Occasionally Travel Quotes

My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!

I will spend my life traveling, laughing, drinking all kinds of tea, meeting new people, reading good books, growing things, creating beauty, eating chocolate, doing magic, making love and occasionally I will write something worth reading.

From then on, Matilda would visit the library only once a week in order to take out new books and return the old ones. Her own small bedroom now became her reading-room and there she would sit and read most afternoons, often with a mug of hot chocolate beside her. She was not quite tall enough to reach things around in the kitchen, but she kept a small box in the outhouse which she brought in and stood on in order to get whatever she wanted. Mostly it was hot chocolate she made, warming the milk in a saucepan on the stove before mixing it. Occasionally she made Bovril or Ovaltine. It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She traveled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

A Grand Design we couldn't see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.

Time is a dream - or a nightmare - from which there is never any waking. We who travel in Time are dreamers who occasionally share a common experience.

Where else can bubble-gum hearts, the dream travellers, the serial killers, and the occasional guest-star from beyond the grave occupy the same space?

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me

I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one's life. Wherever I've traveled--Kenya, Chile, Australia, Japan--I've found the most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns,we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.

Much as I hate to stand out in a crowd, I have this terrible occasional compulsion to make myself a source of merriment for the world, and I had come close to sealing new heights with a Russian hat. Now, clearly, that would be unnecessary.

Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis.

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which--we are told--a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome.

We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart.

It seems simple to define what a library is—namely, it is a storeroom of books. But the more time I spent at Central, the more I realized that a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears. There were days when I came to the library and planted myself near the center of the main corridor and simply watched the whirl and throb of the place. Sometimes people ambled by, with no apparent destination. Some people marched crisply, full of purpose. Many were alone, some were in pairs; occasionally they traveled in a gaggle. People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren't. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.

When Noriko went on the occasional visit, she had found him big-hearted and self-assured, as children who know how fiercely they are loved often are.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. —Winston Churchill

When he was at home, he spent more time reading books than watching TV. He’d even been known to shed the occasional tear as he turned the pages. If he ever caught me watching him during one of these moments, he would look embarrassed and say, ‘Stop staring.

But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.

Though most tourists accepted the occasional comic misadventure, it was important to them that overall their vacation should be pleasant. When you spend money on a holiday you are essentially purchasing happiness: if you don't enjoy yourself you will feel defrauded.

No one, from pontiffs to professors, has a monopoly on the truth. In the end, we are all just travelers--not scientists or mystics or any one brand of thinker. By nature, we are scientists and mystics, reductionists and holists, left-brained and right-brained, mixed up creatures trying to catch an occasional glimpse of the truth. The best we can do is to be tolerant of both sides of our nature--knowing that these reflect the twin aspect of the universe--and learn from whatever wisdom is offered.

It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.

wherever they live, travel, hike, swim, fish, dive, kayak, or trek, they risk being confronted by something capable of doing them in with tooth, fang, claw, jaw, or stinger, and yet there is no public clamor to eradicate any animal because of the peril it poses to the human population. australians have learned to coexist in relative peace with nearly everything, and when occasionally a human life is lost to an animal, the public usually reacts philosophically.

Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile ‘cigarette and sweets’ stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway.

He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on. In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung. Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium - nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the sparkle curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, solemnly enjoying new-found popularity and expanded respect. From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen´s ability to establish succinct analogies among life´s realities, his talent for creating intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have neither "covered" his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies - aural bouquets of gardenia and thistle - that bring to mind an electrified, de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just could`t expose. It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life," said Simone de Beauvoir. "I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish….You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.'' I tend more to frustration than anger, but otherwise I know precisely what de Beauvoir means. I want twenty-four hours more in each day, and nine consecutive lives to live, for I am greedy for life and art as well, with all their occasionally conflicting demands. I want as much time as possible to continue to work hard and learn. I'm greedy for it all.

I hope you will write occasionally? Some token of your impressions?” “Oh! I shall not spare you. It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. Expect long descriptions of everything.

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

They hang around, hitting on your friends or else you never hear from them again. They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober, they’re passing through town and want dinner, they take your hand across the table, kiss you when you come back from the bathroom. They were your loves, your victims, your good dogs or bad boys, and they’re over you now. One writes a book in which a woman who sounds suspiciously like you is the first to be sadistically dismembered by a serial killer. They’re getting married and want you to be the first to know, or they’ve been fired and need a loan, their new girlfriend hates you, they say they don’t miss you but show up in your dreams, calling to you from the shoe boxes where they’re buried in rows in your basement. Some nights you find one floating into bed with you, propped on an elbow, giving you a look of fascination, a look that says I can’t believe I’ve found you. It’s the same way your current boyfriend gazed at you last night, before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights above the bed, and moved against you in the dark broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs of headlights from the freeway’s passing trucks, the big rigs that travel and travel, hauling their loads between cities, warehouses, following the familiar routes of their loneliness.

(First lines) Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no trains or buses headed in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies at the nextdoor town of Paradise Chapel; occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Ratcliffe. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brandnew cars pretty fast, and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country, and here in the sunken marshes where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark water like drowned corpses. Often the only movement on the landscape is a broken spiral of smoke from a sorry-looking farmhouse on the horizon, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling endlessly over the bleak deserted pinewoods.

If you can overcome the occasional angst, you may have the chance to see some interesting things, perhaps the same things the tour buses bring people to see, but purified by solitude, if you will. In any case, do not stay in the hotel room. That is the only place you are vulnerable.

People who have never canoed a wild river, or who have done so only with a guide in the stern, are apt to assume that novelty, plus healthful exercise, account for the value of the trip. I thought so too, until I met the two college boys on the Flambeau. Supper dishes washed, we sat on the bank watching a buck dunking for water plants on the far shore. Soon the buck raised his head, cocked his ears upstream, and then bounded for cover. Around the bend now came the cause of his alarm: two boys in a canoe. Spying us, they edged in to pass the time of day. ‘What time is it?’ was their first question. They explained that their watches had run down, and for the first time in their lives there was no clock, whistle, or radio to set watches by. For two days they had lived by ‘sun-time,’ and were getting a thrill out of it. No servant brought them meals: they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they misguessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes; which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke. Before our young adventurers pushed off downstream, we learned that both were slated for the Army upon the conclusion of their trip. Now the motif was clear. This trip was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were ‘on their own’ in this particular sense. Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.

I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away. Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.

I am a man, not an angel, and if the grief that overtook me occasionally blurred my vision and led to certain lapses of conduct, that in no way should cast doubt on the truth of my story. Before anyone tries to discredit me by pointing to those stains on my record, I come forward of my own free will and openly pronounce my guilt to the world. These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoken into the wrong ear.

Accept dear God the soul of Dixon Hartnell, who made his own amends and who travelled his own way. He failed as we all fail, and perhaps more often than some. Yet he recognized fundamental things. Not that we are evil; for we are not. But that, by whatever name--self interest, impulse, anger, lust, or greed--we are inclined that way; and that it is our tragedy to know this can never change, our duty to try at every moment to overcome it; and our glory occasionally to succeed.

I didn’t want my life to be an occasional adventure. I wanted adventure to be my life.

Occasionally, when trapped by memories, I would mistake change for loss, and grieve...

Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up work he does not like, disciplines himself, sacrifices some fantasy he had once, to travel or to paint, or even possibly to write, may feel toward the artist and writer a jealousy of his adventurous life. The artist and the writer have generally paid the full price for their independence and for the privilege of doing work they love, or for their artistic rebellions against standardized living or values.

It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite. A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.

I kept looking at her. It was mountains, weather, or her — I didn’t know. But I felt a lot of feelings as she read my words, bending over the bed, facing me, and occasionally looking at me between those five pages.

Tomorrow will be like today, and the day after tomorrow will be like day before yesterday," said Apollonius. "I see your remaining days each as quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified. Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture any of them anymore. People will talk to you and visit with you out of sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, but refusing to fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking what it is they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in life's economy. A living thing should either create or destroy according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young lives about you which you occasionally chide for a fancied impropriety never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die you will be buried and forgotten and that is all. The morticians will enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as well has never lived at all. I cannot see the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste.

Strangely, Indians travelling outside the subcontinent do not seem to have left itineraries of where they went or descriptions of what they saw. Distant places enter the narratives of storytelling only very occasionally. Notions

A group of wolves is called a pack. Although wolves tend to travel together, one member is occasionally ostracized and becomes a "lone wolf." Life is difficult for lone wolves, but their self-reliance often makes them stronger than average.

I like traveling to other places to do the exact same things I do at home: read books in bed, occasionally get over-priced takeout, and groan exasperatedly at tourists chattering excitedly outside my door over whatever thrilling activity they are about to go do.

Now, I will drink no German beer. The white wine of the country, with a little soda-water; perhaps occasionally a glass of Ems or potash. But beer, never — or, at all events, hardly ever.” It is a good and useful resolution, which I recommend to all travellers. I

The bus stops right in front of our house and takes me day to day, week to week, and month to month of the same girls saying the same things. But at the end of March, as I stand on the stage, accepting my award for receiving 100 percent in every class for the whole month, I catch a glimpse of myself in the certificate's shiny gold stamp and finger my baby hair back away from my face. I know I'm not going to get stuck on the bus with those girls. I'm going to travel places too far for them to see, miles and miles outside of being black, past the snap of their fingers with the complementary 'Baby, boom,' 'Baby, pop,' or 'Baby, please,' past anything they say about me until I can feel them so far behind that I can look back and see stupid little girls, still occasionally talking their smack, pushing me on.

...To see your life flow in obscurity among the treasures of the heart and of nature, happy in your anonymity, and to occasionally lose yourself in reading or in the pleasure of being a sensitive admirer of the fine arts; that’s the image of modern life you’re looking for!

Contemplating while barefoot on the grounds my father and grandfather walked, I saw my life clearly. With African sun nibbling on my dark skin and gentle winds soothing my foreboding, my past life and current responsibilities overwhelmed me occasionally. Abundant tears flowed freely. Dripping on my face and clothes. Travelling through the ancient roads created by my forefathers, grasslands, trees and anthills kept me company. A lonely journey. I knew that nothing remains the same, but ones past never changes. Even in the loneliness of my past, I accepted that you cannot effectively go forward without knowing how and where you started your journey. Even in that state of near dejection I was aware that my sojourn in foreign lands is not forever, but my lording of this beautiful land, my own Africa, where my spent body will finally rest someday, is for eternity. Nothing remains the same, but nothing ever changes. It depends on how you look at your life.

Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. This allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

By tossing them together, it seemed to Emmett, Abernathe was encouraging a boy to believe that the great scientific discoverers were not exactly real and the heroes of legend not exactly imagined. That shoulder to shoulder they traveled through the realms of the known and unknown making the most of their intelligence and courage, yes, but also of sorcery and enchantment and the occasional intervention of the gods. Wasn’t it hard enough in the course of life to distinguish between fact and fancy, between what one witnessed and what one wanted? Wasn’t it the challenge of making this very distinction that had left their father, after twenty years of toil, bankrupt and bereft?

The world is full of instructions and advice on how to mother, in bookstores, in academia, on the playgrounds, in the media. Mothers are always examining how they treat their children, but aside from the occasional “Don’t talk to your mother that way,” or “You shouldn’t have listened to your mother,” there’s not much guidance out there for daughters.

In the meantime, the Bear had attained the Avenue, where blinding, brilliant traffic travelled like a line of light from north to south, as if between worlds. But it was Jacob who saw the ladder, wrestled with the angel, and obtained a birthright under false pretenses. The Bear had done none of these things. He pulled the hat brim farther down on his face and walked south beneath the vault of darkness, above him like guardians or heralds the electric signs of bars and stores- white, orange, yellow, gold, red, brilliant blue and green, occasional imperial purple - as if they were angels that had descended to earth only to hire themselves out as lures for business, possibly for reasons of pity. The Bear walked beneath them like a resolute and powerful man, the saxophone case at his side swinging like a cache of fate, love, gold or vengeance. When he realised that he could have his pick of them - that all options, attributions and possibilities actually were open to him, that he was, at the moment, exalted, liberated, free - he stopped walking for a moment, put down the saxophone case, looked gradually around him at the Avenue, raised his snout and smiled broadly, and there on the pavement stretched out his great and inevitable arms. Aah. The night entered him like honey, and he began so heartily and with such depth of pleasure that it might have been for the first time in his life, to laugh out loud.

Yet even more important than role modeling is love. For even in chaotic and disordered homes genuine love is occasionally present, and from such homes may come self-disciplined children. And not infrequently parents who are professional people—doctors, lawyers, club women and philanthropists—who lead lives of strict orderliness and decorum but yet lack love, send children into the world who are as undisciplined and destructive and disorganized as any child from an impoverished and chaotic home. Ultimately love is everything. The mystery of love will be examined in later portions of this work. Yet, for the sake of coherency, it may be helpful to make a brief but limited mention of it and its relationship to discipline at this point.

Although Galileo was a devout Catholic, it was his conflict with the Vatican, sadly mismanaged on both sides, that lay at the basis of the running battle between science and religion, a tragic and confusing schism which persists unresolved. More than ever today, religion finds its revelatory truths threatened by scientific theory, and retreats into a defensive corner, while scientists go into the attack insisting that rational argument is the only valid criterion for an understanding of the workings of the universe. Maybe both sides have misunderstood the nature of their respective roles. Scientists are equipped to answer the mechanical question of how the universe and everything in it, including life, came about. But since their modes of thought are dictated by purely rational, materialistic criteria, physicists cannot claim to answer the questions of why the universe exists, and why we human beings are here to observe it, any more than molecular biologists can satisfactorily explain why – if our actions are determined by the workings of a selfish genetic coding – we occasionally listen to the voice of conscience and behave with altruism, compassion and generosity. Even these human qualities have come under attack from evolutionary psychologists who have ascribed altruism to a crude genetic theory by which familial cooperation is said to favour the survival of the species. Likewise the spiritual sophistication of musical, artistic and poetic activity is regarded as just a highly advanced function of primitive origins.

She’d always pictured her future self as a lone wolf traveling around the world, ensnaring romantic conquests and achieving her wildest and most ambitious goals. She didn’t think that at nineteen she would be so dependent on other people; she pictured herself as an autonomous and untouchable force that occasionally flitted back home to show off her new feathers before flying away to her life that was much more exciting than theirs.

For me? Oh, God. My idea of the perfect life would be if we just stayed in bed all the time. We could make love more or less continuously, and only get up to bring supplies, you know, fresh water and fruit to scurvy, and make occasional trips to the bathroom to shave before diving back to bed. And once in a while we could change the sheets. And go to the movies to prevent bedsores. And running. I would still have to run every morning.

Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay Area and made a fortune there. Every year or so, these west-coasters travel back to Michigan and call us up for dinner or drinks, occasions they use to educate us on the inner workings of the tech industry. They refer to the companies they work for in the first person plural, a habit I have yet to acculturate to. Occasionally they lapse into the utopian, speaking of robotics ordinances and brain-computer interfaces and the mystical, labyrinthine channels of capital, conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a civilizing mission. Being lectured quickly becomes dull, and so my husband and I, to amuse ourselves, will sometimes play the rube. “So what, exactly, is a venture capitalist?” we’ll say. Or: “Gosh, it sounds like science fiction.” I suppose we could tell them the truth—that nothing they’re proclaiming is news; that the boom and bustle of the coastal cities, like the smoke from those California wildfires, liberally wafts over the rest of the country. But that seems a bit rude. We are, after all, Midwesterners. Here, work is work and money is money, and nobody speaks of these things as though they were spiritual movements or expressions of one’s identity.

Handbrake found the drive to Jaipur that morning particularly frustrating. The new tarmac-surfaced toll road, which was part of India’s proliferating highway system, had four lanes running in both directions, and although it presented all manner of hazards, including the occasional herd of goats, a few overturned trucks and the odd gaping pothole, it held out an irresistible invitation to speed. Indeed, many of the other cars travelled as fast as 100 miles

In four months Miranda will be back in Toronto, divorced at twenty-seven, working on a commerce degree, spending her alimony on expensive clothing and consultations with stylists because she’s come to understand that clothes are armor; she will call Leon Prevant to ask about employment and a week later she’ll be back at Neptune Logistics, in a more interesting job now, working under Leon in Client Relations, rising rapidly through the company until she comes to a point after four or five years when she travels almost constantly between a dozen countries and lives mostly out of a carry-on suitcase, a time when she lives a life that feels like freedom and sleeps with her downstairs neighbor occasionally but refuses to date anyone, whispers “I repent nothing” into the mirrors of a hundred hotel rooms from London to Singapore and in the morning puts on the clothes that make her invincible, a life where the moments of emptiness and disappointment are minimal, where by her midthirties she feels competent and at last more or less at ease in the world, studying foreign languages in first-class lounges and traveling in comfortable seats across oceans, meeting with clients and living her job, breathing her job, until she isn’t sure where she stops and her job begins, almost always loves her life but is often lonely, draws the stories of Station Eleven in hotel rooms at night.

income taxes are not the only taxes you pay in life. They are just the financial form. Everything we do has a toll attached to it. Waiting around is a tax on traveling. Rumors and gossip are the taxes that come from acquiring a public persona. Disagreements and occasional frustration are taxes placed on even the happiest of relationships. Theft is a tax on abundance and having things that other people want. Stress and problems are tariffs that come attached to success.

Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far).

The reason these diatribes are heard by more than just the occasional potted plant or captured hero is this: sparks quite frequently find themselves surrounded by people whether they want to be or not. We are not just talking about the stereotypical traveler whose cart breaks down during a storm and thus must seek shelter at the lone castle glimpsed through the trees and so finds himself at a timely ringside seat for the revelation of the latest abomination of science (although there is no denying this happens far more than is statistically probable). No, your seriously steeped-in-madness dabbler in the esoteric sciences usually finds themself taxed with a rag-tag collection of hangers-on, typically consisting of minions, constructs, adventurers, and those unique, unclassifiable, individuals whose raison d’être appears to be to remind us of what a strange world it is. Even more interestingly, it appears that the greater the spark, the more of these individuals they spontaneously accumulate.

It’s my personal opinion that airlines can do two things to make air travel better for everyone. The first is to have the people taking boarding tickets recognize the person who seems the most unreasonably determined to be sitting on the plane, hold up their arm, and joyfully announce over the loudspeaker: “YOU, SIR! You are our winner for most unaccountably and frantically eager to get on a plane that will not leave until every single person is seated anyway. Well done, you! Can you tell us how you feel now that you’ve won?” At best he’ll realize he’s being a bit douchey, laugh it off, and might calm the hell down from now on. At worst he’ll start yelling and then everyone else gets a good show. Then give him a small medal and a mild tranquilizer. Plus a mild tranquilizer for the person who has to sit next to him. And, if you’re handing them out, I’ll take one too. In fact, mild tranquilizers for everyone! (I apologize for the gender stereotyping, but in fairness it usually is a he. And he’s usually in a business suit. And he often has triple-diamond status. And he’s occasionally my husband.) Frankly,

For four months of my life, I traveled constantly with Nora, occasionally touching down in the States for a few days. We lived a life of relentless tension, yet it was also often crushingly boring. I had little to do, other than keep Nora company while she dealt with her “mules.” I would roam the streets of strange cities all alone. I felt disconnected from the world even as I was seeing it, a person without purpose or place. This was not the adventure I craved. I was lying to my family about every aspect of my life and growing sick and tired of my adopted drug “family.

I wanted to write an adventure story, not, it's true, I really did. I shall have failed, that's all. Adventures bore me. I have no idea how to talk about countries, how to make people wish they had been there. I am not a good travelling salesman. Countries? Where are they , whatever became of them. When I was twelve I dreamed of Hongkong. That tedious, commonplace little provincial town! Shops sprouting from every nook and cranny! The Chinese junks pictured on the lids of chocolate boxes used to fascinate me. Junks: sort of chopped-off barges, where the housewives do all their cooking and washing on deck. They even have television. As for the Niagara Falls: water, nothing but water! A dam is more interesting; at least one can occasionally see a big crack at its base, and hope for some excitement. When one travels, one sees nothing but hotels. Squalid rooms, with iron bedsteads, and a picture of some kind hanging on the wall from a rusty nail, a coloured print of London Bridge or the Eiffel Tower. One also sees trains, lots of trains, and airports that look like restaurants, and restaurants that look like morgues. All the ports in the world are hemmed in by oil slicks and shabby customs buildings. In the streets of the towns, people keep to the sidewalks, cars stop at red lights. If only one occasionally arrived in a country where women are the colour of steel and men wear owls on their heads. But no, they are sensible, they all have black ties, partings to one side, brassières and stiletto heels. In all the restaurants, when one has finished eating one calls over the individual who has been prowling among the tables, and pays him with a promissory note. There are cigarettes everywhere! There are airplanes and automobiles everywhere.

By planting rye I am creating carbon sinks in my backyard, expanding my role in the carbon cycle, launching my own backyard campaign to offset global warming. My emissions, after all, reflect a rural but very comfortable life in which I enjoy goods that travel great distances - clementines from Spain, wine from California - and on the occasional holiday I fly south, seeking warmer places. Will planting rye in the shoulder seasons be enough to make a difference? Certainly not, but it is a gesture, a way to frame the question and provide a benchmark to judge the extent of my complicity.

If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions. The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth peddlers, fortune-tellers, and all the other travelers who sold things the people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful. They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travelers and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like corrugated iron. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woodsand fell into bear traps. People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.

Although Alice’s and my paths had crossed occasionally over the years, our romantic relationship had only begun some eighteen months earlier at a party to mark Julian’s departure to South America for a six-month trek across the Andes. This was probably his most infamous escapade, as it involved travelling with his girlfriends at the time, a pair of Finnish twins by the names of Emmi and Peppi who, he claimed, had been conjoined at birth and were only separated by an American surgeon when they were four years old. It was true that whenever I looked at them they seemed to be leaning towards each other at a slightly unnatural angle

There’s a good explanation for why the Georgian age’s greatest novelist spends so much time in her letters discussing tea and sugar, and the finer details of the trimmings of clothes. These were the things in their lives over which Jane and Cassandra had control. Where the sisters should live was not their choice. Major purchases like furniture were rare. Independent travel, higher education lay out of reach. What did fall within their grasp was the purchase and the use of household supplies, and the ability to give and accept occasional invitations for visits to friends and relatives. No wonder the letters devote so much attention to these matters.

Is there a bird among them, dear boy?” Charity asked innocently, peering not at the things on the desk, but at his face, noting the muscle beginning to twitch at Ian’s tense jaw. “No.” “Then they must be in the schoolroom! Of course,” she said cheerfully, “that’s it. How like me, Hortense would say, to have made such a silly mistake.” Ian dragged his eyes from the proof that his grandfather had been keeping track of him almost from the day of his birth-certainly from the day when he was able to leave the cottage on his own two legs-to her face and said mockingly, “Hortense isn’t very perceptive. I would say you are as wily as a fox.” She gave him a little knowing smile and pressed her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell her, will you? She does so enjoy thinking she is the clever one.” “How did he manage to have these drawn?” Ian asked, stopping her as she turned away. “A woman in the village near your home drew many of them. Later he hired an artist when he knew you were going to be somewhere at a specific time. I’ll just leave you here where it’s nice and quiet.” She was leaving him, Ian knew, to look through the items on the desk. For a long moment he hesitated, and then he slowly sat down in the chair, looking over the confidential reports on himself. They were all written by one Mr. Edgard Norwich, and as Ian began scanning the thick stack of pages, his anger at his grandfather for this outrageous invasion of his privacy slowly became amusement. For one thing, nearly every letter from the investigator began with phrases that made it clear the duke had chastised him for not reporting in enough detail. The top letter began, I apologize, Your Grace, for my unintentional laxness in failing to mention that indeed Mr. Thornton enjoys an occasional cheroot… The next one opened with, I did not realize, Your Grace, that you would wish to know how fast his horse ran in the race-in addition to knowing that he won. From the creases and holds in the hundreds of reports it was obvious to Ian that they’d been handled and read repeatedly, and it was equally obvious from some of the investigator’s casual comments that his grandfather had apparently expressed his personal pride to him: You will be pleased to know, Your Grace, that young Ian is a fine whip, just as you expected… I quite agree with you, as do many others, that Mr. Thornton is undoubtedly a genius… I assure you, Your Grace, that your concern over that duel is unfounded. It was a flesh wound in the arm, nothing more. Ian flipped through them at random, unaware that the barricade he’d erected against his grandfather was beginning to crack very slightly. “Your Grace,” the investigator had written in a rare fit of exasperation when Ian was eleven, “the suggestion that I should be able to find a physician who might secretly look at young Ian’s sore throat is beyond all bounds of reason. Even if I could find one who was willing to pretend to be a lost traveler, I really cannot see how he could contrive to have a peek at the boy’s throat without causing suspicion!” The minutes became an hour, and Ian’s disbelief increased as he scanned the entire history of his life, from his achievements to his peccadilloes. His gambling gains and losses appeared regularly; each ship he added to his fleet had been described, and sketches forwarded separately; his financial progress had been reported in minute and glowing detail.

The aspect of mind that dominates our existence, or so it seems, concerns the world around us, actual or recalled from memory, with its objects and events, human and not, as represented by myriad images of every sensory stripe, often translated in verbal languages and structured in narratives. And yet, a remarkable yet, there is a parallel mental world that accompanies all those images, often so subtle that it does not demand any attention for itself but occasionally so significant that it alters the course of the dominant part of the mind, sometimes arrestingly so. That is the parallel world of affect, a world in which we find feelings traveling alongside the usually more salient images of our minds.

But you know what? I’m waving to you from the shores of forty-three and the months are peeling away. It’s looking extremely likely that I’ll still be paying off my student loans when I’m forty-four. Has this ruined my life? Has it kept me from pursuing happiness, my writing career, and ridiculously expensive cowboy boots? Has it compelled me to turn away from fantastically financially unsound expenditures on fancy dinners, travel, “organic” shampoo, and high-end preschools? Has it stopped me from adopting cats who immediately need thousands of dollars in veterinary care or funding dozens of friends’ artistic projects on Kickstarter or putting $20 bottles of wine on my credit card or getting the occasional pedicure? It has not.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the planet of Golgafrincham: it is a planet with an ancient and mysterious history, rich in legend, red, and occasionally green with the blood of those who sought in times gone by to conquer her; a land of parched and barren landscapes, of sweet and sultry air heady with the scent of the perfumed springs that trickle over its hot and dusty rocks and nourish the dark and musky lichens beneath; a land of fevered brows and intoxicated imaginings, particularly among those who taste the lichens; a land also of cool and shaded thoughts among those who have learned to forswear the lichens and find a tree to sit beneath; a land also of steel and blood and heroism; a land of the body and of the spirit. This was its history. And in all this ancient and mysterious history, the most mysterious figures of all were without doubt those of the Great Circling poets of Arium. These Circling Poets used to live in remote mountain passes where they would lie in wait for small bands of unwary travelers, circle around them, and throw rocks at them. And when the travelers cried out, saying why didn’t they go away and get on with writing some poems instead of pestering people with all this rock-throwing business, they would suddenly stop, and then break into one of the seven hundred and ninety-four great Song Cycles of Vassillian. These songs were all of extraordinary beauty, and even more extraordinary length, and all fell into exactly the same pattern.

Yet, the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth. When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe with its galaxies hurdling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionally represented among them. When I pour over the data that established the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day, every 24 hour rotation of Earth, people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children's children will witness and pay for with their health and wellbeing. And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves. I occasionally forget these things because however big the world is in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps, the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe.

These domestic accounts—which take up a lot of the nearly six-hundred-page compilation of his travel, war, and domestic diaries published in 2009—stand out in his work as records of something almost antithetical to the subjects of a political writer: places in which nothing was seriously wrong and no conflicts raged. The minor troubles—a jackdaw hanging around the chicken coops, potatoes rotted by frost, goats terrified by thunder, birds eating the strawberries, greenfly on the roses, and lots of slugs—worked against the gardener’s agenda but not against any law of nature or morality. The majority of his entries are concerned with his own activity with his domesticated plants and animals, but he makes notes as well on the agricultural fields beyond and the wild things around him. Occasional speculations and small experiments are also recorded.

The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama. According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was heir to a small Himalayan kingdom, sometime around 500 BC. The young prince was deeply affected by the suffering evident all around him. He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it? At the age of twenty-nine Gautama slipped away from his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his family and possessions. He travelled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, searching for a way out of suffering. He visited ashrams and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely – some dissatisfaction always remained. He did not despair. He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.

The general kind and soft customs of Mustang were soon to strike me as exceptional. Apart from occasional disputes between husband and wife, which like family rows all around the world bring raised voices, I never heard a person scream or shout; Even the children had very civilised manners. In fact the only person I knew to consistently angry in Lo Mantang was myself, and Tibetans consider bd temper a Western characteristic. Take for example the reactions of European to missing his train; he will invariably swear under his breath. Who in our can stand frustration without giving vent to anger? I soon had to master my own temper, having raised my voice against one of the innumerable people who stopped to stare at me and my smal party, I was told by a peasant: ‘’I cannot understand; you are a great man, how is it that small things like myself deserve your wrath?’’ After that I learned to be tolerant, realising that by getting mad I was only debasing myself, and that it was stupid to be bothered by trivialities.

In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness, " and other suprahuman entities. On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes, had they found out, " says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.

As Sharar pointed out, a large part of Europe's power consisted of its capacity to kill, which was enhanced by continuous and vicious wars among the region's small nations in the seventeenth century, a time when Asian countries knew relative peace. 'The only trouble with us,' Fukuzawa Yukichi, author, educator and prolific commentator on Japan's modernization, lamented in the 1870s, 'is that we have had too long a period of peace and no intercourse with outside. In the meantime, other countries, stimulated by occasional wars, have invented many new things such as steam trains, steam ships, big guns and small hand guns etc.' Required to fight at sea as well as on land, and to protect their slave plantations in the Caribbean, the British, for instance, developed the world's most sophisticated naval technologies. Mirza Abu Talib, an Indian Muslim traveller to Europe in 1800, was among the first Asians to articulate the degree to which the Royal Navy was the key to British prosperity. For much of the nineteenth century, British ships and commercial companies would retain their early edge in international trade over their European rivals, as well as over Asian producers and traders.

...in certain regions the party is organized like a gang whose toughest member takes over the leadership. The leader’s ancestry and powers are readily mentioned, and in a knowing and slightly admiring tone it is quickly pointed out that he inspires awe in his close collaborators. In order to avoid these many pitfalls a persistent battle has to be waged to prevent the party from becoming a compliant instrument in the hands of a leader. Leader comes from the English verb “to lead,” meaning “to drive” in French.15 The driver of people no longer exists today. People are no longer a herd and do not need to be driven. If the leader drives me I want him to know that at the same time I am driving him. The nation should not be an affair run by a big boss. Hence the panic that grips government circles every time one of their leaders falls ill, because they are obsessed with the question of succession: What will happen to the country if the leader dies? The influential circles, who in their blind irresponsibility are more concerned with safeguarding their lifestyle, their cocktail parties, their paid travel and their profitable racketeering, have abdicated in favor of a leader and occasionally discover the spiritual void at the heart of the nation.

And this is also true. In creative work—creative work of all kinds—those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook—a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always—these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come—for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.

Occasionally, a prickly pear cactus blocked my path. I maneuvered around the larger, invincible plants, but stomped down the weaker, two-foot-high cacti that were in my way As we struggled to carry the two hundred pound litter, twilight deepened and it became harder and harder to see. I aggressively stomped what I thought was a small cactus that was in my way. In the growing shadows I didn’t realize that I was only seeing the top two feet of a giant cactus that jutted above the lip of an arroyo. The rest of the massive cactus was hidden below the edge of the gully. My stomp carried me forward over the edge of the drop-off. I instinctively let go of the litter, extended my arms to break my fall and tumbled into the welcoming embrace of the “mother of all” cacti. My spontaneous girlish, high pitched scream startled everyone into immobility, stopping their forward travel. My bemused teammates cautiously peered over the ledge and saw me crucified on a giant prickly pear cactus. I felt like I was nailed to the plant, unable to move a muscle. Apparently, my rampant stomping of baby cacti had earned me bad cactus karma and the enmity of Mother Nature. As my teammates carefully pried me off the bloody cactus patch, I swear I could hear the other nearby cacti chuckling softly.

Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent. In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn’t have anticipated. This isn’t to say we’re in a police state, a term that’s often misused. Generally speaking, we’re free to travel. We don’t face mass censorship. We still have habeus corpus. And the odds of any single person being victimized by a wrong-door raid, shot or beaten by a cop, or otherwise victimized by militarized police violence are slim to nil. But perhaps we have entered a police state writ small. At the individual level, a police officer’s power and authority over the people he interacts with day to day is near complete. Absent video, if the officer’s account an incident differs from that of a citizen— even several citizens— his superiors, the courts, and prosecutors will nearly always defer to the officer. If other officers are nearby, there are policies in place—official and unofficial—to encourage them to back one another up. Even if the officer does violate the citizen’s rights, the officer is protected by qualified immunity.

We often associate science with the values of secularism and tolerance. If so, early modern Europe is the last place you would have expected a scientific revolution. Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you had travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe. If you had then sailed on to contemporary Paris or London, you would have found cities awash with religious extremism, in which only those belonging to the dominant sect could live. In London they killed Catholics, in Paris they killed Protestants, the Jews had long been driven out, and nobody in his right mind would dream of letting any Muslims in. And yet, the Scientific Revolution began in London and Paris rather than in Cairo and Istanbul.

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

The land around Ankh-Morpork is fertile and largely given over to the cabbage fields that help to give the city its distinctive odor. The gray light of pre-dawn unrolled over the blue-green expanse, and around a couple of farmers who were making an early start on the spinach harvest. They looked up, not at a sound, but at a travelling point of silence where sound ought to have been. It was a man and a woman and something like a size five man in a size twelve fur coat, all in a chariot that flickered as it moved. It bowled along the road toward Holy Wood and was soon out of sight. A minute or two later it was followed by a wheelchair. Its axle glowed red-hot. It was full of people screaming at one another. One of them was turning a handle on a box. It was so overburdened that wizards occasionally fell off and ran along after it, shouting, until they had a chance to jump on again and start screaming. Whoever was attempting to steer was not succeeding, and it weaved back and forth across the road and eventually hurtled off it completely and through the side of a barn. One of the farmers nudged the other. "Oi've seen this on the clicks," he said. "It's always the same. They crash into a barn and they allus comes out the other side covered in squawking chickens." His companion leaned reflectively on his hoe. "It'd be a sight worth seeing that," he said. "Sure would." "'Cos all there is in there, boy, is twenty ton of cabbage." There was a crash, and the chair erupted from the barn in a shower of chickens and headed madly toward the road. The farmers looked at one another. "Well, dang me," said one of them.

Sometimes our need clouds our ability to develop perspective. Being needy is kind of like losing your keys. You become desperate and search everywhere. You search in places you know damn well what you are looking for could never be. The more frantic you become in trying to find them the less rational you are in your search. The less rational you become the more likely you'll be searching in a way that actually makes finding what you want more difficult. You go back again and again to where you want them to be, knowing that there is no way in hell that they are there. There is a lot of wasted effort. You lose perspective of your real goal, let's say it's go to the grocery store, and instead of getting what you need -nourishment, you frantically chase your tail growing more and more confused and angry and desperate. You are mad at your keys, you are mad at your coat pockets for not doing their job. You are irrational. You could just grab the spare set, run to the grocery store and get what you need, have a sandwich, calm down and search at your leisure. But you don't. Where ARE your keys?! Your desperation is skewing your judgement. But you need to face it, YOUR keys are not in HIS pocket. You know your keys are not there. You have checked several times. They are not there. He is not responsible for your keys. You are. He doesn't want to be responsible for your keys. Here's the secret: YOU don't want to be responsible for your keys. If you did you would be searching for them in places they actually have a chance of being. Straight boys don't have your keys. You have tried this before. They may have acted like they did because they wanted you to get them somewhere or you may have hoped they did because you didn't want to go alone but straight boys don't have your keys. Straight boys will never have your keys. Where do you really want to go? It sounds like not far. If going somewhere was of importance you would have hung your keys on the nail by the door. Sometimes it's pretty comfortable at home. Lonely but familiar. Messy enough to lose your keys in but not messy enough to actually bother to clean house and let things go. Not so messy that you can't forget about really going somewhere and sit down awhile and think about taking a trip with that cute guy from work. Just a little while longer, you tell yourself. His girlfriend can sit in the backseat as long as she stays quiet. It will be fun. Just what you need. And really isn't it much safer to sit there and think about taking a trip than accepting all the responsibility of planning one and servicing the car so that it's ready and capable? Having a relationship consists of exposing yourself to someone else over and over, doing the work and sometimes failing. It entails being wrong in front of someone else and being right for someone too. Even if you do find a relationship that other guy doesn't want to be your chauffeur. He wants to take turns riding together. He may occasionally drive but you'll have to do some too. You will have to do some solo driving to keep up your end of the relationship. Boyfriends aren't meant to take you where you want to go. Sometimes they want to take a left when you want to go right. Being in a relationship is embarking on an uncertain adventure. It's not a commitment to a destination it is just a commitment to going together. Maybe it's time to stop telling yourself that you are a starcrossed traveler and admit you're an armchair adventurer. You don't really want to go anywhere or you would venture out. If you really wanted to know where your keys were you'd search in the most likely spot, down underneath the cushion of that chair you've gotten so comfortable in.

The railway journey to London was accomplished in a miraculous two hours, at least four times faster than it would have been had they gone by coach. That turned out to be fortunate, as it soon became apparent that the Ravenel family did not travel well. Pandora and Cassandra were both overcome with excitement, never having set foot on a train before. They chattered and exclaimed, darting across the station platform like feeding pigeons, begging West to purchase railway editions of popular novels--only a shilling apiece--and sandwiches packaged in cunning little paper boxes, and handkerchiefs printed with pastoral scenes. Loaded with souvenirs, they boarded the family’s first-class railway carriage and insisted on trying every seat before choosing the ones they preferred. Helen had insisted on bringing one of her potted orchids, its long, fragile stem having been stabilized with a stick and a bit of ribbon. The orchid was a rare and sensitive species of Blue Vanda. Despite its dislike of being moved, she believed it would be better off in London with her. She carried the orchid in her lap the entire way, her absorbed gaze focused on the passing landscape. Soon after the train had left the station, Cassandra made herself queasy by trying to read one of the railway novels. She closed the book and settled in her seat with her eyes closed, moaning occasionally as the train swayed. Pandora, by contrast, couldn’t stay seated for more than a few minutes at a time, jumping up to test the feeling of standing in a moving locomotive, and attempting to view the scenery from different windows. But the worst traveler by far was Clara, the lady’s maid, whose fear of the train’s speed proved resistant to all attempts at soothing. Every small jolt or lurch of the carriage drew a fearful cry from her until Devon had given her a small glass of brandy to settle her nerves.

Elizabeth’s concern that Ian might insult them, either intentionally or otherwise, soon gave way to admiration and then to helpless amusement as he sat for the next half-hour, charming them all with an occasional lazy smile or interjecting a gallant compliment, while they spent the entire time debating whether to sell the chocolates being donated by Gunther’s for $5 or $6 per box. Despite Ian’s outwardly bland demeanor, Elizabeth waited uneasily for him to say he’d buy the damned cartload of chocolates for $10 apiece, if it would get them on to the next problem, which she knew was what he was dying to say. But she needn’t have worried, for he continued to positively exude pleasant interest. Four times, the committee paused to solicit his advice; four times, he smilingly made excellent suggestions; four times, they ignored what he suggested. And four times, he seemed not to mind in the least or even notice. Making a mental note to thank him profusely for his incredible forbearance, Elizabeth kept her attention on her guests and the discussion, until she inadvertently glanced in his direction, and her breath caught. Seated on the opposite side of the gathering from her, he was now leaning back in his chair, his left ankle propped atop his right knee, and despite his apparent absorption in the topic being discussed, his heavy-lidded gaze was roving meaningfully over her breasts. One look at the smile tugging at his lips and Elizabeth realized that he wanted her to know it. Obviously he’d decided that both she and he were wasting their time with the committee, and he was playing an amusing game designed to either divert her or discomfit her entirely, she wasn’t certain which. Elizabeth drew a deep breath, ready to blast a warning look at him, and his gaze lifted slowly from her gently heaving bosom, traveled lazily up her throat, paused at her lips, and then lifted to her narrowed eyes. Her quelling glance earned her nothing but a slight, challenging lift of his brows and a decidedly sensual smile, before his gaze reversed and began a lazy trip downward again. Lady Wiltshire’s voice rose, and she said for the second time, “Lady Thornton, what do you think?” Elizabeth snapped her gaze from her provoking husband to Lady Wiltshire. “I-I agree,” she said without the slightest idea of what she was agreeing with. For the next five minutes, she resisted the tug of Ian’s caressing gaze, firmly refusing to even glance his way, but when the committee reembarked on the chocolate issue again, she stole a look at him. The moment she did, he captured her gaze, holding it, while he, with an outward appearance of a man in thoughtful contemplation of some weighty problem, absently rubbed his forefinger against his mouth, his elbow propped on the arm of his chair. Elizabeth’s body responded to the caress he was offering her as if his lips were actually on hers, and she drew a long, steadying breath as he deliberately let his eyes slide to her breasts again. He knew exactly what his gaze was doing to her, and Elizabeth was thoroughly irate at her inability to ignore its effect. The committee departed on schedule a half-hour later amid reminders that the next meeting would be held at Lady Wiltshire’s house. Before the door closed behind them, Elizabeth rounded on her grinning, impenitent husband in the drawing room. “You wretch!” she exclaimed. “How could you?” she demanded, but in the midst of her indignant protest, Ian shoved his hands into her hair, turned her face up, and smothered her words with a ravenous kiss. “I haven’t forgiven you,” she warned him in bed an hour later, her cheek against his chest. Laughter, rich and deep, rumbled beneath her ear. “No?” “Absolutely not. I’ll repay you if it’s the last thing I do.” “I think you already have,” he said huskily, deliberately misunderstanding her meaning.

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go everyday, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. Unboubtedly, if I close my eyes or stare vaguely at the ceiling I can re-create the scene: a tree in the distance, a short dingy figure run towards me. But I am inventing all this to make out a case. That Moroccan was big and weather-beaten, besides, I only saw him after he had touched me. So I *still* know he was big and weather-beaten: certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't *see* anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction. There are many cases where even these scraps have disapeared: nothing is left but words: I could still tell stories, tell them too well [...] but these are only the skeletons. There's the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isn't I, I have nothing in common with him. He travels through countries I know no more about than if I had never been there. Sometimes, in my story, it happens that I pronounce these fine names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury. New images are born in me, images such as people create from books who have never travelled. My words are dreams, that is all. For a hundred dead stories there still remain one or two living ones. I evoke these with caution, occasionally, not too often, for fear of wearing them out, I fish one out, again I see the scenery, the characters, the attitudes. I stop suddenly: there is a flaw, I have seen a word pierce through the web of sensations. I suppose that this word will soon take the place of several images I love. I must stop quickly and think of something else; I don't want to tire my memories. In vain; the next time I evoke them a good part will be congealed.

Pilgrimage is premised on the idea that the sacred is not entirely immaterial, but that there is a geography of spiritual power. Pilgrimage walks a delicate line between the spiritual and the material in its emphasis on the story and its setting though the search is for spirituality, it is pursued in terms of the most material details of where the Buddha was born or where Christ died, where the relics are or the holy water flows. Or perhaps it reconciles the spiritual and the material, for to go on pilgrimage is to make the body and its actions express the desires and beliefs of the soul. Pilgrimage unites belief with action, thinking with doing, and it makes sense that this harmony is achieved when the sacred has material presence and location. Protestants, as well as the occasional Buddhist and Jew, have objected to pilgrimages as a kind of icon worship and asserted that the spiritual should be sought within as something wholly immaterial, rather than out in the world. There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in Christian pilgrimage, as there is in mountaineering. To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes during a journey. Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one's body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp. We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the jour ney. Too, we tend to imagine life as a journey, and going on an actual expedition takes hold of that image and makes it concrete, acts it out with the body and the imagination in a world whose geography has become spiritualized. The walker toiling along a road toward some distant place is one of the most compelling and universal images of what it means to be human, depicting the individual as small and solitary in a large world, reliant on the strength of body and will. In pilgrim age, the journey is radiant with hope that arrival at the tangible destination will bring spiritual benefits with it. The pilgrim has achieved a story of his or her ow and in this way too becomes part of the religion made up of stories of travel and transformation.

He returned to the table with a pile of pastries and two coffees. “Hungry?” she asked. “Let’s figure out what you like.” He waved at the pastries. How thoughtful. She picked up a small biscuit cookie to nibble but shook her head. “Too crunchy.” “Try the scone,” he recommended. One bite. “Nope. No scones. Maybe I’m not a pastry person.” “I’m taking notes over here.” He almost spit out his sip of coffee from laughter when she had to empty her mouth into a small napkin after biting into a cheesy sweet concoction. “Sorry.” Her face went hot. “I’ll stick with croissants. What about you? What do you like?” He shrugged. “I’m not picky.” “Is it bad to be picky? Does it mean I’m high maintenance?” “Maybe you’re not into sweets.” “If I dribbled chocolate all over you, I’d lick it off and like it.” She slapped a hand over her mouth. “Did I just say that out loud? Forget I said that.” “No undoing that. It’s stuck in here.” He tapped his head. “Moon madness.” “It’s mid-morning. There’s no moon in the sky.” He peeked out the window. “Maybe not a full moon, but there’s one in the sky. This insanity is our bodies cranking up for the main event later today.” His eyes traveled down her body and back up; he wet his lips with his tongue. Her mind flashed back to the moment his lips were on hers, the way his fingers had dug into her, the desperation flowing from his fingertips. Things were about to get a lot more interesting as the day wore on. In silence, they ate for a while. She leaned back and stared at him. “You may have to answer to someone, but you like what you do most of the time. Why do you do it? Save humans against things that bump in the night?” “I’m cursed to follow orders.” “Sure, you’re forced into some things, but that only goes so far.” He wiped a few crumbs off the table. “Perhaps so. It’s a good cause. Most of the time. Occasionally, the missions we’re ordered on are based on erroneous information.” She reached out and put her hand over his. “I might be as bad as they made me out. I don’t remember. I appreciate you trying to help me figure it out, but if I start to show an inclination toward evil or world domination, do your job.” He rotated his hand to hold hers and stared at their connection. “The fact you considered it means you’re not someone I should kill.” “We don’t know.” She removed her hand from his. “Tell me something about yourself. What pastry do you like? Are you a scones person?” He shook his head. “I’m not into a lot of sweets, but I’ve realized I like chocolate.

The Man-Moth Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light. (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

I suppose it means that I will be free to travel with my maid, or to live in the country while you are in town, or I may live in town while you are in the country if I wish. I mean if I find your company...er...unpleasant." "I see," Daniel said dryly. "And if we are always apart, how exactly are we to gain heirs?" "Oh." Suzette flushed. "Well, I suppose we could arrange for occasional visits for...er...procreative purposes." "Occasional visits for procreative purposes?" he achoed with disbelief, and then muttered dryly, "My, how scintillating that sounds." Suzette frowned, for really it did sound rather cold, nothing like the passionate delirium she had read about in one of Lisa's novels. But then, truthfully,she simply couldn't fathom the ecstasies described in that book. She'd never even been kissed and what if she didn't enjoy his kisses? Just because he didn't have bad breath didn't mean she would enjoy these visits she spoke of so boldly. Coming to a decision, she straightened abruptly, and said, "We must kiss." That caught his attention and he asked with amazement, "What?" "Well, we should see if we would deal well together in...er...that regard," she muttered, blushing hotly. Swallowing, she forced herself to add firmly, "You should kiss me. Then we will know." "My dear young lady," Daniel began seeming half amused and half horrified, "I really do not think-" "Oh,for pity's sake," Suzette interuppted impatiently, and then leaned forward again,this time pressing her lips to his. In her rush to get it over with, she lost her balance a bit and had to catch a hold of his jacket to steady herself as she smooshed her mouth against his. She then waited for the warm and wonderful commotion she'd read about to assault her. Unfortunately, there wasn't any commotion. Really this was no more exciting than pressing her mouth to a cup, Suzette thought with dismay, and released him to sit back again with a most disappointed sigh. "Oh dear, I fear you're no good at this." "Excuse me? I am no good at this?" Daniel asked with amazed disbelief. "My dear girl, if you think that was a kiss-" "Do stop calling me a girl," Suzette snapped a bit impatiently and got to her feet, too agitated now to sit. "You sound like you're old enough to be my father and you aren't quite that old." "Not quite that old? For pity's sake! What a charmer you are," he said with irritation, and then stood up as well and informed her with some dignity, "That was not a proper kiss." "Well if you are such an expert, why do you not show me how to do it right?" she suggested, glowering with frustration at this turn of events.

Marcus released the countess as if he had been burned. His first reaction was a piercing relief that Lillian was still alive. However, the relief was followed immediately by the awareness that she was far from safe. In light of St. Vincent’s need of a fortune, it made perfect sense for him to abduct Lillian. Marcus turned from his mother, never wanting to look at her again, unable to bring himself to speak to her. His gaze locked with Simon Hunt’s. Predictably, Hunt was already making rapid calculations. “He’ll take her to Gretna Green, of course,” Hunt murmured, “and they’ll have to travel east to the main road in Hertfordshire. He won’t risk traveling the back ways and getting mired in mud, or having the wheels damaged from broken road. From Hertfordshire it will be approximately forty-five hours to Scotland… and at a speed of ten miles per hour, with occasional stops for fresh relay horses…” “You’ll never overtake them,” the countess cried with a cackling laugh. “I told you I would have my way, Westcliff!” “Oh, shut up, you evil hag!” cried Daisy Bowman impatiently from the doorway, her eyes huge in her pale face. “Lord Westcliff, shall I run to the stables and tell them to saddle a horse?” “Two horses,” Simon Hunt said resolutely. “I’m going with him.” “Which ones—” “Ebony and Yasmin,” Marcus replied. They were his best Arabians, bred for speed over long distance. They were not as lightning-fast as thoroughbreds, but they would endure a punishing pace for hours, traveling at least three times as fast as St. Vincent’s coach. Daisy disappeared in a flash, and Marcus turned to his sister. “See that the countess is gone by the time I return,” he said curtly. “Pack whatever she needs, and get her off the estate.” “Where do you wish me to send her?” Livia asked, pale but composed. “I don’t give a damn, so long as she knows not to return.” Realizing that she was being banished, and most likely exiled, the countess rose from her chair. “I will not be disposed of in this manner! I won’t have it, my lord!” “And tell the countess,” Marcus said to Livia, “that if the slightest harm comes to Miss Bowman, she had better pray that I never find her.” Marcus strode from the room, shoving through a small crowd that had gathered in the hallway. Simon Hunt followed, pausing only to murmur briefly to Annabelle and press a kiss to her forehead. She stared after him with an anxious frown, biting her lip to keep from calling after him. After a lengthy pause, the countess was heard to mutter, “It matters not what becomes of me. I am content in the knowledge that I have prevented him from befouling the family lineage.” Livia turned to give her mother a half-pitying, half-contemptuous glance. “Marcus never fails,” she said softly. “Most of his childhood was spent learning to overcome impossible odds. And now that Marcus has finally found someone worth fighting for… do you really think he would let anything stop him?

Yes, he admitted, if gravity is always attractive, and never repulsive, then the stars in the universe might be unstable. But there was a loophole in this argument. Assume that the universe is, on average, totally uniform and infinite in all directions. In such a static universe, all the forces of gravity cancel one another out, and the universe becomes stable once again. Given any star, the forces of gravity acting on it from all the distant stars in different directions eventually sum to zero, and hence the universe does not collapse. Although this was a clever solution to this problem, Newton realized there was still a potential flaw to his solution. The universe might be uniform on average, but it cannot be exactly uniform at all points, so there must be tiny deviations. Like a house of cards, it appears to be stable, but the tiniest flaw will cause the entire structure to collapse. So Newton was clever enough to realize that a uniform infinite universe was indeed stable but was always teetering on the edge of collapse. In other words, the cancellation of infinite forces must be infinitely precise or else the universe will either collapse or be ripped apart. Thus, Newton’s final conclusion was that the universe was infinite and uniform on average, but occasionally God has to tweak the stars in the universe, so they do not collapse under gravity. Why Is the Night Sky Black? But this raised another problem. If we start with a universe that is infinite and uniform, then everywhere we look into space our gaze will eventually hit a star. But since there are an infinite number of stars, there must be an infinite amount of light entering our eyes from all directions. The night sky should be white, not black. This is called Olbers’ paradox. Some of the greatest minds in history have tried to tackle this sticky question. Kepler, for example, dismissed the paradox by claiming that the universe was finite, and hence there is no paradox. Others have theorized that dust clouds have obscured starlight. (But this cannot explain the paradox, because, in an infinite amount of time, the dust clouds begin to heat up and then emit blackbody radiation, similar to a star. So the universe becomes white again.) The final answer was actually given by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848. Being an amateur astronomer, he was fascinated by the paradox and said that the night sky is black because, if we travel back in time far enough, we eventually encounter a cutoff—that is, a beginning to the universe. In other words, the night sky is black because the universe has a finite age. We do not receive light from the infinite past, which would make the night sky white, because the universe never had an infinite past. This means that telescopes peering at the farthest stars will eventually reach the blackness of the Big Bang itself. So it is truly amazing that by pure thought, without doing any experiments whatsoever, one can conclude that the universe must have had a beginning.

Surely you’re not going to destroy another book, are you?” “I’ve decided my obsession with reading has gotten me absolutely nowhere, so . . . I’m tossing all the nonsense out of my life and intend to travel forth with less baggage.” “You love to read.” “And I’ll occasionally indulge that love, but enough is enough.” She held up her copy of Pride and Prejudice. “This, for all intent and purposes, is a fairy tale. I’m done with fairy tales for good, as well as anything by Shakespeare. I loathe his stories, don’t understand most of what he’s written, and I was only reading them because of any future children I hoped to have. But since I’m destined to remain a spinster forever . . . I’m chucking them into the fire.” “What do Shakespeare and any children you might have in the future have in common?” Millie sent him a look that clearly said she found him a little dense. “I wanted to be knowledgeable so that my children wouldn’t suffer any embarrassment because of my ignorance and lack of education.” Everett’s mouth dropped open before he had the presence of mind to snap it shut when she shot him a glare. Bracing himself in case she got it into her head to punch him as she’d done Mr. Victor, Everett stepped closer to her and pried the copy of Pride and Prejudice out of her hand. “Any child would be lucky to call you mother, Millie. You’re smart, well-read, curious about everything, and have a true love for children.” Staring at him for a long moment, Millie tilted her head. “I knew we should have summoned the physician to take a look at you after your last brawl.” “My wits are not addled, Millie. Quite honestly, my mind is clearer right now than it’s been in years.” He brought her hand up to his lips and kissed it, relieved when her eyes widened just a bit. “And I have to tell you something else.” “What?” she asked in a voice that sounded somewhat breathless. “I can’t allow you to burn any Jane Austen book—but especially not Pride and Prejudice.” “That’s what you have to say to me—that I can’t burn a silly book?” “I finished the story, Millie. I read Pride and Prejudice from cover to cover, and . . . I’m your Mr. Darcy and you’re my Lizzy.” “You . . . finished . . . the story?” “Indeed. And if you didn’t hear me the first time, I’m Mr. Darcy.” “I’m fairly certain Mr. Darcy would have had an English accent, but since Lizzy did enjoy reading, I suppose it’s not too much of a stretch to compare me with her, although. . . .” As Millie continued talking, really rapidly at that, Everett simply watched her, taking in every detail of her face. Her green eyes were sparkling and her cheeks were flushed a delicate shade of pink. Brown curls had begun to escape the pins someone had put in her hair, and a spray of flowers that had been tucked into that hair was hanging somewhat forlornly over her ear. Her lips were still moving incredibly fast, but the second his gaze settled on them, he couldn’t seem to look away. They were delightful lips, just the right shade of pink, and . . . Everett leaned forward and claimed those rapidly moving lips with his own. For