry?” don’t simply repeat what you’ve just said. Rephrase it. • If they don’t hear what you’ve said after you’ve repeated it two or three times, don’t say, “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.” To the person who can’t hear it, everything matters. • If you’re in a room with a bright window or bright lights, allow the hearing-impaired person to sit with their back to the light (for lipreading). • Most hearing-impaired people will have a very hard time distinguishing speech over a noisy air conditioner, a humming fish tank, a fan, or anything that whirs or murmurs or rumbles. Don’t try to talk to them when the TV is on, and turn off the background music when they come to visit. • Don’t talk to a hearing-impaired person unless you have their full attention. A hearing-impaired person can’t cook and hear at the same time, no matter how collegial it may seem to join her in the kitchen. • If you’re part of a small group, speak one at a time. At a dinner party or book group, where there may be eight or ten people present, try to have one general conversation, instead of several overlapping small ones. • If you’re at an event—a performance or a church service or a big meeting—give the hearing-impaired person a few moments after the event is over to readjust their hearing—either mentally or manually (changing the program on a hearing aid, for instance). • Never lean into a hearing-impaired person’s ear and whisper in the middle of a performance. They can’t hear you!

In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were.

Suddenly, a loud popping and banging shattered the quiet. Almost hidden in a cloud of dust, a car roared along the road below us. Cattle lumbered to their feet, horses raised their heads and galloped away, a flock of chickens scattered in all directions. Hannah gasped. “Oh, my Lord, it’s John Larkin in his father’s motorcar. If he catches me looking like this, he’ll think I’m a common hoyden.” Her bare foot plunged toward me. The tree swayed violently, my head swam. Afraid to move, I clung to a branch. “For heaven’s sake, Andrew, hurry. He’ll be here any moment!” With Hannah pushing me, I slid from limb to limb, down, down, faster and faster. By the time I hit the ground, my legs were shaking so hard I could barley stand. Without so much as a thought for me, Hannah grabbed her shoes and ran across the lawn. Her feet were bare, her shirtwaist untucked, her skirt dusty. Twigs and leaves clung to her hair. As quick as she was, the Model T was quicker. Pursued by Buster, it rolled to a noisy stop under a tree. Without pausing to say hello, Hannah darted past John, scurried up the steps, and vanished into the house.

Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring-ring. “Hello, yes? Yes, that’s right. Yes. You’ll ’ave to speak up, there’s an awful lot of noise in ’ere. What? “No, I only do the bar in the evenings. It’s Yvonne who does lunch, and Jim he’s the landlord. No, I wasn’t on. What? “You’ll have to speak up. “What? No, don’t know nothing about no raffle. What? “No, don’t know nothing about it. ’Old on, I’ll call Jim.” The barmaid put her hand over the receiver and called over the noisy bar. “ ’Ere, Jim, bloke on the phone says something about he’s won a raffle. He keeps on saying it’s ticket 37 and he’s won.” “No, there was a guy in the pub here won,” shouted back the barman. “He says ’ave we got the ticket.” “Well, how can he think he’s won if he hasn’t even got a ticket?” “Jim says ’ow can you think you’ve won if you ’aven’t even got the ticket. What?” She put her hand over the receiver again. “Jim, ’e keeps effing at me. Says there’s a number on the ticket.” “ ’Course there was a number on the ticket, it was a bloody raffle ticket, wasn’t it?” “ ’E says ’e means it’s a telephone number on the ticket.” “Put the phone down and serve the bloody customers, will you?

the opposite— He notices it. In Revelation 3:19 Jesus says, “Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline.” God knows that if our sinful choices do not have consequences, they will destroy us. Because He loves us and doesn’t want that to happen to us, He brings about consequences in our life that cause us to learn from our mistakes. The “acceptance” I’m talking about is for those things that are part of our children’s personal makeup. These are the unique things that make them individuals—the emotional, intellectual, and physical DNA. These are also the things that have no moral problems affixed to them. Many of our kids do things that annoy, frustrate, or embarrass us, but they are not wrong. Every time we point these things out, we tell them that they don’t measure up. This builds a foundation of insecurity in them. Boys are often berated because they are noisy, messy, or aggressive. Girls are often criticized for being too emotional, picky, or overly sensitive. Some kids are criticized for being slow, forgetful, or inquisitive, or for saying whatever pops into their heads. They have a hard time getting up, struggle in certain subjects in school,

Separately they surveyed their individual plates, trying to decide which item was most likely to be edible. They arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment; both of them picked up a strip of bacon and bit into it. Noisy crunching and cracking sounds ensued-like those of a large tree breaking in half and falling. Carefully avoiding each other’s eyes, they continued crunching away until they’d both eaten all the bacon on their plates. That finished, Elizabeth summoned her courage and took a dainty bite of egg. The egg tasted like tough, salted wrapping paper, but Elizabeth chewed manfully on it, her stomach churning with humiliation and a lump of tears starting to swell in her throat. She expected some scathing comment at any moment from her companion, and the more politely he continued eating, the more she wished he’d revert to his usual unpleasant self so that she’d at least have the defense of anger. Lately everything that happened to her was humiliating, and her pride and confidence were in tatters. Leaving the egg unfinished, she put down her fork and tried the biscuit. After several seconds of attempting to break a piece off with her fingers she picked up her knife and sawed away at it. A brown piece finally broke loose; she lifted it to her mouth and bit-but it was so tough her teeth only made grooves on the surface. Across the table she felt Ian’s eyes on her, and the urge to weep doubled. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked in a suffocated little voice. “Yes, thank you.” Relieved to have a moment to compose herself, Elizabeth arose and went to the stove, but her eyes blurred with tears as she blindly filled a mug with freshly brewed coffee. She brought it over to him, then sat down again. Sliding a glance at the defeated girl sitting with her head bent and her hands folded in her lap, Ian felt a compulsive urge to either laugh or comfort her, but since chewing was requiring such an effort, he couldn’t do either. Swallowing the last piece of egg, he finally managed to say, “That was…er…quite filling.” Thinking perhaps he hadn’t found it so bad as she had, Elizabeth hesitantly raised her eyes to his. “I haven’t had a great deal of experience with cooking,” she admitted in a small voice. She watched him take a mouthful of coffee, saw his eyes widen with shock-and he began to chew the coffee. Elizabeth lurched to her feet, squired her shoulders, and said hoarsely, “I always take a stroll after breakfast. Excuse me.” Still chewing, Ian watched her flee from the house, then he gratefully got rid of the mouthful of coffee grounds.

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas—the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation. I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV. They watch TV and see how we live here in the West. They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash. I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

Did the countess tell you what was said between her and me?” Lillian asked tentatively. Marcus shook his head, his mouth twisting. “She told me that you had decided to elope with St. Vincent.” “Elope?” Lillian repeated in shock. “As if I deliberately… as if I had chosen him over—” She stopped, aghast, as she imagined how he must have felt. Although she had not shed a single tear during the entire day, the thought that Marcus might have wondered for a split second if yet another woman had left him for St. Vincent… it was too much to bear. She burst into noisy sobs, startling herself as well as Marcus. “You didn’t believe it, did you? My God, please say you didn’t!” “Of course I didn’t.” He stared at her in astonishment, and hastily reached for a table napkin to wipe at the stream of tears on her face. “No, no, don’t cry—” “I love you, Marcus.” Taking the napkin from him, Lillian blew her nose noisily and continued to weep as she spoke. “I love you. I don’t mind if I’m the first one to say it, nor even if I’m the only one. I just want you to know how very much—” “I love you too,” he said huskily. “I love you too. Lillian… Please don’t cry. It’s killing me. Don’t.” She nodded and blew into the linen folds again, her complexion turning mottled, her eyes swelling, her nose running freely. It appeared, however, that there was something wrong with Marcus’s vision. Grasping her head in his hands, he pressed a hard kiss to her mouth and said hoarsely, “You’re so beautiful.” The statement, though undoubtedly sincere, caused her to giggle through her last hiccupping sobs. Wrapping his arms around her in an embrace that was just short of crushing, Marcus asked in a muffled voice, “My love, hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s bad form to laugh at a man when he’s declaring himself?” She blew her nose with a last inelegant snort. “I’m a hopeless case, I’m afraid. Do you still want to marry me?” “Yes. Now.” The statement shocked her out of her tears. “What?” “I don’t want to return with you to Hampshire. I want to take you to Gretna Green. The inn has its own coach service— I’ll hire one in the morning, and we’ll reach Scotland the day after tomorrow.” “But… but everyone will expect a respectable church wedding…” “I can’t wait for you. I don’t give a damn about respectability.” A wobbly grin spread across Lillian’s face as she thought of how many people would be astonished to hear such a statement from him. “It smacks of scandal, you know. The Earl of Westcliff rushing off for an anvil wedding in Gretna Green…” “Let’s begin with a scandal, then.” He kissed her, and she responded with a low moan, clinging and arching against him, until he pushed his tongue deeper, molding his lips tighter over hers, feasting on the warm, open silkiness of her mouth. Breathing heavily, he dragged his lips to her quivering throat. “Say, ‘Yes, Marcus,’” he prompted. “Yes, Marcus.

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century. The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service’s 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third—49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio—is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.

Just as we perceive the outside world on the basis of sensory signals met with a top-down flow of perceptual expectations and predictions, the same applies to perceptions of the internal state of the body. The brain has to know what the internal state of the body is like. It doesn’t have direct access to it, even though both the brain and body happen to be wrapped within a single layer of skin. As with perception of the outside world, all the brain gets from the inside of the body are noisy, ambiguous electrical signals. Therefore it has to bring to bear predictions and expectations in order to make sense of the barrage of sensory signals coming from inside the body, in just the same way as for vision and all the other “classic” senses. And this is what’s collectively called interoception—perception of the body from within. The same computational principles apply. In this view, we can think of emotional conscious experiences, feeling states, in the framework of “interoceptive inference.” So emotions become predictions—“best guesses”—about the hidden causes of interoceptive signals, in the same way that experiences of the outside world are constituted by predictions of the causes of sensory signals. This gives a nice computational and mechanistic gloss to old theories of emotion that originated with William James and Karl Lange—that emotion has to do with perception of physiological change in the body and by the subsequent cognitive “appraisal” of these changes. The predictive-processing view adds to these theories by saying that emotional experience is the joint content of predictions about the causes of interoceptive signals at all levels of abstraction.

Kay lived in a house full of Robertson boys and men, and I’m still not sure how she survived. There were Phil, me, and my three brothers, and there were usually a couple of our friends hanging around. But Kay has a lot of patience and has always been very funny-I think that’s where I get my sense of humor-and she has a mechanism for turning anything into fun. I’m not sure Phil has ever really understood her humor. Jase and Phil are a lot more serious and have a much more dry sense of humor, so Kay and I are always making fun of them and have our inside jokes about them. Sometimes, Kay and I will be in the kitchen laughing together, and Phil will walk in and tell us we’re being too noisy. He’ll be trying to watch the late news and will say, “Hey, Saturday Night Live is over.” Every time Phil walks out of the room, I’ll make a face at him, almost behind his back. Phil says he doesn’t even know how to laugh, while Kay is always jovial and constantly has a big smile on her face. You know what they say about how opposites attract. Korie: The thing that has impressed me most about Kay is that she really rarely gets truly aggravated or mad at Phil and the boys. She knows how to not sweat the small stuff. She’s been through a lot in her and Phil’s marriage, and I think it taught her that most things are really not worth getting mad at. She has a really fun side to her. Willie and Jep are always putting food down her back, grabbing her from behind, or throwing something into her hair, and I’m sure it got pretty old about twenty years ago. At some point, most people would be like, “Okay, enough already.” But Kay laughs every time. She doesn’t take herself very seriously, which I think is one of the most important qualities for enjoying life and one I have made sure to try to pass on to our children.

I just lay on the mountain Meadowside in the moonlight, head to grass, and heard the silent recognition of my temporary woes. Yes, so to try to attain to Nirvana when you're already there, to the top of a mountain when you're already there and only have to stay -thus to stay in the nirvana bliss is all I have to do, you have to do, no effort no path really no discipline but just to know that all is empty and awake , a vision and a movie in God's universal mind(Alya-Vijnana) and to stay more or less wisely in that. Because silence itself is the sound of diamonds which can cut through anything the sound of holy emptiness the sound of extinction and bliss, that graveyard silence which is like the silence of an infant's smile the sound of eternity, of the blessedness surely to be believed the sound of nothing ever happened Except God(Which I'd soon hear in a noisy Atlantic tempest) What exists is god in his emanation, what does not exist is god in his peaceful neutrality, what neither exist nor does not exist is god's immortal primordial dawn of father sky9this world this very minute). So, I said stay in that no dimensions here to any of the mountain s or mosquitos and whole milky ways of worlds Because sensation is emptiness old age is emptiness. T's only the golden eternity of gods mind so practice kindness and sympathy remember that men are not responsible in themselves as men for their ignorance and unkindness, they should be pitied, God does pity it, because who says anything about anything since everything is just what it is, free of interpretations. God is not the attainer, he is the farer in that which everything is the abider one caterpillar, a thousand hairs of God. So, know constantly that this is only, you ,God ,empty and awake and eternally free as the unnumerable atoms of emptiness everywhere.

Mike sounded dismissive of Western communication styles, but he admitted that he sometimes wished he could be noisy and uninhibited himself. “They’re more comfortable with their own character,” he said of his Caucasian classmates. Asians are “not uncomfortable with who they are, but are uncomfortable with expressing who they are. In a group, there’s always that pressure to be outgoing. When they don’t live up to it, you can see it in their faces.” Mike told me about a freshman icebreaking event he’d participated in, a scavenger hunt in San Francisco that was supposed to encourage students to step out of their comfort zones. Mike was the only Asian assigned to a rowdy group, some of whom streaked naked down a San Francisco street and cross-dressed in a local department store during the hunt. One girl went to a Victoria’s Secret display and stripped down to her underwear. As Mike recounted these details, I thought he was going to tell me that his group had been over the top, inappropriate. But he wasn’t critical of the other students. He was critical of himself. “When people do things like that, there’s a moment where I feel uncomfortable with it. It shows my own limits. Sometimes I feel like they’re better than I am.” Mike was getting similar messages from his professors. A few weeks after the orientation event, his freshman adviser—a professor at Stanford’s medical school—invited a group of students to her house. Mike hoped to make a good impression, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. The other students seemed to have no problem joking around and asking intelligent questions. “Mike, you were so loud today,” the professor teased him when finally he said good-bye. “You just blew me away.” He left her house feeling bad about himself. “People who don’t talk are seen as weak or lacking,” he concluded ruefully.

He swore, raked his hands through his hair and tried to pinpoint the moment she'd so neatly turned the tables on him, when the pursued had become the pursuer. "I don't like forward women." The sound she made was something between a snort and a giggle, and was girlish and full of fun. It made him want to grin. "Now that's a lie, and you don't do it well. I've noticed you're an honest sort of man, Brian. When you don't want to speak your mind, you say nothing-and that's not often. I like that about you,even if it did irritate me initially.I even like your slightly overwide streak of confidence. I admire your patience and dedication to the horses, your undertstanding and affection for them. I've never been involved with a man who's shared that interest with me." "You've never been involved with a man at all." "Exactly.That's just one reason why. And to continue, I appreciate the kindness you showed my mother when she was sad,and I appreciate the part of you that's struggling to back away right now instead of taking what I've never offered anyone before." She laid a hand on his arm as he stared at her with baffled frustration. "If I didn't have that respect and that liking for you,Brian,we wouldn't be having this conversation no matter how attracted I might be to you." "Sex complicates things, Keeley." "I know." "How would you know? You've never had any." She gave his arm a quick squeeze. "Good point.So,you want to try the tack room?" When his mouth fell open, she laughed and threw her arms around him for a noisy kiss on his cheek. "Just kidding.Let's go up to the main house and have some dinnre instead." "i've work yet." She drew back. She couldn't read his eyes now. "Brian, neither of us have eaten. We can have a simple meal in the kitchen-and if you're worried, we won't be alone in the house so I'll have to keep my hands off you. Temporarily.

In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon… soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered - look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes - or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors - the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit - well, son, your possibilities, as unrealised as the erections of your penis - in a moment - soon - will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered - not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us.

If they hadn't found me, I'd be dead now. Harry stuck his wand up its nose and Ron knocked it out with its own club. They didn't have time to come and fetch anyone. It was about to finish me off when they arrived." Harry and Ron tried to look as though this story wasn't news to them. "Well- in that case..." said Professor McGonagall, staring at the three of them, "Miss Granger, you foolish girl, how could you think of tackling a mountain troll on your own?" Hermione hung her head. Harry was speechless. Hermione was the last person to do anything against the rules, and here she was, pretending she had, to get them out of trouble. It was as if Snape had started handing out sweets. "Miss Granger, five points will be taken from Gryffindor for this," said Professor McGonagall. "I'm very disappointed in you. If you're not hurt at all, you'd better get off to Gryffindor tower. Students are finishing the feast in their houses." Hermione left. Professor McGonagall turned to Harry and Ron. "Well, I still say you were lucky, but not many first years could have taken on a full-grown mountain troll. You each win Gryffindor five points. Professor Dumbledore will be informed of this. You may go." They hurried out of the chamber and didn't speak at all until they had climbed two floors up. It was a relief to be away from the smell of the troll, quite apart from anything else. "We should have gotten more than ten points," Ron grumbled. "Five, you mean, once she's taken off Hermione's." "Good of her to get us out of trouble like that," Ron admitted. "Mind you, we did save her." "She might not have needed saving if we hadn't locked the thing in with her," Harry reminded him. They had reached the portrait of the Fat Lady. "Pig snout," they said and entered. The common room was packed and noisy. Everyone was eating the food that had been sent up. Hermione, however, stood alone by the door, waiting for them. There was a very embarrassed pause. Then, none of them looking at each other, they all said "Thanks," and hurried off to get plates. But from that moment on, Hermione Granger became their friend. There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.

In My Prayer. My silent niche. You incarnate in my prayer. Dawn is all dancing like a rainbow in your smile. Anxious to uncover dreams after morning. The desire to arrange sparkly beads in your hair. Reduce heartbeat, please at the tips of your fingers. I will pray together with night just to keep remembering you. A never ending memory to always say your name. Silence that leads to longing for the rising of light. Horizon knocked on all the gates, which grabbed a reprehensible body, who hesitated to stop at the tip of the tongue. Lips murmuring, stringing questions hung at the end of time. The self that is always broken and dishonest, who is kufr and who is infidel. All beings submit to the most holy feet. Let silence accept everything that is magical. Although the reflection of the moon's face is filled with wounds with lies in our mouths, betrayed by lust and unstoppable desires. May you soon incarnate so that a million flowers bloom in the heart of the most cursory. The eyes are altered, betraying a million flashes of light from the darkest night. The most beautiful gems are buried in mud puddles. Even though the sky is still dark. Heavy rain that is redder than all blood. Which surpassed the fangs of the old snake. The endless cycle of the sun throws puzzles about the mysteries of the universe that are never answered. The beginning of all this sorrow in myself. If only you please, transform into a butterfly in my prayer tonight. A pair of wings that burned like a fire of longing in my heart. Who suddenly fidgeted and flew into your eyes. Then descend on the branch of the Khuldi tree, before breaking into my tears. Suppose tonight, in my prayer, you incarnate like a thunderous storm. Like the sound of noisy thunder. The footsteps stepped hurriedly on the foggy road. Infiltrate the gaps of our thoughts and feelings. Shackle our arms, knees and breath. If only, in my prayer tonight you will be transformed into murky tears. Who trembled, even though it would patiently take care of my sadness. The pain that somehow healed my soul. Beliefs that keep mysteries for my deepest secrets, which you endlessly hum, in order to be a comfort for my sad life. My dear. Lady of my heart. My love. My soul. Bless me with all your generosity. With your mercy, with your endless love. With your infinite anger.

No Big Deal or the End of the World? Here’s something that should be obvious: People don’t like to have their grievances downplayed or dismissed. When that happens, even the smallest irritation can turn into an obsessive crusade. Imagine you’re staying at a hotel, and the air-conditioning isn’t working right. You call the front desk to mention it, and they say, oh yeah, they know about that, and someone is going to come fix that next week (after you’ve left). In the meantime, could you just open a window (down to that noisy, busy street)? Not a word of apology, no tone of contrition. Now what was a mild annoyance—that it’s 74F degrees when you like to sleep at 69F—is suddenly the end of the world! You swell with righteous fury, swear you’ll write a letter to management, and savage the hotel in your online review. Jean-Louis Gassée, who used to run Apple France, describes this situation as the choice between two tokens. When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says “It’s no big deal” or the token that says “It’s the end of the world.” Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other. The hotel staff in the example above clearly took the “It’s no big deal” token and as a result forced you to take the “It’s the end of the world” token. But they could just as well have made the opposite choice. Imagine the staff answering something like this: “We’re so sorry. That’s clearly unacceptable! I can completely understand how it must be almost impossible to sleep when it’s so hot in your room. If I can’t fix this problem for you tonight, would you like me to refund your stay and help you find a different hotel room nearby? In any case, while we’re figuring out the solution, allow me to send up a bottle of ice water and some ice cream. We’re terribly sorry for this ordeal and we’ll do everything to make it right.” With an answer like that, you’re almost forced to pick the “It’s no big deal” token. Yeah, sure, some water and ice cream would be great! Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either. And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn. Keep that in mind the next time you take a token. Which one are you leaving for the customer?

This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of the wrong people,” said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. “And, before it gets back on the right track,” said Jones, “some heads are going to roll.” I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. “You’re completely crazy,” he said. Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information— That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony— That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase— That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers— That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia— That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I’ve seen in my time. And for me to attempt such a mechanical explanation is perhaps a reflection of the father whose son I was. Am. When I pause to think about it, which is rarely, I am, after all, the son of an engineer. Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself—will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows—some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history— But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.” Howard W. Campbell, Jr., praises himself. There’s life in the old boy yet! And, where there’s life— There is life.

Often the most effective statement we can make in a noisy world is to say nothing at all. Don't waste your words over something or to someone who deserves silence.

Sound. No matter how great a movie looks, if the audience can’t understand what the actors are saying, they’ll get frustrated and lose interest quickly. I know when I see a low-budget movie and the sound is crummy, I shut it off. The less money you have, the less you’ll probably budget for postproduction sound, so what you get during the shoot becomes even more important. Don’t scrimp here. If your production sound is good enough, you won’t need a lot of ADR (additional dialogue recording), which most of the time you need because there’s a flaw in the production sound, or an airplane was overhead and you couldn’t get a clean take. Your sound person should scout your locations. If you’re going to be shooting on a weekday and you visit on a weekend, make sure that there isn’t a noisy garage next door that’s only open Monday to Friday. Sometimes you do ADR because you want to change the performance. That’s fine, but I can usually tell when an actor has been looped, and I hate it, and so do many directors. Some actors are hopelessly bad at it—they’re never able to dub themselves in a convincing way. The best reason to use ADR is when you want to fill in a scene where lots of people are talking at once.

And where jazz music was concerned, there was a saying, Segodnia on igraet dzhaz, a zavtra rodinu prodast: Today you play jazz, tomorrow you betray the motherland.” Igor,

Imagine sitting in your car with the engine running. You notice the noise of the engine and, not understanding that the noise comes from the engine, you decide to leave this noisy place and find some peace. As you drive away, the noise seems to follow you, so you drive faster, desperately trying to escape it as you become more and more frantic. You continue to drive around for some time before, in desperation, you ask a peaceful-looking person on the side of the road how you can escape this noisy place. The person smiles knowingly and says, "Have you thought about turning the car off?'' You consider this for a moment before asking, "But how would I be able to escape from the noise if I turned the car off? I''d be stuck here." The stranger laughs and tells you to try it anyway, you can always turn the car back on if necessary. This makes sense so you do as the stranger suggests. Turning the key back the other way, a deafening silence erupts as the engine cuts out. You laugh at your foolishness, thank the stranger and continue living your life.

You of all boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasise? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.’ ‘But still, the Fire of Life … it is just a fairy tale,’ insisted Dog the bear and Bear the dog, together. Nobodaddy drew himself up indignantly. ‘Do I look,’ he demanded, ‘like a fairy to you? Do I resemble, perhaps, an elf? Do gossamer wings sprout from my shoulders? Do you see even a trace of pixie dust? I tell you now that the Fire of Life is as real as I am, and that only that Unquenchable Blaze will do what you all wish done. It will turn bear into Man and dog into Dog-Man, and it will also be the End of Me. Luka! You little murderer! Your eyes light up at the very thought! How thrilling! I am amongst assassins! What are we waiting for, then? Are we starting now? Let’s be off! Tick, tock! There is no time to lose!’ At this point Luka’s feet began to feel as if somebody was gently tickling their soles. Then the silver sun rose above the horizon, and something quite unprecedented began to happen to the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood that wasn’t Luka’s real neighbourhood, or not quite. Why was the sun silver, for one thing? And why was everything too brightly coloured, too smelly, too noisy? The sweetmeats on the street vendor’s barrow at the corner looked like they might taste odd, too. The fact that Luka was able to look at the street vendor’s barrow at all was a part of the strange situation, because the barrow was always positioned at the crossroads, just out of sight of his house, and yet here it was, right in front of him, with those oddly coloured, oddly tasting sweetmeats all over it, and those oddly coloured, oddly buzzing flies buzzing oddly all around it. How was this possible? Luka wondered. After all, he hadn’t moved a step, and there was the street vendor asleep under the barrow, so the barrow obviously hadn’t moved either; and how did the crossroads arrive as well, um, that was to say, how had he arrived at the crossroads?

They are programming people,” Harris says. “There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true—” “Technology is not neutral?” Cooper interrupts. “It’s not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.

Earlier I noted that we seem to have stumbled backward into a digital life we didn’t sign up for. As I’ll argue next, it’s probably more accurate to say that we were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps.

How spacious are these squares, How resonant bridges and stark! Heavy, peaceful, and starless Is the covering of the dark. And we walk on the fresh snow As if we were mortal people. That we are together this hour Unseparable -- is it not a miracle? The knees go unwittingly weaker It seems there's no air -- so long! You are my life's only blessing, You are the sun of my song. Now the dark buildings are stirring And I'll fall on earth as they shake -- Inside of my village garden I do not fear to awake. Escape "My dear, if we could only Reach all the way to the seas" "Be quiet" and descended the stairs Losing breath and looking for keys. Past the buildings, where sometime We danced and had fun and drank wine Past the white columns of Senate Where it's dark, dark again. "What are you doing, you madman!" "No, I am only in love with thee! This evening is wide and noisy, Ship will have lots of fun at the sea!" Horror tightly clutches the throat, Shuttle took us at dusk on our turn. The tough smell of ocean tightrope Inside trembling nostrils did burn. "Say, you most probably know: I don't sleep? Thus in sleep it can be" Only oars splashed in measured manner Over Nieva's waves heavy. And the black sky began to get lighter, Someone called from the bridge to us, As with both hands I was clutching On my chest the rim of the cross. On your arms, as I lost all my power, Like a little girl you carried me, That on deck of a yacht alabaster Incorruptible day's light we'd meet.

To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The disease called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem straining to keep things in rather than to let things out. For the kings of finance speechlessness is counted a way of being strong, though it should rather be counted a way of being sly. By this time the Parliament does not parley any more than the Speaker speaks. Even the newspaper editors and proprietors are more despotic and dangerous by what they do not utter than by what they do. We have all heard the expression "golden silence." The expression "brazen silence" is the only adequate phrase for our editors. If we wake out of this throttled, gaping, and wordless nightmare, we must awake with a yell. The Revolution that releases England from the fixed falsity of its present position will be not less noisy than other revolutions. It will contain, I fear, a great deal of that rude accomplishment described among little boys as "calling names"; but that will not matter much so long as they are the right names. THE

AND SO THE SUN HAS GONE AWAY, HE’S LEFT US ALL FOR ANOTHER DAY. NOW THE MOON HAS COME OUT INSTEAD, HE’S SMILING STARDUST ON YOUR HEAD! “THAT DUST IS FILLED WITH LOVELY DREAMS OF PUPPIES AND GIFTS AND CUSTARD CREAMS, A GREAT BIG NOISY BIRTHDAY BASH, AND BUCKETS AND BUCKETS OF LOVELY CASH. VISITS FROM FRIENDS FROM FAR AWAY, COME TO SHARE A MOST WONDERFUL DAY, OR MAYBE YOU’LL DREAM THAT YOU CAN FLY, SOARING THROUGH THE CLOUDS IN THE BLUEST SKY! SO RUSH TO BED IF YOU’RE NOT YET IN! YOU’LL FALL ASLEEP WITH A MASSIVE GRIN. YOU’LL BE HAPPY AS YOU DREAM THE NIGHT AWAY, THEN WE’LL SAY HELLO TOMORROW FOR A BRIGHT NEW DAY!

Just a few days before, Jason had been part of the noisy street- scape, trying to talk to his aunt Joyce back in Shakopee, Minnesota. To avoid the blaring traffic and techno music, he’d ducked into a quiet construction site, phone pressed against his ear, eyes on his shoes. That was when a hard punch connected with his cheekbone. The phone went flying. Probably the worst text I’ve ever gotten was the one line, Jason’s been mugged. Accounting it later, he would say his military training must have kicked in. “Before I could think about it, I’d kicked the legs out from under one of the guys.” And that was when he said it. Jason uttered a phrase so outrageous, so utterly shameless, it can be used only once per life- time, and until then stored in a special box sternly labeled, In case of emergency, break glass. “It’s terrible; it’s right out of a Steven Seagal direct-to-VHS movie,” he admitted, as I coaxed the story out of him again. “Well, I mustered up my army drill sergeant voice and I barked, ‘Motherf*cker! You want a piece of me?’” Jason claims the second it came out of his mouth, he was already embarrassed. Embarrassed in front of what turned out to be teen boys, kids really, who clearly didn’t speak English. They ran off with his phone and Jason found his way back to Brian’s hospital room with a headache, a purple contusion, and a strong will to get his brother well—and the hell out of Asia.

Do you want to go out with me?” he asks. He looks surprised by his own question, and I assume he wants to take it back. But he doesn’t. He just looks at me expectantly. “Define out?” I say. He grins. “You and me on a date.” He doesn’t have a car, and he just got out of prison. A date might be kind of difficult. But I can’t say that. I’ll hurt his feelings. “What kind of date?” I ask instead. “The kind where you and I spend some time together,” he says with a shrug. “We’re doing that now,” I inform him. “Well, damn,” he sings. “You’re right.” He looks around at the horses. “Next time, remind me to take you someplace nicer.” I laugh. He smiles at me. “That’s a beautiful sound,” he says quietly. I look at Tequila and pat her behind. “Did you pass gas, girl?” I ask. I grin at him. “Sorry, but she can be kind of noisy.” He smiles and rubs his chin. I bet it’s scratchy under his fingertips, and if I were another person, I would want to touch it to find out. “And she’s funny, too,” he says under his breath.

It took several seconds for Jonah to remember what he’d been saying. “Well, we ran some tests. Turns out he was loaded out of his mind on meth. The hardest part was that he told us they had the equipment to do the alien removal in their basement, but it was noisy and disturbed the neighbors. So his brother told him to come to the hospital to get it done. We were wondering if the brother was drugged out too, but when we called his house he admitted that he’d just gone along with the whole alien thing to get the guy to the hospital.” “Smart brother.

I do doubt she ever felt so cluttered and noisy and jangled that she put her boot through the ice. As soon as I did it, I could just hear her saying in alarm, “Well. My stars!” But there are days I do feel that way, and I am beginning to know that it is because I hold on. I fight. I resist. It doesn’t even matter what I resist; there is simply something in me that tends to resist things as they are. I have been fighting since I was very small. And I believe that my addiction was a response, in some measure, to the fact that the fight was futile, and I could not tolerate that fact. I couldn’t tolerate the fact that I did not control the world. I could not, or would not, learn to accept it.

Once, in grade school, our class was taken on an overnight excursion to a campground. The air was warm: we had a campfire and ate hot dogs; and as darkness fell, we were herded down to the lake. There were perhaps thirty children, so I suppose there were at least four or five adults. We trooped through the woods with flashlights. There must have been yelling and singing, the grown-ups chattering. A noisy expedition. At the shore of the lake we were presented, as if on a stage, with a doubled moon -- one floating in the clear dark sky, one in the clear dark calm of the water. Were there exclamations, shouts of amazement, loud giggle praise for this sight? There might have been, but for me there was only silence. An unprecedented silence, tranquil and immense. Silence, and the moon on the lake -- a sight so pure I nearly staggered under its impact. I knew, without the words to say it, that the lack in my life of what this moon and lake represented was the other side of the coin of happiness. Not unhappiness, but shame, which was possibly the same thing, and which then rose up in me in nauseating waves.

They were the only members of their family, and they were both humble, crushed, and thrust aside by life; they were united in sadness and tenderness by a bond of mutual pity and common suffering, borne in secret. With the Kraffts—robust, noisy, brutal, solidly built for living, and living joyously—these two weak, kindly creatures, out of their setting, so to speak, outside life, understood and pitied each other without ever saying anything about it.

Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn’t an “exactly when.” It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha’s case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Seneca says: ‘if we are situated in the midst of a noisy city, let there be a preceptor at our side to contradict those who laud vast incomes and to praise instead the man who is wealthy on little and who measures wealth by how it is used.

The Spring Has Many Silences - 1901-1991 The spring has many sounds: Roller skates grind the pavement to noisy dust. Birds chop the still air into small melodies. The wind forgets to be the weather for a time And whispers old advice for summer. The sea stretches itself And gently creaks and cracks its bones…. The spring has many silences: Buds are mysteriously unbound With a discreet significance, And buds say nothing. There are things that even the wind will not betray. Earth puts her finger to her lips And muffles there her quiet, quick activity…. Do not wonder at me That I am hushed This April night beside you. The spring has many silences.

What is true is that India is an artificial state—a state that was created by a government, not a people. A state created from the top down, not the bottom up. The majority of India’s citizens will not (to this day) be able to identify her boundaries on a map, or say which language is spoken where or which god is worshiped in what region. Most are too poor and too uneducated to have even an elementary idea of the extent and complexity of their own country. The impoverished, illiterate agrarian majority have no stake in the state. And indeed, why should they, how can they, when they don’t even know what the state is? To them, India is, at best, a noisy slogan that comes around during the elections. Or a montage of people on government TV programs wearing regional costumes and saying “Mera Bharat Mahaan” (My India Is Great).

Develop spatial skills by modeling your school, house, or neighborhood. Learn engineering and design skills by making structural models of Buckminster Fuller’s tetrahedron-based geodesic domes, Snelson’s tensegrity sculptures, and other architectural forms. Teacher Brenda Jackson particularly recommends the modeling of bridges for its multidisciplinary aspects: “In [a] bridge design project,” she says, “a variety of disciplines is involved. Drawing the proposed design, coping with the practical problem of tension, and using calculations and manual skill in making the model, are all parts of the problem. Testing the bridge to destruction, although somewhat noisy, involves learning in a practical way, and the results are often so spectacular that they are unlikely to be quickly forgotten.

Not telling the truth, intentionally or by default, creates an inner cacophony of conflicting noisy vibrations. This is because the body only tells the truth, while the ego brain can say many untrue things, and the collision of these vibrations is intensely dissonant. So much of our inner noise comes from our own regret and frustration for not speaking up, not expressing what we really feel, or not communicating honestly from our heart. This creates such a conflicted frequency that our inner voice is drowned out and we can’t hear it at all. This is perhaps the main reason why so many people have trouble sensing their intuition.

Love and aspirations! Let me take you behind the rainbow, And show you the colours of love, Let me make you wet with my feelings of love, As every droplet of my colourful feelings kisses you behind that rainbow. Let me borrow some colourful mist from the butterfly, And sprinkle it on your soul, Let me love you whole including your soul, As you become the envy of every butterfly. Let me take you to the garden of roses, lavenders and other beautiful flowers, And love you like careless lovers, Let us be those carefree and self indulgent lovers, As I secretly endow you with the beauty of all these flowers. Let us stand at the banks of the noisy rivulet, And flow with its hastiness in one direction, Let you be the sea and I will be the river flowing in this direction, As you and I become the part of the happily and always rushing rivulet. Let me take you to a place where it is always morning, And let the dew fall on your soul and quench you, Let you be the pasture of million grass blades as the dew drops kiss you, As you witness the wave of pleasure engulfing you , then only for you let me be this morning. Let me take you to the distant valley where the shepherdess sings a beautiful song, And you try to be her melody, Let me then be the every note of this melody, As you get drawn towards the mesmerising song. Let me make you sit before my mirror long enough, And fill myself just with your visual imaginations, Let there be no memory left in me except your imaginations, As I love you today Irma may it be till eternity, and yet not enough! Let me feel your bright body and deep eyes, under the sun, And I shall love you in presence of this universe, Let me kiss you , to feel you and to remember you just like this universe, As sometimes under the moonlight I feel you are my warmth and my only sun! Let me love you forever, Although loving is brief but forgetting is an infinite loop of time, So, let me love you Irma till the end of time, Because we were born for each other and to be together forever. Let me now take you to the pinnacle of hopes, dreams and beautiful aspirations, And you decide if you wish to push me into the abyss of nothingness, Let me tell you though, I shall find you even in that nothingness, Because as we both stood in front of the mirror, I hope you remember, my reflection was a representation of your beauty and aspirations!

MIND GAME Name That Loop For the rest of the day, try to “catch” your negative mind loops as they happen. Watch for signs of mental “pain” or friction, which are a good indicator of thought processes that need debugging. Debug each negative thought loop down to its root problem using one of the three techniques: • The Five Whys: Ask “Why?” five times. • Worst-Case Scenario: What’s the worst thing that could happen? • Third-Person Perspective: What would you say if you were hearing this from someone else? At the end of the day, write down each of the “root problems” you uncovered on your practice sheet, preferably using the METAL method. In Part 1 of Mind Hacking, we’ve seen how the mind is a naturally noisy place and how we can cultivate focus and awareness of the mind’s programming through

Perhaps she stood in the street attracted by the crowd, and, as she listened to our Saviour’s talk, it seemed to hold her fast. She had never heard a man speak after that fashion, and when he spoke of abounding mercy, and the willingness of God to accept as many as would come to him, then the tears began to follow each other down her check; and when she listened again to that meek and lowly preacher, and heard him tell of the Father in heaven who would receive prodigals and press them to his loving bosom, then her heart was fairly broken, she relinquished her evil traffic, she became a new woman, desirous of better things, anxious to be freed from sin. But she was greatly agitated in her heart with the question, could she, would she, be really forgiven ? Would such pardoning love as she had heard of reach even to her? She hoped so, and was in a measure comforted. Her faith grew, and with it an ardent love. The Spirit of God still wrought with her till she enjoyed a feeble hope, a gleam of confidence; she believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah , that he had appeared on earth to forgive sins, and she rested on him for the forgiveness of her sins, and longed for an opportunity to do him homage, and if possible to win a word direct from his mouth... and I have already derived such benefit from him that I love him better than all besides; I love him as my own soul... Now, when she came to the door, the Saviour was reclining at his meat, according to the Oriental custom, and his feet were towards the door; for the Pharisee had but little respect for Christ , and had not given him the best and innermost place at the feast ; but there he lay with his uncovered feet towards the door, and the woman, almost unperceived, came close to him, and, as she looked and saw that the Pharisee had refused him the ordinary courtesy of washing his feet, and that they were all stained and travel-worn with Lis long journeys of love, she began to weep, and the tears fell in such plenteous showers that they even washed his feet. Here was holy water of a true sort. The crystal of penitence falling in drops, each one as precious as a diamond. Never were feet bedewed with a more precious water than those penitent eyes showered forth. Then, unbinding those luxurious tresses, which had been for her the devil’s nets in which to entangle souls, she wiped the sacred feet therewith. Surely she thought that her chief adornment, the crown and glory of her womanhood, was all too worthless a thing to do service to the lowest and meanest part of the Son of God. That which once was her vanity now was humbled and yet exalted to the lowest office; she made her eyes a ewer and her locks a towel. “Never,” says bishop Hall, “was any hair so preferred as this ; how I envy those locks that were graced with the touch of those sacred feet.” There a sweet temptation overtook her, “I will even kiss those feet, I will humbly pay reverence to those blessed limbs.” She spake not a word, but how eloquent were her actions ! better even than psalms and hymns were these acts of devotion. Then she bethought her of that alabaster box containing perfumed oil with which, like most Eastern women, she was wont to anoint herself for the pleasure of the smell and for the increase of her beauty, and now, opening it, she pours out the costliest thing she has upon his blessed feet. Not a word, I say, came from her; and, brethren, we would prefer a single speechless lover of Jesus, who acted as she did, to ten thousand noisy talkers who have no gifts, no heart, no tears. As for the Master, he remained quietly acquiescent, saying nothing, but all the while drinking in her love, and letting his poor weary heart find sweet solace in the gratitude of one who once was a sinner, but who was to be such no more.

And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth.

And she gave me victory and kept me from harm like she always has. Did she not?" The patter rises to save me. It tells me to put away the dagger. Smile big, spin out the falsehoods, let him slide an arm around my hips and plant a noisy kiss on my cheek. Wear my spoils, put on my show, spread my legs. Be part and parcel of whatever full measure of vengeance he thinks to carry out. Follow after like a good little pet. See to it that I'm doing all the things he's decided make a place for me with him so no one pays much attention to what he's doing. "No" I say, quiet but steady. "No, she didn't.