Obsessed With Disappeared Quotes

The world is so obsessed with defining sexuality for everyone and attaching labels to it. Any time any person openly leaves the sexual norm, their sexuality becomes, more often than not, the absolute defining characteristic of that person. It becomes the first thing people think about and often the first thing they mention. Every other part of that person all but disappears.

I pointed at him. “If I die, I'm haunting your ass for eternity.” Josh placed a hand over his heart, a scandalized expression spreading across his face. Any hints of the earlier brooding had disappeared. “JR, I'm shocked. There are children around. Try to keep your obsession with my ass under wraps until we return to our room.

If I blink she'll disappear," he told her. She looked at him and said,"Maybe that is the best thing for you.

I will be my undoing, If I become my obsession. I will forget the ones I love, If I do not serve them. I will war with others, If I refuse to see them. Therefore, I choose to turn away From my reflection, To rely not on myself But on my brothers and sisters, To project always outward Until I disappear [And only God remains.]

What's the difference between love and obsession? Didn't both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn't you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn't every man in love a fool and every woman a slave? Love was like rain: it turned to ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn't find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn't go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, 'Dear you, good-bye from me'. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you'd known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.

She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

The problem with obsession is absence. When the object of your obsession disappears, what are you? Do you even exist

And what is a friend? More than a father, more than a brother: a traveling companion, with him, you can conquer the impossible, even if you must lose it later. Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. It is a friend that you communicate the awakening of a desire, the birth of a vision or a terror, the anguish of seeing the sun disappear or of finding that order and justice are no more. That's what you can talk about with a friend. Is the soul immortal, and if so why are we afraid to die? If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end? What is death, when you come down to it? The closing of a parenthesis, and nothing more? And what about life? In the mouth of a philosopher, these questions may have a false ring, but asked during adolescence or friendship, they have the power to change being: a look burns and ordinary gestures tend to transcend themselves. What is a friend? Someone who for the first time makes you aware of your loneliness and his, and helps you to escape so you in turn can help him. Thanks to him who you can hold your tongue without shame and talk freely without risk. That's it.

As God was expunged from American life, idols came in to fill the void; idols of sensuality, idols of greed, of money, of success, comfort, materialism, pleasure, sexual immorality, self-worship, self-obsession. The sacred increasingly disappeared, and the profane took its place.

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy. When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

I’m just trying to live my life, but it seems as if sadness always piles itself up around me. It’s in my bed, the toothbrush in my bathroom, and the memory of my cellphone. Over the past few years, I’ve wanted to move on, I’ve wanted to take hold of something I couldn’t reach. What that is, I have no idea. Not knowing where such obsessive thoughts were coming from, I simply drowned myself in my work. Then one day I realized that my heart was withering, and in it there was nothing but pain. And that my beliefs, that I once held so passionately, had completely disappeared.

As each new generation becomes more distanced from human interaction by its all-consuming obsession with superfluous technology, our collective passion wanes a little more, making the cracks in each persons’ bridge wider, until it is easy to fall through the fractures and disappear forever.

Okay, dumbass. Perspective time," Gordon muttered as he ripped the greasy bag open. He would force himself to eat. He was not going to become an obsessed basketcase. He wasn't. "First of all," he said, yanking the utensil drawer open." He is capable of murdering a huge juicer in the middle of the street and then disappearing with the body within seconds." He removed one of the cartons and shoved his fork into the mound of noodles. "Two, he is probably a sociopath. Three, he thinks I'm a complete ballsack of a moron.

The door slammed into someone, splashing coffee down the front of her… I swallowed hard. For just a moment I was transfixed by the droplets of coffee that cascaded down her chest, disappearing beneath her tank top. But then I heard the thud as her cup landed on the ground and it pulled me out of my trance. Just as I was about to force my eyes to her face, she started to slip. I grabbed her waist to prevent her from falling.

Imagine that a writer has to finish a novel in three months. The objective is clear; the problem is that the writer can't stop obsessing over it. Every day she wakes up thinking, "I have to write that novel," and every day she sets about reading the newspaper and cleaning the house. Every evening she feels frustrated and promises she'll get to work the next day. Days, weeks, and months pass, and the writer still has't gotten anything down on the page, when all it would have taken was to sit down and get that first word out, then the second . . . to flow with the project, expressing their ikigai. As soon as you take these first small steps, your anxiety will disappear and you will achieve a pleasant flow in the activity you're doing.

Now they are both looking at me and smiling. Carly’s smile is so bold, so certain. Jenni’s is tentative, flashing wide for a second and then disappearing. ‘Everything all right?’ I ask. ‘Carly was just telling me about your holiday,’ Jenni says. There is a pause. ‘And the party.’ ‘Party?’ ‘For bonfire night.

The obsession with Japan in otaku culture did not develop from Japanese tradition, but rather emerged after this tradition disappeared.

When a person finds someone who makes all the negativity in their lives disappear, it's hard not to feed off that person.

The problem with obsession is absence. When the object of your obsession disappears, what are you? Do you even exist?

My only real escape came from fantasy. I disappeared into a world of books, becoming obsessed with science fiction. I believed in other planets and races, searching the sky at night for stars, secretly hoping to be abducted and taken to a kinder planet. Maybe God had made a mistake sending me here, I thought. It was obvious I belonged somewhere else. Here I questioned everything and nothing ever made sense.

Mention you’re from Yorktown, Virginia, and I’ll forever connect you with the Colonial Parkway, the ribbon of road snaking along the York River where four couples either disappeared or were murdered between 1986 and 1989.

Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies. When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God. 75. Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil? Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.

Feelings that have been pushed away do not actually disappear; they live on in the darkness of the Unconscious, pulling the strings in our relationships, our work, self-expression, causing us to become reactive, compulsive, obsessive, depressed, anxious, and deteriorate our physical health until one day, we remember, all feelings have a right to exist in us. So, we stop numbing ourselves, and feed them love, attention, curiosity and Presence. Now, they can finally come to rest.

Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power—a holy union that is reconstructed around its disappearance. The whole world adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power—obsession with its death, obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power—a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it (no one wants it anymore, everyone unloads it on everyone else) and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning.

The first change is a realization that I am no longer alone. Even when I'm lying in the dark by myself, I now sense other beings hovering near me. It isn't just me living in this house, but unfinished love and my dejection and anger and dead Paulie, and their miraculous presence feels as real as my fingernails digging into my hand. The second change is that I'm not more obsessed with cooking, like the Roman gourmets and their cherished chefs, who wanted to put all things wonderful or special or new or majestic or strange or scary-looking on the table. The cooks back then knew only how to bake or boil, but I understand how a few drops of pomegranate juice can transform a dish. The third change is that with these first two revelations, my sense of taste has become ever more sensitive and sharp, my imagination richer. When I got my ears pierced and walked into the street in the middle of winter, I become one large ear. All sensation and pain were concentrated in my ears. It's that same feeling. Everything about me disappears and I'm only a pink tongue. This is the time to grow into a truly good chef.

To visualize this dance, the transparent components of the cell had to be coloured using a stain. As it happened, the stains that were best able to colour the chromosomes were acidic. Unfortunately, these stains tended to dissolve the mitochondria; their obsession with the nucleus meant that cytologists were simply dissolving the evidence. Other stains were ambivalent, colouring mitochondria only transiently, for the mitochondria themselves rendered the stain colourless. Their rather ghostly appearance and disappearance was scarcely conducive to firm belief. Finally Carl Benda demonstrated, in 1897, that mitochondria do have a corporeal existence in cells. He defined them as ‘granules, rods, or filaments in the cytoplasm of nearly all cells … which are destroyed by acids or fat solvents.’ His term, mitochondria (pronounced ‘my-toe-con-dree-uh’), was derived from the Greek mitos, meaning thread, and chondrin, meaning small grain. Although his name alone stood the test of time, it was then but one among many. Mitochondria have revelled in more than thirty magnificently obscure names, including chondriosomes, chromidia, chondriokonts, eclectosomes, histomeres, microsomes, plastosomes, polioplasma, and vibrioden.

John has a narrow mind. For him, neither the beauty nor the prosperity of the city of Ephesus is worth a second glance. Ephesus was situated at the end of the Silk Road from China and the caravan route from India which used to pass through the Parthian Empire en route to the West. But the prophet is quite unaware that this particular world exists at all. Even culture means absolutely nothing to him; for example, in 18:22 he rejoices that not only song but also the sound of the flute have disappeared. The world which he knows is limited to the seven churches whose Christianity corresponded with his own; and that in but a single province of the Roman Empire, namely Asia. As to the rest, he is only familiar with the mother church in Jerusalem and the sister church in Rome. John is utterly obsessed by Rome. The fact that this particular metropolis had bestowed both law and peace upon no less than one-half of the world never got through to him at all. He is also quite oblivious of the fact that Rome oppresses nations and exploits slaves. He could not care less about national or social considerations. He abominates the "whore on the seven hills" simply because Rome is persecuting Christians. This is precisely what the Apocalypse is all about: innocent suffering.

To Ingram, the way that Japan had lurched into a culture of extreme uniformity was alien, restrictive and potentially dangerous. The disappearance of diversity, highlighted by the extinction of the Taihaku cherry, was indicative of Japan’s militaristic mood in the 1920s and 1930s. The ubiquity of the lookalike Somei-yoshino cherry spoke volumes about the dark path of conformity which the Japanese followed, until their 1945 defeat.

Then as the decade made way for the new millennium, cable exploded with its own original content and film studios began to obsess over international box office sales. Somewhere along the line, we became unrelatable and invisible to the Hollywood system. Our images and diverse portrayals just weren’t worth the dollars and effort anymore. The images I had grown up with and grown so accustomed to seeing slowly disappeared, and it seemed to happen all at once.

As I curled my hurting self over my notebook, writing moved quickly from idle pastime to a necessity, and I plunged into it with the desperate obsession of one clinging to a life raft. Broken, aching, I cracked my delicate heart like a fragile eggshell and poured its contents onto the page. The words flowed quickly, rich and poignant. Painful and vulnerable. Pieces of myself floated into Lady Jayne’s character, and anyone who read this would see me in the pages.

This obsession was, perhaps, a detail. One of many in a life which had not turned out the way she had expected. Denise always thought that life would build upon itself, that people would multiply, events would crowd for time, that life at thirty would seem like twice of twenty. She thought it might overgrow itself like a garden. But it wasn't turning out this way. Your twenties chocked with flowering vines; your thirties thinned to only what you tended. People disappeared, and events, and opportunity.

If decomposing bodies have disappeared from culture (which they have), but those same decomposing bodies are needed to alleviate the fear of death (which they are), what happens to a culture where all decomposition is removed? We don’t need to hypothesize: we live in just such a culture. A culture of death denial. This denial takes many forms. Our obsession with youth, the creams and chemicals and detoxifying diets pushed by those who would sell the idea that the natural aging of our bodies is grotesque.

People might be dismissive of someone obsessed with mystery stories, as if the line between fiction and reality was so distinct. They didn’t know, perhaps, that Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, Dr. Joseph Bell, and that the methods Arthur Conan Doyle created for his fictional detective inspired generations of real-world detectives. Did they know that Arthur Conan Doyle went on to investigate mysteries in his real life and even absolved a man of a crime for which he had been convicted? Did they know how Agatha Christie brilliantly staged her own disappearance in order to exact an elegant revenge on a cheating husband?

A plague of ennui afflicted London's many prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that even since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity into sentience, a obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time. No, they didn't really know what that mean, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out.

Jeremy Spencer, always religious to an obsessive degree, had disappeared hours before a show while on tour with Fleetwood Mac in the U.S. According to band lore, it had happened right here in Los Angeles in 1971. He walked out of the band’s hotel room announcing, “Just going out to a bookstore”, and never returned. Somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard he climbed into a van belonging to members of a religious group who called themselves the Children of God. After a long, frantic search involving the police and close friends, Jeremy was finally tracked down to a ramshackle house that was the headquarters of the Children of God. He’d become a full-fledged member of a religious group that some would label a cult. And there he stayed. He refused to come back to either Fleetwood Mac or his wife and children, choosing instead to join a group of religious fanatics and leave all that he had ever known behind. And now he was standing in

Unfortunately, my mind was also in part formed by the apocalyptic, death-obsessed culture of the past several decades. Tens of millions were supposed to have died in an ice age back in the 1980s, just as predicted in 1969, and still more were said to be doomed by a bath of acid rain shortly thereafter, as well as in radiation that would fry the world when the ozone layer disappeared. Hadn’t hundreds of millions more perished at the turn of the millennium—Y2K—when every damn computer went haywire and all the nuclear missiles in the world were launched, to say nothing of the lethal effects of canola oil in theater popcorn? Living in the End Times was exhausting. When you were assured that billions of people were on the brink of imminent death at every minute of the day, it was hard to get the necessary eight hours of sleep, even harder to limit yourself to only one or two alcoholic drinks each day, when your stress level said, I gotta get smashed.

During those last few months, the writer Patrick Weekes would take builds of Inquisition home and let his nine-year-old son play around with the game. His son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse, which Weekes found amusing. One night, Weekes’ son came up and said he’d been killed by a bunch of spiders, which seemed strange—his son’s characters were too high a level to be dying to spiders. Confused, Weekes loaded up the game, and sure enough, a group of spiders had annihilated his son’s party. After some poking around, Weekes figured out the problem: if you dismounted the horse in the wrong place, all your companions’ gear would disappear. “It was because my son liked the horse so much more than anyone else had ever or will ever like the horse,” Weekes said. “I doubt we would’ve seen it, because it takes spamming the button to figure out there’s a one-in-one-thousand chance that if you’re in the right place, it’s going to wipe out your party members.

I WASN’T AWARE THE LADIES got a turn at the proposing. I thought it was up to us stalwart lads to risk rejection and to do the actual asking.” “We can take first crack,” the earl said, his finger tracing the rim of his glass, “but I took first through fifth, and that means it’s her turn.” “I’m sure you’ll explain this mystery to me, as I hope at some point to put an end to my dreary bachelor existence,” Dev murmured, taking a long swallow of his drink. The earl smiled almost tenderly. “With Anna, I proposed, explaining to her she should marry me because I am titled and wealthy and so on.” “That would be persuasive to most any lady I know, except the lady you want.” “Precisely. So I went on to demonstrate she should marry me because I am, though the term will make you blush, lusty enough to bring her a great deal of pleasure.” “I’d marry you for that reason,” Dev rejoined, “or I would if, well… It’s a good argument.” “It is, if you are a man, but on Anna, the brilliance of my logic was lost. So I proposed again and suggested I could make her troubles disappear, then failed utterly to make good on my word.” “Bad luck, that.

How did we end up like this? Being obsessed with how we're perceived. Overlooking things that are right under our noses. Working for something that's unrealistically ideal. Obsessing after being turned down. We're all living our lives the way we choose. Some people say, "Is that who you really are?" "Don't you think you're capable of so much more?" I'm quite sure of it. Because there's still room for improvement. We all expect the best from ourselves and it's not easy to reach that point, no matter how hard we try. Even if we succeed, we easily crumble in the face of criticism. Sometimes we lose our way and can't accept ourselves, or we simply hide. We can never truly be free from others. It's great to put in the effort to become better, but we also need to work hard to get along with others. I'm not saying that it's all bad, but that doesn't mean you have to hate yourself for not being accepted. You may think it wasn't enough. But that's also a part of you. And if you look back on it, it may not've been as bad as you thought. It's a part of you that doesn't disappear. And it's something to live with. If you're swayed by what others think and start hating yourself, there's something wrong with that.

You know what's weird?" David said as Stevie was lost in thought. "What's weird is making a hobby out of the death of your classmate. You know what's also weird? Going through people's rooms, including the room of your dead classmate. Because you seem crazy." People might be dismissive of someone obsessed with mystery stories, as if the line between fiction and reality was so distinct. They didn't know, perhaps, that Sherlock Holmes was based on a a real man, Dr. Joseph Bell, and that the methods Arthur Conan Doyle created for his fictional detective inspired generations of real-world detectives. Did they know that Arthur Conan Doyle went on to investigate mysteries in his real life and even absolved a man of a crime for which he had been convicted? Did they know how Agatha Christie brilliantly staged her own disappearance in order to exact an elegant revenge on a cheating husband? They probably did not. And no one was going to discount Stevie Bell, who had gotten into this school on the wings of her interest in the Ellingham case, and who had been a bystander at a death that was now looking more and more suspicious. She was not crazy. And Hayes's key was in her pocket and Pix was on her way back. Stevie turned away and left David's room without saying anything else. Because she was also not going to let him see her cry.

Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre. „Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable. In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra! Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.

I dispelled my invisibility for a few seconds in his full view, a finger resting provocatively on my lower lip, giving him a come-hither look under a streetlight. His jaw and the bottle of Żubrówka dropped at the same time. It shattered, drawing his eyes to the sidewalk, and I took the opportunity afforded by his distraction to disappear again. "That was mean," Oberon said, watching the man look wildly around for me and pawing at his eyes as if to clear them. Why? I asked. I’ve done him no harm. "Yes, you have. You will haunt him for the rest of his life. I know from experience." You’re haunted by someone flashing you on a street corner? "No. It was a dog park. Atticus and I were just arriving and she was leaving." Oh, here we go. "She was so fit and her coat was tightly curled and she had a perfect pouf on the end of her tail like a tennis ball. I saw her for maybe five seconds, until she hopped into a Honda and her human drove her away. And now I can’t see a Honda without seeing her." But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Kind of romantic? A vision of perfection you can treasure forever, unspoiled by reality. "Well, I don’t know. In reality I’d like to try spoiling her, if she was in the mood." Look, Oberon, that man is lonely. He’s too skinny and sweaty, and I’m willing to bet you five cows that he’s socially awkward or he wouldn’t be staggering drunk at this hour. But now, for the rest of his life, he will remember the na**d woman on the street who looked at him with desire. When people treat him like something untouchable, he will have that memory to comfort him. "Or obsess over. What if he starts wandering the streets every night looking for you?" Then he’s misunderstood the nature of beauty. It doesn’t stay, except in our minds. "Oh! I think I see. That’s true, Clever Girl! Sausage never stays, because I eat it, but it’s always beautiful in my mind.

In this way we give our lack, we give what we do not have, Aristophanes’ claim that such a thing is impossible notwithstanding. Men in Western culture generally seem to have a harder time than women do admitting to lack, a harder time verbally admitting that they are missing something, incomplete in some respect, limited in some way – in a word, castrated. (The reader will, I hope, allow me to momentarily associate men with obsession here, and women with hysteria, in a way that vastly overgeneralizes things, in order to highlight something schematically at first.) I do not mean simply admitting that they do not actually know how to drive somewhere in particular or that they do not know some specific fact about something that has come up in a conversation – I mean a lack that is more far-reaching than that! To love is to admit to lack (Soler, 2003, p. 243), and Lacan even goes so far at one point – and here I am jumping ahead some 15 years in his work – to suggest that when a man loves, it is insofar as he is a woman (Lacan, 1973–4, class given on February 12, 1974). Insofar as he is a man, he can admit to desiring the so-called partial objects he sees in his partner, but he generally feels that perfectly good partial objects of much the same kind can be found in many different partners. Insofar as he is a man, he contents himself with the enjoyment he derives from the partial objects he finds in a whole series of interchangeable partners, and avoids like the plague showing that he lacks.But unlike desire, “Love demands love,” as Lacan (1998a, p. 4) puts it in Seminar XX; love insistently requests love in return. When one is fascinated by or lusts after a sexual partner, one’s desire does not necessarily wither or disappear if one does not feel desired in return. Even if “desire is the Other’s desire” (a claim often repeated by Lacan; see, for example, Lacan, 2015, p. 178), in the sense that we wish to be desired in return by the object of our desire, desire can do just fine without being requited. But “to love is to want to be loved” (Lacan, 2006a, p. 853): to love – at least in our times – is to implicitly ask the beloved for love that can make good or somehow compensate one for one’s own lack, the hollow or emptiness one feels inside. In this sense, all love seems to constitute a request for love in return. (In Alcibiades’ case, this takes the form of a pressing demand for Socrates to prove that he returns Alcibiades’ passion for Socrates.) Since to love is to show and declare one’s lack, love is feminine, as Colette Soler (2003, p. 97) says, following Lacan’s statements to their logical conclusion.

So who’s right: those who say automated jobs will be replaced by better ones or those who say most humans will end up unemployable? If AI progress continues unabated, then both sides might be right: one in the short term and the other in the long term. But although people often discuss the disappearance of jobs with doom-and-gloom connotations, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing! Luddites obsessed about particular jobs, neglecting the possibility that other jobs might provide the same social value. Analogously, perhaps those who obsess about jobs today are being too narrow-minded: we want jobs because they can provide us with income and purpose, but given the opulence of resources produced by machines, it should be possible to find alternative ways of providing both the income and the purpose without jobs. Something similar ended up happening in the equine story, which didn’t end with all horses going extinct. Instead, the number of horses has more than tripled since 1960, as they were protected by an equine social-welfare system of sorts: even though they couldn’t pay their own bills, people decided to take care of horses, keeping them around for fun, sport and companionship. Can we similarly take care of our fellow humans in need?

If you forever continue to be obsessed by your own failures as well as your husband’s, wife’s, or children’s past behavior, weaknesses, and so forth, you will recall and repeat similar failures. Every one of those failures, events, and shortcomings belongs to a past that has already disappeared. Each tomorrow is absolutely new, and your luminous future is about to begin. However, if you constrict yourself with your own thoughts and feelings, refuse to forgive, criticize your husband’s, wife’s, or children’s past, tremble with fear that the same may be repeated, and carry those past memories with you forever—then you will never attain true peace. No matter how large failures and shortcomings are, they are of the past and are gone and vanished. Take courage and change your thinking, trusting in your family’s wonderful future, and firmly sever yourself from past events with your own will.

The paradox of attempting selfless living is that it drives the focus unendingly on self: self-abdication, self-discipline, self-condemnation, all require self-measurement and subsequent self-adjustment. Self, self, self, self. That is, the so-called selfless folks are often the most self-obsessed people I’ve ever met. In trying not to be as loathsome as a swarm of mosquitoes crashing a prayer walk, I focused even more on my performance and in many respects became even less attuned, less loving, to the world around me. It takes a lot of energy to disappear something that won’t leave.

There's nothing like a good obsession to keep a guy mesmerized.

The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women’s bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control—men’s bodies, adolescents’ bodies, infants’ bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care… Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation’s highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.

Like everyone, I have my own, maybe obsessive, futile, maybe in some way authentic, vision: all of a sudden, I will imagine the entire homogenous world as it is revealed to us—the streets, the cities, the rooms, those intelligent beasts of a sad and predatory nature, who have learnt to stand on their hind legs, who have built all this but are fated to disappear, who, despite this, still try to cling to something solid and lasting, still try to ward off the inevitability of death, who dreamt up fairy tales and, now that these stories have been disproved, are disconsolate —and for me the only means of defending myself from our terrible fate is love, my love—Lyolya. Without love we fall into a stupor or despair, it covers our naked animal essence; with the fear of death, with deliberate attempts to grab hold of some kind of eternity, one that is at once a mystery to us and yet devised by us, even the remains of love, even its very echo in music, imbues us with a semblance of fearlessness, dignity and the spiritual range to disregard death. Only by loving, by knowing about love, hoping for love, are we inspired and meaningfully engaged in life, able to banish the sovereignty of petty day-to-day cares, to stop waiting for the end to come;

rendered the aircraft no longer airworthy and was thereby beyond the scope of human endeavor to control.” The force that rendered the aircraft uncontrollable was unknown. Another report from a similar disappearance said that “no more baffling problem has ever been presented for investigation.” It was obvious to me that my research into the subject of missing planes had become an obsession, which had everyone concerned, because the media frenzy was over. The public’s fascination with the Bermuda Triangle had passed. I was the only one still fixated on it. One friend suggested it was pregnancy hormones, but Sarah thought I had lost touch with reality. A week ago, she’d begged me, yet again, to see a therapist. As I sat at the kitchen table, I felt the sweet sensation of my baby moving in my belly. It was like a flutter of butterfly wings. Was he kicking or rolling over? Or was he a she? I sat back and stared at those crash reports and realized how quiet the condo was. There was no music or television, laughter or conversation. It was just me, alone with the sound of pages turning. It wasn’t so bad in the daytime, but at night, in the darkness, with only one lamp at my desk or with the cold glare of the fluorescent light bulb over the kitchen table and the unbearable silence, I recognized how desperately I missed Dean.

At once, the sounds disappear even though the waves become ravenous and lightning splits the sky.

You said you didn't love her enough. How did you know in the end that you didn't?" ... "Because when she went away I didn't miss her. Because I could stand having her out of my sight; because I didn't want to touch her every time I saw her; because I didn't have the urge to buy her flowers every time I passed a flower stall; because I didn't look for her around every corner; because she wasn't in my head every time I looked up from a market report; because she didn't make me feel stoned - and didn't make me feel glad I wasn't; she didn't fire up my imagination; she didn't make me forget the gloom of the past, as the song goes. Because she didn't make me almost wish she'd disappear so I could find her.

Self-critique ends up in self-destruction; flow becomes glut; accretive construction becomes unwieldy exaggeration; self-reflection becomes a disappearance through petrification; gathering becomes obsessive hoarding; order becomes disorder; consumers become producers, as the audience turns on the show. Through excess, through writing being taken beyond reasonable limits of sense and on into an exuberant sense of fun, Joyce replicates the moment in the historical cycle of the ricorso, the extreme point of the historical process. He takes his writing to a distant place where it teeters through the last anarchic stage of Vico’s cycle, as it moves from one epoch to another.

And I hate, I hate that I go toward her. It’s like I can’t even help myself. Something about her just drags me in, and that unsurety disappears the moment her fingers close around my wrist.

Woman?" he asked me. "Yeah, the woman you were kissing, the one in the little apartment with the baby boy in a crib-" The memories flashed to life all around me then and my heart began to race as I looked around at memory after memory of him and my mom. They'd met while she was working in The Sparkling Uranus and he'd become somewhat obsessed with her, paying for private dances night after night before finally plucking up the courage to ask her to be his. She'd been heart broken when they'd met after Gareth's father had left her for his Elysian Mate and she'd been left to raise a baby all alone, but then she'd slowly fallen in love with this man. A man who had the same golden hair as I had naturally. A man whose penetrating gaze was running all over me like he was noticing the same similarities I was.  "That woman is my mother," I breathed. "And my father disappeared before he ever even knew she was pregnant with me-

She looked at me again, and the sweet and shy Nicole disappeared. Her eyes blazed. "The others aren't here, are they?" she said. "You have no intention of rescuing me. Why would you? I'm competition for your precious Daniel. You don't want him, but you don't want anyone else to have him either. You're a selfish b*tch, Maya Delaney. A sl*t, too, fooling around with every guy in sight, right under his nose." As Nicole raged, the hair on my neck prickled, because in her eyes, I saw madness. Obsession and madness. "Everything comes so easy for you, doesn't it, Maya? School, boys, friends, sports. Even your precious animals. You can't just take care of them like any normal person. You have to be some kind of animal whisperer. Magical healer. So damned special. Like Serena, captain of the swim team and the best singer on the freaking island, and how much does she practice? Sings in the shower. Paddles around the lake. Do you know how hard I work? It's never enough. You two get the trophies and the solos and the As and the boys." You're crazy, I thought. Did they do this to you with their experiments? Or is this just you? I started inching back. "You're just going to leave me here?" she said. "Well, you know what, Maya? I could use a little company." She screamed, a long drawn-out shriek of feigned terror.

EVERYONE WHO served in the Iraq war knew the stories about the missing American cash. Not long after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the U.S. government secretly flew twelve billion dollars in cash to Baghdad. I know it’s hard to believe, and it sounds like it was made up by one of those wacko left-wing conspiracy-obsessed blogs on the Internet. But it’s a matter of documented fact. Twelve billion dollars in U.S. banknotes was trucked from the Federal Reserve Bank in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where it was put on pallets and loaded on C-130 military transport planes and flown to Baghdad. The idea, I guess, was that this was the only way to pay our contractors working in Iraq and run the puppet government: in stacks of Benjamins. Baghdad was awash in crisp new American banknotes. Gunnysacks full of cash sat around, unguarded, in Iraqi ministry offices. Bureaucrats and soldiers played football with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. And here’s the best part: Somehow, nine billion dollars just disappeared. Vanished. Without a trace.

The need for meaningful symbols, beliefs, stories, and rituals by which to organize our lives and understand our purpose has not disappeared. In fact, we are starving for them.

We are all shits, my friends. We are all literary snobs in this vicarious little room of our own, dilettantish, smug, hidden from the fucked-up world. We are enslaved to the folly and the whirlpool of our own obsessions. Where is now rather than our own deeply intoxicating pasts? Where is Lampedusa, where is the tragedy of others? What do we think of a man playing "Nessun Dorma" on a saw in the shadows of a U-station? The lost homeless in Kreuzberg, the drug pushers in Gorlitzer Park, the illegally immigrant prostitutes, freezing their arses at Hackescher Markt? And all the other foreigners, wretched foreigners, who don't have wine and company? Why do we meet for this writer who laments his lost Russia, when losses are everywhere? We adore him because we find some cracked mirror there, we think that words will save us, that a fine description will drag us away from our own disappointments, and offer consolation, or explanation, or the return of a disappeared father. We want to cancel our nothingness with his vigour of incarnation, we want to believe, truly believe, in literary salvation. Who else tells us that a twig reflected in a puddle is worthy of our notice? That it looks like an undeveloped photograph, that it symptomises something inside us, that it reminds us of the entanglements of words and things and reflections; that we must all notice the withering as well as the blossoming; and that immortal gesture is always present and exists inside the world...

Once virtually every song produced[22] was available at the click of a mouse (via legitimate purchase or more nefarious means), music lost some of the power it had long held as a marker of selfhood. It became just another product that could be downloaded in the privacy of one’s own home, not something that was easily trotted out as a symbol of the buyer’s tastes and beliefs. That didn’t mean music was ever in danger of disappearing from the culture entirely; it just meant that it would no longer be much use to people obsessed with not only finding examples of authentic self-expression but letting every person they came in contact with know that authenticity was integral to their conception of self.

By this time tomorrow, he would likely have heard Emmie had accepted Bothwell’s suit, and there was not one damned thing he could do about any of it. Better she marry the vicar than disappear to parts entirely unknown in her quest to see Winnie well settled at Rosecroft. “Have

Winnie, I will pine for the sight of you until then.” “’Bye, Lord Amery.” She waved a floured paw but didn’t look up from her dough. “He will pine,” the earl growled at Douglas’s retreating back. “Winnie, you must learn to make a fellow work for your attention.” “I must?” Winnie did look up and blinked at him in disarming confusion. “But I like Lord Amery.” “I know.” The earl made one last foray at the cookies. “And you want to borrow him for your temporary papa, you little traitor. I should have you court-martialed for treason.” “Treason?” “High treason.” The earl nodded then dipped his head to blow a rude noise against her neck. “Until luncheon.” Emmie watched him disappear, letting the back door bang loudly in his wake, while Winnie’s squeals of delighted indignation faded to a huge, bashful smile. “So,

Despite recent German setbacks on the battlefield, the Wolf still has hope that his plans for global domination will yet be realized. His greatest goal is the eradication of the Jewish people, with whom he is obsessed, despite not having had any intentional contact with a Jew in twenty years. “This war can end two ways,” he said in a January 30, 1942, address to the German parliament. “Either the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.” Prior

Richard Kay Richard Kay became friends with Diana, Princess of Wales, through his job as royal correspondent for London’s Daily Mail. After her separation in 1992, he used his knowledge to give a penetrating and unique insight into Diana’s troubled life, and they remained friends until the end. Richard is now diary editor or the Daily Mail and lives in London with his wife and three children. Over the years, I saw her at her happiest and in her darkest moments. There were moments of confusion and despair when I believed Diana was being driven by the incredible pressures made on her almost to the point of destruction. She talked of being strengthened by events, and anyone could see how the bride of twenty had grown into a mature woman, but I never found her strong. She was as unsure of herself at her death as when I first talked to her on that airplane, and she wanted reassurance about the role she was creating for herself. In private, she was a completely different person form the manicured clotheshorse that the public’s insatiable demand for icons had created. She was natural and witty and did a wonderful impression of the Queen. This was the person, she told me, that she would have been all the time if she hadn’t married into the world’s most famous family. What she hated most of all was being called “manipulative” and privately railed against those who used the word to describe her. “They don’t even know me,” she would say bitterly, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment in Kensington Palace and pouring tea from a china pot. It was this blindness, as she saw it, to what she really was that led her seriously to consider living in another country where she hoped she would be understood. The idea first emerged in her mind about three years before her death. “I’ve got to find a place where I can have peace of mind,” she said to me. She considered France, because I was near enough to stay in close touch with William and Harry. She thought of America because she--naively, it must be said--saw it as a country so brimming over with glittery people and celebrities that she would be able to “disappear.” She also thought of South Africa, where her brother, Charles, made a home, and even Australia, because it was the farthest place she could think of from the seat of her unhappiness. But that would have separated her form her sons. Everyone said she would go anywhere, do anything, to have her picture taken, but in my view the truth was completely different. A good day for her was one where her picture was not taken and the paparazzi photographers did not pursue her and clamber over her car. “Why are they so obsessed with me?” she would ask me. I would try to explain, but I never felt she fully understood. Millions of women dreamed of changing places with her, but the Princess that I knew yearned for the ordinary humdrum routine of their lives. “They don’t know how lucky they are,” she would say. On Saturday, just before she was joined by Dodi Al Fayed for their last fateful dinner at the Ritz in Pairs, she told me how fed up she was being compared with Camilla. “It’s all so meaningless,” she said. She didn’t say--she never said--whether she thought Charles and Camilla should marry. Then, knowing that as a journalist I often work at weekends, she said to me, “Unplug your phone and get a good night’s sleep.

But since C had disappeared, the fantasies that obsessed me were all the worst things I could imagine at any given time.

There’s something else, too, Miss Emmie.” Stevens had gone bashful now, and Emmie was intrigued. “Here.” Stevens beckoned her to follow him out the back of the stables, to where a separate entrance led to a roomy foaling stall. “He said you needed summat other’n t’mule, and you’re to limber her up, as Miss Winnie will be getting a pony soon.” A sturdy dapple-gray mare stood regarding Emmie from over a pile of hay. She turned a soft eye on Emmie and came over to the half door to greet her visitors. “Oh, Stevens.” Emmie’s eyes teared up again. “She is so pretty… so pretty.” “He left ye a message.” Stevens disappeared back into the barn and came out with a sealed envelope. “I can tack her up if ye like.” Emmie tore open the envelope with shaking fingers. How dare he be so thoughtful and generous and kind? Oh, how dare he… She couldn’t keep the horse, of course; it would not be in the least proper, but dear Lord, the animal was lovely… My dear Miss Farnum, Her name is Petunia, and she is yours. I have taken myself to points distant, so by the time I return, you will have fallen in love with her, and I will be spared your arguments and remonstrations. She is as trustworthy and reliable a lady as I have met outside your kitchen, and at five years of age, has plenty of service yet to give. Bothwell has been alerted you will be joining him on his rides, should it please you to do so. And if you are still determined not to keep the horse, dear lady, then consider her my attempt at consolation to you for inflicting Scout on the household in my absence. St. Just He’d drawn a sketch in the corner of Scout, huge paws splayed, tongue hanging, his expression bewildered, and broken crockery scattered in every direction. The little cartoon made Emmie smile through her tears even as Winnie tugged Scout out behind the stables to track Emmie down. “Are you crying, Miss Emmie?” Winnie picked up Emmie’s hand. “You mustn’t be sad, as we have Scout now to protect us and keep us company.” “It isn’t Scout, Winnie.” Emmie waved a hand toward the stall where Petunia was still hanging her head over the door, placidly watching the passing scene. “Oh.” Winnie’s eyes went round. “There’s a new horse, Scout.” She picked up her puppy and brought him over to the horse. The mare sniffed at the dog delicately, then at the child, then picked up another mouthful of hay. “Her name’s Petunia,” Emmie said, finding her handkerchief. “The earl brought her from York so I can ride out with the vicar.” “She’s very pretty,” Winnie said, stroking the velvety gray nose. “And not too big.” The mare was fairly good size, at least sixteen and a half hands, and much too big for Winnie. “Maybe once I get used to her, I can take you up with me, Winnie. Would you like that?” “Would I?” Winnie squealed, setting the dog down. “Did you hear that, Scout? Miss Emmie says we can go for a ride. Oh… We must write to the earl and thank him, Miss Emmie, and I must tell Rose I have a puppy, too. I can knight Scout, can’t I?” “Of course you may,” Emmie said, reaching for Winnie’s hand. “Though you must know knights would never deign to be seen in the castle kitchens, except perhaps in the dead of winter, when it’s too cold to go charging about the kingdom.” “Did knights sleep in beds?” “Scout can stay with Stevens above the carriage house when you have repaired to your princess tower for your beauty sleep.” “I’ll ask Scout.” It

Somehow, I cannot see anyone describing me as gracious, loving, and happy.” He frowned at his sandwich as if in puzzlement. “You are loving,” Anna replied staunchly, though she hadn’t exactly planned for those words to leave her mouth. “Now that is beyond surprising.” The earl eyed her in the deepening shadows. “How do you conclude such a thing, Mrs. Seaton?” “You have endless patience with your family, my lord,” she began. “You escort your sisters everywhere; you dance attendance on them and their hordes of friends at every proper function; you harry and hound the duke so his wild starts are not the ruination of his duchy. You force yourself to tend to mountains of business which you do not enjoy, so your family may be safe and secure all their days.” “That is business,” the earl said, looking nonplussed that his first sandwich had disappeared, until Anna handed him a second.

Ellen.” Val’s smile disappeared. “I won’t hurt you.” Her gaze dipped to his groin then back up to his face, and he prayed he hadn’t lied. She’d been without a man for five damned years, and Val was… he was well endowed, and he knew this for a fact. Tagging along with Nick on this or that debauch, having four older brothers, spending a couple years at public school then several more at university… Val had seen enough to know his equipment was in proportion to the rest of him. “I won’t hurt you,” he said again, holding her gaze. “Because our first rule is you tell me if you don’t like something. Promise?” She nodded once, but her gaze drifted back to his groin. “If you can’t find your voice, then pinch me,” Val went on. “Pinch me hard, understand?” “Pinch you,” Ellen repeated. “Hard.” “Hard enough to bruise,” Val clarified. “And my arse doesn’t count, because when I’m in a certain mood, I like that.” “Dear heavens.” He smiled at her blush.

You have accepted my apology?” he asked, his voice cooling. “I have.” “And you won’t be resigning or disappearing without notice?” “I will not.” “Your word, Anna?” he pressed, reverting to tones of authority. “My word, your lordship.” He flinched at that, which was a minor gratification. A silence, unhappy for her, God knew what for him, stretched between them. “Were you to disappear, I would worry about you, you know,” he said softly. He trailed his fingers down over her wrist to lace with hers and squeeze briefly. She nodded, as there was nothing to say to such folly.

Were you so in love and lust that you couldn’t think straight? Did you disappear from your friends and family for a period of time because of your obsession with your new love interest? Where is this person now?

She looked at Driggs, who was still glaring at her. “May I help you?” she asked peevishly. “Knock it off.” “Knock what off? I’m not doing anything.” “Yes, you are. You’re scheming.” He got up and walked toward his room. “Scheming leads to crazy ideas. Crazy ideas lead to trouble. I get dragged into your trouble, we both get kicked out of Croak, and the next thing you know, we’re freezing to death in the waters of the North Atlantic.” “Dude, you are way too obsessed with Titanic.” Driggs looked indignant. “What is so wrong with having a healthy respect for heart-wrenching filmmaking of unequaled —” He shook his head. “Look, this isn’t about me. Just quit it with the evil plots, all right? If you get exiled, I’m going to be pissed as hell.” He slammed the door. “Why?” she yelled. He poked his head out. “I don’t want to have to clean out your room again.” He slammed the door once more and disappeared into a crash of drums. Lex was not amused. Although secretly, she was

Since Paul wasn’t a big conversationalist—he was the anti-Mac, in other words, and today had been the longest she’d ever heard him speak in consecutive sentences—Jena watched the scenery for a while. Then she decided to study the inside of Paul’s truck to see what she could learn about him. Technically, it was exactly like hers and Gentry’s. It had a black exterior with a blue light bar across the top and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Division logo on the doors. It was tech heavy on the front dash, just like theirs, with LDWF, Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, and Louisiana State Police Troop C radios, a laptop, a GPS unit, and a weather unit. In her truck and in Gentry’s, the cords and wires were a colorful tangle of plastic and metal, usually with extra plugs dangling around like vines. Paul’s cords were all black, and he had them woven in pairs and tucked underneath the dash, where they neatly disappeared. She leaned over to see how he’d achieved such a thing, and noticed identical zip ties holding them in place. “Sinclair, I hate to ask, but what are you doing?” He sounded more bemused than annoyed, so she said, “I’m psychoanalyzing you based on the interior of your truck.” He almost ran off the road. “Why?” “Your scintillating conversation was putting me to sleep.” His dark brows knit together but he seemed to have no answer to that. She turned around in her seat, as much as the seat belt allowed, and continued her study. Paul had a 12-gauge shotgun and a .223 carbine mounted right behind the driver’s seat, same as in her own truck. The mounts had hidden release buttons so the agents could get the guns out one-handed and quickly. But where her truck had a catch-all supply of stuff, from paper towels to zip ties to evidence bags to fast-food wrappers thrown in the back, Paul’s backseat was empty but for a zippered storage container normal people used for shoes. Each space held different things, all neatly arranged. Jena spotted evidence bags in one. Zip ties in another. Notebooks. Citation books. Paperwork. A spare uniform hung over one window, with a dry-cleaner’s tag dangling from the shirt’s top button. Good Lord. She turned back around. “What did you learn?” Paul finally asked. “You’re an obsessive-compulsive neat freak,” she said. “Accent on freak.

Paul understood that the prohibition (what he called “the Law”) was not the water that extinguished excessive desire, but a fuel that fed it. The problem for Paul was not desire as such, but rather its morphing into an obsessive/excessive impulse through the introduction of a law—a law that tempts us to act immorally precisely by demanding that we act morally.

Stop looking at me like that.” “Like what?” “Like I’m going to disappear.

When we struggle to make friends, or the social connections we have are superficial, we don’t feel we have someone who “has our backs” in good or bad times. We don't feel we can trust others. That is what makes it so easy to just disappear into a fantasy relationship with someone whom we can project all of our affection onto.

He pulls the ring from my finger, staring at the diamond for a long moment. Then he tucks it in his pocket and disappears into the bedroom.

A Methodist clergywoman, Shamy declares in the introduction that she hopes the book will bring together those who work with and love people who have dementia. She describes this communion as a “fellowship of the foolish.” “For foolish we most certainly will appear,” she writes, “in a society obsessed by the quantifiable, by the immediate, by productivity and usefulness, by competition and profit, by individualism and loss of community, and where the bottom line really is the bottom line.

One tiny yellow sticky note, nine little words, and my stomach twisted into knots. It was only a month into the school year. How could I be failing science already? Do you know how long an hour can feel when you're waiting to find out something like that? Not surprisingly, for the entire class I felt a gnawing sense of anxiety that kept me from focusing. Don't get me wrong; I'm not one of those obsessive kids who cry over an A-minus. And my parents aren't cracking a whip at my heels while they fill out my college applications five years early or anything. I'm really just kind of a regular girl. Above average grades, sure. But I don't exactly lose sleep if a pop quiz doesn't end up being my finest moment.

There is a fear of catching AIDS , but a fear also of simply catching sex. There is a fear of catching anything whatever which might seem like a passion, a seduction, a responsibility. And, in this sense, it is once again the male who has most deeply fallen victim to the negative obsession with sex. To the point of withdrawing from the sexual game, exhausted by having to bear such a risk, and no doubt also wearied by having historically assumed the role of sexual power for so long. Of which feminism and female liberation have divested him, at least dejure (and, to a large extent, de facto). But things are more complicated than this, because th e male who has been emasculated in this way and stripped of his power, has taken advantage of this situation to fade from the scene, to disappear — doffing th e phallic mask of a power which has, in any event, become increasingly dangerous. This is the paradoxical victory of the movement for feminine emancipation. That movement has succeeded too well and now leaves the female faced with the (more or less tactical and defensive) defaulting of the male. A strange situation ensues, in which women no longer protest against male power, but are resentful of the 'powerlessness' of the male . The defaulting of the male now fuels a deep dissatisfaction generated by disappointment with a sexual liberation which is going wrong for everyone. And this dissatisfaction finds expression, contradictorily, in the phantasm of sexual harassment. This is, then, a very different scenario from traditional feminism. Women are no longer alienated by men, but dispossessed of the masculine, dispossessed of the vital illusion of the other and hence also of their own illusion, their desire and privilege as women. It is this same effect which causes children secretly to hate their parents, who no longer wish to assume the role of parent and seize the opportunity of children's emancipation to liberate themselves as parents and relinquish their role. What we have, then, is no longer violence on the part of children in rebellion against the parental order, but hatred on the part of children dispossessed of their status and illusion as children. The person who liberates himself is never who you though the was. This defaulting o f the male has knock-on effects which extend into the biological order. Recent studies have found a fall in the rate of sperm in the seminal fluid, but, most importantly, a decline of their will to power: they no longer compete to go and fertilize the ovum. There is no competition any more. Are they, too , afraid of responsibility? Should we see this as a phenomenon analogous to what is going on in the visible sexual world, where a reticence to fulfil roles and a dissuasive terror exerted by the female sex currently prevail? Is this an unintended side-effect of the battle against harassment - the assault of sperm being the most elementary form of sexual harassment?

But no, Scarlett was even worse than Rex, if anything, always wanting to be outdoors, always wanting to run, to disobey, to talk. Oh my God, to talk.’ She rests a delicate hand against her cheekbone and then rubs it across her forehead. ‘Such a nightmare of a child. And then the teenage years. Oh my goodness. The boys – you know, she lost her virginity when she was thirteen. Thirteen. She was obsessed with boys.

Observe your wandering mind It is likely, sooner or later, that we learn that the mind has a life of its own. A very active, energetic, inquisitive, and sometimes obsessed life. And so even with the best intentions to hold our focus on the breath and keep it breath by breath, after a while it's hard not to notice the purpose may get sidetracked, stolen, distracted, and we get involved in some other mind operation. The many infinite scenarios and storylines played out in the mind: perhaps it's dreaming and thinking about future events, or planning or fantasizing about some possibility. Or perhaps it's about recollecting past events and getting carried away by past memories and emotions. Or perhaps it's talking about this or that with ourselves, or with someone else for that matter, and objecting to this or that. It could be practically anything, and this very air will quickly disappear from our consciousness in the process of the breath that we were paying attention to, even though it is always flowing in and out of the body, of course. Note when your mind has wandered And although we made the commitment to just be with a healthy sense. But in any moment you realize the focus is no longer with the air, or on the breath, not making that into a question, or blaming yourself for this lack in concentration in any way. Clearly, and freely and affectionately remember what is in your mind at this moment. If the breath in the field of consciousness is no longer center stage, what is it? In the note, see, hear, smell what's in your head. Clearly, and freely and affectionately mention what is in your mind at this moment. If the breath in the field of consciousness is no longer center stage, what is it? Allow yourself to be aware of the breath again And then encouraging the air to be part of it right now, because it's here right now and just allowing wherever the consciousness is pushed to be, however it is, and returning the primacy of concentration once more to the heart, to the nostrils, to the flood of breath stimuli in the body, right now. So when you realize that the mind has slipped or diverted, it is already back to understanding purpose. That is consciousness, which is life itself. They just pick up on what the wind is like at this moment. Ride the waves of the breath So focusing, if you will, the concentration on the body, and then as well you can maintain the focus on the breath by floating on the waves of the air sensations, and when you know that the mind has wandered and is no longer breathing again and again, softly, compassionately only realizing what the mind is up to now. Allowing it to be just as it is, and just in reconnecting with the spirit that is also already here, once again presenting it as the center stage in the area of consciousness and thus exercising with the consistency of open and affectionate devotion to the unfolding of your life as it unfolds right here, breath by breath and moment by moment.

I have a whole spreadsheet dedicated to episodes of Disappeared, where I Google the cases every few months to see if they solved what happened to the people yet. Music sounds like a much healthier obsession.

To Instagram, then; she needed visual candy: oh look, a new post from Rachel, a car-fie, a caption about the golden hour, a Louis Vuitton duffel in the background. God, she was so self-obsessed; had she aged even a day since they’d graduated? Had she done something to her lips, or was it just a filter? Anjali scrolled back through Rachel’s older posts, even though she had seen and summarily judged them all before, shifting in her seat, attempting to ignore the sensation in her bladder. Oh no—had she accidentally liked one? She tapped again. The heart disappeared, then reappeared. Had she tapped twice? Thrice? Was the Wi-Fi even working? Had she ever responded to that text from Rachel? She had to have, right? The things you did, the places your mind went, when you needed to pee. She swore her brain

Quiet.” He throws me on the bed and disappears. I stare at the door and am just about to move when he comes

Unfortunately, my mind was also in part formed by the apocalyptic, death-obsessed culture of the past several decades. Tens of millions were supposed to have died in an ice age back in the 1980s, just as predicted in 1969, and still more were said to be doomed by a bath of acid rain shortly thereafter, as well as in radiation that would fry the world when the ozone layer disappeared. Hadn’t hundreds of millions more perished at the turn of the millennium—Y2K—when every damn computer went haywire and all the nuclear missiles in the world were launched, to say nothing of the lethal effects of canola oil in theater popcorn? Living in the End Times was exhausting. When you were assured that billions of people were on the brink of imminent death at every minute of the day, it was hard to get the necessary eight hours of sleep, even harder to limit yourself to only one or two alcoholic drinks each day, when your stress level said, I gotta get smashed. As

Is Israel really the biggest, baddest wolf on the block? Heck no. Even if you put every single one of Israel’s mistakes under a microscope, they still wouldn’t come close to those of many other countries around the world. In Saudi Arabia, Chop Square is literally a place for weekly public decapitations. In Dubai, the working class are literal slaves. In China, disappearances are normal and Muslims are being tracked and put into camps. In Turkey, journalists and activists are imprisoned and killed. In Iran, LGBTQ+ people are executed. In Syria, the government uses chemical weapons against its own people. In Russia, there is arbitrary detention, and worse. In Myanmar, the army is massacring the Rohingya Muslim population. In Brunei, Sharia law was just enacted. In North Korea—no description needed. All over the world, millions of people are dying because of tyrannical leaders, civil wars, and unimaginable atrocities. But you don’t see passionate picket lines against Dubai or Turkey or even Russia. The one country that’s consistently singled out is… Israel. The UN has stated values of human dignity, equal rights, and economic and social advancement that are indeed fantastic, and they are the values upon which Israel was established and is operating. The sting is it that countries that certainly do not adhere to some or any of these values are often the ones who criticize Israel while keeping a straight face. “Look over there!” those leaders say, so the world will not look at their backyards and see their own gross human rights violations. All this led to a disproportionate number of UN resolutions against the only Jewish state and the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is an easy punching bag, but this obsession over one country only is being used to deflect time and energy away from any real discussion of human rights in the world’s actual murderous regimes. And Israelis aren’t the only ones who have noticed this disproportionate censorship. The United States uses its veto power to shut down almost every Security Council resolution against Israel, and it does this not because of “powerful lobbies” (sorry to burst your bubble). The reason the US shuts down most of these resolutions is because the US gets it. In a closed-door meeting of the Security Council in 2002, former US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte is said to have stated that the US will oppose every UN resolution against Israel that does not also include: condemnation of terrorism and incitement to terrorism, condemnation of various terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and a demand for improvement of security for Israel as a condition for Israeli withdrawal from territories. If a resolution doesn’t include this basic and rational language, the US will veto it. And it did and it does, thank the good Lord, in what we know today as the Negroponte Doctrine.

Girlfriends asked inconvenient questions. They didn’t appreciate when you disappeared out of the country for weeks at a time to some godforsaken war zone to meet with a vicious dictator. They were a liability. There was no telling when they would suddenly turn on you like a viper and go to the authorities with all the little pieces of information they had learned after months in your bed.

A word to the wise: If ever you should feel like you have too much choice in life, remember that life still makes a good deal of choices for you. You can only play with the hand you’ve been dealt, and options that you have in one moment often disappear the next if you don’t make moves to capitalize on them. The beauty in this is that drastic change is the catalyst for personal growth, and personal growth is a vital component of the artist’s life, with each phase of it bringing new challenges, new opportunities, and a new perspective.

Moronation Street (Sonnet 1013) Nationalism is modern cannibalism, As such nationalism is terrorism. Royalty is an act of crime, Obsessive Bloodline Disorder is clinical barbarism. Character and excellence are the measure of life, Not some cavemen constructs of blood and borders. When the I disappears and the world appears, That's when the animal disappears and the human appears. Fundamentalism is the antithesis of religion, For religion oughta bring inclusion not division. Nationalism is the desecration of a nation's humane identity, Each nation's security is predicated on collective ascension. Enough with the coronation of morons - enough with moronation! Beyond blood and border await the streets of civilization.

Millions more were planted nationwide after Japan’s military victory against Russia in 1905, and to celebrate Emperor Taishō’s accession to the throne in 1912 and Emperor Shōwa’s (Hirohito) in 1926. Other cherries were neglected or simply disappeared. Few people cared, and fewer still did anything about it.

Day-to-day life with a genius is immeasurably more difficult than life with an ordinary person. A genius, like anyone else, can be self-obsessed, inattentive, capricious, mistrustful or irritable. And only after his death, when the trumpets start to resound, and the insults are covered with haze and disappear, do the things that only those who were close to him knew and went through go somewhere far away, and now become so unimportant and insignificant. And it seems that the time that was spent with that person was real life, and now all that’s left is remembering and describing the happy times of the past for others.

Along with the gradual disappearance of true and profound spirituality, these evil forces want to fill humanity with false illusions and egotism. Human beings under the control of Alien Parasites display attraction to superficial matters such as: titles, award ceremonies, rank, knowledge for knowledge sake and so on. Humanity must rise above the temptations of egoic titles, obsessive study and the pursuit of an endless amount of university degrees and certificates of study.

Foucault: the obsession with an ever more precise genealogy, the ever more scientific elision of an effect in the present by the exhaustion of a preliminary objectivity. It is like a system of thought that has begun to spin on its axis when confronted with an obstacle it will never get over - it will never jump over its shadow, the procedures that engender it, its retrospective sequential logic. This is the way you become an absolute reference, by connecting up with an inflexible heredity of knowledge, with an authority which necessarily seeks to ground itself further and further back in time. An austere line this, which allows itself neither anticipation nor even a breakthrough into the present, which allows itself no mental infringement of the law of its species, Which is that you have to be sure of what you are asserting. This is illusory because no thinking can be sure of itself, nor conscious of its own mechanisms. It must take the risk of what it does not say, rather than simply being so careful about what it says. Even if there is a great objective modesty in Foucault's prudence, his tragedy lies in his never having managed to cross this defensive line, of having walled himself up in his own discriminations, always demanding another power. Foucault put all his strategic efforts into constructing that demand, all his energy, which was increasingly uncertain of its own state, and increasingly confused by the exaggeration of his reputation. He died of that infinite regression, disappeared, leaving us no hope, but leaving little for himself either, on the ambiguous fringes of the very Highest Scholarship.

Our preoccupation with other people stems from our evolutionary past: Belonging to a group was necessary for survival. Reproduction, defense, and hunting large animals—all these were impossible tasks for individuals to achieve alone. Banishment meant certain death, and those who opted for the solitary life—of which there were surely a few—fared no better and disappeared from the gene pool. In short, our lives depended on and revolved around others, which explains why we are so obsessed with our fellow humans today. The result of this infatuation is that we spend about 90 percent of our time thinking about other people and dedicate just 10 percent to assessing other factors and contexts.

She was sick. She was obsessed with sick stuff.” I shrivel a little. I wonder what Tasia would think about me. “And she liked to cause trouble.” She gives Jed a look, like he will understand. “Look, I’m not saying I’m happy she’s gone or anything

If you’re not interested in them, they will become obsessed with you. If you are interested in them, they will disappear. It’s like … it’s like math. It’s an equation.

The British, representing a democracy with a free press and conscious of their international image, were susceptible to such shaming. But in Mahatma Gandhi’s own day non-violence could have done nothing for the Jews of Hitler’s Germany, who disappeared into gas chambers far from the flashbulbs of a war-obsessed press. It is ironically to the credit of the British Raj that it faced an opponent like Mahatma Gandhi and allowed him to succeed. The power of non-violence rests in being able to say, ‘to show you that you are wrong, I punish myself’. But that has little effect on those who are not interested in whether they are wrong and are already seeking to punish you whether you disagree with them or not. For them your willingness to undergo punishment is the most convenient means of victory. No wonder Nelson Mandela, who wrote that Gandhi had ‘always’ been ‘a great source of inspiration’, explicitly disavowed non-violence as useless in his struggle against the ruthless apartheid regime.

The line from the Obamas was “When they go low, we go high.” It’s a dignified and impressive mantra, if only because for the most part, whether you liked them or not, it’s hard to deny that they followed it. But the now cliché remark should not be taken conclusively, for it makes one dangerous omission. It forgets that from time to time in life, we might have to take someone out behind the woodshed. How we have lost this. How squeamish we have become. We now blindly demonize what is often one of the most effective forms of action. How vulnerable this ignorance has made us to the few real conspiracies, successful or not, that exist in the world. In this rare occasion, though, we got a glimpse, a peek behind the curtain, as the title of Gawker’s last post put it, of how things work. Now we know. Peter showed us. And yet our instinct is to turn away, to put our fingers in our ears. It’s why not once in nearly a decade of concentrated effort and scheming directed at a single enemy—at an entity who was obsessively covered and followed by the media—by an opponent who publicly stated his undying hatred of that enemy, did a single spectator, victim, or even many of the participants suspect any of what you read in the pages of this book. There is no question that what Thiel did over those years was brilliant, cunning, and ruthless. It is equally true that Gawker mostly beat itself. Denton and company allowed this to happen. Even the most cynical and aggressive media site on the planet had missed what was happening right in front of them; they did nothing to save themselves. “The idea of a conspiracy,” Thiel would say to me, “is linked with intentionality, with planning, working towards longer-term goals. In a world where you don’t have conspiracies maybe also those things disappear.

Feelings that have been pushed away do not actually disappear; they live on in the darkness of the Unconscious, pulling the strings in our relationships, our work, self-expression, causing us to become reactive, compulsive, obsessive, depressed, anxious, and deteriorate our physical health until one day, we remember, all feelings have a right to exist in us. So, we stop numbing ourselves, and feed them love, attention, curiosity and Presence. Now, they can finally come to rest.

You have become obsessed with escaping this world, escaping your body,flying away from it instead of embracing the flesh, When this world is miserable, when you see the misery around you, rather than acting as a God would act, rather than commanding the tempest to cease, you instead flee. This is the final incarnation, the world into which you have forced yourself, yet rather than fulfilling your purpose here - which is to become a god in this, the only realm where that is possible - you instead struggle to leave this world and disappear into that infinite nothingness, the omnipresent quandary from which you descended. This world, this life of yours, is the next phase of your existence.