Obscure Positive Quotes

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

So many people think that they are not gifted because they don’t have an obvious talent that people can recognize because it doesn’t fall under the creative arts category—writing, dancing, music, acting, art or singing. Sadly, they let their real talents go undeveloped, while they chase after fame. I am grateful for the people with obscure unremarked talents because they make our lives easier---inventors, organizers, planners, peacemakers, communicators, activists, scientists, and so forth. However, there is one gift that trumps all other talents—being an excellent parent. If you can successfully raise a child in this day in age to have integrity then you have left a legacy that future generations will benefit from.

For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged (...) Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the unusual position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives.

It is possible for the most obscure person in a church, with a heart right toward God, to exercise as much power for the evangelization of the world, as it is for those who stand in the most prominent positions.

Yes. I—I can't help liking her—just a little bit! She's not an ungenerous nature; and I am so glad her difficulties have all suddenly ended." She explained how Arabella had been summoned back, and would be enabled to retrieve her position. "I was referring to our old question. What Arabella has been saying to me has made me feel more than ever how hopelessly vulgar an institution legal marriage is—a sort of trap to catch a man—I can't bear to think of it. I wish I hadn't promised to let you put up the banns this morning!

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.

One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.

The capacity of the rational mind to deceive, manipulate, scheme, trick, falsify, minimize, mislead, betray, prevaricate, deny, omit, rationalize, bias, exaggerate and obscure is so endless, so remarkable, that centuries of pre-scientific thought, concentrating on clarifying the nature of moral endeavour, regarded it as positively demonic. This is not because of rationality itself, as a process. That process can produce clarity and progress. It is because rationality is subject to the single worst temptation—to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute.

Quinn seemed to have become one of a jaded philosophical society, a group of arcane deviates. Their raison d'etre was a kind of mystical masochism, forcing initiates toward feats of occult daredevilry - "glimpsing the inferno with eyes of ice", to take from the notebook a phrase that was repeated often and seemed a sort of chant of power. As I suspected, hallucinogenic drugs were used by the sect, and there was no doubt that they believed themselves communing with strange metaphysical venues. Their chief aim, in true mystical fashion, was to transcend common reality in the search for higher states of being, but their stratagem was highly unorthodox, a strange detour along the usual path toward positive illumination. Instead, they maintained a kind of blasphemous fatalism, a doomed determinism which brought them face to face with realms of obscure horror. Perhaps it was this very obscurity that allowed them the excitement of their central purpose, which seemed to be a precarious flirting with personal apocalypse, the striving for horrific dominion over horror itself. ("The Dreaming In Nortown")

We succeeded in taking that picture from [deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideaologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitands of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness-- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us... To my mind, there is perhaps no better demostration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favorably received at first; but remain in obscurity until they win notice from intelligence of a high order, by whose influence they are brought into a position which they then maintain, in virtue of the authority thus given them. If the reason of this should be asked, it will be found that ultimately, a man can really understand and appreciate those things only which are of like nature with himself. The dull person will like what is dull, and the common person what is common; a man whose ideas are mixed will be attracted by confusion of thought; and folly will appeal to him who has no brains at all; but best of all, a man will like his own works, as being of a character thoroughly at one with himself.

No, my lord Count, you shan't have her... you shall not have her! Just because you are a great nobleman, you think you are a great genius—Nobility, fortune, rank, position! How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born—nothing more. For the rest—a very ordinary man! Whereas I, lost among the obscure crowd, have had to deploy more knowledge, more calculation and skill merely to survive than has sufficed to rule all the provinces of Spain for a century!

In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old aunt's as if to go home. But as soon as he reached the open down he struck out upon it till he came to a large round pond. The frost continued, though it was not particularly sharp, and the larger stars overhead came out slow and flickering, Jude put one foot on the edge of the ice, and then the other: it cracked under his weight; but this did not deter him. He ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice making sharp noises as he went. When just about the middle he looked around him and gave a jump. The cracking repeated itself; but he did not go down. He jumped again, but the cracking had ceased. Jude went back to the edge, and stepped upon the ground. It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for? He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide. Peaceful death abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him. What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position? He could get drunk.

Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

The risings and settings of the sun, the moon, and the other heavenly bodies may come about from the lighting up and quenching of their fires…; for nothing in our sensory experience runs counter to this hypothesis. Or the said effects may be caused by the emergence of these bodies from a point above the earth and again by the earth’s position in front of them; for nothing in our sensory experience is against this.45 Here two alternative explanations of “risings and settings” are offered; both are of equal value and equally true, since neither is contradicted by anything in our experience. On the contrary, we have all seen fires die down from lack of fuel, and lights obscured or blacked out by objects coming in front of them.

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.

Why are all sociopaths not in positions of great power? … Why do they not win all the time? … most of them are obscure people, and limited to dominating their young children, or a depressed spouse, or perhaps a few employees or coworkers. Not an insignificant number of them are in jail, … or in danger for their careers or their lives. Very few are fabulously wealthy. Even fewer are famous. Having never made much of a mark on the world, the majority are on a downward life course, and by late middle age will be burned out completely. They can rob and torment us temporarily; yes, but they are, in effect, failed lives.

Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it—illness, syndrome, condition—can be almost equally pejorative in their discreet way. We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy. In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation defines energy/matter as behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle, which suggests that it is both, and posits that it is our human limitation to be unable to see both at the same time. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wavelike question. A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness. Physicists gain certain insights from understanding energy as a wave, and other insights from understanding it as a particle, and use quantum mechanics to reconcile the information they have gleaned. Similarly, we have to examine illness and identity, understand that observation will usually happen in one domain or the other, and come up with a syncretic mechanics. We need a vocabulary in which the two concepts are not opposites, but compatible aspects of a condition. The problem is to change how we assess the value of individuals and of lives, to reach for a more ecumenical take on healthy. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ―All I know is what I have words for.‖ The absence of words is the absence of intimacy; these experiences are starved for language.

Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts.

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

Resentment secretes images that obscure your view of the present and distort your memory of the past. Resentment is a positive force of mendacity.

Thing and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would.

If we refuse to acknowledge our wrongs then opportunities will remain invisible and significant grains of truth obscured.

Serving in obscurity can do more to shape a future leader than a dozen years of combing evangelicalism for the perfect position.

As I approach my fortieth birthday without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish—without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time—I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked, somewhere along the line, the wit and courage to contain myself competently within the shapes at hand.

it is almost always a mistake for heads of state to undertake the details of a negotiation. They are then obliged to master specifics normally handled by their foreign offices and are deflected onto subjects more appropriate to their subordinates, while being kept from issues only heads of state can resolve. Since no one without a well-developed ego reaches the highest office, compromise is difficult and deadlocks are dangerous. With the domestic positions of the interlocutors so often dependent on at least the semblance of success, negotiations more often concentrate on obscuring differences than they do on dealing with the essence of a problem.

The unquietest humour possesses all men; ferments, seeks issue, in pamphleteering, caricaturing, projecting, declaiming; vain jangling of thought, word and deed. It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable. For from the lowest dumb rank, the inevitable misery, as was predicted, has spread upwards. In every man is some obscure feeling that his position, oppressive or else oppressed, is a false one: all men, in one or the other acrid dialect, as assaulters or as defenders, must give vent to the unrest that is in them. Of such stuff national well-being, and the glory of rulers, is not made.

Where those responsible for the violence remain in power, they are in a strong position to write its history, and thus to construct a social memory that diverts blame, obscures responsibility, and obstructs all efforts at redress.

We grow up being told to do this and told to do that because it's the 'right' thing to do. If we did something obscure, it'd be 'wrong'. We have been taught to choose the respectable, socially acceptable path that everyone else walks down. What if we were told to do what feels right and were not afraid to perceive the world in an authentic light. We are told how to think and what to think, but not how to feel. We don't always need logic, we need to feel.

Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song.

Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opinions as ‘racist.’ I would obviously scorn to deny such an allegation on my own behalf. I would, rather, prefer to repudiate it on behalf of my former friend. He had known me for many years and cooperated with me on numerous projects, and I am quite confident that he would never have as a collaborator anyone he suspected of racial prejudice. But it does remind me, and not for the first time, that quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There's a general tendency—not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them—to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one.

No matter how great you are at what you do, as long as you remain known only within your own family circles, then you and your talent will die in obscurity and irrelevance. Position yourself to influence the masses by having a media, marketing and communication strategy.

Your dreams are like the market grounds; their locations really matter. If you keep hiding your potentials out of sight, you may be great but unknown! Your influence can travel long distances if only you give them the chances to go where they are needed! Rebrand yourself!

We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing wildly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand.

Consider Rutherford playing his thoroughly unlikely hunch about alpha backscattering, Heisenberg remembering an obscure remark of Einstein’s and concluding that nature only performed in consonance with his mathematics, Lawrence flipping compulsively through obscure foreign journals: Were this thinking not in the framework of scientific work, it would be considered paranoid. In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from “normal” positions, and taking risks by departing from reality.

I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.

Medicalization is itself a product of culture, an ideological position grounded first in the belief that we can separate the body and the mind, and second in the belief that we can separate the mind from the environments in which we live, as if culture is just a bothersome factor that obscures biological realities.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Sometimes our positions are unpopular in the short term, even among the masses, only to be vindicated as events unfold to reveal a truth that was obscured by the faulty analysis of the prevailing common perception. On such occasions we must move in opposition to the direction the masses are attempting to go. Otherwise, what is the meaning of leadership?

It was not a bridle-path—merely a pedestrian's track, and the boughs spread horizontally at a height not greater than seven feet above the ground, which made it impossible to ride erect beneath them. The girl, who wore no riding-habit, looked around for a moment, as if to assure herself that all humanity was out of view, then dexterously dropped backwards flat upon the pony's back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders, and her eyes to the sky. The rapidity of her glide into this position was that of a kingfisher—its noiselessness that of a hawk. Gabriel's eyes had scarcely been able to follow her. The tall lank pony seemed used to such doings, and ambled along unconcerned. Thus she passed under

The evils of life spring partly from natural causes, partly from men’s hostility to each other. In former times, competition and war were necessary for the securing of food, which could only be obtained by the victors. Now, owing to the mastery of natural forces which science has begun to give, there would be more comfort and happiness for all if all devoted themselves to the conquest of Nature rather than of each other. The representation of Nature as a friend, and sometimes as even an ally in our struggles with other men, obscures the true position of man in the world, and diverts his energies from the pursuit of scientific power, which is the only fight that can bring long-continued well-being to the human race.

In the end, right answers and true stories have a positive cascading effect because they illuminate. They enable one to notice and make sense of things that one might have ignored or thought incomprehensible without them, thus allowing for a clearer picture of the world one is surveying. Wrong answers and false stories obscure matters and have little or no explanatory power. They shed no light on the facts, circumstances, or actions in the world they purport to describe, because they are not really of that world, and thus cannot help explain it. Instead, they tend to make matters more confusing, by creating their own negative cascading effect, as other bad answers, weak, illogical, and/or simply false stories must be offered to shore up the original wrong answer’s deficiencies.

No one knows who you are right now. And that's just fine. Being obscure is a great position to be in. Be happy you're in the shadows. Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about them. Keep tweaking. Work out the kinks. Test random ideas. Try new things. No one knows you, so it's no big deal if you mess up. Obscurity helps protect your ego and preserve your confidence.

At twenty-one he had arrived in America a penniless bodybuilder, born in an obscure Austrian village, armed only with the immigrant's time-honored weapons of hope, ambition, and an almost supernatural belief in the great American dream. Now, through the traditional virtues of hard work, talent, charm, intelligence, positive mental attitude, and persistence, Arnold Schwarzenegger had become a household name.

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. We cannot influence fate: we will all die and our individual beings will be obliterated. But we have a choice in how we live. A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature.

Vines’s book makes it seem that the only way to show care for people struggling with homosexuality is to accept their sinfulness. Christians throughout the ages, however, have believed that love requires a tender call to repentance. A life devoid of repentance is a life devoid of Christ. If Christians follow Vines’s attempt to reverse the church’s moral position on homosexuality, their loving call to repent of sin will be silenced, and the grace of Jesus Christ to change people will be obscured.

The most important rule for us is to concentrate on keeping our lives open to God. Let everything else including work, clothes, and food be set aside. The busyness of things obscures our concentration on God. We must maintain a position of beholding Him, keeping our lives completely spiritual through and through. Let other things come and go as they will; let other people criticize us as they will; but never allow anything to obscure the life that “is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

Writing (and reading) is a sort of exercise in empathy, I think. In life, when you encounter people, you and they have separate trajectories, each person pushing in a different direction. What’s remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the uncommon position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives. What

Riding Conflict with the Breath        •  Bring yourself to a place of restful awareness.        •  Let every thought float by like a dream, mirage, or an old and cancelled sitcom.        •  Inhale all of the negativity and stress of the difficulty at hand—whatever the current source of conflict, anger, fear, and tribulation.        •  Breathe deep, inhale, and hoover it up like you’re vacuuming dark clouds. Take it in and then let it dissolve in the inner luminosity of your infinite, radiant, empty nature of mind.        •  Exhale fully. Breathe out love, forgiveness, understanding, loving-kindness, empathic compassion, and life-giving healing energy.        •  Direct this positive breath specifically to perceived obstacle-creators and troublemakers. Poor humans . . . generating their own bad karma and sorrow, seeking happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places!        •  Simply breathe in and out. Let the natural flow wash away and re-harmonize all obscurations on the windshield of your inner “iye.

Iato says in a well-known passage in his Republic that something good can result only if those men come into positions of rule who have no liking for it. His meaning doubtless is, that ability being assumed, unwillingness to rule is a good guarantee that a man will rule truly and ably, whereas an ambitious man may only too easily become one who abuses his power to tyrannize, or one whom a liking for rule brings into an obscure dependence upon those over whom he is supposed to rule, so that his rule becomes an illusion.

Among these heavy yeomen a feminine figure glided, the single one of her sex that the room contained. She was prettily and even daintily dressed. She moved between them as a chaise between carts, was heard after them as a romance after sermons, was felt among them like a breeze among furnaces. It had required a little determination—far more than she had at first imagined—to take up a position here, for at her first entry the lumbering dialogues had ceased, nearly every face had been turned towards her, and those that were already turned rigidly fixed there.

And here before me stands a marvelously groomed little man who is pinning a hero's medal on me because some of his forebears were Alfred the Great and Charles the First, and even King Arthur, for anything I knew to the contrary. But I shouldn't be surprised if inside he feels as puzzled about the fate that brings him here as I. we are public icons, we two: he an icon of kingship, and I an icon of heroism, unreal yet very necessary; we have obligations above what is merely personal, and to let personal feelings obscure the obligations would be failing in one's duty. This was clearer still afterward, at lunch at the Savoy....; they all seemed to accept me as a genuine hero, and I did my best to behave decently, neither believing in it too obviously, nor yet protesting that I was just a simple chap who had done his duty when he saw it--a pose that has always disgusted me. Ever since, I have tried to think charitably of people in prominent positions of one kind or another. We cast them in roles, and it is only right to consider them as players, without trying to discredit them with knowledge of their off-stage life--unless they drag it into the middle of the stage themselves.

When you were born, you could have been anybody. So quick and malleable, your parents could look at your face and see a future president. They tried to mold you as you grew, but they could only work with what they had. And when their tools stopped working, they gradually handed them off to you, asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” There’s a certain art to becoming who you are. There’s no standard kit you can use to assemble yourself, swapping out parts as needed. Instead, it feels more like a kind of stretching, a teasing out at the edges, like a glassblower standing at the furnace. A teenage personality is a delicate medium, its emotions almost too heavy to handle. You had to figure out a way to keep yourself together and tease out the good parts without falling out of balance or stretching yourself too thin. You couldn’t stop everything to try to fix your flaws, but you couldn’t just ignore them either. Luckily, you were nothing if not flexible, softened by the heat of youth, which kept you warm on a dingy couch or a night in the wilderness. You knew that you weren’t just you, you were also the person you would one day become. So even when you failed, you could still be whatever you wanted to be. As long as you kept moving. Inevitably you got hit, and you got hurt. You prided yourself on how well you absorbed the blow, bouncing back as if nothing had happened. But the pain changed you, in little chips and cracks that might take you years to notice. Over time you learned how to position yourself in very specific ways, protecting the most vulnerable parts of your psyche, even as you knew they were still a crucial part of the real you. Gradually you became more and more reluctant to move from that position. Growing a little harder, a little more brittle.

(Caesar:) But to different persons, Conscript Fathers, different degrees of license are allowed. If those who pass a life sunk in obscurity, commit any error, through excessive anger, few become aware of it, for their fame is as limited as their fortune; but of those who live invested with extensive power, and in an exalted station, the whole world knows the proceedings. Thus in the highest position there is the least liberty of action; and it becomes us to indulge neither partiality nor aversion, but least of all animosity; for what in others is called resentment, is in the powerful termed violence and cruelty.

The “noble” person has a completely naïve and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naive” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one’s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately. The noble man’s naive self-confidence, which is as natural to him as tension is to the muscles, permits him calmly to assimilate the merits of others in all the fullness of their substance and configuration. He never “grudges” them their merits. On the contrary: he rejoices in their virtues and feels that they make the world more worthy of love. His naive self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being. Therefore he can afford to admit that another person has certain “qualities” superior to his own or is more “gifted” in some respects—indeed in all respects. Such a conclusion does not diminish his naïve awareness of his own value, which needs no justification or proof by achievements or abilities. Achievements merely serve to confirm it. On the other hand, the “common” man (in the exact acceptation of the term) can only experience his value and that of another if he relates the two, and he clearly perceives only those qualities which constitute possible differences. The noble man experiences value prior to any comparison, the common man in and through a comparison. For the latter, the relation is the selective precondition for apprehending any value. Every value is a relative thing, “higher” or “lower,” “more” or “less” than his own. He arrives at value judgments by comparing himself to others and others to himself

Islamic tradition does not recognize such presumptuous and conceited preoccupation as "reviewing", which is now widely practised among scholars who regard highly this legacy of the Western tradition modern scholarship. a Muslim scholar, with the work of another before him, would either - according to Islamic tradition - refute it (radd), or elaborate it further in commentary (sharh) as the occasion demands. there is no such thing as "reviewing" it, whether the "review" is termed as such or as any other term which describes it. If there are petty mistakes they turn a blind eye to them; if there are obscurities they explain them in commentary - they polish a positive work and make it shine.

Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can “knock” the other’s “hustle”—can give his game away. It is still not possible to overstate the price a Negro pays to climb out of obscurity—for it is a particular price, involved with being a Negro; and the great wounds, gouges, amputations, losses, scars, endured in such a journey cannot be calculated. But even this is not the worst of it, since he is really dealing with two hierarchies, one white and one black, the latter modeled on the former. The higher he rises, the less is his journey worth, since (unless he is extremely energetic and anarchic, a genuinely “bad nigger” in the most positive sense of the term) all he can possibly find himself exposed to is the grim emptiness of the white world—which does not live by the standards it uses to victimize him—and the even more ghastly emptiness of black people who wish they were white. Therefore, one “exceptional” Negro watches another “exceptional” Negro in order to find out if he knows how vastly successful and bitterly funny the hoax has been. Alliances, in the great cocktail party of the white man’s world, are formed, almost purely, on this basis, for if both of you can laugh, you have a lot to laugh about. On the other hand, if only one of you can laugh, one of you, inevitably, is laughing at the other.

Do not underestimate your own courage. You are part of an elite. Not of power, position and wealth, but an elite of the sensitive, the considerate and the tenacious. Its members are to be discovered in all castes, and throughout all ages, and among them there is a shared understanding. They represent a tradition of struggle against cruelty and unrelenting chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few gain notoriety. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, their consideration is without frills, their tenacity is not braggartly but has the power to really endure, and above all the can accept the irony of their own fate". ... "It is pointless to be any less than all you can be.

Gotama's awakening involved a radical shift of perspective rather than the gaining of privileged knowledge into some higher truth. He did not use the words "know" and "truth" to describe it. He spoke only of waking up to a contingent ground--"this-conditionality, conditioned arising"--that until then had been obscured by his attachment to a fixed position. While such an awakening is bound to lead to a reconsideration of what one "knows," the awakening itself is not primarily a cognitive act. It is an existential readjustment, a seismic shift in the core of oneself and one's relation to others and the world. Rather than providing Gotama with a set of ready-made answers to life's big questions, it allowed him to respond to those questions from an entirely new perspective. To live on this shifting ground, one first needs to stop obsessing about what has happened before and what might happen later. One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This is not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life. Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be. Gotama did not encourage withdrawal to a timeless, mystical now, but an unflinching encounter with the contingent world as it unravels moment to moment.

them flouncing into the pool, drinking, tossing up their heads, drinking again, the water dribbling from their lips in silver threads. There was another flounce, and they came out of the pond, and turned back again towards the farm. She looked further around. Day was just dawning, and beside its cool air and colours her heated actions and resolves of the night stood out in lurid contrast. She perceived that in her lap, and clinging to her hair, were red and yellow leaves which had come down from the tree and settled silently upon her during her partial sleep. Bathsheba shook her dress to get rid of them, when multitudes of the same family lying round about her rose and fluttered away in the breeze thus created, "like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing." There was an opening towards the east, and the glow from the as yet unrisen sun attracted her eyes thither. From her feet, and between the beautiful yellowing ferns with their feathery arms, the ground sloped downwards to a hollow, in which was a species of swamp, dotted with fungi. A morning mist hung over it now—a fulsome yet magnificent silvery veil, full of light from the sun, yet semi-opaque—the hedge behind it being in some measure hidden by its hazy luminousness. Up the sides of this depression grew sheaves of the common rush, and here and there a peculiar species of flag, the blades of which glistened in the emerging sun, like scythes. But the general aspect of the swamp was malignant. From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth, and in the waters under the earth. The fungi grew in all manner of positions from rotting leaves and tree stumps, some exhibiting to her listless gaze their clammy tops, others their oozing gills. Some were marked with great splotches, red as arterial blood, others were saffron yellow, and others tall and attenuated, with stems like macaroni. Some were leathery and of richest browns. The hollow seemed a nursery of pestilences small and great, in the immediate neighbourhood of comfort and health, and Bathsheba arose with a tremor at the thought of having passed the night on the brink of so dismal a place.

Whatever men please to think or say, the Romish doctrine of the real presence if pursued to its legitimate consequences obscures every leading doctrine of the gospel and damages and interferes with the whole system of Christ's truth. Grant for a moment that the Lord's Supper is a sacrifice and not a Sacrament, grant that every time the words of consecration are used the natural body and blood of Christ are present on the communion table under the forms of bread and wine, grant that everyone who eats that consecrated bread and drinks that consecrated wine does really eat and drink the natural body and blood of Christ, grant for a moment these things and then see what momentous consequences result from these premises. You spoil the blessed doctrine of Christ's finished work when He died on the cross. A sacrifice that needs to be repeated is not a perfect or complete thing. You spoil the priestly office of Christ. If there are priests that can offer an acceptable sacrifice to God besides Him, the great High Priest is robbed of His glory. You spoil the scriptural doctrine of the Christian ministry. You exalt sinful men into the position of mediators between God and man. You give to the sacramental elements of bread and wine an honor and veneration they were never meant to receive. You produce an idolatry to be abhorred by faithful Christians. Last but not least, you overthrow the true doctrine of Christ's human nature. If the body born of the Virgin Mary can be in more places than one at the same time, it is not a body like our own and Jesus was not the last Adam in the truth of our nature.

Joy is a two-way street. It is being human turned to God; and it is being (the instrument of) God, turned to humankind. The soul, turned to God, becomes irradiated with Divinity, simply by becoming transparent to that Divine Light, which is its Source. And that Divine Light shines through the soul, illumining all who come in contact with it. Recall that Jesus held this very same position (...): 'First', he said, 'seek the kingdom of God'; in other words, you cannot really do much for others or shed any light in the world until first you find that light within yourself. The Light Itself will do what is necessary for humankind; our only task is to rid ourselves of all that tends to obscure that Light---in other words, our ignorance, our selfish attachment to our make-believe world of self-gratification, our inner darkness.

She was conquered; but she would never own it as long as she lived. Her pride was indeed brought low by despairing discoveries of her spoliation by marriage with a less pure nature than her own. She chafed to and fro in rebelliousness, like a caged leopard; her whole soul was in arms, and the blood fired her face. Until she had met Troy, Bathsheba had been proud of her position as a woman; it had been a glory to her to know that her lips had been touched by no man's on earth—that her waist had never been encircled by a lover's arm. She hated herself now. In those earlier days she had always nourished a secret contempt for girls who were the slaves of the first good-looking young fellow who should choose to salute them. She had never taken kindly to the idea of marriage in the abstract as did the majority of women she saw about her.

No direct evidence yet documents Earth’s tidal cycles more than a billion years ago, but we can be confident that 4.5 billion years ago things were a lot wilder. Not only did Earth have five-hour days, but the nearby Moon was much, much faster in its close orbit, as well. The Moon took only eighty-four hours—three and a half modern days—to go around Earth. With Earth spinning so fast and the Moon orbiting so fast, the familiar cycle of new Moon, waxing Moon, full Moon, and waning Moon played out in frenetic fast-forward: every few five-hour days saw a new lunar phase. Lots of consequences follow from this truth, some less benign than others. With such a big lunar obstruction in the sky and such rapid orbital motions, eclipses would have been frequent events. A total solar eclipse would have occurred every eighty-four hours at virtually every new Moon, when the Moon was positioned between Earth and the Sun. For some few minutes, sunlight would have been completely blocked, while the stars and planets suddenly popped out against a black sky, and the Moon’s fiery volcanoes and magma oceans stood out starkly red against the black lunar disk. Total lunar eclipses occurred regularly as well, almost every forty-two hours later, like clockwork. During every full Moon, when Earth lies right between the Sun and the Moon, Earth’s big shadow would have completely obscured the giant face of the bright shining Moon. Once again the stars and planets would have suddenly popped out against a black sky, as the Moon’s volcanoes put on their ruddy show. Monster tides were a far more violent consequence of the Moon’s initial proximity. Had both Earth and the Moon been perfectly rigid solid bodies, they would appear today much as they did 4.5 billion years ago: 15,000 miles apart with rapid rotational and orbital motions and frequent eclipses. But Earth and the Moon are not rigid. Their rocks can flex and bend; especially when molten, they swell and recede with the tides. The young Moon, at a distance of 15,000 miles, exerted tremendous tidal forces on Earth’s rocks, even as Earth exerted an equal and opposite gravitational force on the largely molten lunar landscape. It’s difficult to imagine the immense magma tides that resulted. Every few hours Earth’s largely molten rocky surface may have bulged a mile or more outward toward the Moon, generating tremendous internal friction, adding more heat and thus keeping the surface molten far longer than on an isolated planet. And Earth’s gravity returned the favor, bulging the Earth-facing side of the Moon outward, deforming our satellite out of perfect roundness.

Then, too, the dissemination of the truth in a society based on coercion was always hindered in one and the same manner, namely, those in power, feeling that the recognition of this truth would undermine their position, consciously or sometimes unconsciously perverted it by explanations and additions quite foreign to it, and also opposed it by open violence. Thus the truth—that his life should be directed by the spiritual element which is its basis, which manifests itself as love, and which is so natural to man—this truth, in order to force a way to man's consciousness, had to struggle not merely against the obscurity with which it was expressed and the intentional and unintentional distortions surrounding it, but also against deliberate violence, which by means of persecutions and punishments sought to compel men to accept religious laws authorized by the rulers and conflicting with the truth.

Take It Easy Trying too hard produces unexpected results: The flashy leader lacks stability. Trying to rush matters gets you nowhere. Trying to appear brilliant is not enlightened. Insecure leaders try to promote themselves. Impotent leaders capitalize on their position. It is not very holy to point out how holy you are. All these behaviors come from insecurity. They feed insecurity. None of them helps the work. None contributes to the leader’s health. The leader who knows how things happen does not do these things. Consider: When you think that you are so good, what are you comparing yourself with? God? Or your own insecurities? Do you want fame? Fame will complicate your life and compromise simplicity in your comings and goings. Is it money? The effort of trying to get rich will steal your time. Any form of egocentricity, of selfishness, obscures your deeper self and blinds you to how things happen.

All the men of this party were fishing for rubles, decorations, and promotions, and in this pursuit watched only the weathercock of imperial favor, and directly they noticed it turning in any direction, this whole drone population of the army began blowing hard that way, so that it was all the harder for the Emperor to turn it elsewhere. Amid the uncertainties of the position, with the menace of serious danger giving a peculiarly threatening character to everything, amid this vortex of intrigue, egotism, conflict of views and feelings, and the diversity of race among these people—this eighth and largest party of those preoccupied with personal interests imparted great confusion and obscurity to the common task. Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.

Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable. Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow. And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness. The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.

and, amongst others, my breviary with the gold corners, which I beg he will preserve in remembrance of his affectionate uncle.' "The heirs sought everywhere, admired the breviary, laid hands on the furniture, and were greatly astonished that Spada, the rich man, was really the most miserable of uncles — no treasures — unless they were those of science, contained in the library and laboratories. That was all. Caesar and his father searched, examined, scrutinized, but found nothing, or at least very little; not exceeding a few thousand crowns in plate, and about the same in ready money; but the nephew had time to say to his wife before he expired: `Look well among my uncle's papers; there is a will.' "They sought even more thoroughly than the august heirs had done, but it was fruitless. There were two palaces and a vineyard behind the Palatine Hill; but in these days landed property had not much value, and the two palaces and the vineyard remained to the family since they were beneath the rapacity of the pope and his son. Months and years rolled on. Alexander VI. died, poisoned, — you know by what mistake. Caesar, poisoned at the same time, escaped by shedding his skin like a snake; but the new skin was spotted by the poison till it looked like a tiger's. Then, compelled to quit Rome, he went and got himself obscurely killed in a night skirmish, scarcely noticed in history. After the pope's death and his son's exile, it was supposed that the Spada family would resume the splendid position they had held before the cardinal's time; but this was not the case. The Spadas remained in doubtful ease, a mystery hung over this dark affair, and the public rumor was, that Caesar, a better politician than his father, had carried off from the pope the fortune of the two cardinals. I say the two, because Cardinal Rospigliosi, who had not taken any precaution, was completely despoiled. "Up to this point," said Faria, interrupting the thread of his narrative, "this seems to you very meaningless, no doubt, eh?" "Oh, my friend," cried Dantes, "on the contrary, it seems as if I were

The emotions commanding him were similarly simple and straightforward. He feared what he could not understand, and he despised what he feared. But acknowledging fear did not make him a coward – for he had proclaimed for himself an eternal war against all that threatened him, be it a devious wife who had raised walls round her soul, or conspirators against the empire of Lether. His enemies, he well understood, were the true cowards. They thought within clouds that obscured all the harsh truths of the world. Their struggles to ‘understand’ led, inevitably, to seditious positions against authority. Even as they forgave the empire’s enemies, they condemned the weaknesses of their own homeland – not recognizing that they themselves personified such weaknesses. An empire such as Lether was ever under siege. (...) A siege, inside and out, yes – the very privileges the empire granted were exploited by those who would see the empire destroyed. And there could be no room for ‘understanding’ such people – they were evil, and evil must be expurgated.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

A careful examination will show that what we call "Chance" is merely an expression relating to obscure causes; causes that we cannot perceive; causes that we cannot understand. The word Chance is derived from a word meaning "to fall" (as the falling of dice), the idea being that the fall of the dice (and many other happenings) are merely a "happening" unrelated to any cause. And this is the sense in which the term is generally employed. But when the matter is closely examined, it is seen that there is no chance whatsoever about the fall of the dice. Each time a die falls, and displays a certain number, it obeys a law as infallible as that which governs the revolution of the planets around the sun. Back of the fall of the die are causes, or chains of causes, running back further than the mind can follow. The position of the die in the box; the amount of muscular energy expended in the throw; the condition of the table, etc., etc., all are causes, the effect of which may be seen. But back of these seen causes there are chains of unseen preceding causes, all of which had a bearing upon the number of the die which fell uppermost.

A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS A MAN CAN'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A MOTHER A NAME MEANS A LOT JUST BY ITSELF A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD A RELAXED MAN IS NOT NECESSARILY A BETTER MAN A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS A SINCERE EFFORT IS ALL YOU CAN ASK A SINGLE EVENT CAN HAVE INFINITELY MANY INTERPRETATIONS A SOLID HOME BASE BUILDS A SENSE OF SELF A STRONG SENSE OF DUTY IMPRISONS YOU ABSOLUTE SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM ABSTRACTION IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE ACTION CAUSES MORE TROUBLE THAN THOUGHT ALIENATION PRODUCES ECCENTRICS OR REVOLUTIONARIES ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED AMBITION IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS COMPLACENCY AMBIVALENCE CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE ANIMALISM IS PERFECTLY HEALTHY ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL ANYTHING IS A LEGITIMATE AREA OF INVESTIGATION ARTIFICIAL DESIRES ARE DESPOILING THE EARTH AT TIMES INACTIVITY IS PREFERABLE TO MINDLESS FUNCTIONING AT TIMES YOUR UNCONSCIOUS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND AUTOMATION IS DEADLY AWFUL PUNISHMENT AWAITS REALLY BAD PEOPLE BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS BEING ALONE WITH YOURSELF IS INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR BEING HAPPY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE BEING JUDGMENTAL IS A SIGN OF LIFE BEING SURE OF YOURSELF MEANS YOU'RE A FOOL BELIEVING IN REBIRTH IS THE SAME AS ADMITTING DEFEAT BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS CALM IS MORE CONDUCIVE TO CREATIVITY THAN IS ANXIETY CATEGORIZING FEAR IS CALMING CHANGE IS VALUABLE WHEN THE OPPRESSED BECOME TYRANTS CHASING THE NEW IS DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY CHILDREN ARE THE HOPE OF THE FUTURE CHILDREN ARE THE MOST CRUEL OF ALL CLASS ACTION IS A NICE IDEA WITH NO SUBSTANCE CLASS STRUCTURE IS AS ARTIFICIAL AS PLASTIC CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST CRIME AGAINST PROPERTY IS RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT DECADENCE CAN BE AN END IN ITSELF DECENCY IS A RELATIVE THING DEPENDENCE CAN BE A MEAL TICKET DESCRIPTION IS MORE VALUABLE THAN METAPHOR DEVIANTS ARE SACRIFICED TO INCREASE GROUP SOLIDARITY DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS DISORGANIZATION IS A KIND OF ANESTHESIA DON'T PLACE TOO MUCH TRUST IN EXPERTS DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES DREAMING WHILE AWAKE IS A FRIGHTENING CONTRADICTION DYING AND COMING BACK GIVES YOU CONSIDERABLE PERSPECTIVE DYING SHOULD BE AS EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL ELABORATION IS A FORM OF POLLUTION EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE AS VALUABLE AS INTELLECTUAL RESPONSES ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING ANYWAY ENSURE THAT YOUR LIFE STAYS IN FLUX EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU EVERY ACHIEVEMENT REQUIRES A SACRIFICE EVERYONE'S WORK IS EQUALLY IMPORTANT EVERYTHING THAT'S INTERESTING IS NEW EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE DESERVE SPECIAL CONCESSIONS EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID EXPRESSING ANGER IS NECESSARY EXTREME BEHAVIOR HAS ITS BASIS IN PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY EXTREME SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO PERVERSION FAITHFULNESS IS A SOCIAL NOT A BIOLOGICAL LAW FAKE OR REAL INDIFFERENCE IS A POWERFUL PERSONAL WEAPON FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE FEAR IS THE GREATEST INCAPACITATOR FREEDOM IS A LUXURY NOT A NECESSITY GIVING FREE REIN TO YOUR EMOTIONS IS AN HONEST WAY TO LIVE GO ALL OUT IN ROMANCE AND LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY GOING WITH THE FLOW IS SOOTHING BUT RISKY GOOD DEEDS EVENTUALLY ARE REWARDED GOVERNMENT IS A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE GRASS ROOTS AGITATION IS THE ONLY HOPE

From the subtle afflictions caused by love of status is seeking after and aspiring positions of authority – this is something whose reality is hidden and obscure. It is not understood except by those who have knowledge of Allah, those who love Him and who are at enmity with those ignorant ones from His creation who desire to compete with Him with regard to His Lordship and Divinity and right to worship, despite their despicability and the contemptible position they have before Allah and in the eyes of His chosen servants who have knowledge of Him. Know that love of status attained by having one’s orders and prohibitions obeyed and enacted, and by merely the attainment of a position above the people and to have importance over them, and that it be seen that the people are in need of him and seek their needs from him – then the soul of this person is seeking to compete with Allah in His Lordship and His Divinity and right to worship. Some such people may even seek to put the people into such a condition of need that they are compelled to request their needs from them, and to display their poverty before them and their need of them. Then he is inflated with pride and self-importance because of that, whereas this befits none except Allah alone.

Dr. H. K. Beecher is the name of one of the first serious students of pain in the United States. In 1946, he published an article in the Annals of Surgery titled “Pain in Men Wounded in Battle” (Vol. 123, p. 96). For years it was widely quoted because of its most interesting observation. But now Dr. Beecher is passing into obscurity, for what he had to say is no longer acceptable to students of pain. Dr. Beecher questioned 215 seriously wounded soldiers at various locations in the European theater during World War II shortly after they had been wounded and found that 75 percent of them had so little pain that they had no need for morphine. Reflecting that strong emotion can block pain, Dr. Beecher went on to speculate: “In this connection it is important to consider the position of the soldier: His wound suddenly releases him from an exceedingly dangerous environment, one filled with fatigue, discomfort, anxiety, fear and real danger of death, and gives him a ticket to the safety of the hospital. His troubles are over, or he thinks they are.” This observation is reinforced by a report of the United States surgeon general during World War II, noted in Martin Gilbert’s book The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), that in order to avoid psychiatric breakdown, infantrymen had to be relieved of duty every so often. The report said, “A wound or injury is regarded not as a misfortune, but a blessing.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

robbery by European nations of each other's territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day. To the several cabinets the several political establishments of the world are clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth—including America, of course—consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and re-stolen 500 times. The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other. In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen several millions of times. A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere. In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the original wash left dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash. She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along the northern boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. It is England's prospective property, and Russia knows it; but Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy. Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid for it. And now straightway they are beginning the old game again—to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast slice of Central Africa with the English flag and the English missionary and the English trader scattered all over it, but with certain formalities neglected—no signs up, "Keep off the grass," "Trespassers-forbidden," etc.—and she stepped in with a cold calm smile and put up the signs herself, and swept those English pioneers promptly out of the country. There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the form of a maxim: Get your formalities right—never mind about the moralities. It was an impudent thing; but England had to put up with it. Now, in the case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago. England should have snatched Madagascar from the French clothes-line. Without an effort she could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is too late. The signs of the times show plainly enough what is going to happen. All the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to the Christian governments of Europe. I am

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. ... A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes--of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked with in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he 'adopted' someone into the family as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. The post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology-applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is 'ideology-driven'). A crackdown required both force and ideology. While the instruments of force---the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street-washing machines---were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word 'stability,' a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the 'preventative counter-revolution,' when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough. At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.

What he finds at once is that every theory of the origin of the universe drives us into inconceivabilities. The atheist tries to think of a self-existent world, uncaused and without beginning; but we cannot conceive of anything beginningless or uncaused. The theist merely puts back the difficulty by a step; and to the theologian who says, “God made the world,” the child’s unanswerable query comes, “Who made God?” All ultimate religious ideas are logically inconceivable. All ultimate scientific ideas are equally beyond rational conception. What is matter? We reduce it to atoms, and then find ourselves forced to divide the atom as we had divided the molecule; we are driven into the dilemma that matter is infinitely divisible,—which is inconceivable; or that there is a limit to its divisibility,—which also is inconceivable. So with the divisibility of space and time; both of these are ultimately irrational ideas. Motion is wrapped in a triple obscurity, since it involves matter changing, in time, its position in space. When we analyze matter resolutely we find nothing at last but force—a force impressed upon our organs of sense, or a force resisting our organs of action; and who shall tell us what force is? Turn from physics to psychology, and we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. “Ultimate scientific ideas,” then, “are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended... In all directions the scientist’s investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known.”305 The only honest philosophy, to use Huxley’s word, is agnosticism.

In looking for a vocabulary for this quest for authenticity, I found psychoanalysts more helpful than lawyers. The object-relations theorist D. W. Winnicott makes a distinction between a True Self and a False Self that usefully tracks the distinction between the uncovered and covered selves. The True Self is the self that gives an individual the feeling of being real, which is “more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.” The True Self is associated with human spontaneity and authenticity: “Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.” The False Self, in contrast, gives an individual a sense of being unreal, a sense of futility. It mediates the relationship between the True Self and the world. What I love about Winnicott is that he does not demonize the False Self. To the contrary, Winnicott believes the False Self protects the True Self: “The False Self has one positive and very important function: to hide the True Self, which it does by compliance with environmental demands.” Like a king castling behind a rook in chess, the more valuable but less powerful piece retreats behind the less valuable but more powerful one. Because the relationship between the True Self and the False Self is symbiotic, Winnicott believes both selves will exist even in the healthy individual. Nonetheless, Winnicott defines health according to the degree of ascendancy the True Self gains over the False one. At the negative extreme, the False Self completely obscures the True Self, perhaps even from the individual herself. In a less extreme case, the False Self permits the True Self “a secret life.” The individual approaches health only when the False Self has “as its main concern a search for conditions which will make it possible for the True Self to come into its own.” Finally, in the healthy individual, the False Self is reduced to a “polite and mannered social attitude,” a tool available to the fully realized True Self.

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

For, finally, what is the rank man occupies in Nature? A nonentity, as contrasted with infinity; a universe, contrasted with nonentity; a middle something between everything and nothing. He is infinitely remote from these two extremes; his existence is not less distant from the nonentity out of which he is taken, than from the infinity in which he is engulfed. His intellect holds the same rank in the order of intelligences, as his body does in the material universe, and all it can attain is, to catch some glimpses of objects that occupy the middle, in eternal despair of knowing either extreme—all things have sprung from nothing, and are borne forward to infinity. Who can follow out such an astonishing career? The Author of these wonders, and he alone, can comprehend them. This condition, the middle, namely, between two extremes, is characteristic of all our faculties. Our senses perceive nothing in the extreme. A very loud sound deafens us; a very intense light blinds us; a very great or a very short distance disables our vision; excessive length or excessive brevity obscures discourse; too much pleasure cloys, and unvaried harmony offends us. Extreme heat, or extreme cold, destroys sensation. Any qualities in excess are hurtful to us, and pass beyond the ranges of our senses. We cannot be said to feel them, but to endure them. Extreme youth and extreme old age alike enfeeble the mind; too much or too little food, disturbs its operations; too much, or too little instruction, represses its vigor. Extremes are to us, as though they did not exist, and we are nothing in reference to them. They elude us, or we elude them. Such is our real state; our acquirements are confined within limits which we cannot pass, alike incapable of attaining universal knowledge or of remaining in total ignorance. We are in the middle of a vast expanse, always unfixed, fluctuating between ignorance and knowledge; if we think of advancing further, our object shifts its position and eludes our grasp; it steals away and takes an eternal flight that nothing can arrest. This is our natural condition, altogether contrary, however, to our inclinations. We are inflamed with a desire of exploring everything, and of building a tower that shall rise into infinity, but our edifice is shattered to pieces, and the ground beneath it discloses a profound abyss.

It seems the primary breeding group for what might, in the widest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth. The confrontation between these opposition forces and the powers that be, of course, will obviously take a form essentially different from that typical of an open society or a classical dictatorship. Initially, this confrontation does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings' repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realization of their real social and political interests. Its power, therefore does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were—that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather, it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movements it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, under what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to predict) in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate. And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a think crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action preventatively, even the most modest attempts to live within the truth.

Now, in Scribner's window, I saw a book called The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. I went inside, and took it off the shelf, and looked at the table of contents and at the title page which was deceptive, because it said the book was made up of a series of lectures that had been given at the University of Aberdeen. That was no recommendation, to me especially. But it threw me off the track as to the possible identity and character of Etienne Gilson, who wrote the book. I bought it, then, together with one other book that I have completely forgotten, and on my way home in the Long Island train, I unwrapped the package to gloat over my acquisitions. It was only then that I saw, on the first page of The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, the small print which said: "Nihil Obstat ... Imprimatur." The feeling of disgust and deception struck me like a knife in the pit of the stomach. I felt as if I had been cheated! They should have warned me that it was a Catholic book! Then I would never have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside -- to get rid of it as something dangerous and unclean. Such is the terror that is aroused in the enlightened modern mind by a little innocent Latin and the signature of a priest. It is impossible to communicate, to a Catholic, the number and complexity of fearful associations that a little thing like this can carry with it. It is in Latin -- a difficult, ancient and obscure tongue. That implies, to the mind that has roots in Protestantism, all kinds of sinister secrets, which the priests are supposed to cherish and to conceal from common men in this unknown language. Then, the mere fact that they should pass judgement on the character of a book, and permit people to read it: that in itself is fraught with terror. It immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition. That is something of what I felt when I opened Gilson's book: for you must understand that while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church. That is a rather common position in the world today. After all, I had not bought a book on medieval philosophy without realizing that it would be Catholic philosophy: but the imprimatur told me that what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear. Now, in light of all this, I consider that it was surely a real grace that, instead of getting rid of the book, I actually read it. The result was that I at once acquired an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and for the Catholic faith. And that last thing was the most important of all.

Stoic ethics is a species of eudaimonism. Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well—to flourish. That is, we make it a lemma that all people ought to pursue a good life for themselves as a categorical commitment second to none. It does not follow from this that they ought to pursue any one particular version of the good life, or to cling tenaciously to the one they are pursuing. … Living virtuously is the process of creating a single, spatiotemporal object—a life. A life has a value as an object, as a whole. It is not always the case that its value as an object will be a function of the value of its spatiotemporal parts considered separately. But it is always the case that an evaluation of the parts will be incomplete until they are understood in the context of the whole life. What seems so clearly valuable (or required or excellent) when we focus on a thin temporal slice of a life (or a single, long strand of a life) may turn out to be awful or optional or vicious when we take a larger view. And it is the life as a whole that we consider when we think about its value in relation to other things, or its value as a part of the cosmos. … In our view, a focus on the parts of a life, or on the sum of its parts, obscures some important features of ethical inquiry. One such feature is the extent to which an agent’s own estimate of the value of his life is necessarily inconclusive: others will have to judge his life as a whole, because its character as a whole is not likely to be predictable while he is around to judge it, and because many important holistic considerations, such as its beauty, excellence, justice, and net effect, are things that he is either not well situated to judge or at least not in a privileged position to judge. Another feature obscured is the range of ways in which a single event or characteristic, without wide causal connections to other elements of one’s life, can nonetheless ruin it; for example, the possibility that a monstrously unjust act can indelibly stain a whole life. A third, related obscurity introduced by ignoring a whole-life frame of reference is the extent to which both aesthetic criteria and the notion of excellence have clear roles in the evaluation of a life. The whole-life frame of reference, together with a plausible account of the variety of ways in which a life can be a good one, keeps Stoicism sharply distinct from Epicurean doctrines, or their modern “welfarist” offshoots. How well my life is going from the inside, so to speak, in terms of the quality of my experience, is only one of the things that enters into a Stoic evaluation of it. We hold that there is a single unifying aim in the life of every rational agent, and that aim, guided by the notion of a good life (happiness, eudaimonia), is virtue, understood as the perfection of agency.

You could have just asked.” She straightened up from Murphy and looked at me. “Instead, you took advantage of me and never said a word.” “I didn’t take advantage of you. I was just doing what I thought was best.” “Well, you don’t get to decide what’s best for me!” Her voice rose, and Murphy paused in purring to look up at her. “I don’t get a say?” I shot back, trying to hold on to my temper. She took a deep breath. “Of course you do. But you didn’t say anything. You just did. Just like at dinner. You just announced I was getting a restraining order. There was no conversation.” I opened my mouth, but she kept talking. “How am I supposed to trust you when you do things like this without me knowing?” “You don’t trust me anymore?” I said the words with quiet calm. Surely this wasn’t enough to ruin the trust between us. She blew out a breath and paced across the room. “I didn’t say that.” She spun away from me and looked at the wall. “I’m just upset.” I strode across the room. It was darker where she was. The lights were off in here, and from this position in the room, the crackling fire in the bedroom didn’t cast much light. My feet stopped when I was directly behind her. Usually, I would touch her without thought. But right then I paused. Fuck. That. I wrapped my hands around her wrists, then loosened my grip to slide my palms up her arms to rest at her shoulders. I felt her exhale, and I wrapped one of my arms across her chest and pulled her back against my front. “I could tell you I’m sorry,” I whispered in her ear. “I could whisper how much I love you and that I won’t ever do something like this again.” The back of her head hit my chest as I spoke. The silky strands of her perfectly straight hair tickled my lips as I talked, and the scent of her shampoo enticed me closer. “But I’m not going to apologize.” She stiffened, but I strengthened my hold, unwilling to let her pull away. I kept my voice whisper soft and my lips right beside her ear. “I’d do it again, in a friggin’ heartbeat if that’s what I thought you needed.” The frustration in her body was evident, but I ignored it. “Do you know how much I love you?” I whispered. “I love you so g**damned much that it scares the shit out of me. You have no idea the kind of power you wield, how much of me you own. Knowing you were completely vulnerable, that you were locked unknowingly in a bathroom with someone who literally lurked around while you were naked, while you were washing yourself, makes me sick. He could have raped you.” My voice broke on the last part because I had to force the words out of my mouth. “He didn’t,” she said quickly and tried to turn to face me. I wouldn’t let her. I liked her where she was. It was easier to bare my heart when she wasn’t staring into me with her eyes. “No, he didn’t. But he’s put bruises on you. The way you looked in that pool last night. The way your body just kind of stopped. You sank to the bottom with a dark cloud of hair obscuring your face. I knew you had to be reliving what happened. It broke me, Rim. Loving me has cost you so fucking much. Too much.” This time, she wouldn’t let me hold her. She spun around and tipped her chin up to look at me. I let her see. I let her see the bleakness in my eyes. “Loving you has given me way more than I imagined.” She reached up and brushed the backs of her knuckles across my cheek. I dragged my fingers through her hair. “It scares me too,” Rimmel whispered. “How much I love you.” “I’m going to protect you. I’m going to protect us,” I said. “I won’t ever stop.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more subtle ones.

Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence.14 Because these ideas are constantly reinforced, they are very hard to avoid believing and internalizing. Examples of ideology in the United States include individualism, the superiority of capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system, consumerism as a desirable lifestyle, and meritocracy (anyone can succeed if he or she works hard). The racial ideology that circulates in the United States rationalizes racial hierarchies as the outcome of a natural order resulting from either genetics or individual effort or talent. Those who don’t succeed are just not as naturally capable, deserving, or hardworking. Ideologies that obscure racism as a system of inequality are perhaps the most powerful racial forces because once we accept our positions within racial hierarchies, these positions seem natural and difficult to question, even when we are disadvantaged by them. In this way, very little external pressure needs to be applied to keep people in their places; once the rationalizations for inequality are internalized, both sides will uphold the relationship.

While this positive image and story are much closer to the truth, they carry some risks. The first is that the positive self-image is used to hide and repress the negative self-image and feelings that you don’t like. The beliefs of the negative self-image remain in your unconscious, obscured by the positive ones you laid over them. You haven’t reclaimed your faith from your negative self-image. Instead, you are now feeding two opposing self-images. It is quite possible to have faith in a positive and a negative self-image at the same time. The result is that you bounce from one belief bubble to another. In one moment, you might feel unworthy. In the next moment, your perspective and thoughts shift to defending yourself from this belief by holding up the positive image. The opposing beliefs may go back and forth like a debate in your mind. Since you have faith in both beliefs, both appear true. If you are unaware that this is occurring, the conflicting beliefs can be confusing and unsettling.

Prior domestication. It's possible that the person or situation provokes a deep memory of someone attempting to domesticate you and you resisting. Even if you can't fully remember the event, your subconscious or deep memory is making the connection. As a result, your perception of the current situation is skewed by the domestication of the past. You are seeing this person as a potential threat, and your conscious or unconscious mind has labeled them as such, even if you don't realize it. If you can connect the dots and see that the reason this person bothers you is based on a past experience rather than the current situation, you have begun to eliminate their power to upset you, putting your will back into your control. With the knowledge of the memory or similar situation that the person is activating in you, you can work toward forgiving and releasing the trauma caused by the past domesticator and see the current situation in a new light, no longer obscured by the shadow of your past. Often just the association with the past begins to free you from the torment of the present situation, thus removing its power over you and absolving it as a potential trigger. 2. Mirroring. Everyone is our mirror, and our reflection of things we don't like about ourselves is most vivid in those who have the same qualities. In other words, you may see a piece of yourself in this other person even if you don't realize it. This truth may come as a surprise to some of you, and your initial reaction may be to disagree. But I invite you to look deeper. Whatever characteristic you see in another that you don't like is often a characteristic you see in some degree in yourself. For instance, if you catch someone in a lie and that bothers you greatly, can you find a time in your past where you have also been a liar? If you find yourself complaining about the shortcomings of your friends, notice how many of those complaints could also apply to you. This can be a hard truth to swallow at first, but it is also a useful tool to dissolve any negative internal reaction that occurs when dealing with someone else, because it allows you to see him or her as yourself. 3. Attachment. When you encounter someone who has an uncanny ability to provoke a reaction in you, it may be because you have an attachment to a belief that you feel needs to be defended, and you view this other person as a threat to that belief. When you are very attached to your beliefs, conflicts are almost certain to arise. While some beliefs may need defending, especially when they involve the physical well-being of yourself or someone else, these are typically not the ones we find ourselves in conflict over. There is a big difference between defending a belief that protects your physical being and a belief that simply supports a position your ego holds dear. Knowing the difference between the two, as well as your commitment to respecting another's right to believe differently than you, is a way to release your attachment to a belief grounded in egotism and view the other person's viewpoint with respect.

If your Judge Imposter obscures your ability to see beyond surface glam, you never experience people for who they really are. I’ve also traveled enough to know two things about beauty: (1) It is truly in the eye of the beholder (along with the judgments in the beholder’s mind), and (2) it is informed by the culture you grew up in: what’s judged as beautiful in one culture might be bland or uninteresting in another

acknowledging advantage is only a first step, and this acknowledgment can be used in a way that renders it meaningless and allows us white people to exempt ourselves from further responsibility. For example, I have often heard whites dismissively say, “Just because of the color of my skin, I have privilege.” Statements like this describe privilege as if it’s a fluke—something that just happens to us as we move through life, with no involvement or complicity on our part. Critical race scholar Zeus Leonardo critiques the concept of white privilege as something white people receive unwittingly. He says that this concept is analogous to suggesting that people could walk through life with other people stuffing money into their pockets without any awareness or consent on the walker’s part. Leonardo challenges this conceptualization, which positions white privilege as innocence, by arguing that “for white racial hegemony to saturate everyday life, it has to be secured by a process of domination, or those acts, decisions, and policies that white subjects perpetrate on people of color.”19 Viewing privilege as something that white people are just handed obscures the systematic dimensions of racism that must be actively and passively, consciously and unconsciously, maintained.

One way that whites protect their positions when challenged on race is to invoke the discourse of self-defense. Through this discourse, whites characterize themselves as victimized, slammed, blamed, and attacked.5 Whites who describe the interactions in this way are responding to the articulation of counternarratives alone; no physical violence has ever occurred in any interracial discussion or training that I am aware of. These self-defense claims work on multiple levels. They identify the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social positions. The claims blame others with less social power for their discomfort and falsely describe that discomfort as dangerous. The self-defense approach also reinscribes racist imagery. By positioning themselves as the victim of antiracist efforts, they cannot be the beneficiaries of whiteness. Claiming that it is they who have been unfairly treated—through a challenge to their position or an expectation that they listen to the perspectives and experiences of people of color—they can demand that more social resources (such as time and attention) be channeled in their direction to help them cope with this mistreatment.

In any case, the theory of Brownian motion was independently developed in 1900 by a Frenchman, Louis Bachelier. Bachelier was not actually concerned with the motion of microscopic particles suspended in a liquid. He was concerned with prices on the French stock market. Prices on the Bourse, like particles in a liquid, are subject to a vast array of random forces, so many that the prices’ behavior can only be studied probabilistically. This is exactly what Bachelier did in his remarkable doctoral thesis, “The Theory of Speculation.” Yet although his paper is couched in terms of futures and stock options and “call-o-more’s” (whatever those are), the mathematics is identical to that of Brownian motion, and Bachelier’s equation explaining the drift of prices with time is the same as the one Einstein later derived for the position of particles. In his paper Bachelier anticipated the Black-Scholes approach to options trading, and for his prescient work he has in recent years been crowned the “father of economic modeling.” At the time, though, Bachelier seems to have been ignored, and he passed into obscurity. Could Einstein have known of his predecessor’s work and merely transplanted the mathematics to particles? I am aware of no evidence that this is the case.

Both of these states operate simultaneously. Always, in every age, we will struggle with faith both because God positively tests us by withdrawing His consoling presence and because we are never as faithful as we should be. God is always partially obscure and we are always partially blind.

Given Loreti's position in society, the press had followed, panting. But they were to be disappointed by the police's failure to find any sign of what the English call "foul play," and so the investigation had been downsized to "missing person," whereupon the articles began to grow shorter and the pages on which they were printed further to the back of the newspapers. After a month or two, the articles followed the person into obscurity. Brunetti, who often saw things in a literary way, thought of this as a transposed simile. In the first days, the Loreti case was compared to some crime from the past. After a year, a new crime was compared to the Loreti disappearance. Over the years and generations, it had drifted into the distant past, Brunetti realized: from sensation to footnote.

The path dips down to Gal Vihara: a wide, quiet, hollow, surrounded with trees. A low outcrop of rock, with a cave cut into it, and beside the cave a big seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ananda, I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. The vicar general, shying away from "paganism." hangs back and sits under a tree reading the guidebook. I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything - without refutation - without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures. Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more "imperative" than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no "mystery." All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya... everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely, with Mahabalipuram and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage, Asian or European or American, and it is clear, pure, complete. It says everything: it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it. The whole thing is very much a Zen Garden, a span of bareness and openness and evidence, and the great figures, motionless, yet with the lines in full movement, waves of vesture and bodily form, a beautiful and holy vision. The rest of the "city", the old palace complex, I had no time for. We just drove around the roads and saw the ruined shapes, and started on the long drive home to Kandy.

We take it for granted that great individuals—Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King—can have great positive impacts on the world. But we are loath to believe the same about negative impacts—unless the individuals are obvious monsters like Hitler or Stalin. But small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined, and have access to power. Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer had access to power—all the way to the White House—by virtue of their positions as physicists who had won the Cold War. They used this power to support their political agenda, even though it meant attacking science and their fellow scientists, evidently believing that their larger end justified their means. Perhaps this, too, was part of their professional legacy. During the Manhattan Project, and throughout the Cold War, for security reasons many scientists had to hide the true nature of their work. All weapons

We too often forget," says Spencer at the outset, "that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil/ but generally also a soul of truth in things erroneous." He proposes, therefore, to examine religious ideas, with a view to finding that core of truth which under the changing form of many faiths, has given to religion its persistent power over the human soul. What he finds at once is that every theory of the origin of the universe drives us into inconceivabilities. The atheist tries to think of a self-existent world, uncaused and without beginning; but we cannot conceive of anything beginningless or uncaused. The theist merely puts back the difficulty by a step; and to the theologian who says, "God made the world," the child's unanswerable query comes, "Who made God?" All ultimate religious ideas are logically inconceivable. All ultimate scientific ideas are equally beyond rational conception. What is matter? We reduce it to atoms, and then find ourselves forced to divide the atom as we had divided the molecule: we are driven into the dilemma that matter is infinitely divisible, which is inconceivable; or that there is a limit to its divisibility, which also is inconceivable. So with the divisibility of space and time; both of these are ultimately irrational ideas. Motion is wrapped in a triple obscurity, since it involves matter changing, in time, its position in space. When we analyze matter resolutely we find nothing at last but force a force impressed upon our organs of sense, or a force resisting our organs of action; and who shall tell us what force is? Turn from physics to psychology, and we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. "Ultimate scientific ideas," then, "are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended. ... In all directions the scientist's investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known." The only honest philosophy, to use Huxley's word, is agnosticism.

Look for the best in others, even when it’s obscured. Positivity begets more positivity.

Philosophy insists that there is a joy which is absolute, which never changes. That joy cannot be the joys and pleasures we have in this life, and yet Vedanta shows that everything that is joyful in this life is but a particle of that real joy, because that is the only joy there is. Every moment really we are enjoying the absolute bliss, though covered up, misunderstood, and caricatured. Wherever there is any blessing, blissfulness, or joy, even the joy of the thief in stealing, it is that absolute bliss coming out, only it has become obscured, muddled up, as it were, with all sorts of extraneous conditions, and misunderstood. But to understand that, we have to go through the negation, and then the positive side will begin. We have to give up ignorance and all that is false, and then truth will begin to reveal itself to us. When we have grasped the truth, things which we gave up at first will take new shape and form, will appear to us in a new light, and become deified. They will have become sublimated, and then we shall understand them in their true light.

80386 instruction set supports interlocked increment and decrement, but the result of the increment/decrement operation is not returned. Only the flags are updated by the operation. As a result, the only information you get back from the CPU about the result of the operation is whether it was zero, positive, or negative. (Okay, you also get some obscure information such as whether there were an even or odd number of 1 bits in the result, but that’s hardly useful nowadays.)

[Political reaslism] "does not mean that we throw our political convictions away: we have no reason to end up with none, or with someone else’s. Nor does it mean that we stare at our convictions with ironical amazement, as Rorty suggests. But we do treat them as political convictions which determine political positions, which means, for one thing, that we acknowledge that they have obscure causes and effects. It also means that we take certain kinds of view of our allies and opponents. Even if we were utopian monarchs, we would have to take into account others’ disagreement as a mere fact. As democrats, we have to do more than that. But remembering the points about the historical conditions, we should not think that what we have to do is simply to argue with those who disagree: treating them as opponents can, oddly enough, show more respect for them as political actors than treating them simply as arguers – whether as arguers who are simply mistaken, or as fellow seekers after truth. A very important reason for thinking in terms of the political is that a political decision – the conclusion of a political deliberation which brings all sorts of considerations, considerations of principle along with others, to one focus of decision – is that such a decision does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost.

[Political realism] "does not mean that we throw our political convictions away: we have no reason to end up with none, or with someone else’s. Nor does it mean that we stare at our convictions with ironical amazement, as Rorty suggests. But we do treat them as political convictions which determine political positions, which means, for one thing, that we acknowledge that they have obscure causes and effects. It also means that we take certain kinds of view of our allies and opponents. Even if we were utopian monarchs, we would have to take into account others’ disagreement as a mere fact. As democrats, we have to do more than that. But remembering the points about the historical conditions, we should not think that what we have to do is simply to argue with those who disagree: treating them as opponents can, oddly enough, show more respect for them as political actors than treating them simply as arguers – whether as arguers who are simply mistaken, or as fellow seekers after truth. A very important reason for thinking in terms of the political is that a political decision – the conclusion of a political deliberation which brings all sorts of considerations, considerations of principle along with others, to one focus of decision – is that such a decision does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Let us propose, for now, that what constitutes a revolution is not the existence of a situation in which there has been a breakdown of the status quo, nor the mere presentation of just any demands by a certain number of people however large or well intentioned. Neither is it the expression of the mysterious, metaphysical will of The People or The Nation. Rather, revolution is the disruptive intrusion into an opening in the status quo, by means of politicized human agents, of a program which advances the rectification of structural injustice, and enables forms of human flourishing which did not previously exist in the intervened-upon situation. It may be from below or from above, from assemblies of citizens or institutions of the state, from civil disobedience, or from a war of liberation. All that matters is: That the guiding ideas have a positive emancipatory content (even if they are negative in their form). That they push for the side of the oppressed within any given historical contradiction, and do not collude with that of the oppressors. Such ideas do not obscure, but clarify, the historical problems that are to be faced, and what is to be done. That the concrete means to accomplish these ideas exist. That there are active militants to serve as the operators in the tortuous dialectic between the ideas and the concrete means.

The purpose of my influential position is to make God’s name great, to advance His kingdom on Earth, and to serve others.

No one knows who you are right now. And that's just fine. Being obscure is a great position to be in. Be happy you're in the shadows.

Taxes occupy a strange position in the emotional landscape, oscillating between moments of great passion (April 15 and election days) and near-lethal boredom (every other day), and this is what makes fiddling with taxes so enticing: Politicians can always whip the electorate into a lather, winning a mandate for change, but rely on dullness and complexity to obscure the true consequences of tax adjustments. All that matters is making sure that a plurality of voters understand that they will be beneficiaries of favorable treatment (even if not the primary beneficiaries), without focusing overmuch on what the consequences will be and what others will bear them. That plurality of voters has, for many decades, been the Boomers. To

Back in 1415, Prince Henry and his brothers had convinced their father, King John of Portugal, to capture the principal Muslim trading depot in the western Mediterranean: Ceuta, on the northeastern tip of Morocco. These brothers were envious of Muslim riches, and they sought to eliminate the Islamic middleman so that they could find the southern source of gold and Black captives. After the battle, Moorish prisoners left Prince Henry spellbound as they detailed trans-Saharan trade routes down into the disintegrating Mali Empire. Since Muslims still controlled these desert routes, Prince Henry decided to “seek the lands by the way of the sea.” He sought out those African lands until his death in 1460, using his position as the Grand Master of Portugal’s wealthy Military Order of Christ (successor of the Knights Templar) to draw venture capital and loyal men for his African expeditions. In 1452, Prince Henry’s nephew, King Afonso V, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write a biography of the life and slave-trading work of his “beloved uncle.” Zurara was a learned and obedient commander in Prince Henry’s Military Order of Christ. In recording and celebrating Prince Henry’s life, Zurara was also implicitly obscuring his Grand Master’s monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves. In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africans in the modern era. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas. Zurara’s inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry’s racist policies concerning African slave-trading.1

This has led, on the one hand, to an unhealthy pressure against creative thinking and to a sterile adherence to fixed formulations. A nearly pathological fear of revisionism has obscured the fact that every tradition with the vitality to endure has revised and must continually revise itself with the onward march of history and with the progressive achievements of human knowledge. Marxists must judge matters on the basis of the evidence, on the basis of truth criteria established by the highest level of development of scientific method at any given time, and not on the basis of conformity or nonconformity to established Marxist premises, no matter how fundamental. Only if its most basic premises are continually scrutinized can the continued affirmation of them be meaningful. Of course, if really basic premises could no longer be affirmed in this way, then it would be legitimate to query whether the new position should still be considered Marxist. But only by being open to this possibility, by following Marx’s own advice to question everything, can Marxism be adhered to and developed in a healthy way.

The Ego is swept up like a leaf in a gale, and in the swiftness of the indeterminable, that which is always about to happen becomes truth to the Ego. Things that were obscure now become self- evident, as the Ego pleases itself by its own will. This is the end of the duality of the consciousness: it is the negation of all faith by simply living. In place of belief is a positive death state, and all that remains of belief is sleep, a negative state. This sleep is the dead body of all we believe. The Ego, which was previously subjected to law, now seeks stillness in sleep and death. The Death Posture and its alternative reality represent freedom from law, and ascension from duality. In the final cataclysm, the universe may be reduced to ashes, and noone will be sorry, but the Ego will escape the Judgement! In that final freedom there is nothing that is ‘necessary’ – dare I say more? I would rather commit a sin than compromise myself.

In order to penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature, it is necessary that both notions and axioms be derived from things by a more sure and guarded way, and that a method of intellectual operation be introduced altogether better and more certain. 19. There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one files from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried. 20. The understanding left to itself takes the same course (namely the former) which it takes in accordance with logical order. For the mind longs to spring up to positions of higher generality, that it may find rest there, and so after a little while wearies of experiment. But this evil is increased by logic, because of the order and solemnity of its disputations. 21. The understanding left to itself, in a sober, patient, and grave mind, especially if it is not hindered by received doctrines, tries a little that other way, which is the right one, but with little progress; for the understanding, unless directed and assisted, is a thing unequal, and quite unfit to contend with the obscurity of things. 22. Both ways set out from the senses and particulars, and rest in the lightest generalities, but the difference between them is infinite. For the one just glances at experiment and particulars in passing, the other dwells duly and orderly among them. The one, again, begins at once by establishing certain abstract and useless generalities, the other rises by gradual steps to that which is prior and better known in the order of nature.

being famous is a thing that depends greatly on position and opportunity. It is not enough to possess gifts and powers: there must also be the means of exhibiting them. For want of opportunity some of the greatest men perhaps are buried in obscurity.

Paul knew what revolutionary commands he was giving the Philippians! In order to digest and live out commands like “Don’t be selfish,” “Don’t try to impress others,” “Be humble,” “Think of others as better than yourselves,” and “Take an interest in others,” we must acquire a living and active understanding of Christ’s humility—hence verses 5–11. Only in understanding that the King of everything took the position of a slave can we fathom servanthood ourselves.

The press would indeed take the “conservative” position. A New York Times reporter put it this way: “The Academy found that since there is no politically or economically realistic way of heading off the greenhouse effect, strategies must be prepared to adapt to a ‘high temperature world.’”50 But the Academy hadn’t found that; the committee had asserted it. And it wasn’t the Academy; it was Bill Nierenberg and a handful of economists.

For the mythological hero is the champion not of things become but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo: Holdfast, the keeper of the past. From obscurity the hero emerges, but the enemy is great and conspicuous in the seat of power; he is enemy, dragon, tyrant, because he turns to his own advantage the authority of his position. He is Holdfast not because he keeps the past but because he keeps. The tyrant is proud, and therein resides his doom. He is proud because he thinks of his strength as his own; thus he is in the clown role, as a mistaker of shadow for substance; it is his destiny to be tricked. The mythological hero, reappearing from the darkness that is the source of the shapes of the day, brings a knowledge of the secret of the tyrant's doom. With a gesture as simple as the pressing of a button, he annihilates the impressive configuration. The hero-deed is a continuous shattering of the crystallizations of the moment

We take it for granted that great individuals—Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King—can have great positive impacts on the world. But we are loath to believe the same about negative impacts—unless the individuals are obvious monsters like Hitler or Stalin. But small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined, and have access to power.

They would not sit idly by while their product was vilified; instead, they would create a Tobacco Industry Committee for Public Information to supply a “positive” and “entirely ‘pro-cigarette’” message to counter the anti-cigarette scientific one. As the U.S. Department of Justice would later put it, they decided “to deceive the American public about the health effects of smoking.

The procedure followed in this egalitarian claim troubles me more than most of the other claims that I consider in this book. When no explanations or disclaimers are made alerting readers to the uniform lack of support from scholarly specialists for such an interpretation, this wild speculation (or so it seems to me, after reading these other articles) is taken as truth by unsuspecting readers. Cindy Jacobs, for example, simply trusts Kroeger’s interpretation of this fresco as truthful, and counts it as evidence for women’s participation in high positions of governing authority in the early church.6 Thousands of readers of Jacobs’s book will also take it as true, thinking that since it has a footnote to a journal on church history, there must be scholarly support for the idea. And so something that is a figment of Catherine Kroeger’s imagination, something that no scholar in the field has ever advocated, is widely accepted as fact. The requirements of truthfulness should hold us to higher standards than this. Kroeger’s article therefore uses apparently untruthful claims based on obscure material outside the Bible in order to turn people away from being obedient to the Bible in what it says about restricting the office of pastor and elder to men. And turning people away from obeying the Bible is another step on the path toward liberalism.

PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.

It frequently happens that a great discovery supplies the wanting links between a number of obscure facts, and thus adds quite as much to our knowledge by its indirect bearings as by the positive additions it makes to the general stock.

Anyone, therefore, who obscures the glory of God, puts himself in the position of striving to subvert the eternal purpose of God. .

You know the limited edition ramp. If you write very obscure verse (and why shouldn't you, pray?) for which there is little or no market, you pretend there is an enormous demand, and that the stuff has to be rationed. Only 300 copies will be printed, you say, and then the type will be broken up forever. Let the connoisseurs and bibliophiles savage each other for the honor of snatching a copy. Positively no reprint. Reproduction in whole or in part forbidden. 300 copes of which this is Number 4,312. Hand-monkeyed oklamon paper, indigo boards in inter-pulped squirrel-toe, not to mention twelve point Campile Perpetua cast specially for the occasion. Complete, unabridged, and positively unexpurgated. Thirty-five bob a knock and a gory livid bleeding bargain at the price. Well, I have decided to carry this thing a bit further. I beg to announce respectfully my coming volume of verse entitled 'Scorn for Taurus.' We have decided to do it in eight point Caslon on turkey-shutter paper with covers in purple corduroy. But look out for the catch. When the type has been set up, it will instantly be destroyed, and NO COPY WHATSOEVER WILL BE PRINTED. In no circumstances will the company's servants be permitted to carry away even a rough printer's proof. The edition will be so utterly limited that a thousand pounds will not even buy one copy. This is my idea of being exclusive. The charge will be 5 shillings. Please do not make an exhibition of yourself by asking me what you get for your money. You get nothing you can see or feel, not even a receipt. But you do yourself the honor of participating in one of the most far-reaching literary experiments ever carried out in my literary workshop.

Musical ideas opposed first to intellectual ideas: veiled in shadow, opaque to the intellect (to the light). They have an 'obscure surface' (Proust), yet they are resistant in their own manner: distinct, unequal value and signification--less identical to themselves than non-different. Selfsame and not sameness; consistent, 'differentiated'... This conceptualization of the idea applies to notions of the sensible: like music, the sensible gives 'notions without equivalent': light, sound, relief, sensuousness... These ideas exist without intelligible sunlight and are related to visible light: a frame [membrure] of the visible. Secret, unveiled and veiled, 'alogical' (Scheler) essences, some addressing the aesthesiological body, others the libidinal body... What is fundamental: under any intellectual idea, penetrable, graspable by the intuitus mentis, there is one of those entities that is not a matter of positives but differences, 'differentiated' and collectively hidden from the night or from the void of the soul--i.e., their consistency, the possibility of identifying each one, is primarily due to their non-difference with themselves because they are poles of carnal life = invisible frame or structure of the visible--vision participates in these cogitatio caeca [blind thoughts], entails a secret, more than empirical visibility.

Page 112: In 1970 an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission administrator, Alfred Blumrosen—who despite his relative obscurity is one of the major architects and theorists of today’s racial preference system—expressed this repudiation of color-blind liberalism with surprising candor: "If discrimination is narrowly defined, for example, be requiring an evil intent to injure minorities, then it will be difficult to find that it exists. If it does not exist, then the plight of racial and ethnic minorities must be attributable to some more generalized failures in society, in the fields of basic education, housing, family relations, and the like. The search for efforts to improve the condition of minorities must then focus in these general and difficult areas, and the answers can come only gradually as basic institutions, attitudes, customs, and practices are changed." The solution, for Blumrosen and other left-liberal bureaucrats and judges, was to redefine discrimination to mean disparity, to permit the government, “by intelligent, effective, and aggressive legal action,” to assign positions in schools, factories, offices, and government on the basis of racial proportions in the population at large.

Let’s take a broader view for a moment. Visualize a power grid. This is the conception of human society that constitutes the postmodernist worldview. It posits that we are born and positioned by elements of our identity, such that we have different levels of access to power—privilege is like being plugged in to the network—and we learn to perform our position and thus “conduct” the power through ourselves as part of the system, often without ever knowing that the grid is there. This learning is achieved mostly by socialization into “hegemonic” identity roles constructed and accepted by society and is rarely intentional. By performing our roles, we uphold the social and cultural assumptions that grant and deny access to power. Furthermore, access to power has an automatically corrupting influence, which leads us to perform our roles, thus socializing ourselves and others into accepting the inequities of the system, justifying our own access, and rationalizing the exclusion of others. This is all done through discourses—ways we speak about things, including how we represent them in nonverbal media. As this conception of society, which originated in the obscure and complex language of the original postmodernists, has evolved, it has consolidated into a belief system. Thus, we frequently see Theorists state this explanation with the confidence of an objective belief—something that would not have been possible for the first postmodernists.

In 771, a traveller arrived in the city [Baghdad] with a copy of a work of Hindu astronomy called the Siddhanta (The Opening of the Universe), by the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta (598-668). Unlike Euclid, Brahmagupta did not set out his mathematical propositions clearly with proofs, but obscured them (as was traditional in Indian mathematics) under a veil of poetry -- beautiful, but extremely difficult to unravel. Al-Mansur gave his court astrologer, al-Fazari, the Herculean task of translating the Siddhanta, which introduced Baghdad to the concept of 'positional notation' -- the way we write numbers to this day, using the digits 1 to 9, in columns of units, tens, hundreds and so on. The possibilities that this system opened up were limitless; when it was eventually adopted, it transformed the entire discipline of mathematics by allowing calculations that would have been impossible with the old Roman-numeral system. Positional notation was already known in Syria and had been admired by Severus Sebokht, who wrote about the 'nine sings' of Indian mathematicians in 662.

The myth of worldly decline can seem old-fashioned, darkly pessimistic, and deeply discouraging when compared to the tales of upward evolution and unending progress. Yet this world is essentially a place of mystery and what looks darkest at the beginning can have bright threads hidden within. Conversely, things that seem most positive can be found to have a dark shadow that eventually comes to the light of day and obscures what seemed so bright to begin with.

Sayers calls out this obsessive dedication to the King James translation for what it is—idolotry. Readers were holding the words sacrosanct, but not the words of the Greek original, not the authentic documents, “but to every syllable of a translation made three hundred years ago (and that not always with perfect accuracy) in an idiom so old-fashioned that, even as English, it is often obscure to us or positively misleading.” Sayers points out how we become more attached to what is familiar than devoted to what is true. (p. 142)

The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink. The almost certain consequences that follow taking even a glass of beer do not crowd into the mind to deter us. If these thoughts occur, they are hazy and readily supplanted with the old threadbare idea that this time we shall handle ourselves like other people. There is a complete failure of the kind of defense that keeps one from putting his hand on a hot stove. The alcoholic may say to himself in the most casual way, “It won’t burn me this time, so here’s how!” Or perhaps he doesn’t think at all. How often have some of us begun to drink in this nonchalant way, and after the third or fourth, pounded on the bar and said to ourselves, “For God’s sake, how did I ever get started again?” Only to have that thought supplanted by “Well, I’ll stop with the sixth drink.” Or “What’s the use anyhow?” When this sort of thinking is fully established in an individual with alcoholic tendencies, he has probably placed himself beyond human aid, and unless locked up, may die or go permanently insane. These stark and ugly facts have been confirmed by legions of alcoholics throughout history. But for the grace of God, there would have been thousands more convincing demonstrations. So many want to stop but cannot. There is a solution. Almost none of us liked the self-searching, the leveling of our pride, the confession of shortcomings which the process requires for its successful consummation. But we saw that it really worked in others, and we had come to believe in the hopelessness and futility of life as we had been living it. When, therefore, we were approached by those in whom the problem had been solved, there was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet. We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed. The great fact is just this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences* which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows and toward God’s universe. The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves. If you are as seriously alcoholic as we were, we believe there is no middle-of-the-road solution. We were in a position where life was becoming impossible, and if we had passed into the region from which there is no return through human aid, we had but two alternatives: One was to go on to the bitter end, blotting out the consciousness of our intolerable situation as best we could; and the other, to accept spiritual help. This we did because we honestly wanted to, and were willing to make the effort.

As I stood there watching the mists softly rise, I wondered what vista could be more beautiful than this. The dense mist obscured visibility at times. The wind howled and roared as it swept through." - Shree Shambav

Can I get a boost?” he asked Lovise, who didn’t look thrilled about the idea of lifting Dex onto her shoulders so he could reach the camera more easily—and Sophie wasn’t in love with the position either, mostly because it would draw all kinds of attention to them if the obscurer stopped working.

while there has been a great deal of public debate about belief in God in recent years (much of it a little petulant, much of it positively ferocious), the concept of God around which the arguments have run their seemingly interminable courses has remained strangely obscure the whole time. The more scrutiny one accords these debates, moreover, the more evident it becomes that often the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing; and I would go as far as to say that on most occasions none of them is talking about God in any coherent sense at all. It is not obvious to me, therefore, that their differences really amount to a meaningful disagreement, as one cannot really have a disagreement without some prior agreement as to what the basic issue of contention is.

Our culture encourages such a posture. We all have been brought up and educated with the “adversarial” model for resolving disputes. This model, based on our legal system, assumes that the truth will emerge through the most vigorous combat between advocates of opposing positions. If each of us fights for our own opinion as ruthlessly as possible, then the one left standing when the smoke clears must be right. Regrettably, this model obscures the truth as often as it helps us discover it. The adversarial model favors the bigger, stronger, louder champion, regardless of his or her views. Even worse, it distracts us from looking for creative ways to reconcile conflicts by finding new perspectives that accommodate differences or mediate opposing positions.

I shall overcome any obscuration.

I examined London in the light of the fire. To my relief, he looked the same as always, ever young, his silver bangs partially obscuring his indigo eyes. “Where have you been?” I asked. “In Cokyri.” He smirked. “Creating a diversion.” He paused, staring into the flames, then continued. “Prior to that I was in the mountains, helping Cannan and the rest in whatever fashion I could. Mostly trying to keep my head on my shoulders.” He shrugged and ran a hand through his unruly hair. “I was a wanted man, you know, although not wanted in the way I would like to have been.” Had I been in better spirits, I would have laughed at his wry humor, but as it was I moved to his side to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you for coming. Thank you for finding us.” He nodded, and put his arm around my shoulder. “Get some sleep, Alera. I’ll wake you if things get worse.” I stayed where I was for several minutes, glad for his comfort, then lay down next to Narian, talking softly to him, wanting to be near him if he slipped away. Morning broke, and I felt Narian stir. I sat up and stared at him, then at London, who was cooking some broth over the fire. “He’s going to make it,” London said. “I told you he was strong.” Narian’s eyes opened and his gaze fell on me. “Now this is a welcome sight,” he rasped, and I kissed him. He looked over at London, then remarked, “And you’re a surprising sight.” I helped Narian into a sitting position and London brought him the broth. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” he said. “But we’ll ride out in two hours’ time. We need to keep moving in case the High Priestess sends guards to verify Narian’s death. I don’t want to be sipping tea when she fails to find a body. And we need to see who is in control of Hytanica this day.

MT: These texts are at one and the same time very beautiful and obscure; they need to be explicated, clarified. “What is hidden will be revealed.” Why must Revelation be hidden? RG: It's not that it must be hidden, actually it's not hidden at all. It's mankind that is blind. We're inside the closure of representation, everyone is in the fishbowl of his or her culture. In other words, mankind doesn't see what I was saying earlier, the principle of illusion that governs our viewpoint. Even after the Revelation, we still don't understand. MT: Does that mean that things are going to emerge gradually, but that at first they're incomprehensible? RG: They seem incomprehensible because mankind lives under the sign of Satan, lives a lie and lives in fear of the lie, in fear of liars. The reversal performed by the Passion has yet to occur. MT: Insofar as the Church itself has been mistaken for two thousand years and has been practicing a sacrificial reading of the Passion of the Christ, that reading is a way of hiding Revelation. RG: I'm not saying that the Church is mistaken. The reading that I'm proposing is in line with all the great dogmas, but it endows them with an anthropological underpinning that had gone unnoticed. MT: Why not just clean up our bad habits by sweeping them away once and for all in the year zero, making way for an era of love and infinite peace? RG: Because the world wouldn't have been able to take it! Since the sacrificial principle is the fundamental principle of the human order—up to a certain point human beings need to pour out their violence and tensions onto scapegoats—destroying it all at once is impossible. That's why Christianity is made in such a way as to allow for transitions. This is no doubt one of the reasons why it is at once so far from and so close to myth, and always susceptible to being interpreted a bit mythically. When Nietzsche says that Christianity is impossible, that it can only lead to absurdities, to outrageous, insane things, it can be said that he's superficially right, even if ultimately he's wrong. You can't get rid of the sacrificial principle by just flicking it away as if it were a piece of dust. History isn't finished. Every day very interesting things, changes in outlook, are happening right before our eyes. In the United States and everywhere, a lot of current cultural phenomena can be unified by describing them as the discovery of new victims, or rather as their concrete rehabilitation, for in truth we've known about them for a long time: women, children, the elderly, the insane, the physically and mentally handicapped, and so forth. For example, the question of abortion, which has great importance in American debates, is no longer formulated except in the following terms: “Who is the real victim? Is it the child or is it the mother?” You can no longer defend a given position, or indeed any of them, except by making it into a contribution to the anti-victimary crusade. MT

Rules for the Use and Arrangement of Words The following rules for the use and arrangement of words will be found helpful in securing clearness and force. 1. Use words in their proper sense. 2. Avoid useless circumlocution and "fine writing." 3. Avoid exaggerations. 4. Be careful in the use of not ... and, any, but, only, not ... or, that. 5. Be careful in the use of ambiguous words, e. g., certain. 6. Be careful in the use of he, it, they, these, etc. 7. Report a speech in the first person where necessary to avoid ambiguity. 8. Use the third person where the exact words of the speaker are not intended to be given. 9. When you use a participle implying when, while, though, or that, show clearly by the context what is implied. 10. When using the relative pronoun, use who or which, if the meaning is and he or and it, for he or for it. 11. Do not use and which for which. 12. Repeat the antecedent before the relative where the non-repetition causes any ambiguity. 13. Use particular for general terms. Avoid abstract nouns. 14. Avoid verbal nouns where verbs can be used. 15. Use particular persons instead of a class. 16. Do not confuse metaphor. 17. Do not mix metaphor with literal statement. 18. Do not use poetic metaphor to illustrate a prosaic subject. 19. Emphatic words must stand in emphatic positions; i. e., for the most part, at the beginning or the end of the sentence. 20. Unemphatic words must, as a rule, be kept from the end. 21. The Subject, if unusually emphatic, should often be transferred from the beginning of the sentence. 22. The object is sometimes placed before the verb for emphasis. 23. Where several words are emphatic make it clear which is the most emphatic. Emphasis can sometimes be given by adding an epithet, or an intensifying word. 24. Words should be as near as possible to the words with which they are grammatically connected. 25. Adverbs should be placed next to the words they are intended to qualify. 26. Only; the strict rule is that only should be placed before the word it affects. 27. When not only precedes but also see that each is followed by the same part of speech. 28. At least, always, and other adverbial adjuncts sometimes produce ambiguity. 29. Nouns should be placed near the nouns that they define. 30. Pronouns should follow the nouns to which they refer without the intervention of any other noun. 31. Clauses that are grammatically connected should be kept as close together as possible. Avoid parentheses. 32. In conditional sentences the antecedent or "if-clauses" must be kept distinct from the consequent clauses. 33. Dependent clauses preceded by that should be kept distinct from those that are independent. 34. Where there are several infinitives those that are dependent on the same word must be kept distinct from those that are not. 35. In a sentence with if, when, though, etc. put the "if-clause" first. 36. Repeat the subject where its omission would cause obscurity or ambiguity. 37. Repeat a preposition after an intervening conjunction especially if a verb and an object also intervene. 38. Repeat conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronominal adjectives. 39. Repeat verbs after the conjunctions than, as, etc. 40. Repeat the subject, or some other emphatic word, or a summary of what has been said, if the sentence is so long that it is difficult to keep the thread of meaning unbroken. 41. Clearness is increased when the beginning of the sentence prepares the way for the middle and the middle for the end, the whole forming a kind of ascent. This ascent is called "climax." 42. When the thought is expected to ascend but descends, feebleness, and sometimes confusion, is the result. The descent is called "bathos." 43. A new construction should not be introduced unexpectedly.

He crossed to the small guard station and foraged through its drawers until he found the first-aid box. He threw bottles over his shoulder and they shattered on the ground behind him. When he came to the procaine hydrochloride vial, he stopped. The Maingate physician had insisted it be present in case emergency oral surgery were ever necessary for the guards; in addition to being a contained security unit, the Tower had to be a self-sufficient medical station. Allander withdrew a needle from the small packet and fit it gently into a plastic syringe. He punched the needle through the rubber top of the vial and withdrew some of the liquid, then cleared the air from the syringe. A few drops squirted through, onto the floor. Taking a deep breath, Allander inserted the needle into the tip of the ring finger on his left hand. He waited for the numbness to spread and settle. After a few minutes, he removed a scalpel from its sterile package and dipped it in the container of alcohol. Then he made a neat incision, cutting diagonally through his fingerprint. Since the anesthetic had not fully taken effect, he felt a painful tingling in the pad of his finger, but feeling suddenly rushed for time, he continued. Using tweezers, he pried underneath the skin, grimacing as he saw his flesh rise along the straight line of the cut. The blood came and washed over the end of the tweezers until it obscured his view. Once, he felt the tweezers close on something hard and he pulled gently, but when the tweezers emerged from the bloody gash, they held only fleshy material that looked like gristle. Allander hadn’t anticipated that numbing the finger would have made it difficult for him to distinguish the location sensor from his own senseless tissue. Beginning to lose patience, he pressed the tweezers in until they hit the bone. He applied too much pressure and they slid around the side of his finger next to his nail, pulling the flesh around and stretching the cut open. He heard a soft, metallic clink as the tweezers struck something distinctly alien, and he bit his lip in a mixture of pain and delight. Finally, working the tweezers around the metal, he withdrew the sensor, which was the size of a large pea. The flesh around the cut strained and whitened at the edges as he pulled the bloody orb through. After pressing gauze to his wound, Allander wrapped it with medical tape, bandaging it thoroughly. Then he used the tape to affix the location sensor to the side of the Hole. It was close enough to its assigned location that the difference in position would not be detected from the mainland.

To have followed the speculative vision of Behaim in his famous globe, or of others like him, would have been disastrous, even though their work represents the cream of fifteenth-century mapmaking and was known to Columbus. Indeed, as one commentator has observed, if his chart had been based on the Behaim scenario, 'Columbus could not even have known of the whereabouts of the New World, much less discover it.' Yet not only does he seem to have known where he was going but, on some accounts, when he was going to get there: 'Now and then Pinzón and Columbus consult and deliberate -- mutually discuss their route. The map or chart passes not infrequently from the one captain to the other; the observations and calculations as to their position are daily recorded, their conduct and course for the night duly agreed upon. On the eve of their due arrival Columbus issues the order to stay the course of the armada, to shorten sail, because he knew that he was close to the New World and was afraid of going ashore during the obscurity of the night ... How does he know the place and the hour? 'His Genius' says the Columbus legend in explanation. But the Map? The critics will ask, what did it contain? Whose was it? What did that map contain that was so frequently passed from Columbus to Pinzón during the voyage?' I've presented my case that what the map may have contained was an accurate but ancient, and indeed antediluvian, representation of the coast and islands of Central America, notably the north-south-oriented Great Bahama Bank island, which Columbus -- no less ignorant than any of his contemporaries about the existence of the Americas -- took to be an accurate map of part of the coast of China and the islands of Japan.

The phrase “fake news” sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test. These euphemisms obscure the fact that the sex-slave story is an out-and-out lie. The people who wrote it knew that it wasn’t true. There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists—and the rest of us—must stop giving equal time to things that don’t have a fact-based opposing side. Two sides to a story exist when evidence exists on both sides of a position. Then, reasonable people may disagree about how to weigh that evidence and what conclusion to form from it. Everyone, of course, is entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts. Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.

Centuries before anyone had ever heard of biological evolution, Saint Augustine warned of creating false fundamentals in regard to our interpretation of the book of Genesis. “In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision,” he wrote, “we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

In many cases we find ourselves drawn to doctrines such as rebirth not out of a genuine existential insight or concern, but rather out of a need for consolatioṇ At the level of popular religion, Buddhism, as much as any other tradition, has provided such consolatioṇ Yet if we take an agnostic position, we will find ourselves facing death as a moment of our existential encounter with life. Any examined human life involves the realization that we have been thrown into this world, without any choice, only to look forward to the prospect of being expelled at death. The sheer sense of bafflement and perplexity at this situation is crucial to spiritual awareness. To opt for a comforting, even a discomforting, explanation of what brought us here or what awaits us after death severely limits that very rare sense of mystery with which religion is essentially concerned. We thereby obscure with consoling man-made concepts that which most deeply terrifies and fascinates us.

Welcome obscurity. No one knows who you are right now. And that’s just fine. Being obscure is a great position to be in. Be happy you’re in the shadows. Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about them. Keep tweaking. Work out the kinks. Test random ideas. Try new things. No one knows you, so it’s no big deal if you mess up. Obscurity helps protect your ego and preserve your confidence…. Would you want the whole world to watch you the first time you do anything? If you’ve never given a speech before, do you want your first speech to be in front of ten thousand people or ten people? You don’t want everyone to watch you starting your business. It makes no sense to tell everyone to look at you if you’re not ready to be looked at yet…. These early days of obscurity are something you’ll miss later on, when you’re really under the microscope. Now’s the time to take risks without worrying about embarrassing yourself.

Richard Nixon, a president not generally recalled as a visionary environmentalist, created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law several signature pieces of environmental legislation: the Clean Air Act Extension, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. Things were changing, though, and within a few years, Ronald Reagan would begin to shift the Republican Party away from both environmental preservation and environmental regulation, a position that would separate the party from its historic environmentalism, and put it on a collision course with science.

THE WRATH TO COME. — MATTHEW 3:7 I t is pleasant to pass over a country after a storm has spent itself—to smell the freshness of the herbs after the rain has passed away, and to note the drops while they glisten like purest diamonds in the sunlight. That is the position of a Christian. He is going through a land where the storm has spent itself upon His Savior’s head, and if there be a few drops of sorrow falling, they distill from clouds of mercy, and Jesus cheers him by the assurance that they are not for his destruction. But how terrible it is to witness the approach of a tempest—to note the forewarnings of the storm; to mark the birds of heaven as they droop their wings; to see the cattle as they lay their heads low in terror; to discern the face of the sky as it grows black, and to find the sun obscured, and the heavens angry and frowning! How terrible to await the dread advance of a hurricane, to wait in terrible apprehension till the wind rushes forth in fury, tearing up trees from their roots, forcing rocks from their pedestals, and hurling down all the dwelling-places of man! And yet, sinner, this is your present position. No hot drops have fallen as yet, but a shower of fire is coming. No terrible winds howl around you, but God’s tempest is gathering its dread artillery. So far the water-floods are dammed up by mercy, but the floodgates will soon be opened: The thunderbolts of God are still in His storehouse, the tempest is coming, and how awful will that moment be when God, robed in vengeance, shall march forth in fury! Where, where, where, O sinner, will you hide your head, or where will you run to? May the hand of mercy lead you now to Christ! He is freely set before you in the Gospel: His pierced side is the place of shelter. You know your need of Him; believe in Him, cast yourself upon Him, and then the fury shall be past forever.

In our culture of constant access and nonstop media nothing feels more like a curse from God than time in the wilderness,” wrote pastor Jonathan Martin in his book Prototype. “Our society tells us that if and when we get ‘there’—the job or position or degree we’ve always wanted—that’s when all the important stuff will start happening. Not so. All the good stuff happens in obscurity.

Ideologies that obscure racism as a system of inequality are perhaps the most powerful racial forces because once we accept our positions within racial hierarchies, these positions seem natural and difficult to question, even when we are disadvantaged by them. In this way, very little external pressure needs to be applied to keep people in their places; once the rationalizations for inequality are internalized, both sides will uphold the relationship.

The good/bad binary certainly obscures the structural nature of racism and makes it difficult for us to see or understand. Equally problematic is the impact of such a worldview on our actions. If, as a white person, I conceptualize racism as a binary and I place myself on the “not racist” side, what further action is required of me? No action is required, because I am not a racist. Therefore, racism is not my problem; it doesn’t concern me and there is nothing further I need to do. This worldview guarantees that I will not build my skills in thinking critically about racism or use my position to challenge racial inequality.

They identify the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social positions.

In the words of the Athenian historian Thucydides, ‘When it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty.

Trust yourself and accept the position God has given you among the peers of your time and the sequence of events that have unfolded since birth. Great men have always done so, and remained childlike in regards to the future beyond their years and age, withholding their perception from it, and having absolute trust for that which is in their heart, labouring with the mind, body and soul. Men must accept in the highest form of the mind the same heavenly destiny; and not act as children and disabled, protected and cared for by others; and not act as cowards fearing a revolution, but become guides, protectors, rescuers, and leaders, manifesting God’s work, and advancing through chaos and obscurity.

Guardians of the Vote: History, Heroes, and the Legacy of Voting Rights—1960s v. Today” by Jet Thomas, Ed.S., a retired educator, is an essential text covering all aspects of voting in the United States of America. It focuses on how Black Americans, along with other minority groups, have suffered from unequal and often biased circumstances that have suppressed their participation in this cornerstone of democracy. Thomas covers the history of voting with particular emphasis on the events that led to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s; he features both well-known and more obscure figures who were leaders in creating change – whom he refers to as “Guardians of the Vote;” and the concerns we are facing today due to decisions by the Supreme Court that have weakened the Voting Rights Act. He exposes and explains the current tactics of political maneuvering to circumvent the rights of citizens who are exercising their right to cast votes. Journalist Tavis Smiley contributed the foreword, which describes how the individual reader can become a guardian of the vote by increasing their involvement in the process, with education and training from supportive organizations, making every effort to vote in every election, and then instructing children on the importance of voting and the history of civil rights empowerment. The foreword functions as an outline for what the reader will encounter in the body of the book, as discussed in its nine chapters. Many readers will realize that much of the material that Thomas presents was never covered in their own educational experience, at least not in-depth, and depending on the era of their school attendance, in discussions of current events – this reader/reviewer can attest to very little, even though the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed less than a decade before my own high school graduation. In retrospect, and with consideration of my memories of the coverage presented on the major network news broadcasts of the time, that seems quite shocking. The Introduction offers an excellent overview of the history of key events related to voting in the United States. Thomas then offers nine highly detailed yet very readable chapters covering topics that include discrimination methods found in communication, voter intimidation and restrictions, political manipulation, a study of pertinent legislation, a survey of key voter advocacy groups, and profiles of leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement. The text is amplified with graphic introductions to each chapter that provide a timeline of historical events. There are also numerous photos of pertinent materials, important historic and well-recognized figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Congressman John Lewis, along with the individuals he profiles as “Guardians of the Vote.” These visuals provide additional interest and context to the narrative. The author has compiled and organized a vast trove of information to educate and inform readers on the importance of making their voices heard through voting. He also strives to acquaint them with the obstacles Black Americans and other minorities face when attempting to vote, and solutions for remedying this very large problem facing our democracy. His in-depth research and careful documentation are highly evident. In addition, he provides a helpful glossary and references to assist his audience. Readers from high school age onward will come away with new information that will aid them in becoming “Guardians of the Vote” in their own right. Knowledge truly is power when the goal is positive change. “Guardians of the Vote” by Jet Thomas, Ed.S. is a book that should be used to teach history and current events in every high school classroom, in college courses, in community study groups, and in political organizations. It is an important book, and I recommend it to every current and prospective citizen of this country.

To accomplish the vast work of bringing all living beings happiness, especially the peerless happiness of full enlightenment, we need to become enlightened. To guide others perfectly, we need to develop the inner qualities of our mind, especially omniscient wisdom, compassion for all beings, and the perfect power to reveal the methods to help others. These qualities are vital in healing ourselves and all other living beings. Enlightenment means cessation of ignorance, anger, attachment, and all other unhealthy thoughts, as well as cessation of even their subtle imprints, and completion of all realizations. And enlightenment is achieved through mental development. We need to develop both compassion and wisdom. We need to develop not only the wisdom that understands conventional reality, especially the causes of happiness and suffering, but also the wisdom that understands ultimate reality, because it is only then that we can eliminate the ignorance that is the root of all suffering and its causes and achieve liberation. Normally, before we can teach others about literature, philosophy, science, or handicrafts we ourselves need to be qualified to teach. For example, before doctors can train other people to become doctors, they must have the knowledge and clinical skills needed to diagnose even obscure diseases. In a similar way, we cannot lead all living beings to the state of full enlightenment unless we are perfectly qualified through development of the positive qualities of mind, especially compassion and wisdom. Only then can we really help others. The purpose of our life is to heal every single living being's body and mind of all suffering and its causes and to bring every one of them to the ultimate, everlasting happiness of full enlightenment. Developing our inner qualities of wisdom and compassion is the way to heal our own mind and body, and through this we will then also be able to heal others. (p. 31)

Summit meetings, justifications for: "The favorite cliche of those who advocate summit talks regardless of the circumstances is, 'Talking is always better than fighting.' This, however, is not the only choice. Talking is no better than not talking when you do not know what you are going to talk about." — Richard M. Nixon, 1960 Summit meetings, negotiations at: "It is almost always a mistake for heads of delegation to undertake the details of a negotiation. They are then obliged to master specifics normally handled by their foreign offices and are deflected onto subjects more appropriate to their subordinates, while being kept from issues only heads of state can resolve. Since no one without a well-developed ego reaches the highest office, compromise is difficult and deadlocks are dangerous. With the domestic positions of the interlocutors so often dependent on at least the semblance of success, negotiations more often concentrate on obscuring differences than they do on dealing with the essence of a problem." — Henry A. Kissinger, 1994 [See Amb. Freeman's own account of his experience of summit meetings during the interview "Amb. Chas Freeman: Trump’s Next Move: Does He Even Know?"] Summit meetings, purpose of: "When the primary purpose of summit meetings is thought to be the fostering of good will, they become not a forum for negotiations but a substitute for them; not an expression of policy but a means of obscuring its absence. The constant international travels of heads of government without a clear program or purpose may be less an expression of statesmanship than a symptom of panic." — Henry A. Kissinger, 1960

More often than not the "successful entrepreneurs" of the time were officials of the Communist Party or members of the Young Communist League, and this seemed to confirm the popular suspicion that there was corruption and that the source of their wealth was not so much enterprise and initiative as power and access to resources. On top of that, for the seventy years of its existence the Soviet Union had been inculcating contempt for wheeler-dealers and anyone else in pursuit of private profit. Someone working in commerce in those times could live reasonably well, but it was more prestigious to be a cosmonaut, in the military, or a professor. Then, suddenly cosmonauts were nobodies, just ordinary mortals who got rewarded for their pains with a three-room apartment and a black Volga car, and professors could barely make ends meet. At the same time, some obscure cooperative owner, and just about anyone selling something in the market-was a lord of the universe and had more money than any Hero of Labor ever received. It turned out that being poor was much more bearable when everybody else was, but it was intolerable once you could see your neighbor was far richer. We often hear talk about the envy Russian or Soviet people felt toward the first entrepreneurs, and that is what made the late 1980s such a hateful time. I believe, however, it was all caused by the inequality of opportunities. If Gorbachev could have made it easy for everyone to become an entrepreneur, if millions of people had taken that up, rather than just tens of thousands of the smartest, or wiliest, or those who found themselves well positioned, then everything could have been different. Instead, the setting up of cooperatives, and later of the first businesses, was made monstrously complicated and was totally under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy. If you wanted to start a business, you had to pay bribes or have contacts, or at least have the kind of charisma that could bring walls tumbling down. For long years this established the image of businesspeople as shifty, devious individuals who had got in on the act by less than legal means. In the army, the police, and the KGB, resentment at this decline in the status of officers was particularly acute. Something was going to have to change.