Notice Period Quotes

I was ten. I had noticed something was weird earlier in the day, but I knew from commercials that one's menstrual period was a blue liquid that you poured like laundry detergent onto maxi pads to test their absorbency. This wasn't blue, so...I ignored it for a few hours.

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.

There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere.

That’s an unfortunate place for a birthmark,” I said, more than a little unnerved that it was so similarly positioned to my own scar. Patch casually but noticeably slid his sleeve down over his wrist. “You’d prefer it someplace more private?” “I wouldn’t prefer it anywhere.” I wasn’t sure how this sounded and tried again. “I wouldn’t care if you didn’t have it at all.” I tried a third time. “I don’t care about your birthmark, period.

Age makes you notice certain things. For example, I now know that a man’s life is broadly divided into three periods. During the first, it doesn’t even occur to us that one day we will grow old, we don’t think that time passes or that from the day we are born we’re all walking toward a common end. After the first years of youth comes the second period, in which a person becomes aware of the fragility of life and what begins like a simple niggling doubt rises inside you like a flood of uncertainties that will stay with you for the rest of your days. Finally, toward the end of life, the period of acceptance begins, and, consequently, of resignation, a time of waiting.

I was ten years old. I had noticed something was weird earlier in the day but I knew from commercials that one's menstrual period was a blue liquid that you poured like laundry detergent onto maxi pads to test their absorbency. This wasn't blue so...I ignored it for a few hours. When we got home I pulled my mom aside to ask if it was weird I was bleeding in my underpants. She was very sympathetic but also a little baffled. Her eyes said "Dummy didn't you read 'How Shall I Tell My Daughter ". I HAD read it but nowhere in the pamphlet did anyone say that your period was NOT a blue liquid. At that moment two things became clear to me I was now technically a woman and I would never be a doctor.

Adolescence is a dreadful period. We tend to notice those youngsters who misbehave and call attention to themselves, but there are others, equally miserable, who receive no help simply because they are silent. (41)

HOW CAN I TELL IF A MAN I’M SEEING WILL BECOME ABUSIVE? • He speaks disrespectfully about his former partners. • He is disrespectful toward you. • He does favors for you that you don’t want or puts on such a show of generosity that it makes you uncomfortable. • He is controlling. • He is possessive. • Nothing is ever his fault. • He is self-centered. • He abuses drugs or alcohol. • He pressures you for sex. • He gets serious too quickly about the relationship. • He intimidates you when he’s angry. • He has double standards. • He has negative attitudes toward women. • He treats you differently around other people. • He appears to be attracted to vulnerability. No single one of the warning signs above is a sure sign of an abusive man, with the exception of physical intimidation. Many nonabusive men may exhibit a umber of these behaviors to a limited degree. What, then, should a woman do to protect herself from having a relationship turn abusive? Although there is no foolproof solution, the best plan is: 1. Make it clear to him as soon as possible which behaviors or attitudes are unacceptable to you and that you cannot be in a relationship with him if they continue. 2. If it happens again, stop seeing him for a substantial period of time. Don’t keep seeing him with the warning that this time you “really mean it,” because he will probably interpret that to mean that you don’t. 3. If it happens a third time, or if he switches to other behaviors that are warning flags, chances are great that he has an abuse problem. If you give him too many chances, you are likely to regret it later. Finally, be aware that as an abuser begins his slide into abuse, he believes that you are the one who is changing. His perceptions work this way because he feels so justified in his actions that he can’t imagine the problem might be with him. All he notices is that you don’t seem to be living up to his image of the perfect, all-giving, deferential woman.

When I near Charlie’s house, I notice she’s standing in the doorway with a spatula in her hand. Despite being on edge, I can’t stop myself from grinning. I feel like such a chick around her sometimes, like I’m seconds away from buying a tiara and starting my period.

In fact, it often happens that, at the very top of organizations, apparently crucial positions can go unfilled for long periods of time without there being any noticeable effect—even, on the organization itself.

Oh!” This was said brightly, as if she was happy he had noticed. “I decided I needed my own workspace, instead of constantly infringing upon yours. So I had a few of the boys move a desk in here.” He stared at the petite, feminine, desk that was pushed against his. And wondered how the bloody hell she had managed to convince men who were terrified of him to move the desk inside his domain. “Absolutely not.” *** Two hours later, he was still scowling as she happily worked on . . . whatever the hell it was she was working on. Across from him. At her desk. How the hell . . . He remembered saying no. He remembered cursing. Threatening her unborn children. Then there was a sort of hazy period of smiles and calm words. Then she had touched the back of his hand with her naked fingers. And now, here he was with . . . her desk . . . pressed to his—surreptitiously watching her scratch her paper, the tip of her tongue poking from the side of her mouth as she worked.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness.

My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present. In connection with the experiences of awakening, I had noticed that such stages and such areas exist, and that each successive period in one’s life bears within itself, as it is approaching its end, a note of fading and eagerness for death. That in turn leads to a shifting to a new area, to awakening and new beginnings.

The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.

And the years flow past, each of them as unremarkable as the next, as unnoticed as nanoseconds, in fact, not even long enough to contain anything noticeable – centuries just barely registered as moments in space/time. Soon the millennia are passing by at a modest rate of 47 per minute, and of course all manner of things noticeable and not-so-noticeable occur along the way (though most falling into the latter category). Naturally there come periods where lying is greatly rewarded, followed by periods where lying is greatly punished (our poor unlucky editor!), along with every other conceivable and inconceivable reversal and re-reversal of standards, and… Wait, did anyone else just hear God yawn?

the hospital after the diagnosis she formed a sudden and strong intuition: “This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.” The cancer treatment that followed was exhausting and terrible, but Gallagher couldn’t help noticing, in that corner of her brain honed by a career in nonfiction writing, that her commitment to focus on what was good in her life—“movies, walks, and a 6:30 martini”—worked surprisingly well. Her life during this period should have been mired in fear

You are not the pain you feel, nor are you the part that periodically stresses out. None of these disturbances have anything to do with you. You are the one who notices these things. Because your consciousness is separate and aware of these things, you can free yourself. To free yourself of your inner thorns, you simply stop playing with them.

How do you free yourself? In the deepest sense, you free yourself by finding yourself. You are not the pain you feel, nor are you the part that periodically stresses out. None of these disturbances have anything to do with you. You are the one who notices these things. Because your consciousness is separate and aware of these things, you can free yourself. To free yourself of your inner thorns, you simply stop playing with them.

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only. This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord, You promised me Lord, that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?” The Lord replied, “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.

Living is made up of these little things - a day to day business punctuated with things seen, seen best when we weren't looking for them, or things that just happened to us while we were walking "dully along" and that we ought to notice these things. It is very easy to bandage the eyes and tell everyone that life is dull. But I am called odd by these people because I really don't think so. I try to make the day have a THING in it, and it usually does whether I try or not. And that makes the day. Period. But I am purposeless. I am talking of this far too seriously, but it rather hurts when I think that I was once very vulnerable to the charges that come my way. I have tried so damned hard to put a thing as simply as it appeared to me, and tried too damned hard not to let myself blow up a simple happening into a symbol of unrequited love but to leave it as it is. shit.

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

Reading Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, "The Thirties", I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. Hr paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam tricked out of his oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period - twenty years, perhaps - during which he did not notice it.

And as I continued to draw, I noticed more. Like how food rotates between meat and fish. Like how you’re always eating the worst parts of the dish. How all you think of is the well-being of our family. I’m really sorry… I’m sorry… for being a terrible son…

The aim of mindfulness is to know suffering fully. It entails paying calm, unflinching attention to whatever impacts the organism, be it the song of a lark or the scream of a child, the bubbling of a playful idea or a twinge in the lower back. You attend not just to the outward stimuli themselves, but equally to your inward reactions to them. You do not condemn what you see as your failings or applaud what you regard as success. You notice things come, you notice them go. Over time, the practice becomes less a self-conscious exercise in meditation done at fixed periods each day and more a sensibility that infuses one’s awareness at all times.

In general, one's memories of any period must necessarily weaken as one moves away from it. One is constantly learning new facts, and old ones have to drop out to make way for them. At twenty I could have written the history of my schooldays with an accuracy which would be quite impossible now. But it can also happen that one's memories grow sharper after a long lapse of time, because one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed undifferentiated among a mass of others.

Napoleon Hill wrote a famous section in his classic work Think and Grow Rich called “Sexual Transfiguration.” Hill noticed and theorized that extremely successful men also had extremely high sex drives. And not only did they have very high sex drives, but they also channeled this sexual energy into their work and their accomplishments. Often they would abstain from sex or masturbation for long periods of time and would, therefore, feel more energized.

I was bleeding but hoped he wouldn’t notice. I do this sometimes; a game I personally call, I have my period, let’s see if I can hide it! A darkish room and quick condom removal (make it seem like you’re just really nice and thorough, and use baby wipes to take it off) and even quicker moving of towels to cover any spots on the bed take care of this-though more than once I then saw smears on the pillowcase. Dirty! I love it. I want to not, like, ruby-shower heavy bleed on someone, but reach inside myself with a couple fingers and write my name on a dude’s chest with it. C-h-l-o-e. Smiley face.

I do not wish to shine. I prefer shadows, quiet, periods of solitude. I do not wish to be noticed. If one is all but invisible to others, one cannot be envied, inspire anger or suspicion. Near invisibility is a way of life that I recommend.

Certain times of day are especially conducive to focused creativity, thanks to circadian rhythms of arousal and mental alertness. Notice when you seem to have the most energy during the day, and dedicate those valuable periods to your most important creative work. Never book a meeting during this time if you can help it. And don’t waste any of it on administrative work!

This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.

I’m reminded that, often, God allows us to wrestle for long periods of time as we reach out for him. At one of the most painful times of his life, Jesus prayed three times without any noticeable response from God (Matthew 26:39–44). It is as if God is helping us to truly own our pleas, wishes, and desires—to want them deeply, from the heart, rather than casually or offhandedly.

Most changes in perception are gradual: we grow to hate or love an idea, a person, or a place over a period of time. I had certainly nursed a hatred of Nora Jansen over many years, placing much of the blame for my situation on her. This was not one of those instances. Sometimes, rarely, the way we see something is subject to alchemy. My emotions changed so rapidly, and I felt so strongly all the things I had in common with these two women, there was no way not to take immediate notice and stock of what was happening. Our troubled history was suddenly matched by our more immediate shared experience as prisoners on an exhausting journey. We huddled together

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks. … Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again. Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

I left Los Angeles on 3 January and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on 5 January. For me there was no 4 January. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of Earth, it appears I had no being. I find that a little uncanny, to say the least. I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said: ‘Passengers are advised that on some crossings twenty-four-hour loss of existence may occur

Stress-relieving impulses like these had driven most of his actions during the previous year. His intervention on behalf of his patients was a compulsion that had little to do with the patients themselves; often, in fact, he failed to notice the patients at all, only their outcomes. Each spasm of control offered a period of relief and afterglow.

The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice—not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children—but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.” I do. I’ve been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.

To sit in a tree and watch the coming of dawn is a strange thing. As soon as you can see the ground with any detail it seems that you’re twice as high as you thought you were. Tree stumps go through brief periods when they look like people. The root wads of overturned trees look like bears. You can’t tell whether the trail you’re sitting along passes through a large meadow you should have noticed earlier or just a slight opening in the trees that you wouldn’t have noticed earlier. But as the light comes up enough to make out the individual leaves on the ground, you realize that you’re only as high as you thought you were. The stumps go back to being stumps, the root wads back to root wads. The trail begins to look like how you remembered it.

I looked to the sitting room then and gaped at Alec's body lying across my sofa making it look smaller than it was. He was reading something. A book. "What are you readin'?" I curiously asked. "That porn book we were talking about earlier at my house. This dude is my God! He just fucked this Ana chick while she was on her period." "Stop it!" I screeched. "Stop readin' and put the bloody book down!" He was reading Fifty Shades of Grey. I was both horrified and mortified. Alec got up from the sofa, placed the book on the coffee table and turned in my direction. "Why are you blushing?" Him noticing my embarrassment only caused my already red cheeks to heat up even more. "Oh damn, your cheeks are so flushed," Alec said and took a step towards me.

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours—preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.

Here’s the short version of how to practice mindfuless: 1. Start with two minutes. For two minutes a day, direct your attention to your breath: the way the air comes into your body and your chest and belly expand, and the way the breath leaves your body and your chest and belly deflate. 2. The first thing that will happen is your mind will wander to something else. That’s normal. That’s healthy. That’s actually the point. Notice that your mind wandered, let those extraneous thoughts go—you can return to them as soon as the two minutes are up—and allow your attention to return to your breath. 3. Noticing that your mind wandered and then returning your attention to your breath is the real work of mindfulness. It’s not so much about paying attention to your breath as it is about noticing what you’re paying attention to without judgment, and making a choice about whether you want to pay attention to it. What you’re “mindful” of is both your breath and your attention to your breath. By practicing this skill of noticing what you’re paying attention to, you are teaching yourself to be in control of your brain, so that your brain is not in control of you. This regular two-minute practice will gradually result in periodic moments throughout the day when you notice what you’re paying attention to and then decide if that’s what you want to pay attention to right now, or if you want to pay attention to something else. What you pay attention to matters less than how you pay attention. This is a sideways strategy for weeding trauma out of your garden. It’s a way of simply noticing a weed and then deciding if you want to water it or not, pull it or not, fertilize it or not. The weed of trauma will gradually disappear as long as at least half the time you choose not to nurture it. And the more you choose to withdraw your protection from the trauma, the faster it will wither and die. Mindfulness is good for everyone and everything. It is to your mind what exercise and green vegetables are to your body. If you change only one thing in your life as a result of reading this book, make it this daily two-minute practice. The practice grants the opportunity to “cultivate deep respect for emotions,” differentiating their causes from their effects and granting you choice over how you manage them.

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

Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed. They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That’s how things were now. The sidewalk wasn’t quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.

One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: 'Kotex Understands.' In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death - the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly - I'd sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I'd cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands.

Recently, evolutionary psychologist have turned their sights on love and divorce. It didn´t take long to notice that when people fall in love, there´s period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak. The internal signals in the body and breain are literally a love drug. And then it beginds to decline. From this perspective, we are preprogramed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed – which is, on average, about 4 years. In psychologist Helen Fisher´s view, the internally generated love drug love drug is simply an efficient mechanism to get men and women to stick together long enough to increase the survival likehood of their young.

Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something – some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature – has told him it is time to wake up ... At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at any other time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.

The most striking fact is that the United States has become noticeably more inegalitarian than France (and Europe as a whole) from the turn of the twentieth century until now, even though the United States was more egalitarian at the beginning of this period. What makes the US case complex is that the end of the process did not simply mark a return to the situation that had existed at the beginning: US inequality in 2010 is quantitatively as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century,

Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed!—You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her—and before her niece, too—and before others, many of whom (certainly some,) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her.

Consistency is everything to YouTube. If you provide consistent content over a period of time, as long as the quality is good, you will find your audience and your place on the site. You may not end up a viral sensation, but if you’re not making money exclusively off of YouTube, that’s no reason to worry.

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving.

I myself have the ability to do repetitive tasks, or stare into space for long periods of time without feeling the least bit bored. There is always something going on if one looks hard enough. Tiny dramas unfold all around us. Intellectuals like Veronica are oblivious to this, however. They are too busy thinking to notice anything.

the arithmetic makes it plain that inflation is a far more devastating tax than anything that has been enacted by our legislature. The inflation tax has a fantastic ability to simply consume capital. It makes no difference to a widow with her saving in a 5 percent passbook account whether she pays 100 percent income tax on her interest income during a period of zero inflation, or pays no income taxes during years of 5 percent inflation. Either way, she is 'taxed' in a manner that leave her no real income whatsoever. Any money she spends comes right out of capital. She would find outrageous a 120 percent income tax, but doesn't seem to notice that 5 percent inflation is the economic equivalent.

How do you free yourself? In the deepest sense, you free yourself by finding yourself. You are not the pain you feel, nor are you the part that periodically stressed out. None of these disturbances have anything to do with you. You are the one who notices these things. Because your consciousness is separate and aware of these things, you can free yourself.

The living conditions to which every person was thus subjected constantly increased in complexity, without contemporaries particularly noticing it; once again, these conditions called for a greater efficiency in economic output; the foundations of economic activity, which had been laid in the Carolingian period, were now no longer up to the task. Communication

Nietzsche needed no flamboyance, no outward proof of genius, so long as he had his illness. It enabled him to live numberless lifetimes within one. She noticed how his life fell into a general pattern. A regular recurrent decline into sickness always demarcated one period of his life from another. Every illness was a death, a dip down into Hades. Every recuperation was a joyful rebirth, a regeneration. This mode of existence refreshed him. During each fleeting recuperation the world gleamed anew. And so each recuperation became not only his own rebirth, but also the birth of a whole new world, a new set of problems that demanded new answers. It was like the annual fertility cycle of the god being plowed into the ground.

I never got to take you to the prom. You went with Henry Featherstone. And you wore a peach-colored dress.” “How could you possibly know that?” Callie asked. “Because I saw you walk in with him.” “You didn’t know I was alive in high school,” Callie scoffed. “You had algebra first period, across the hall from my trig class. You ate a sack lunch with the same three girls every day, Lou Ann, Becky and Robbie Sue. You spent your free period in the library reading Hemingway and Steinbeck. And you went straight home after school without doing any extracurricular activities, except on Thursdays. For some reason, on Thursdays you showed up at football practice. Why was that, Callie?” Callie was confused. How could Trace possibly know so much about her activities in high school? They hadn’t even met until she showed up at the University of Texas campus. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You haven’t answered my question. Why did you come to football practice on Thursdays?” “Because that was the day I did the grocery shopping, and I didn’t have to be home until later.” “Why were you there, Calllie?” Callie stared into his eyes, afraid to admit the truth. But what difference could it possibly make now? She swallowed hard and said, “I was there to see you.” He gave a sigh of satisfaction. “I hoped that was it. But I never knew for sure.” Callie’s brow furrowed. “You wanted me to notice you?” “I noticed you. Couldn’t you feel my eyes on you? Didn’t you ever sense the force of my boyish lust? I had it bad for you my senior year. I couldn’t walk past you in the hall without needing to hold my books in my lap when I saw down in the next class.” “You’re kidding, right?” Trace chuckled. “I wish I were.” “Then it wasn’t an accident, our meeting like that at UT?” “That’s the miracle of it,” Trace said. “It was entirely by accident. Fate. Kisma. Karma. Whatever you want to call it.

It take it Priss has you tied up in knots?” There wasn’t much point in denying it. And maybe admitting things to Dare would help him get them under control. “I want her.” “No shit. Tell me something I don’t know.” Trace had trusted Dare forever, as a good friend, a partner in business and as an honorable man. He knew Dare had uncanny instincts and deadly skills. But he thought he had covered his reaction to Priss. “Damn.” Trace ran a hand through his hair. “Do you think Molly and Chris picked up on it, too?” After a short sound that might have been a stifled laugh, Dare said, “They’re neither blind, deaf, or stupid. So . . . yeah. I’m betting they noticed.” Trace frowned. With a shake of his head, Dare dismissed his concern. “It’s not a big deal, Trace. Don’t sweat it.” The mild, even amused reaction to his predicament surprised Trace. “She’s off-limits.” “You think so?” Dare looked down at the dappling of sunshine through tree limbs, then back at Trace. “Why’s that?” “What do you mean, why’s that? Hell, Dare, I barely know the woman.” “You knew her well enough to take her picture.” If Dare smiled, he was going to flatten him. Period.

For three decades I have lived within a silence that declares periods too embarrassing, too unwanted, too female to talk about out loud. I have done this for so long that I almost no longer notice it. Almost. Bur now I am sick of the silence and the secrecy and the warped idea that blood is taboo when it comes out of a vagina. Because it is just not fucking good enough. To hell with covering up, with being embarrassed, with being silent.

IT IS NATURAL for us who were not living in those days to imagine that when half Russia had been conquered and the inhabitants were fleeing to distant provinces, and one levy after another was being raised for the defense of the fatherland, all Russians from the greatest to the least were solely engaged in sacrificing themselves, saving their fatherland, or weeping over its downfall. The tales and descriptions of that time without exception speak only of the self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair, grief, and the heroism of the Russians. But it was not really so. It appears so to us because we see only the general historic interest of that time and do not see all the personal human interests that people had. Yet in reality those personal interests of the moment so much transcend the general interests that they always prevent the public interest from being felt or even noticed. Most of the people at that time paid no attention to the general progress of events but were guided only by their private interests, and they were the very people whose activities at that period were most useful. Those who tried to understand the general course of events and to take part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of society, they saw everything upside down, and all they did for the common good turned out to be useless and foolish—

The FBI issued 216 secret, internal threat warnings between January 1 and September 10, 2001, of which 6 mentioned possible attacks against airports or airlines. The State Department issued 9 separate warnings during the same period to embassies and citizens abroad, including 5 that highlighted a general threat to Americans all over the world. The Federal Aviation Administration issued 15 notices of possible terrorist threats against American airlines.19

It seems to me that, side by side with the decline of religious life, the neuroses grow noticeably more frequent. There are as yet no statistics with actual figures to prove this increase. But of one thing I am sure, that everywhere the mental state of European man shows an alarming lack of balance. We are living undeniably in a period of the greatest restlessness, nervous tension, confusion, and disorientation of outlook. Among my patients from many countries, all of them educated persons, there is a considerable number who came to see me not because they were suffering from a neurosis but because they could find no meaning in their lives or were torturing themselves with questions which neither our philosophy nor our religion could answer. Some of them perhaps thought I knew of a magic formula, but I soon had to tell them that I didn’t know the answer either. And this brings us to practical considerations.

By just spending a few minutes in gratitude each day, you'll notice your thoughts start to shift in a remarkably short period of time. Most of us aren't used to practicing gratitude, so the effects are noticeable immediately since you're using a part of your brain that probably hasn't been used much before, at all. As you notice your thoughts shifting, you'll also notice your mood shifting. You'll feel better. Joyous, even. And when you're in that joyous, happy place-that's when the miracles start happening.

At the beginning of a relationship with a covert narcissist, you feel incredibly valued. Then you begin to experience little things, statements they make, looks they give that begin to demean and devalue you. It is all very subtle. Over a long period of time, you are given the message by someone you love and trust that you have no value, no matter what you do, no matter how kind you are, no matter how much you do for them, you will never ever be enough for them. The cold, hard truth is you do not matter to them, and unfortunately, the message you end up receiving is that you do not matter, period. The confusing thing is that while you are being devalued, you are also experiencing kindness. You receive beautiful love letters, affection, and loving gestures. You continue to believe this is a good relationship, and your partner loves you. You tell everyone around you how lucky you are to have the partner you do because you sincerely believe that. Your friends tell you they wish their husband/wife/partner was more like yours. However, though you are saying all of these things, you don’t notice your self-image and self-worth slowly declining over time. Through the years, you notice your health isn’t great, you feel depressed, you aren’t that happy, but you contribute these things to other things in life or blame yourself. The way your CN partner treats you goes unnoticed because it has become your normal. You don’t notice the consistent devaluing because it is so subtle. You don’t realize how you feel is a result of the trauma of living with an abuser.

By the way,” Arabella said, “you might get a call from school. I forgot to mention it before.” Mother paused. “Why?” “Well, we were playing basketball and I guess I pulled on Diego’s jersey. I don’t even remember doing it. And Valerie decided it would be a good idea to snitch on me. I mean, I saw her walk over to the coach and pull on his sleeve like she was five or something. I even asked Diego if he cared, and he said he didn’t even notice. It’s a sport! I was into it.” “Aha,” Mother said. “Get to the call-from-school part.” “I told her that snitches get stitches. And Coach said that I made a terrorist threat.” “That’s stupid,” Lina said, pushing back her dark hair. “It’s not a threat, it’s just a thing people say.” “Snitches do get stitches.” Bern shrugged. “Your school is stupid,” Grandma Frida said. “So he said I had to apologize and I refused, since she snitched on me, so I got sent to the office. I’m not in trouble, but they want to move me to third-period PE now.” Well, it could’ve been worse. At least she didn’t hurt anybody.

Hey, baby,” Chelsea said in a voice that bordered on baby talk as Mike bent down to give her a quick kiss. “Miss me?” Violet almost rolled her eyes. “I thought about you all period,” he answered, his voice husky. “Did you get the note I left in your backpack?” Violet couldn’t hold back any longer; she rolled her eyes. Neither of them noticed. “I did. You’re so sweet.” The cooing verged on sickening. “Did anyone say anything about your mustache?” Mike winced, as if he suddenly remembered the patchy hair on his upper lip. “A coupla’ people,” he reluctantly responded, and Violet suspected that he’d taken his hair share of ribbing over it. Chelsea ignored the obvious distress in his voice. “Vi and I gotta run or we’ll be late.” She stretched up to kiss him and then rubbed her thumb across the hairs above his lip as if she were petting them. “See you after class.” Chelsea tugged at Violet, who was still staring at his unsightly mustache. It was like seeing a car accident…hard to look away. “So do you? Like it, I mean?” Violet asked as she was being dragged down the hallway. “The mustache?” Chelsea grimaced. “God, no. It’s hideous on him.” “Then, why?” “I told you, to see if he’d actually do it. Don’t worry. I’m gonna make him shave it this weekend.” Violet wasn’t sure whether to congratulate her friend on her training abilities or reprimand her for being so cruel. In the end, she didn’t do either, mostly because she knew it wouldn’t make any difference. Chelsea was Chelsea. Trying to convince her that what she’d done was wrong would be like banging your head against a brick wall. It would be painful to you but accomplish nothing.

My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present. In connection with the experiences of awakening, I had noticed that such stages and such areas exist, and that each successive period in one’s life bears within itself, as it is approaching its end, a note of fading and eagerness for death.

I should have identified the out-worn learning of a complacent old gentleman if I had not at last recognised that the man facing me was an old friend, whom my memories had endowed with the continuous vigour of youth which he seemed now completely to lack. I had known him on the threshold of life, he had been my school-fellow and unconsciously, I was regarding him, like myself, as though we were both living in the period of our youth. I heard it said that he looked quite his age and I was surprised to notice some familiar signs of it in his face. Then I realised that, in fact, he was old and that life makes its old men out of adolescents who last many years

Mr. Brock’s account of his adventure in London has given the reader some short notice of his friend, Mr Macshane. Neither the wits nor the principles of that worthy Ensign were particularly firm: for drink, poverty, and a crack on the skull at the battle of Steenkirk had served to injure the former; and the Ensign was not in his best days possessed of any share of the latter. He had really, at one period, held such a rank in the army, but pawned his half-pay for drink and play; and for many years past had lived, one of the hundred thousand miracles of our city, upon nothing that anybody knew of, or of which he himself could give any account. Who has not a catalogue of these men in his list? who can tell whence comes the occasional clean shirt, who supplies the continual means of drunkenness, who wards off the daily-impending starvation? Their life is a wonder from day to day: their breakfast a wonder; their dinner a miracle; their bed an interposition of Providence. If you and I, my dear sir, want a shilling tomorrow, who will give it us? Will OUR butchers give us mutton-chops? will OUR laundresses clothe us in clean linen? — not a bone or a rag. Standing as we do (may it be ever so) somewhat removed from want,[*] is there one of us who does not shudder at the thought of descending into the lists to combat with it, and

And the feel of the Park itself was most strange and interesting - what I noticed most was its separateness; it seemed to be smiling and amiable, but somehow aloof from the miles and miles of London all around. At first I thought this was because it belonged to an older London - Victorian, eighteenth century, earlier than that. And then, as I watched the sheep peacefully nibbling the grass, it came to me that Hyde Park has never belonged to any London - that it has always been, in spirit, a stretch of the countryside; and that it thus links the Londons of all periods together most magically - by remaining forever unchanged at the heart of the ever-changing town.

Peter never cared anything for the words or the deeds of old Parlow…. But Frosted Moses! … he had lived for ever, and people said that he could never die. Peter had heard that he had been in the Ark with Noah, and he had often wished to ask him questions about that interesting period, about Ham, Shem and Japheth, and about the animals. Of course, therefore, he knew everything about Life, and this remark of his about Courage was worth considering. Peter watched him very solemnly and noticed how his white beard shone in the fire-light, how there was a red handkerchief falling out of one enormous pocket, and how there was a big silver ring on one brown and bony finger …

Joanna stared off to the horizon, where periodic flashes of lightning continually backlit a towering cloud bank. “Evidence or no evidence,” she muttered, “I say bring on the rain.” “Don’t let her Highness hear you say that,” Ernie said, nodding toward Fran Daly, who was crouched on all fours next to what remained of the burial mound. “We’re pretty well down to the body now. If it starts to rain before she finishes up, I’m afraid she’ll go nuts.” “She already is nuts,” Joanna said. “But what’s going on? From down where I’ve been standing, I couldn’t see a thing.” “You didn’t notice that Dr. Daly got awfully quiet all of a sudden?” Ernie asked. “Well, I did, but…” “Maybe you’d better come take a look.

He had been married to Lucille then, and I noticed that as time went on Bill talked about that period in his life with increasing gloom, as if in hindsight it had grown darker and more painful than when he was actually living it. Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

It's only second period, and the whole school knows Emma broke up with him. So far, he's collected eight phone numbers, one kiss on the cheek, and one pinch to the back of his jeans. His attempts to talk to Emma between classes are thwarted by a hurricane of teenage females whose main goal seems to be keeping him and his ex-girlfriend separated. When the third period bell rings, Emma has already chosen a seat where she'll be barricaded from him by other students. Throughout class, she pays attention as if the teacher were giving instructions on how to survive a life-threatening catastrophe in the next twenty-four hours. About midway through class, he receives a text from a number he doesn't recognize. If you let me, I can do things to u to make u forget her. As soon as he clears it, another one pops up from a different number. Hit me back if u want to chat. I'll treat u better than E. How did they get my number? Tucking his phone back into his pocket, he hovers over his notebook protectively, as if it's the only thing left that hasn't been invaded. Then he notices the foreign handwriting scribbled on it by a girl named Shena who encircled her name and phone number with a heart. Not throwing it across the room takes almost as much effort as not kissing Emma. At lunch, Emma once again blocks his access to her by sitting between people at a full picnic table outside. He chooses the table directly across from her, but she seems oblivious, absently soaking up the grease from the pizza on her plate until she's got at least fifteen orange napkins in front of her. She won't acknowledge that he's staring at her, waiting to wave her over as soon as she looks up. Ignoring the text message explosion in his vibrating pocket, he opens the contain of tuna fish Rachel packed for him. Forking it violently, he heaves a mound into his mouth, chewing without savoring it. Mark with the Teeth is telling Emma something she thinks is funny, because she covers her mouth with a napkin and giggles. Galen almost launches from his bench when Mark brushes a strand of hair from her face. Now he knows what Rachel meant when she told him to mark his territory early on. But what can he do if his territory is unmarking herself? News of their breakup has spread like an oil spill, and it seems as though Emma is making a huge effort to help it along. With his thumb and index finger, Galen snaps his plastic fork in half as Emma gently wipes Mark's mouth with her napkin. He rolls his eyes as Mark "accidentally" gets another splotch of JELL-O on the corner of his lips. Emma wipes that clean too, smiling like she's tending to a child. It doesn't help that Galen's table is filling up with more of his admirers-touching him, giggling at him, smiling at him for no reason, and distracting him from his fantasy of breaking Mark's pretty jaw. But that would only give Emma a genuine reason to assist the idiot in managing his JELL-O.

And John Nash, my mathematical hero, revolutionized analysis and geometry with the proof of three theorems in scarcely more than five years before succumbing to paranoid schizophrenia. There is a fine line, it is often said, between genius and madness. Neither of these concepts is well defined, however. And in the case not only of Grothendieck but also of Gödel and Nash, periods of mental derangement, so far from promoting mathematical productivity, actually precluded it. Innate versus acquired, a classic debate. Fischer, Grothendieck, Erdős, and Perelman were all Jewish. Of these, Fischer and Erdős were Hungarian. No one who is familiar with the world of science can have failed to notice how many of the most gifted mathematicians and physicists of the twentieth century were Jews, or how many of the greatest geniuses were Hungarian (many

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose.

Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily distracted by what is in front of their eyes. Slowly, over a great period of time, our ancestors overcame this basic animal weakness. By looking long enough at any object and refusing to be distracted—even for a few seconds—they could momentarily detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. In this way they could notice patterns, make generalizations, and think ahead. They had the mental distance to think and reflect, even on the smallest scale. These early humans evolved the ability to detach and think as their primary advantage in the struggle to avoid predators and find food. It connected them to a reality other animals could not access. Thinking on this level was the single greatest turning point in all of evolution—the emergence of the conscious, reasoning mind.

Being in a state referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involves gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually something straight ahead—a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are really not looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it—however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intent concentration.

Why don’t you ever tell me about my real parents? You’re scared they’ll love me more than you do.” “Asha, we’ve already told you,” her mom says in a cracking voice. “We don’t know anything about them. That’s just the way things worked in India back then.” “And why don’t you ever take me to India? Every other Indian kid I know goes all the time. What is it, Dad—are you ashamed of me? I’m not good enough for your family?” Asha stares at her father, looking down at his hands clenched so tightly the knuckles are drained of color. “It’s not fair.” Asha can’t hold back the tears now. “Everyone else knows where they come from, but I have no idea. I don’t know why I have these eyes that everybody always notices. I don’t know how to deal with this damn hair of mine,” she yells, clenching it in her fist. “I don’t know why I can remember every seven-letter Scrabble word, but none of the periodic table. I just want to feel that someone, somewhere, really understands me!

After initial annoyance about the surprise drills, the Pentagon quickly saw value in the president’s interest. “It is the first time in years that they have a president who takes his role as Commander-in-Chief seriously,” a White House aide bragged. “They’re ecstatic.” Amid Vietnam, Watergate, and a relatively calm period of the Cold War in general, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had shown little interest in the emergency procedures, which for the most part had continued to chug along far off the White House’s radar. Carter’s administration, on the other hand, ran the only full-scale activation of the Greenbrier congressional relocation facility—on cue, the Forsythe Associates team hauled hundreds of desks out of their warehouse on the resort grounds and—while the conference facilities were closed to the public—set up the exhibit hall as if Congress had successfully relocated there. Outside the small Forsythe Associates crew, none of the resort guests or staffers noticed. •

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.” He also said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” But we are right now in a period of great vulnerability. As noted earlier, when television became the primary source of information in the United States, the “marketplace of ideas” changed radically. Most communication was in only one direction, with a sharp decline in participatory democracy. During this period of vulnerability for American democracy—while traditional television is still the dominant source of information and before the Internet is sufficiently developed and secured as an independent, neutral medium—there are other steps that can and should be taken to foster more connectivity in our self-government.

In a house, as in a garden, there is a point when over-mingling can occur. At first, when the new plants are dug in, there is too much space between them. They seem artificial, temporary. Then, as they grow, the bed finds a point of balance, the taller trees occupying the upper layers, the sprawling shrubs - the hydrangeas, buddleia, pittosporum - filling out the middle, and the smaller bulbs and ground covers punctuating the under-spaces. Then, without warning, equilibrium is lost. A rampant jasmine covers an adolescent tree; a hydrangea thrives, forcing out a lilly pilly that struggles for light beneath a spreading magnolia. The spaces are subsumed. In the house, there was a period when everyone thrived. Even Heloise had been noticed by Jerome, who was sitting down with her on most days and doing sums and geography, and reading poetry. 'She has real talent,' he said to Helena, over the kitchen bench. She raised an eyebrow ambiguously but didn't comment. Then, slowly, the balance began to slip.

Bless me, readers, for I have published. It's been five years since my last book. Greetings, fellow sinners! If you picked up a copy of this book, it means you are either: 1) wracked with guilt and are looking for penance, or 2) need to spend over $10.00 at the airport newsstand so you can use your credit card. Either way, welcome to Stephen Colbert's Midnight Confessions. As America's foremost TV Catholic, it was natural for me to do a segment inspired by the church. After all, the Catholic Church and late night TV actually have a lot in common: our shows last about an hour, we're obsessed with reaching younger demographics, and the hosts are almost always men. This religious-adjacent tome contains all my favorite confessions from The Late Show. These are things that aren't necessarily sins, but I do feel guilty about them. For instance, repackaging material from the show and selling it in a book. I've always been a big fan of confession. The confessional is a great place to go to relieve yourself of your sins. Unless you're claustrophobic, in which case it's a suffocating death trap of despair! And while most confession books just give you run-of-the-mill mortal sins, I go one step further and provide you with mortal sins, venial sins, deadly sins, and even sins of omission (Notice that the previous sentence didn't have a period!) This book is a throwback to a simpler life when people would go to a priest to confess their sins. As opposed to how it's done now - getting drunk and weeping to Andy Cohen on Bravo. Confessing your sins is a great way to get things off your chest. Second only to waxing. The only downside is that you get introduced to it as a kid, before you have any juicy sins to confess. Oh, you stole a cookie? That's adorable, Becky. Come back when you total your dad's Chevy. Now you might be asking yourself, "What if I'm not Catholic - can I still enjoy this book?" Of course. After all, no matter what religion you are - be it Jewish, Muslim, Lutheran, Pagan, or SoulCycle - we all have things to feel guilty about. For example, not being Catholic.

Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. For I have already argued that the present age is in its presentation of itself dominantly Weberian, and I have also noticed that Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism – irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unresolved and his solutions defy reason – remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture. Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right. So it was was with much student radicalism of the sixties.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

Colby was quietly shocked to find Tate not only at his door the next morning, but smiling. He was expecting an armed assault following their recent telephone conversation. “I’m here with a job offer.” Colby’s dark eyes narrowed. “Does it come with a cyanide capsule?” he asked warily. Tate clapped the other man on the shoulder. “I’m sorry about the way I’ve treated you. I haven’t been thinking straight. I’m obliged to you for telling me the truth about Cecily.” “You know the baby’s yours, I gather?” Tate nodded. “I’m on my way to Tennessee to bring her home,” he replied. Colby’s eyes twinkled. “Does she know this?” “Not yet. I’m saving it for a surprise.” “I imagine you’re the one who’s going to get the surprise,” Colby informed him. “She’s changed a lot in the past few weeks.” “I noticed.” Tate leaned against the wall near the door. “I’ve got a job for you.” “You want me to go to Tennessee?” Colby murmured dryly. “In your dreams, Lane,” Tate returned. “No, not that. I want you to head up my security force for Pierce Hutton while I’m away.” Colby looked around the room. “Maybe I’m hallucinating.” “You and my father,” Tate muttered, shaking his head. “Listen, I’ve changed.” “Into what?” “Pay attention. It’s a good job. You’ll have regular hours. You can learn to sleep without a gun under your pillow. You won’t lose any more arms.” He added thoughtfully, “I’ve been a bad friend. I was jealous of you.” “But why?” Colby wanted to know. “Cecily is special. I look out for her, period. There’s never been a day since I met her when she wasn’t in love with you, or a time when I didn’t know it.” Tate felt warmth spread through his body at the remark. “I’ve given her hell. She may not feel that way, now.” “You can’t kill love,” Colby said heavily. “I know. I’ve tried.” Tate felt sorry for the man. He didn’t know how to put it into words. Colby shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve learned to live with my ghosts, thanks to that psychologist Cecily pushed me into seeing.” He scowled. “She keeps snakes, can you imagine? I used to see mine crawling out of whiskey bottles, but hers are real.” “Maybe she’s allergic to fur,” Tate pointed out. Colby chuckled. “Who knows. When do I start?” he added. “Today.” He produced a mobile phone and dialed a number. “I’m sending Colby Lane over. He’s my relief while I’m away. If you have any problems, report them to him.” He nodded as the person on the other end of the line replied in the affirmative. He closed up the phone. “Okay, here’s what you need to do…

to look around. At first sight, the apartment was perfectly ordinary. He made a quick circuit of the living room, kitchenette, bathroom, and bedroom. The place was tidy enough, but with a few items strewn here and there, the sort of things that might be left lying around by a busy person—a magazine, a half-finished crossword puzzle, a book left open on a night table. Abby had the usual appliances—an old stove and a humming refrigerator, a microwave oven with an unpronounceable brand name, a thirteen-inch TV on a cheap stand, a boom box near a modest collection of CDs. There were clothes in her bedroom closet and silverware, plates, and pots and pans in her kitchen cabinets. He began to wonder if he’d been unduly suspicious. Maybe Abby Hollister was who she said she was, after all. And he’d taken a considerable risk coming here. If he was caught inside her apartment, all his plans for the evening would be scotched. He would end up in a holding cell facing charges that would send him back to prison for parole violation. All because he’d gotten a bug up his ass about some woman he hardly knew, a stranger who didn’t mean anything. He decided he’d better get the hell out. He was retracing his steps through the living room when he glanced at the magazine tossed on the sofa. Something about it seemed wrong. He moved closer and took a better look. It was People, and the cover showed two celebrities whose recent marriage had already ended in divorce. But on the cover the stars were smiling over a caption that read, Love At Last. He picked up the magazine and studied it in the trickle of light through the filmy curtains. The date was September of last year. He put it down and looked at the end tables flanking the sofa. For the first time he noticed a patina of dust on their surfaces. The apartment hadn’t been cleaned in some time. He went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. It seemed well stocked, but when he opened the carton of milk and sniffed, he discovered water inside—which was just as well, since the milk’s expiration period had ended around the time that the People cover story had been new. Water in the milk carton. Out-of-date magazine on the sofa. Dust everywhere, even coating the kitchen counters. Abby didn’t live here. Nobody did. This apartment was a sham, a shell. It was a dummy address, like the dummy corporations his partner had set up when establishing the overseas bank accounts. It could pass inspection if somebody came to visit, assuming the visitor didn’t look too closely, but it wasn’t meant to be used. Now that he thought about it, the apartment was remarkable for what

Can’t you wait for bed?” “I could, but the house is full of people. Why’d you insist my mother had to stay with us in the house? She was perfectly willing to take a cabin.” “First of all, there’s only one cabin empty and it’s hunting season, and second, I’m not going to have your mother stay under a different roof when we have two perfectly good upstairs bedrooms. That would be rude. Besides, we’re married—we’re allowed to have sex in our own house, in our own bed.” He grabbed her perfect behind in two large hands and pulled her against him. “You’re noisy when you come.” Then he swooped down on her mouth and kissed her like a starving man. When his lips were somewhat satisfied he broke away slightly and said, “And before and after.” “No, I’m not,” she argued. “Uh-huh. Then you snore and talk in your sleep.” “Do not.” “And you missed a period.” “You noticed that? It’s just a little late.” “Did you pee on a stick yet?” he asked her. Shelby shook her head. “I think it’s too soon and I don’t want to be disappointed. Besides, it might be coming—I feel weepy and my breasts are a little sore.” “You’re pregnant,” he said. “And I want to do you in the hay. You can scream until the horses stampede.” He grinned at her. “Maybe I can get you more pregnant.” “Luke…I don’t want to go home with hay in my hair…” “I can take care of that problem,” he said.

A chair down the row from mine shifted and my mouth watered from the aroma of hot cinnamon rolls. I snuck a peek and noticed red, silky, curly hair. I knew her. Echo Emerson. Not a cinnamon roll in sight, but damn if she didn’t smell like one. We had several of our main courses together and last semester one of our free periods. I didn’t know much about her other than she kept to herself, she was smart, a redhead and she had big tits. She wore large, long-sleeved shirts that hung off her shoulders and tank tops underneath that revealed just enough to get the fantasies flowing. Like always, she stared straight ahead as if I didn’t exist. Hell, I probably didn’t exist in her mind. People like Echo Emerson irritated the crap out of me. “You’ve got a f*cked-up name,” I mumbled. I didn’t know why I wanted to rattle her, I just did. “Shouldn’t you be getting high in the bathroom?” So she did know me. “They installed security cameras. We do it in the parking lot now.” “My bad.” Her foot rocked frantically back and forth. Good, I’d succeeded in getting under that perfect facade. “Echo … echo … echo …” Her foot stopped rocking and red curls bounced furiously as she turned to face me. “How original. I’ve never heard that before.” She swept up her backpack and left the office. Her tight ass swayed side to side as she marched down the hallway.

Claims were made decades after the campaign by Jérôme and Larrey that Napoleon’s lethargy was the result of his suffering from haemorrhoids which incapacitated him after Ligny.74 ‘My brother, I hear that you suffer from piles,’ Napoleon had written to Jérôme in May 1807. ‘The simplest way to get rid of them is to apply three or four leeches. Since I used this remedy ten years ago, I haven’t been tormented again.’75 But was he in fact tormented? This might be the reason why he spent hardly any time on horseback during the battle of Waterloo – visiting the Grand Battery once at 3 p.m. and riding along the battlefront at 6 p.m. – and why he twice retired to a farmhouse at Rossomme about 1,500 yards behind the lines for short periods.76 He swore at his page, Gudin, for swinging him on to his saddle too violently at Le Caillou in the morning, later apologizing, saying: ‘When you help a man to mount, it’s best done gently.’77 General Auguste Pétiet, who was on Soult’s staff at Waterloo, recalled that His pot-belly was unusually pronounced for a man of forty-five. Furthermore, it was noticeable during this campaign that he remained on horseback much less than in the past. When he dismounted, either to study maps or else to send messages and receive reports, members of his staff would set before him a small deal table and a rough chair made of the same wood, and on this he would remain seated for long periods at a time.78

I noticed that a woman on Goodreads said something like, “I was reading along in the beginning thinking, okay, a woman wrote this, there’s her picture, she’s a white lady, the narrator’s a white lady. And then suddenly she says something and you realize she’s a he. And then a few pages later you realize he’s ‘brown.’ I think the author could have been a little more up front about this.” :) It made me happy because in fact I thought everybody would pick the book up, read the back cover, and know they were dealing with a woman writer speaking through a male narrator. Which is a drag, actually, because if you didn’t know the author was a woman, you’d probably assume that an unmarked first-person narrator was a man, but if you knew she was a woman you’d assume her narrator was too. And if you didn’t know the race of the author, you’d probably assume the narrator was white. That’s pretty insidious, of course - it’s the way sexism and racism work. I’m not saying this woman on Goodreads was racist or sexist, I’m saying the fact that we make these assumptions signals that we live in a world that presumes that an unmarked voice is white and male, and that women and people of color will generally be writing from a limited perspective. I guess that’s obvious. But what I was saying about this comment was that it made me realize something else about ebooks - because I can only assume she read it as an ebook if she didn’t get the back jacket copy that explains who’s narrating. I love books, print books, and my own optimal experience of reading this book would be in print, with short breaks to periodically check out the Internet connections that the narrator’s making. But I do think that decontextualization is an interesting side-effect of the ebook…

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. The problem with a claim of this kind, however, is that one can’t borrow another person’s contemplative tools to test it. To see how the feeling of “I” is a product of thought—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted by thought you tend to be in the first place—you have to build your own contemplative tools. Unfortunately, this leads many people to dismiss the project out of hand: They look inside, notice nothing of interest, and conclude that introspection is a dead end. But just imagine where astronomy would be if, centuries after Galileo, a person were still obliged to build his own telescope before he could even judge whether astronomy was a legitimate field of inquiry. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but astronomy’s development as a science would become immensely more difficult. A few pharmacological shortcuts exist—and I discuss some of them in a later chapter—but generally speaking, we must build our own telescopes to judge the empirical claims of contemplatives. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter; many of them can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy after merely thinking about them. But to determine whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—and to see how these states of mind relate to the conventional sense of self, we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts—as transient appearances in consciousness—and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time. This may sound simple enough, but actually accomplishing it can take a lot of work. Unfortunately, it is not work that the Western intellectual tradition knows much about. LOST

When trying to understand why people acted in a certain way, you might use a short checklist to guide your probing: their knowledge, beliefs and experience, motivation and competing priorities, and their constraints. •​Knowledge. Did the person know something, some fact, that others didn’t? Or was the person missing some knowledge you would take for granted? Devorah was puzzled by the elderly gentleman’s resistance until she discovered that he didn’t know how many books could be stored on an e-book reader. Mitchell knew that his client wasn’t attuned to narcissistic personality disorders and was therefore at a loss to explain her cousin’s actions. Walter Reed’s colleagues relied on the information that mosquitoes needed a two- to three-week incubation period before they could infect people with yellow fever. •​Beliefs and experience. Can you explain the behavior in terms of the person’s beliefs or perceptual skills or the patterns the person used, or judgments of typicality? These are kinds of tacit knowledge—knowledge that hasn’t been reduced to instructions or facts. Mike Riley relied on the patterns he’d seen and his sense of the typical first appearance of a radar blip, so he noticed the anomalous blip that first appeared far off the coastline. Harry Markopolos looked at the trends of Bernie Madoff’s trades and knew they were highly atypical. •​Motivation and competing priorities. Cheryl Cain used our greed for chocolate kisses to get us to fill in our time cards. Dennis wanted the page job more than he needed to prove he was right. My Procter & Gamble sponsors weren’t aware of the way the homemakers juggled the needs for saving money with their concern for keeping their clothes clean and their families happy. •​Constraints. Daniel Boone knew how to ambush the kidnappers because he knew where they would have to cross the river. He knew the constraints they were operating under. Ginger expected the compliance officer to release her from the noncompete clause she’d signed because his company would never release a client list to an outsider.

As the result of some observations I have made in recent years, I propose to add two new and previously undescribed varieties to the various forms of insanity with fixed ideas, whose underlying phenomenology is essentially phobic. The two new terms I would like to put forth, following the nomenclature currently accepted by leading clinicians, are dysmorphophobia and taphephobia. The first condition consists of the sudden appearance and fixation in the consciousness of the idea of one’s own deformity; the individual fears that he has become deformed (dysmorphos) or might become deformed, and experiences at this thought a feeling of an inexpressible disaster… The ideas of being ugly are not, in themselves, morbid; in fact, they occur to many people in perfect mental health, awakening however only the emotions normally felt when this possibility is contemplated. But, when one of these ideas occupies someone’s attention repeatedly on the same day, and aggressively and persistently returns to monopolise his attention, refusing to remit by any conscious effort; and when in particular the emotion accompanying it becomes one of fear, distress, anxiety, and anguish, compelling the individual to modify his behaviour and to act in a pre-determined and fixed way, then the psychological phenomena has gone beyond the bounds of normal, and may validly be considered to have entered the realm of psychopathology. The dysmorphophobic, indeed, is a veritably unhappy individual, who in the midst of his daily affairs, in conversations, while reading, at table, in fact anywhere and at any hour of the day, is suddenly overcome by the fear of some deformity that might have developed in his body without his noticing it. He fears having or developing a compressed, flattened forehead, a ridiculous nose, crooked legs, etc., so that he constantly peers in the mirror, feels his forehead, measures the length of his nose, examines the tiniest defects in his skin, or measures the proportions of his trunk and the straightness of his limbs, and only after a certain period of time, having convinced himself that this has not happened, is able to free himself from the state of pain and anguish the attack put him in. But should no mirror be at hand, or should he be prevented from quieting his doubts in some way or other with rituals or movements of the most outlandish kinds, the way a rhypophobic who cannot get water to wash himself might, the attack does not end very quickly, but may reach a very painful intensity, even to the point of weeping and desperation.

And what is the popular color for gowns this Season?” he asked with a smile when it became necessary to announce himself. She gave a little start, and when she raised her face to look up at him, her cheeks were pink, her eyes wide. She looked, for lack of a better comparison, like a child caught doing something she oughtn’t. “Oh! Hello, Grey.” She glanced away. “Um, blue seems to be very favorable this year.” Arching a brow, he nodded at the periodical in her hand. “Beg pardon. I thought you were reading a ladies’ magazine.” “I am,” she replied with a coy smile. “But fashion is not one of its main areas of interest.” With an expression like hers-very much like the Cheshire cat in that book by Lewis Carroll-he doubted it was an article on housekeeping that put such becoming color in her cheeks. “May I?” he asked, holding out his hand. Her grip on the magazine tightened, reluctant to give it up. “Only if you promise not to tell Mama you saw me reading it.” Oh, this was trouble. Still, it was none of his business what a grown woman of three and twenty read. He was curious, that was all. “I promise.” She hesitated, then put the pages into his hand. Placing his fingers between the thin sheaves to mark her spot, Grey flipped to the cover. Christ on a pony! The magazine looked fairly harmless-the sketch on the front showed a demure young lady in a stylish gown and hat, sitting on a park bench. Only upon closer inspection could one notice that the object of her attention-and rapturous smile-was the young man bathing in the lake just on the edge of the page. He was bare-chested-quite possibly bare everywhere, but that key part of anatomy was carefully hidden with a line of text that read, “Ten ways to keep a gentleman at home-and in bed.” He didn’t want to see what she was reading. He had heard of this magazine before. Voluptuous was a racy publication for women, filled with erotic stories, advice, and articles about sexual relationships, how to conduct oneself to avoid scandal, etc. He could take her to task for reading it, but what would be the point? No doubt the information in it would serve her wisely someday. He gave the magazine back to her. “I have to confess, I’m a little surprised to find you reading such…material.” She shrugged. “I was curious. My parents were so happy in their marriage, so very much the opposite of most of what I’ve heard. If I’m to make a match as good as theirs, I need to know as much as I can about how to have a satisfying marriage.” Grey almost groaned. The image of Rose “satisfying” herself filled his mind with such clarity it was difficult to remember he’d never actually seen such a delightful sight. His body stiffened at the delectable images his mind conjured, and he had to fold his hands in front of him to hide his growing arousal.

Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.

Dr. Sherman VanMeter has made a career of unpacking the densest areas of scientific endeavor in accessible—if not polite—terms. You’ve written books on everything from astrophysics to zoology. How are you able to achieve expertise in so many disparate fields? There’s a perception that scientific disciplines are separate countries, when in fact science is a universal passport. It’s about exploring and thinking critically, not memorization. A question mark, not a period. Can you give me an example? Sure. Kids learn about the solar system by memorizing the names of planets. That’s a period. It’s also scientifically useless, because names have no value. The question mark would be to say instead, “There are hundreds of thousands of sizable bodies orbiting the sun. Which ones are exceptional? What makes them so? Are there similarities? What do they reveal?” But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity? You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions. Sounds more like mysticism than science. How do you draw the line? That’s where the critical thinking comes in. I can see how that applies to the categorization of solar objects. But what about more abstract questions? It works there too. Take love, for example. Artists would tell you that love is a mysterious force. Priests claim it’s a manifestation of the divine. Biochemists, on the other hand, will tell you that love is a feedback loop of dopamine, testosterone, phenylethylamine, norepinephrine, and feel-my-pee-pee. The difference is, we can show our work. So you’re not a romantic, then? We’re who we are as a species because of evolution. And at the essence, evolution is the steady production of increasingly efficient killing machines. Isn’t it more accurate to say “surviving machines”? The two go hand in hand. But the killing is the prime mover; without that, the surviving doesn’t come into play. Kind of a cold way to look at the world, isn’t it? No, it’s actually an optimistic one. There’s a quote I love from the anthropologist Robert Ardrey: “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.” You used that as the epigraph to your new book, God Is an Abnorm. But I noticed you left out the last line, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Why? That’s where Ardrey’s poetic license gets the better of his science, which is a perilous mistake. We aren’t “known among the stars” at all. The sun isn’t pondering human nature, the galaxy isn’t sitting in judgment. The universe doesn’t care about us. We’ve evolved into what we are because humanity’s current model survived and previous iterations didn’t. Simple as that. Why is a little artistic enthusiasm a perilous mistake? Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.

Lieutenant Smith was asked by Mister Zumwald to get him a drink,” Wilkes said. “She responded with physical violence. I counseled her on conduct unbecoming of an officer and, when she reacted with foul language, on disrespect to a superior officer, sir, and I’ll stand by that position. Sir.” “I agree that her actions were unbecoming, Captain,” Steve said, mildly. “She really should have resolved it with less force. Which I told her as well as a strong lecture on respect to a superior officer. On the other hand, Captain, Mister Zumwald physically accosted her, grabbing her arm and, when she protested, called her a bitch. Were you aware of that, Captain?” “She did say something about it, sir,” Wilkes said. “However… ” “I also understand that you spent some time with Mister Zumwald afterwards,” Steve said. “Rather late. Did you at any time express to Mister Zumwald that accosting any woman, much less an officer of… what was it? ‘The United States Naval services’ was unacceptable behavior, Captain?” “Sir,” Wilkes said. “Mister Zumwald is a major Hollywood executive… ” “Was,” Steve said. “Excuse me, sir?” Wilkes said. “Was a major Hollywood executive,” Steve said. “Right now, Ernest Zumwald, Captain, is a fucking refugee off a fucking lifeboat. Period fucking dot. He’s given a few days grace, like most refugees, to get his headspace and timing back, then he can decide if he wants to help out or go in with the sick, lame and lazy. And in this case he’s a fucking refugee who thinks it’s acceptable to accost some unknown chick and tell him to get him a fucking drink. Grab her by the arm and, when she tells him to let go, become verbally abusive. “What makes the situation worse, Captain, is that the person he accosted was not just any passing young hotty but a Marine officer. He did not know that at the time; the Marine officer was dressed much like other women in the compartment. However, he does not have the right to grab any woman in my care by the fucking arm and order them to get him a fucking drink, Captain! Then, to make matters worse, following the incident, Captain, you spent the entire fucking evening getting drunk with a fucktard who had physically and verbally assaulted a female Marine officer! You dumbshit.” “Sir, I… ” Wilkes said, paling. “And not just any Marine officer, oh, no,” Steve said. “Forget that it was the daughter of the Acting LANTFLEET. Forget that it was the daughter of your fucking rating officer, you retard. I’m professional enough to overlook that. I really am. There’s personal and professional, and I do actually know the line. Except that it was, professionally, a disgraceful action on your part, Captain. But not just any Marine officer, Captain. No, this was a Marine officer that, unlike you, is fucking worshipped by your Marines, Captain. This is a Marine officer that the acting Commandant thinks only uses boats so her boots don’t get wet walking from ship to ship. This is a Marine officer who is the only fucking light in the darkness to the entire Squadron, you dumbfuck! “I’d already gotten the scuttlebutt that you were a palace prince pogue who was a cowardly disgrace to the Marine uniform, Captain. I was willing to let that slide because maybe you could run the fucking clearance from the fucking door. But you just pissed off every fucking Marine we’ve got, you idiot. You incredible dumbfuck, moron! “In case you hadn’t noticed, you are getting cold-shouldered by everyone you work with while you were brown-nosing some fucking useless POS who used to ‘be somebody.’ ‘Your’ Marines are spitting on your shadow and that includes your fucking Gunnery Sergeant! Captain, am I getting through to you? Are you even vaguely recognizing how badly you fucked up? Professionally, politically, personally?

PART 1-Introduction I:1 A theoretical foundation such as the text is necessary as a background to make these exercises meaningful. Yet it is the exercises which will make the goal possible. An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth. 2 The exercises are very simple. They do not require more than a few minutes, and it does not matter where or when you do them. They need no preparation. They are numbered, running from 1 to 365. The training period is one year. Do not undertake more than one exercise a day. 3 The purpose of these exercises is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now and the second with the restoration of sight. It is recommended that each exercise be repeated several times a day, preferably in a different place each time and, if possible, in every situation in which you spend any long period of time. The purpose is to train the mind to generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is as applicable to one situation as it is to another. 4 Unless specified to the contrary, the exercise should be practiced with the eyes open, since the aim is to learn how to see. The only rule that should be followed throughout is to practice the exercises with great specificity. Each one applies to every situation in which you find yourself and to everything you see in it. Each day’s exercises are planned around one central idea, the exercises themselves consisting of applying that idea to as many specifics as possible. Be sure that you do not decide that there are some things you see to which the idea for the day is inapplicable. The aim of the exercises will always be to increase the application of the idea to everything. This will not require effort. Only be sure that you make no exceptions in applying the idea. 5 Some of the ideas you will find hard to believe, and others will seem quite startling. It does not matter. You are merely asked to apply them to what you see. You are not asked to judge them nor even to believe them. You are asked only to use them. It is their use which will give them meaning to you and show you they are true. Remember only this—you need not believe them, you need not accept them, and you need not welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter nor decrease their efficacy. But allow yourself to make no exceptions in applying the ideas the exercises contain. Whatever your reactions to the ideas may be, use them. Nothing more than this is required.   Lesson 1 - Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything. 1 Now look slowly around you, and practice applying this idea very specifically to whatever you see: 2 This table does not mean anything. This chair does not mean anything. This hand does not mean anything. This foot does not mean anything. This pen does not mean anything. 3 Then look farther away from your immediate area, and apply the idea to a wider range: 4 That door does not mean anything. That body does not mean anything. That lamp does not mean anything. That sign does not mean anything. That shadow does not mean anything. 5 Notice that these statements are not arranged in any order, and make no allowance for differences in the kinds of things to which they are applied. That is the purpose of the exercise. The statement is merely applied to anything you see. As you practice applying the idea for the day, use it totally indiscriminately. Do not attempt to apply it to everything you see, for these exercises should not become ritualistic. Only be sure that nothing you see is specifically excluded. One thing is like another as far as the application of the idea is concerned.