Offering Sympathy Quotes

No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

What happens if your choice is misguided?' I ask, softly. Miss Moore takes a pear from the bowl and offers us the grapes to devour. 'You must try to correct it.' 'But what if it’s too late? What if you can’t?' There's a sad sympathy in Miss Moore's catlike eyes as she regards my painting again. She paints the thinnest sliver of shadow along the bottom of the apple, bringing it fully to life. 'Then you must find a way to live with it.

I didn’t know that money could make the cell doors swing open. I didn’t know that if a woman was drunk when the violence occurred, she wouldn’t be taken seriously. I didn’t know that if he was drunk when the violence occurred, people would offer him sympathy. I didn’t know that my loss of memory would become his opportunity. I didn’t know that being a victim was synonymous with not being believed.

It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?

If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.

Let us assume that entertainment is the sole end of reading; even so I think you would hold that no mental employment is so broadening to the sympathies or so enlightening to the understanding. Other pursuits belong not to all times, all ages, all conditions; but this gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure. Through the night-watches, on all our journeyings, and in our hours of ease, it is our unfailing companion.

Most survivors are cope-aholics, people who cope with whatever is thrown at them without reliance on others. They do not seek sympathy for their pain and feel undeserving if it is offered. They are especially adverse to sympathy from others.

Yet we allow our historical sympathy to override our aesthetic discrimination. We offer flowers of approbation when the artist is safely laid in his grave.

I wasn't offering her pity," Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. "Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy.

I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated

Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments, but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature; nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original; she used to repeat sounding phrases from books; she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment, but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her

Once you get tired of folks offering sympathy that doesn’t fit your pain, it’s easier to draw the bridge up than it is to keep it open.

This may be illustrated by the Taoist story of a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck. He said, “May be.” The next day the horse returned, but brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune. He said, “May be.” And then, the following day, his son tried to saddle and ride one of the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. Again the neighbors came to offer their sympathy for the misfortune. He said, “May be.” The day after that, conscription officers came to the village to seize young men for the army, but because of the broken leg the farmer’s son was rejected. When the neighbors came in to say how fortunately everything had turned out, he said, “May be.”14

When a demand for intelligent sympathy goes unanswered he is a too stern disciplinarian who blames himself for having offered a dullard an opportunity to participate in the warmer movement of a more highly organised life.

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

The confidence game—the con—is an exercise in soft skills. Trust, sympathy, persuasion. The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give. He doesn’t have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us. And so we offer up whatever they want—money, reputation, trust, fame, legitimacy, support—and we don’t realize what is happening until it is too late.

It must be really rough, forced to put on a beautiful dress, stick some diamonds or whatever all over you and choke down champagne and lobster croquettes beside the most beautiful man ever born, on or off planet. I don't know how you get through the day with that weight on your shoulders, Dallas." "Shut up." "And here I am, free to squeeze into the local pizza place with McNab where we will split the pie and the check." Peabody shook her head slowly. The dark bowl of hair under her cap swayed in conceit. "I can't tell you how guilty I feel knowing that." "You looking for trouble, Peabody?" "No, sir." Peabody did her best to look pious. "Just offering my support and sympathy at this difficult time.

You've been playing on my sympathies as though they were harp strings. You-' 'What do you expect me to do?' he cut in. 'Play fair? With a woman who makes up her own rules as she goes along?' 'I expect you to take no for an answer!' He rose. 'I should like to know what you're afraid of.' 'Afraid?' Her voice climbed. 'Afraid? Of you?' 'The only reason I can think of for your rejecting an opportunity to run the world as you see fit is fear that you can't manage the man offering the opportunity.

His power seems to come from a combination of techniques and personality traits. He seems to have no sympathy for anyone, but total empathy. He is enormously self-centered, proud, vain, disdainful of all who lack the good fortune to be him. This is so evident and so oddly convincing (one finds oneself thinking/agreeing that, yes, Arty is a special person and can’t be judged by normal criteria) that when he turns his interest on an individual (on me) the object (me) suddenly feels elevated to his level (as in — yeah, me and Arty are too special and unique to be judged, etc.). Just when you feel despicable, and that Arty’s disdain is too great a burden to endure, he offers you the option of becoming his peer …

By not talking about death with our loved ones, not being clear through advanced directives, DNR (do not resuscitate) orders, and funeral plans, we are directly contributing to this future ... and a rather bleak present, at that. Rather than engage in larger societal discussions about dignified ways for the terminally ill to end their lives, we accept intolerable cases like that of Angelita, a widow in Oakland who covered her head with a plastic bag because the arthritic pain of her gnarled joints was too much to bear. Or that of Victor in Los Angeles, who hung himself from the rafters of his apartment after his third unsuccessful round of chemotherapy, leaving his son to discover his body. Or the countless bodies with decubitus ulcers, more painful for me to care for them even babies or suicides. When these bodies come into the funeral home, I can only offer my sympathy to their living relatives, and promise to work to ensure that more people are not robbed of a dignified death by a culture of silence.

She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, we are beyond mercy.

bring to mind the feeling of being with someone who loves you, while calling up heartfelt emotions such as gratitude or fondness. Next, bring empathy to the difficulties of the other person. Opening to his (even subtle) suffering, let sympathy and goodwill naturally arise. (These steps flow together in actual practice.) Then, in your mind, offer explicit wishes, such as May you not suffer.

The Internet offers access, in principle, to an unprecedented variety of opinions and information. Nonetheless, it could narrow understanding and sympathies rather than broaden them: some people may choose to stay closeted within a cybercommunity of the likeminded.

I never have sympathy for those that have been blinded by the path of God. You chose to walk into the light, not realizing that you were already chained within the darkness. When a hand was offered to you, you looked up into the sky, and bowed your head in blind obedience, when you should have been creating a new possibility. Nothing is more pathetic than to see ignorance in action. Nothing is more laughable than to see the obedient ask an illusion for more power to stay frivolously obedient. I never have sympathy for those that have been blinded by the path of God. I only have sympathy for the Devil...

As for God, I frankly admit that I find it easier to live with the age-old questions about suffering than with many of the easy or pious explanations offered from time to time. Some of which seem to verge on blasphemy. I hope so much that no one has sought to try and comfort you by saying that God must have needed Francesca more than you. I would find it impossible to worship a God who deliberately stole my child from me. Such a God would be a moral monster.

Life is like a cloud. It comes in a million shapes and sizes and it offers no guarantees, no sympathies for the man who told his kid he'd fly a kite today, no consideration for the girl who was sure she'd see the sun today, no promises for the weary world and the wants wants wants of which it has too many today. Life is like that.

Today, I am a little more ready to offer sympathy,

All those years, as the only other person who understood their parents, he had absorbed her miseries offering silent sympathy or a squeeze on the shoulder or a wry smile.

There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though much to create despair. Much, too, you will think, reader, to engender jealousy: if a woman, in my position, could presume to be jealous of a woman in Miss Ingram's. But I was not jealous...Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, any opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her. Too often she betrayed this...Other eyes besides mine watched these manifestations of character--watched them closely, keenly shrewdly. Yes; the future bridegroom, Mr. Rochester himself, exercised over his intended a ceaseless surveillance; and it was from this sagacity--this guardedness of his--this perfect, clear conciousness of his fair one's defects--this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that ever-toturing pain arose. I saw he was going to marry her, for family, perhaps political reasons, because her rank and connecions suited him; I felt he had not given her his love, and that her qualifications were ill adapted to win from him that treasure. This was the point--this was where the nerve was touched and teased--this was where the fever was sustained and fed: she could not charm him. If she had managed the victory at once, and he had yielded and sincerely laid his heart at her feet, I should have covered my face, turned to the wall, and have died to them.

Consider the parable of the Chinese farmer. One day, the farmer’s horse ran away. That evening, the neighbors stopped by to offer their sympathies. “So sorry to hear your horse ran away,” they said. “That’s too bad.” “Maybe,” the farmer said. “Maybe not.” The next day the horse returned, bringing seven wild horses with it. “Oh, isn’t that lucky,” said the neighbors. “Now you have eight horses. What a great turn of events.” “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” The next day the farmer’s son was training one of these horses when he was thrown and broke his leg. “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” said the neighbors. “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” The following day, conscription officers came to the village to recruit young men for the army, but they rejected the farmer’s son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors said, “Isn’t that great!” “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” We lead telephoto lives in a wide-angle world. We never see the big picture. The only sane response is, like the Chinese farmer, to adopt a philosophy of maybe-ism.

Below the surface, the force driving noir stories is the urge to escape: from the past, from the law, from the ordinary, from poverty, from constricting relationships, from the limitations of the self. Noir found its fullest expression in America because the American psyche harbors a passion for independence . . . With this desire for autonomy comes a corresponding fear of loneliness and exile. The more we crave success, the more we dread failure; the more we crave freedom, the more we dread confinement. This is the shadow that spawns all of noir’s shadows: the anxiety imposed by living in a country that elevates opportunity above security; one that instills the compulsion to “make it big," but offers little sympathy to those who fall short. Film noir is about people who break the rules, pursuing their own interests outside the boundaries of decent society, and about how they are destroyed by society - or by themselves. Noir springs from a fundamental conflict between the values of individual freedom and communal safety: a fundamental doubt that the two can coexist. . . . Noir stories are powered by the need to escape, but they are structured around the impossibility of escape: their fierce, thwarted energy turns inward. The ultimate noir landscape, immeasurable as the ocean and confining as a jail cell, is the mind - the darkest city of all.

I had never been the sort of person who was first to offer sympathy, a handkerchief, a listening ear, to an acquaintance who looked distressed, but something about Lucy made me wish to be. I wanted to help her; I wanted to make her smile.

When I see a few of the family members murmur among one another, discussing Aldrich’s offer, any sympathy I feel is washed away with disgust. My grief may tear at my insides still, but the wounds and memories are mine. Mine. ‘They are weak.

Whatever relationship they formed, whether it was one based on a niece’s admiration of an older family member, or common interests, Kate came to believe that her Uncle Tom would offer her the sort of home and sympathy she did not find in Wolverhampton.

London wasn't the first city I'd lived in, but it was certainly the largest. Anywhere else there is always the chance of seeing someone you know or, at the very least, a smiling face. Not here. Commuters crowd the trains, eager to outdo their fellow travelers in an escalating privacy war of paperbacks, headphones and newspapers. A woman next to me on the Northern Line on day held the Metro just inches from her face; it was only three stops later that I noticed she was not reading but crying. It was hard not to offer sympathy and harder still to not start crying myself.

I suppose on reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbors with our words is that our grand-will gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. we can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavor of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.

She was a thin, gypsyish woman, and her face was very keen; she could put on a manner when she felt like it, but she didn’t care a damn who saw her when she didn’t, and she gave her sharp, greenish-eyed grin. He wasn’t rattled by her; he had decided she was going to be a nuisance, and she caught on at once that he was bent on giving her the shove-ho. She was an experienced woman, rough from being so much on the losing side and from having knocked around from town to town, Washington to Brooklyn to Detroit, with what other stops you’d never know, getting gold teeth here and a slash in the cheek there. But she was an independent and never appealed for any sympathy; was never offered any either.

...he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked. I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic.

These are all issues in search of clarity. The good listener knows that, via conversation with another person, we’d ideally move from a confused, agitated state of mind to a calmer and more focused one. Together, through talking, we would work out what is really at stake. But, in reality, this tends not to happen because few of us are sufficiently aware of how to achieve this clarity from our conversation. There aren’t enough good listeners. People tend to assert rather than analyse. They restate in many different ways the fact that they are worried, excited, sad or hopeful, and their interlocutor listens but does not help them to discover more. Good listeners fight against this with a range of conversational gambits. They hover as the other speaks; they offer encouraging remarks; they make gentle positive gestures: a sigh of sympathy, a nod of encouragement, a strategic ‘hmm’ of interest. All the time, they are egging the other to go deeper into issues. They love saying: ‘Tell me more about…’; ‘I was fascinated when you said…’; ‘Why did that happen, do you think?’ or ‘How did you feel about that?

Well, she's dead" I reminded her Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and folded her hands into a prayer. I thought she was going to sing a song, or do some incantation. I didn't expect her to offer me any pity or sympathy. But instead, she squinched her face, sneezed violently, tuned to wiper her face with a huge bath towel lying on the floor by her desk chair, and scribbled on her pad some more. "And how did she die ?" she asked. "Not pineal failure, I suppose." "She mixed alcohol with sedatives," I said. I was too lethargic to lie. And if Dr. Tuttle has forgotten that I'd told her my mother had slit her wristsn telling her the truth wouldn't matter in the long run. "People like your mother," Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head "give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.

The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies—open and undisguised—seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement.

But then a university friend got diagnosed with depression and described it to Brooke as a kind of half paralysis, as if all her muscles had atrophied, and Brooke had a sudden memory of Amy eating cereal in slow motion, swaying like seaweed under water, and she realized she was offering this friend more sympathy and understanding than she’d ever given her own sister. These days she tried hard to see Amy with objective, compassionate eyes,

I must add, too, that the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait path. They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to suspect—so cunning has the Devil been with them—that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one’s own navel, to turn up one’s eyes and humbly offer the back of one’s neck to Gletkin’s revolver—that is an easy solution. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is ananachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears. ...” He felt for the bottle behind him and poured out an other glass. Rubashov noticed that the bottle was already half empty. You also could do with a little solace, he thought. “The greatest criminals in history,” Ivanov went on, “are not of the type Nero and Fouché, but of the type Gandhi and Tolstoy. Gandhi’s inner voice has done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns. To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is.

What for are you crying?” His gaze raised to meet Summer’s, the furrow between his eyes deepening. “What has happened?” He looked to the chair, where the grandmother held up her gnarled hands and shook her head, apparently attempting to offer assurance. “Nothing’s wrong, Pa. It’s onions.” Mr. Ollenburger seemed to wilt with relief. Summer felt a wave of sympathy for the real fear he had experienced. She swept away the tears with the backs of her wrists and held up a thick slice of onion. “Yes … see? You grow powerful onions in your garden, Mr. Ollenburger.

Abiding by moral rules, especially when they are explained meaningfully and mercifully, gives teenagers swimming in a sea of relativism and nihilism what David Brooks calls a “moral vocabulary.” Sympathy for multiple generations of family breakdown wrought by moral anarchy isn’t enough. People need norms, writes Brooks, “basic codes and rules woven into daily life” that offer an alternative to the “plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refuse[s] to assert that one way of behaving [is] better than another. Article from first things.com GENERATION Z: DESPERATE FOR RULES

She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her. Too often she betrayed this, by the undue vent she gave to a spiteful antipathy she had conceived against little Adèle: pushing

We’ve noticed in our own lives that too much sympathy isn’t helpful. It’s draining—and to no useful end. Sympathy kicks in when our heads overidentify with someone in need and we start projecting our own concerns. Our heads persuade us that in order to be a good friend, we have to “get into” that person’s pain, identify with it and make it our own. But that means engulfing ourselves in the same draining emotions our friend is suffering from. By the time we project our own concerns about the problem on top of our friend’s concerns, we’re sinking into an emotional bog that’s not helpful to anyone. That’s why an offer of sympathy so often leads to two people crying in their beers instead of one—with no solution in sight.

But I was not jealous: or very rarely;—the nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word. Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about loving and helping an addict, which most people who haven’t been through it don’t understand, is this: every day the cycle continues is your new worst day. When looked at from the outside it seems endless, the same thing over and over again; but when you’re living it, it’s like being a hamster on a wheel. Every day there’s the chronic anxiety of waiting for news, the horrible rush when it turns out to be bad, the overwhelming sense of déjà vu – and the knowledge that, despite your best efforts, you’ll probably be here again. Even so-called good days are not without their drawbacks. You enjoy them as much as you can, but in the back of your mind there’s the lurking fear that tomorrow you could be back to square one again, or worse. For me, this was life with Amy. If I was stopped by someone in the street and they asked how Amy was doing, I knew they wouldn’t understand if I told them what was going on. I’d learned that it’s nearly impossible to explain how this could keep happening. I’d imagined that, as they offered sympathy, they’d be wondering, How can her family let this carry on? Or, Why didn’t they lock her up until she was clean? But unless an addict wants to quit, they’ll find a way to get drugs, and as soon as they leave the rehab facility they’ll pick up where they left off. Long before Amy was an addict, no one could tell her what to do. Once she became an addict, that stubbornness just got worse. There were times when she wanted to be clean, but the times when she didn’t outnumbered them.

Consider him indulgently: the Egoist is the Son of Himself. He is likewise the Father. And the son loves the father, the father the son; they reciprocate affection through the closest of ties; and shall they view behaviour unkindly wounding either of them, not for each other's dear sake abhorring the criminal? They would not injure you, but they cannot consent to see one another suffer or crave in vain. The two rub together in sympathy besides relationship to an intenser one. Are you, without much offending, sacrificed by them, it is on the altar of their mutual love, to filial piety or paternal tenderness: the younger has offered a dainty morsel to the elder, or the elder to the younger. Absorbed in their great example of devotion do they not think of you. They are beautiful.

He is a slave.” “He is a man, as I am.” Kestrel slipped from her saddle, stood face-to-face with Ronan, and lied. “He is nothing to me.” Ronan’s anger dimmed a little. He waited, listening. “I never should have challenged Irex.” Kestrel decided to weave some truth into her story, to toughen the fabric of it. “But he and I have an unfriendly history. He made me an offer last spring. I turned him down. Since then, he has been…aggressive.” She had Ronan’s sympathy then, and she was grateful, for she didn’t know what she would do if he and Jess turned their backs on her. She needed them--not only today, but always. “Irex angered me. The slave was just an excuse.” How much easier everything would be if that were so. But Kestrel wouldn’t let herself consider the truth. She didn’t want to know its shape or see its face. “I was thoughtless and rash, but I’ve drawn my tiles and must play them. Will you help me, Ronan? Will you do as I asked in my letter?” “Yes.” He still looked unhappy. “Though as far as I can see, there is little for me to do but stand and watch you fight.” “And Jess? Will she be at the duel?” “Yes, as soon as she is done weeping her eyes out. What a fright you’ve given us, Kestrel.” Kestrel opened a saddlebag and passed Ronan the purse with the death-price. He took it, recognizing it by its weight and the fact that her letter had told him to expect it. Softly, he said, “You frightened me.” She embraced him, stepping into his arms. They relaxed around her. His chin rested on top of her head, and she felt his forgiveness. She tried to push away thoughts of Arin on the auction block, of the look in his eyes when he asked where his honor was, of him swearing at her guards in his tongue. She held Ronan more tightly, pressing her cheek against his chest. Ronan sighed. “I’ll ride with you to Irex’s house,” he said, “and see you safely home after you’ve won.

Being an energetic individual, Mr. Laurence struck while the iron was hot, and before the blighted being recovered spirit enough to rebel, they were off. During the time necessary for preparation, Laurie bore himself as young gentleman usually do in such cases. He was moody, irritable, and pensive by turns, lost his appetite, neglected his dress and devoted much time to playing tempestuously on his piano, avoided Jo, but consoled himself by staring at her from his window, with a tragic face that haunted her dreams by night and oppressed her with a heavy sense of guilt by day. Unlike some sufferers, he never spoke of his unrequited passion, and would allow no one, not even Mrs. March, to attempt consolation or offer sympathy. On some accounts, this was a relief to his friends, but the weeks before his departure were very uncomfortable, and everyone rejoiced that the 'poor, dear fellow was going away to forget his trouble, and come home happy'. Of course, he smiled darkly at their delusion, but passed it by with

There was something else in Hollingsworth, besides flesh and blood, and sympathies and affections, and celestial spirit. This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an over-ruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle....They have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious, and never seem to suspect-so cunning has the Devil been with them-that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process, by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

In the train, I read a special issue of Der Spiegel, about the Germans who had been driven out in ethnic cleansing campaigns at the end of World War One. Almost three million from Sudetenland. The Czechs, who offered hardly any resistance to the Germans, celebrated the victory given them by Russians in such a manner. Poland, Yugoslavia, Germans were driven out of these countries, mass executed. The story is not given much attention because people are put in the mass category—Germans, the perpetrators, not the victims. Well, are they all the same? Did they all vote the same way? Those in other countries didn’t vote at all, and their sympathies may have been largely with the invading armies, but it is not these Germans who decided anything or started anything. If the US were suddenly to lose a war that Bush initiates, should all the Americans be driven out from everywhere, be mass executed, all on account of being Americans, even if Bush didn’t win the presidency with a majority vote? Hitler, likewise, never got the majority, but worked with coalitions. If one is not to romanticize, and permanently divide nations into the good ones and the bad ones, and thus perpetrate chauvinism, all these stories have to be told.

This may be our only hope,” said Lillian. “Don’t think too long.” Lillian turned and left, the baggy back of her cardigan seeming to sweep behind her like a cape. “I wasn’t kidding. Someone really has to talk to her about her motivational speaking,” said Dad. “She’s meant to be the town leader, isn’t she?” “She’s the only adult sorcerer alive who isn’t strictly evil,” said Rusty. “So she wins the crown by default, I guess. Unless Henry wants it.” Kami supposed Henry was technically grown up, though he was only a couple of years older than Rusty. “Your town seems very nice,” said Henry, in the tones of one being very polite when offered a large unwanted present that was on fire. “But I only just got here. I don’t feel qualified to lead.” “Okay,” said Dad. “So she’s all we’ve got to work with, as Ash and Jared are both so extremely and tragically seventeen. Fine. So what we need to do now is get the town behind her. Worse politicians have been elected every day.” “I don’t think Lillian will be kissing any babies anytime soon,” Holly said doubtfully. “Since she probably hates babies. And kittens. And rainbows and sunshine,” said Angela, who sounded like she had a certain amount of sympathy for Lillian’s viewpoint.

Because,' he said, 'I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you, especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situation in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and the nI've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.' 'That I never would, sir; you know -,' impossible to proceed. [...] The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway and asserting a right to predominate - to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, and to speak. 'I grieve to leave Thornfield; I love Thornfield; I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life, momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright, and energetic, and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence; with what I delight in, with an origin, a vigorous, and expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you forever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.' 'Where do you see the necessity?' he asked, suddenly. 'Where? You, sir, have placed it before me.' 'In what shape?' 'In the shape of Miss Ingram; a noble and beautiful woman, your bride.' 'My bride! What bride? I have no bride!' 'But you will have.' 'Yes; I will! I will!' He set his teeth. 'Then I must go; you have said it yourself.' 'No; you must stay! I swear it, and the oath shall be kept.' 'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion. 'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automation? a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses your spirits; just as if both had passed through the grace, and we stood at God's feel, equal - as we are!' 'As we are!' repeated Mr. Rochester - 'so,' he added, including me in his arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips; 'so, Jane!' 'Yes, so, sir,' I rejoined; 'and yet not so; for you are a married man, or as good as a married man, and we'd to one inferior to you - to one with whom you have no sympathy - whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union; therefore I am better than you - let me go!' 'Where, Jane? to Ireland?' 'Yes - to Ireland. I have spoke my mind, and can go anywhere now.' 'Jane, be still; don't struggle so, like a wild, frantic bird that is tending its own plumage in its desperation.' 'I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.' Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him. 'And your will shall decide your destiny,' he said; 'I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions.' 'You play a farce, which I merely taught at.' 'I ask you to pass through life at my side - to be my second self, and best earthly companion.' [...] 'Do you doubt me, Jane?' 'Entirely.' 'You have no faith in me?' 'Not a whit.

When I exited the bathroom this time, Marlboro Man was standing right outside the door--just as he’d been at his grandmother’s house when I’d had my flop sweat episode at his cousin’s wedding. He put his arm around me as I dabbed the corners of my eyes with a Kleenex. The gagging had sent my tear ducts into overdrive. “What’s wrong, honey?” It was the first time he’d called me that. I felt married. “I have no idea!” I said. “I must have picked up a stomach bug or something. I’m so sorry!” “It’s okay--we can just head back to the hotel.” “No! I want you to eat…” “I’m fine--I just ate a whole basket of bread and had two Cokes. I’m good to go.” The nausea hit again, and I ran back into the bathroom. After vomiting again, I decided to take him up on his offer. Exiting the cab back at the hotel, I found walking to be difficult. I hadn’t ingested a single drop of liquor, but I suddenly couldn’t walk in a straight line. Grabbing Marlboro Man’s arm, I used him to steady myself until we got to the room, where I immediately fell on the bed and wrapped myself in the comforter. “I feel so sorry for you,” Marlboro Man said, sitting down on the bed beside me and gently playing with my hair, a gesture that proved to be too much for me. “Could you please not do that?” I said. “The motion kinda makes me sick.” I was a complete and utter mess. I was a nauseated loser. It was Marlboro Man who deserved the sympathy.

A more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born, for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person’s strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered - you must have music, dancing, and society - or you languish, you die away. Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your own? Take one day; share it into sections; to each section apportion its task: leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes - include all; do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment: you have had to seek no one’s company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do. Take this advice: the first and last I shall offer you; then you will not want me or any one else, happen what may. Neglect it - go on as heretofore, craving, whining, and idling - and suffer the results of your idiocy, however bad and insuperable they may be.

Good friendship, in Buddhism, means considerably more than associating with people that one finds amenable and who share one's interests. It means in effect seeking out wise companions to whom one can look for guidance and instruction. The task of the noble friend is not only to provide companionship in the treading of the way. The truly wise and compassionate friend is one who, with understanding and sympathy of heart, is ready to criticize and admonish, to point out one's faults, to exhort and encourage, perceiving that the final end of such friendship is growth in the Dhamma. The Buddha succinctly expresses the proper response of a disciple to such a good friend in a verse of the Dhammapada: 'If one finds a person who points out one's faults and who reproves one, one should follow such a wise and sagacious counselor as one would a guide to hidden treasure' If we associate closely with those who are addicted to the pursuit of sense pleasures, power, riches and fame, we should not imagine that we will remain immune from those addictions: in time our own minds will gradually incline to these same ends. If we associate closely with those who, while not given up to moral recklessness, live their lives comfortably adjusted to mundane routines, we too will remain stuck in the ruts of the commonplace. If we aspire for the highest — for the peaks of transcendent wisdom and liberation — then we must enter into association with those who represent the highest. Even if we are not so fortunate as to find companions who have already scaled the heights, we can well count ourselves blessed if we cross paths with a few spiritual friends who share our ideals and who make earnest efforts to nurture the noble qualities of the Dhamma in their hearts. When we raise the question how to recognize good friends, how to distinguish good advisors from bad advisors, the Buddha offers us crystal-clear advice. In the Shorter Discourse on a Full-Moon Night (MN 110) he explains the difference between the companionship of the bad person and the companionship of the good person. The bad person chooses as friends and companions those who are without faith, whose conduct is marked by an absence of shame and moral dread, who have no knowledge of spiritual teachings, who are lazy and unmindful, and who are devoid of wisdom. As a consequence of choosing such bad friends as his advisors, the bad person plans and acts for his own harm, for the harm of others, and the harm of both, and he meets with sorrow and misery. In contrast, the Buddha continues, the good person chooses as friends and companions those who have faith, who exhibit a sense of shame and moral dread, who are learned in the Dhamma, energetic in cultivation of the mind, mindful, and possessed of wisdom. Resorting to such good friends, looking to them as mentors and guides, the good person pursues these same qualities as his own ideals and absorbs them into his character. Thus, while drawing ever closer to deliverance himself, he becomes in turn a beacon light for others. Such a one is able to offer those who still wander in the dark an inspiring model to emulate, and a wise friend to turn to for guidance and advice.

Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you, was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person’s strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered—you must have music, dancing, and society—or you languish, you die away. Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your own? Take one day; share it into sections; to each section apportion its task: leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes, include all; do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment; you have had to seek no one's company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do. Take this advice: the first and last I shall offer you...After my mother's death, I wash my hands of you; from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in Gateshead church, you and I will be as separate as if we had never known each other. You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim. I can tell you this--if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to the new.

I am going to end up alone," he moaned. "Not in any conceivable universe!" One of Sadie's best qualities is the ability to say "Are you effing insane?" with such sweet conviction and nicer words. "I am going to end up alone in a one-room apartment over a dry cleaner." "A dry cleaner?" "He could have said a bar," I offered. "True," he conceded. Frankie was on a roll. "I am going to end up alone in a one-room apartment over a dry cleaner with a cat. Who bites me." "Oh,Frankie-" "I am going to end up alone in a one-room apartment over a dry cleaner with a cat who bites me and pees in my closet full of moth-eaten sweaters." "Well,maybe," Sadie said, reaching around to hug both of us. "But the sweaters will be Dolce & Gabbana." One of her other fabulous qualities is that underneath the sweet conviction, she does have a sense of humor. Frankie did laugh. Then he gave a sigh that I could feel all the way through me. I knew Sadie did,too. "I liked him," he said, very quietly. "I really did. And I thought he felt the same way. I bent and twisted and distorted everything that happened between us to fit my pretty little picture. God, I believed my own hype. How stupid, how incredibly stupid was that?" "Not stupid." Sadie squeezed. "Hopeful. And if we're not that, what's the point? El? Help me out here." I wanted to.I really did. But all I could think of was the fact that at home, exactly where I'd put it in my bag, which was still exactly where I'd dumped it on the floor, was the evidence that Edward had let me down. I was keeping that to myself, at least for the moment. Twisted it to fit my pretty little picture. I didn't think I could take Frankie's complete lack of surprise that a guy (even a dead one) had let me down-or Sadie's sympathy. Not on top of my own anger. Because,plain and simple,it wasn't okay to look at another woman like that, not when you met the love of your life and gave a big flipped finger to the people around you so you could be with her. Not okay even if she was dead, because I, Ella, really really want to believe that sometimes love does conquer all, and sometimes some things do last foever. Truth: Yes,I really am that naive. "You're perfect," I said to Frankie. And I meant it.

During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.

You may find this hard to believe, Mr. Pinter," she went on defensively, "but some men enjoy my company. They consider me easy to talk to." A ghost of a smile touched his handsome face. "You're right. I do find that hard to believe." Arrogant wretch. "All the same, there are three men who might consider marrying me, and I could use your help in securing them." She hated having to ask him for that, but he was necessary to her plan. She just needed one good offer of marriage, one impressive offer that would show Gran she was capable of gaining a decent husband. Gran didn't believe she could, or she wouldn't be holding to that blasted ultimatum. If Celia could prove her wrong, Gran might allow her to choose a husband in her own good time. And if that plan didn't work, Celia would at least have a man she could marry to fulfill Gran's terms. "So you've finally decided to meet Mrs. Plumtree's demands," he said, his expression unreadable. She wasn't about to let him in on her secret plan. Oliver might have employed him, but she was sure Mr. Pinter also spied for Gran. He would run right off and tell her. "It's not as if I have a choice." Bitterness crept into her tone. "In less than two months, if I remain unmarried, my siblings will be cut off. I can't do that to them, no matter how much I resent Gran's meddling." Something that looked oddly like sympathy flickered in his gaze. "Don't you want to marry?" "Of course I want to marry. Doesn't every woman?" "You've shown little interest in it before," he said skeptically. That's because men had shown little interest in her. Oh, Gab's friends loved to stand about with her at balls and discuss the latest developments in cartridges, but they rarely asked her to dance, and if they did, it was only to consult her on rifles. She'd tried flirting, but she was terrible at it. It seemed so...false. So did men's compliments, the few that there were. It was easier to laugh them off than to figure out which ones were genuine, easier to pretend to be one of the lads. She secretly wished she could find a man she could love, who would ignore the scandals attached to he family's name and indulge her hobby of target shooting. One who could shoot as well as she, since she could never respect a man who couldn't hit what he aimed at. I'll bet Mr. Pinter knows his way around a rifle.

I remember that as I sat there, my initial reaction was: flummoxed. Pray to God to heal a baby’s defective heart? Really? But doesn’t God, being omniscient, already know that this baby’s heart is defective? And doesn’t God, being omnipotent, already have the ability to heal the baby’s heart if he wants to? Isn’t the defective heart thus part of God’s plan? What good is prayer, then? Do these people really think that God will alter his will if they only pray hard enough? And if they don’t pray hard enough, he’ll let the baby die? What kind of a God is that? Such coldly skeptical thoughts percolated through my fifteen-year-old brain. But they soon fizzled out. As I sat there looking at the crying couple, listening to the murmur of prayers all around me, my initial skepticism was soon supplanted by a sober appreciation and empathetic recognition of what I was witnessing and experiencing. Here was an entire body of people all expressing their love and sympathy for a young couple with a dying baby. Here were hundreds of people caringly, genuinely, warmly pouring out their hearts to this poor unfortunate man, woman, and child. The love and sadness in the gathering were palpable, and I “got” it. I could see the intangible benefit of such a communal act. There was that poor couple at the front of the church, crying, while everyone around them was showering them with support and hope. While I didn’t buy the literal words of the pastor, I surely understood their deeper significance: they were making these suffering people feel a bit better. And while I didn’t think the congregation’s prayers would realistically count for a hill of beans toward actually curing that baby, I was still able to see that it was a serenely beneficial act nonetheless, for it offered hope and solace to these unlucky parents, as well as to everyone else present there in that church who was feeling sadness for them, or for themselves and their own personal misfortunes. So while I sat there, absolutely convinced that there exists no God who heals defective baby hearts, I also sat there equally convinced that this mass prayer session was a deeply good thing. Or if not a deeply good thing, then at least a deeply understandable thing. I felt so sad for that young couple that day. I could not, and still cannot, fathom the pain of having a new baby who, after only a few months of life, begins to die.

First, to map out the boundaries within which all discussion must go on, I take it for certain that the physical satisfaction of homo-sexual desires is sin. This leaves the homo, no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Second, our speculations on the cause of the abnormality are not what matters and we must be content with ignorance. The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind (Jn. IX 1-3): only the final cause, that the works of God shd. be made manifest in him. This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest: i.e. that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, wh. will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’ Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations wh., if so disabled, we can’t lawfully get. The homo, has to accept sexual abstinence just as the poor man has to forego otherwise lawful pleasures because he wd. be unjust to his wife and children if he took them. That is merely a negative condition. What shd. the positive life of the homo, be? I wish I had a letter wh. a pious male homo., now dead, once wrote to me—but of course it was the sort of letter one takes care to destroy. He believed that his necessity could be turned to spiritual gain: that there were certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, a certain social role which mere men and mere women could not give. But it is all horribly vague— too long ago. Perhaps any homo, who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under Divine guidance will, however, be shown the way. I am sure that any attempt to evade it (e.g. by mock-or quasi-marriage with a member of one’s own sex even if this does not lead to any carnal act) is the wrong way. Jealousy (this another homo, admitted to me) is far more rampant and deadly among them than among us. And I don’t think little concessions like wearing the clothes of the other sex in private is the right line either. It is the duties, the burdens, the characteristic virtues of the other sex, I expect, which the patient must try to cultivate. I have mentioned humility because male homos. (I don’t know about women) are rather apt, the moment they find you don’t treat them with horror and contempt, to rush to the opposite pole and start implying that they are somehow superior to the normal type. I wish I could be more definite. All I have really said is that, like all other tribulations, it must be offered to God and His guidance how to use it must be sought.

In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face. From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start. It's as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent, most children rebel, or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn't give a damn, I was a philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap. And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis?

You don’t like feeling powerless? Then change your definition of power. Do not fix unfixable problems. Do not devote yourself to things you cannot control. You cannot make this world respect you. You cannot make it dignify you. It will never bend to you. This world does not belong to door. She tied her long hair away from her face, meticulously turning on specific track lights and not others, perhaps to highlight the beauty of her Scandinavian-style furniture choices or the incomparable city view. Then she poured herself a glass of wine from a previously opened bottle, joining Reina on the sofa with an air of hospitably withheld dread. “I was born here in Tokyo,” Reina commented. “Not far from here, actually. There was a fire the day I was born. People died. My grandmother always thought it meant something that I was—” She broke off. “What I was.” “People often search for meaning where there is none,” said Aiya placidly. Perhaps in a tone of sympathy, though Reina wasn’t sure what to think anymore. “Just because you can see two points does not mean anything exists between them.” “In other words, fate is a lie we tell ourselves?” asked Reina drolly. Aiya shrugged. Despite the careful curation of her lighting, she looked tired. “We tell ourselves many stories. But I don’t think you came here just to tell me yours.” No. Reina did not know why she was there, not really. She had simply wanted to go home, and when she realized home was an English manor house, she had railed against the idea so hard it brought her here, to the place she’d once done everything in her power to escape. “I want,” Reina began slowly, “to do good. Not because I love the world, but because I hate it. And not because I can,” she added. “But because everyone else won’t.” Aiya sighed, perhaps with amusement. “The Society doesn’t promise you a better world, Reina. It doesn’t because it can’t.” “Why not? I was promised everything I could ever dream of. I was offered power, and yet I have never felt so powerless.” The words left her like a kick to the chest, a hard stomp. She hadn’t realized that was the problem until now, sitting with a woman who so clearly lived alone. Who had everything, and yet at the same time, Reina did not see anything in Aiya Sato’s museum of a life that she would covet for her own. Aiya sipped her wine quietly, in a way that made Reina feel sure that Aiya saw her as a child, a lost little lamb. She was too polite to ask her to leave, of course. That wasn’t the way of things and Reina ought to know it. Until then, Aiya would simply hold the thought in her head. “So,” Aiya said with an air of teacherly patience. “You are disappointed in the world. Why should the Society be any better? It is part of the same world.” “But I should be able to fix things. Change things.” “Why?” “Because I should.” Reina felt restless. “Because if the world cannot be fixed by me, then how can it be fixed at all?” “These sound like questions for the Forum,” Aiya said with a shrug. “If you want to spend your life banging down doors that will never open, try their tactics instead, see how it goes. See if the mob can learn to love you, Reina Mori, without consuming or destroying you first.” Another reflective sip. “The Society is no democracy. In fact, it chose you because you are selfish.” She looked demurely at Reina. “It promised you glory, not salvation. They never said you could save others. Only yourself.” “And that is power to you?” Aiya’s smile was so polite that Reina felt it like the edge of a weapon. “You don’t like feeling powerless? Then change your definition of power. Do not fix unfixable problems. Do not devote yourself to things you cannot control. You cannot make this world respect you. You cannot make it dignify you. It will never bend to you. This world does not belong to you, Reina Mori, you belong to it, and perhaps when it is ready for a revolution it will look to you for leadership.

Suicide should be made odious among the people of God--it should be emphasized as a deadly sin, and no undue feelings of tenderness towards the unfortunate dead, or of sympathy towards the living bereaved, should prevent us denouncing it as a crime against God and humanity, against the Creator and the creature. It is true that the exact enormity of the act is not defined with minute detail in the Holy Scriptures, or the limits of its punishment given; but to believers in the God whom we worship it has always been regarded as a sin of great magnitude; and in many countries especial pains have been taken to discourage it, by refusal to bury in consecrated ground, by indignities offered to the lifeless remains, or by such lack of funereal observances as would produce a peculiar and horrifying effect upon the survivors. Now, while not advocating measures of this description, we do not think that the same laudations and panegyrics should be pronounced over the self-murderer as are so freely uttered over the faithful Saint who has gone to his eternal rest. There is a difference in their death, and that difference should be impressed upon the living, unless the deceased, at the time of the rash act, was in such a mental condition as not to be wholly responsible for his actions; but again, if this condition be the result of sin, of departure from God's laws, then the unfortunate one, like the inebriate, is not altogether free from the responsibility of acts committed while in this state of mental derangement. If he is not censurable for the act itself, he is for the causes that induced it. In such cases the mantle of charity must not be stretched so widely, in our desire to protect our erring friends, as to reflect dishonor on the work of God, or contempt for the principles of the everlasting Gospel. There is an unfortunate tendency in the natures of many to palliate sins by which they are not personally injured; but we must not forget that such palliation frequently increases the original wrong, and brings discredit on the Church and dishonor to the name and work of our blessed Redeemer; in other words, to save the feelings of our friends we are willing to crucify afresh the Lord of life and glory.

His face always got soft with wonder when he felt the life within his wife’s womb. “This kid’s on the move.” Mariah sat up straight and worked her fingers against her lower back again. “He can move out any time now.” “Your back hurts, huh? Come here.” She offered no resistance as he sat on the grass and drew her to sit between his legs. “Lean back and let me do that for you.” “We’re sitting right out on the front lawn,” she reminded him as she dropped her head back against his shoulder. His hands felt so much better on her back than her own did. “So what? We’re dressed.” Then he lowered his voice near her ear. “I’m only imaging we’re not.” “You’re fantasizing about giving a back rub to a naked hippo?” “Your stomach is beautiful, just like the rest of you, but I have a feeling it’s getting kind of heavy for you.” In sympathy, he kissed the corner of her forehead. “I wish I could carry it for you when you get tired like this.” “The baby carrier from Dad will fit you nicely.” Seth responded with a cheeky cluck. “There’s only one thing that came from Dad that fits me nicely.” “Seth…” She drawled his name, and he laughed. “You sound more like a wife all the time.

uninvited help he might offer would be rejected. He was surprised and delighted when she placed a hand on his shoulder as she climbed the wagon steps. He left her to take off her torn, soiled clothing while he supervised the heating of the water cauldron and the preparation of the copper hip-bath. Zama and the other servants removed the afterchest from her wagon and set up the bath in its place. Then they filled it with steaming water. When all was ready, Jim retired and listened through the canvas tent to her splashes, and winced in sympathy at her small cries and exclamations of pain as the water stung her abrasions and thorn pricks. When at last he judged that she had finished he asked permission to enter her wagon tent. ‘Yes, you may come in, for I am as chastely attired as a nun.’ She was wearing the dressing-robe Sarah Courtney had given her. It reached from her chin to her ankles, and down to her wrists. ‘Is there aught I can do to ease your discomfort?’ he asked. ‘I have rubbed your aunt Yasmini’s sovereign balm and ointment upon my ankle and on most of my other afflictions.’ She lifted the hem of the robe a few inches to show her ankle tightly wrapped in bandages. Dorian

Yet, while thousands of clinics have been created to solve feeding problems, very few are set up to help with screaming babies. In fact, most doctors have little to offer families of colicky babies, other than sympathy. “I know it’s hard, but be patient; it won’t last forever.” Or, even worse, “Just put your baby in a dark room and let her cry. She just needs to blow off steam.” (Hey, babies aren’t pressure cookers.)

he spoke to Florry and passed along his condolences, or sympathies, or whatever the hell one is supposed to offer to the sister of a man who is charged with murder and appears guilty of it.

But rather than denouncing the coup leaders as an extremist threat, the former president offered them public sympathy—and, with it, an opening to mainstream politics.

What singles out ‘bad taste’ is merely that the desire for compensation has grown particularly acute because the deprivation has been correspondingly intense. ... In every instance of bad taste, we find an over-eager embracing of a good quality – sweetness, freedom, fun or prosperity – that is, or once was, in very short supply in the owner’s life. Bad taste can appal, but once one understands its origins, sympathy is a more appropriate response. What is ‘bad’ in bad taste is not the person, but the prior difficulty for which they are seeking to compensate through their décor. There is no point in mocking or offering lectures about art history. The problem isn’t a lack of information. It is a trauma created by a badly broken and unbalanced world. Therefore, the solution to bad taste is, in the broad sense, political. Good taste comes about when people feel appreciated, when there’s enough to go around and when there’s an economy that doesn’t routinely humiliate and abase its members. To make good taste more widespread, what matters above all are efforts to diminish the desperate lives in which lapses of taste invariably have their origins.

Endangered Species Even this brief thought is endless. A man speaks as if unaware of the erotic life of the ampersand. In the isolate field he comes to count one by one the rare butterflies as they die. He says witness is to say what you mean as if you mean it. So many of them are the color of the leaves they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a word by which he means to make a claim about grace. I have in my life said many things I did not exactly mean. Walk graceless through the field. Graceless so the insects leap up into the blank page where the margins fill with numbers that speak diminishment. Absence as it nears also offers astonishment. Absence riddles even this briefest thought, here is your introduction to desire, time's underneath where the roots root down into nothing like loose threads hanging from the weaving's underside. No one seeing the roots can guess at the field above. Green equation that ends in yellow occasions. Theory is insubstantial. The eye latches on to the butterflies as they fly and the quick heart follows, not a root in nothing but a thread across abstraction. They fly away. What in us follows we do not name. What the butterflies pull out us as in battle horses pull chariot, we do not name. But there is none, no battle, no surge, no retreat, a field full not of danger, but the endangered, where dust-wings pull from us what we thought we lost, what theory denies, where in us ideas go to die, and thought with the quaking grass quakes. Some call it breath but I'm still breathing. So empty I know I'm not any emptier. On slim threads they pull it out me, disperse-no one takes notes-disappear, &

Compassion, on the other hand, is regenerative, and it offers intuitive understanding and potential solutions. It lets us feel what another is feeling while holding on to our own authenticity. We can embrace our suffering friend without falling into over-responsibility and despair. Caring about the problems and concerns of those we love is a natural part of friendship. We just need to make sure that our feelings of care lead to higher-heart compassion rather than lower-heart sympathy.

I had a sudden premonition that this might be the night he drank himself to death. After he finished one bottle, he fumbled the porcelain decanter of single malt out of its velvet-lined box, hands shaking, fingers trembling. He barely managed to peel off the foil, then couldn’t unscrew the cap. I didn’t offer to help. I hoped he’d give up. In frustration, he bashed the bottle against the fireplace, cracking off the cap, and drank straight from its jagged neck. All this time he continued talking. Or tried to. He sounded strangely maudlin—strange, that is, for a man who, even in his cups, usually avoided self-pity. He conceded that he was lonely and grateful I had kept him company. A forlorn figure in his chair, the bottle tucked between his thighs, he reminded me of Gustave von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Tomorrow, I thought, he’ll be dead, and word will go out around the world. There’s no way he can survive this. Perhaps

I'm not someone who offers advice. I don’t believe people really want anything besides sympathy when they ask for advice. I know I don’t.

Ultrasonic drilling fully explains how the holes and cores found in the Valley Temple at Giza could have been cut, and it is capable of creating all the details that Petrie and I puzzled over. Unfortunately for Petrie, ultrasonic drilling was unknown at the time he made his studies, so it is not surprising that he could not find satisfactory answers to his queries. In my opinion, the application of ultrasonic machining is the only method that completely satisfies logic, from a technical viewpoint, and explains all noted phenomena. [...] The most significant detail of the drilled holes and cores studied by Petrie was that the groove was cut deeper through the quartz than through the feldspar. Quartz crystals are employed in the production of ultrasonic sound and, conversely, are responsive to the influence of vibration in the ultrasonic ranges and can be induced to vibrate at high frequency. When machining granite using ultrasonics, the harder material (quartz) would not necessarily offer more resistance, as it would during conventional machining practices. An ultrasonically vibrating tool bit would find numerous sympathetic partners, while cutting through granite, embedded right in the granite itself. Instead of resisting the cutting action, the quartz would be induced to respond and vibrate in sympathy with the high-frequency waves and amplify the abrasive action as the tool cut through it.

In order to draw mechanical vibrations and relieve the stresses that build up within the Earth, we would need an object that would respond sympathetically with the Earth's fundamental frequency. This object would need to be designed in such a way that its own resonant frequency was the same as, or a harmonic of, the Earth's. In this manner, energy transfer from the source would be at maximum load. In harmony with the Earth's vibrations, this object would have the potential to become a coupled oscillator. (A coupled oscillator is an object that is in harmonic resonance with another, usually larger, vibrating object. When set into motion, the coupled oscillator will draw energy from the source and vibrate in sympathy as long as the source continues to vibrate.) Because the Earth constantly generates a broad spectrum of vibration, we could utilize vibration as a source of energy if we developed suitable technology. Naturally, any device that attracted greater amounts of this energy than is normally being radiated from the Earth would greatly improve the efficiency of the equipment. Because energy will inherently follow the path of least resistance, it follows that any device offering less resistance to this energy than the surrounding medium through which it passes would have a greater amount of energy channeled through it. Keeping all of this in mind and knowing that the Great Pyramid is a mathematical integer of the Earth, it may not be so outlandish to propose that the pyramid is capable of vibrating at a harmonic frequency of the Earth's fundamental frequency.

The winner of that particular honor is an algorithm called Comparison Counting Sort. In this algorithm, each item is compared to all the others, generating a tally of how many items it is bigger than. This number can then be used directly as the item’s rank. Since it compares all pairs, Comparison Counting Sort is a quadratic-time algorithm, like Bubble Sort. Thus it’s not a popular choice in traditional computer science applications, but it’s exceptionally fault-tolerant. This algorithm’s workings should sound familiar. Comparison Counting Sort operates exactly like a Round-Robin tournament. In other words, it strongly resembles a sports team’s regular season—playing every other team in the division and building up a win-loss record by which they are ranked. That Comparison Counting Sort is the single most robust sorting algorithm known, quadratic or better, should offer something very specific to sports fans: if your team doesn’t make the playoffs, don’t whine. The Mergesort postseason is chancy, but the Comparison Counting regular season is not; championship rings aren’t robust, but divisional standings are literally as robust as it gets. Put differently, if your team is eliminated early in the postseason, it’s tough luck. But if your team fails to get to the postseason, it’s tough truth. You may get sports-bar sympathy from your fellow disappointed fans, but you won’t get any from a computer scientist.

there are people in this world who either give or take. The givers walk into a room and they, believe it or not, give. They make that room brighter by offering it any type of succor that it requires. They help people when they need it. They are an ear that listens. A voice that gives advice. Or they are just simply able to share the weight of burden. They offer compassion, sympathy, a rosey smile that lifts you up. They inspire.

There were quite a few times in the weeks after my sister's death that I was cornered at the office, the grocery store, or at church by people who initially approached me to offer sympathy, but then went on to share in exhaustive detail their own grief story. By the end of the conversation, they were in tears and I was trying to comfort them. I don't always mind stepping into another person's pain with them, but in an attempt to show understanding, people often inadvertently ask the bereaved, still fresh off of a loss, to shoulder more than they are already carrying.

The Witch stood on an isthmus connecting two rocky lands, and on either side of her stretch patches of cerulean blue sea, with white-lipped waves of astonishing vigor and particularity. The Witch held in her hands a beast of unrecognizable species, though it was clearly drowned, or nearly drowns. She cradled it in an arm that, without attention to actual skeletal flexibility, lovingly encircled the beast's wet, spiky-furred back. With her other hand she was freeing a breast from her robe, offering suck to the creature. Her expression was hard to read, or had the monk's hand smudged, or age and grime bestowed a sfumato sympathy? She was nearly motherly, with miserable child. Her look was inward, or sad, or something. But her feet didn't match her expression, for they were planted on the narrow strand with prehensile grip, apparent even through the silver-colored shoes, whose coin-of-the-realm brilliance had first caught Boq's eyes. Furthermore, the feet were turned out at ninety-degree angles to the shins. They showed in profile as mirror images, heels clicked together and toes pointing in opposite directions, like a stance in ballet. The gown was a hazy dawn blue.

For more than two centuries, black people had resisted Christianity, often with the tacit acquiescence of their owners. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Christian missionaries who attempted to bring slaves into the fold confronted a hostile planter class, whose only interest in the slaves' spirituality was to denigrate it as idolatry. Westward-moving planters showed little sympathy with slaves who prayed when they might be working and even less patience with separate gatherings of converts, which they suspected to be revolutionary cabals. An 1822 Mississippi law barring black people from meeting without white supervision spoke directly to the planters' fears. But the trauma of the Second Middle Passage and the cotton revolution sensitized transplanted slaves to the evangelicals' message. Young men and women forcibly displaced from their old homes were eager to find alternative sources of authority and comfort. Responding to the evangelical message, they found new meaning in the emotional deliverance of conversion and the baptismal rituals of the church. In turning their lives over to Christ, the deportees took control of their own destiny. White missionaries, some of them still committed to the evangelical egalitarianism of the eighteenth-century revivals, welcomed black believers into their churches. Slaves - sometimes carrying letters of separation from their home congregations - were present in the first evangelical services in Mississippi and Alabama. The earliest religious associations listed black churches, and black preachers - free and slave - won fame for the exercise of 'their gift.' Established denominational lines informed much of slaves' Christianity. The large Protestant denominations - Baptist and Methodist, Anglican and Presbyterian - made the most substantial claims, although Catholicism had a powerful impact all along the Gulf Coast, especially in Louisiana and Florida. From this melange, slaves selectively appropriated those ideas that best fit their own sacred universe and secular world. With little standing in the church of the master, these men and women fostered a new faith. For that reason, it was not the church of the master or even the church of the missionary that attracted black converts; they much preferred their own religious conclaves. These fugitive meetings were often held deep in the woods in brush tents called 'arbors.' Kept private by overturning a pot to muffle the sound of their prayers, these meetings promised African-American spirituality and mixed black and white religious forms into a theological amalgam that white clerics found unrecognizable - what one planter-preacher called 'a jumble of Protestantism, Romanism, and Fetishism.' Under the brush arbor, notions of secular and sacred life took on new meanings. The experience of spiritual rebirth and the conviction that Christ spoke directly to them armed slaves against their owners, assuring them that they too were God's children, perhaps even his chosen people. It infused daily life with the promise of the Great Jubilee and eternal life that offered a final escape from earthly captivity. In the end, it would be they - not their owners - who would stand at God's side and enjoy the blessing of eternal salvation.

How do you find sympathy for someone who has never once offered it to you, especially when that someone happens to be your parent, a person whose arms should always be open wide?

No matter what we do, Nature remains our protector. Even as we ignore it, contamine it, destroy it, Nature offers us sympathy and love. It comforts us in our darkest hours. We do not deserve this. And still it is offered.

No.” Theo stopped, turning that too-intense gaze on her, and she struggled not to look away. “If Jovanovic is after you, then I don’t want you anywhere near Jules and the kids.” “But…” Once again, her life was spinning out of control. After the world’s worst dinner party, all she had was a tiny bedroom in a dilapidated house that she shared with a surprisingly endearing family. Now, the threat of Martin Jovanovic was going to take even that away from her. Of course she didn’t want to endanger Jules or her siblings, but that was supposed to be her safe house. Now, she was cut adrift again, and this time, there was no safe place. Her voice came out embarrassingly small. “But that’s where I live.” It wasn’t until Hugh’s arm circled her that she realized how close he’d gotten. Although a part of her figured she should step away and put some distance between them, a much larger part of her wanted to lean against him and take advantage of the comfort he offered. Although a flicker of sympathy softened Theo’s expression for a moment, his tone remained firm. “We’ll find somewhere else for you to “live until we figure out what to do about Jovanovic.” The “we” surprised her. “You’re going to help me?” “Yes,” both men chorused.

Oh, Tom!” she exclaimed in a voice of deep sympathy. She leaned toward me, studying my face. “Poor man, what’s happened to you?” Empty as a hollow log when the mice are eaten. “My wolf died.” It shocked me that I spoke the truth so bluntly. Jinna was silent, staring at me. I knew she could not understand. I did not expect her to understand. But then, as her helples silence lengthened, I felt very much as if she might understand, for she offered me no useless words. Abruptly, she dropped her knitting in her lap and leaned across to put her hand on my forearm. “Will you be all right?” she asked me. It was not an empty question; she genuinely listened for my reply. “In time,” I told her, and for the first time, I admitted that was true. As disloyal as the thought felt, I knew that as time passed, I would be myself again. And in that moment, I felt for the first time the sensation that Black Rolf had tried to describe to me. The wolfish part of my soul stirred, and, Yes, you will be yourself again, and that is as it should be, I heard near as clearly as if Nighteyes had truly shared the thought with me. Like remembering, but more so, Rolf had told me. I sat very still, savoring the sensation. Then it passed, and a shiver ran over me. “Drink your tea, you’re taking a chill,” Jinna advised me, and leaned down to toss another piece of wood on the fire. I did as she suggested. As I set the cup down, I glanced up at the charm over the mantle. The changeable light from the flames gilded and then hid the beads. Hospitality. The tea was warm and sweet and soothing, the cat purred on my lap, and a woman looked at me fondly. Something in me eased another notch. Petting the cat makes you feel better, Fennel asserted smugly.

My eyes roved over each and every one of the horses, approximating their age and probably stage in training, assessing their form and temperament and noting their reproductive potential. Eventually it dawned on me that silence had fallen. I turned toward Grayden to offer some excuse, but to my surprise, he was gazing at me with affection and sympathy in his green eyes. He smiled and produced a small box, which he extended to me. “What’s this?” I asked, thoroughly confused. He shrugged. “A token of friendship. I would be honored if you would accept it.” Curiously, I took the box from his hand. Anticipating jewelry, I prepared for a show of fake enthusiasm. Such a gift would be a sweet gesture, and undoubtedly beautiful, but I was not one for baubles. The box did contain jewelry, but not of the type I supposed. On a lovely chain of gold hung a small, golden horse, head high, legs outstretched in a gallop. I looked at Grayden, stupefied, although I didn’t need to feign my pleasure. “As I said, your uncle told me of your love for horses,” he explained almost shyly. “That it was a love you shared with your father.” “But I…I don’t understand. What are you…?” Seeing how flustered I was, he reached out and took my hand. “I’m not asking for anything, Shaselle. I just…I think you’re used to being seen as a problem. Maybe it’s presumptuous of me to say that, but your family apologized for so many things about you that I can’t help drawing the conclusion.” Not sure how to react, I opted to remain silent. “I think you’re only a problem for those people who are trying to turn you into something you’re not.” “A lady?” I wryly suggested, regaining my sense of humor. I leaned back on the fence, certain he would agree. “No,” he said, and there was conviction in his voice. “They need to stop trying to turn a free spirit into a traditional wife.” I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Could he truly believe what he was saying? Men played games to placate women. But I knew of no man other than my father who would enjoy seeing a horse pendant around the neck of the woman he was courting. “I do have a question for you,” Grayden said, leaning against the fence next to me. He hesitated, obviously uncertain about where our relationship stood. “The Harvest Festical is approaching. If you have no other plans to attend, would you consider accompanying me?” My eyes again filled with tears. There was no good reason--why should I be breaking down now, when Grayden was being so understanding, so tolerant of my eccentricities? “Come,” he said softly. “I’ll take you back to your cousin.” I let him escort me into the house, feeling like an ungrateful fool. I hadn’t even thanked him for his gift, and I desperately wanted to do so. But I couldn’t conjure the words to convey how I was feeling, and so I murmured farewell at the door.

Abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the United States, and it is tragic that many women who have abortions are all too often mischaracterized and stigmatized, their exercise of moral agency sullied. Their judgment is publicly and forcefully second-guessed by those in politics and religion who have no business entering the deliberation. The reality is that women demonstrate forethought and care; talk to them the way clergy do and witness their sense of responsibility. Women take abortion as seriously as any of us takes any health-care procedure. They understand the life-altering obligations of parenthood and family life. They worry over their ability to provide for a child, the impact on work, school, the children they already have, or caring for other dependents. Perhaps the woman is unable to be a single parent or is having problems with a husband or partner or other kids.2 Maybe her contraception failed her. Maybe when it came to having sex she didn’t have much choice. Maybe this pregnancy will threaten her health, making adoption an untenable option. Or perhaps a wanted pregnancy takes a bad turn and she decides on abortion. It’s pretty complicated. It’s her business to decide on the outcome of her pregnancy—not ours to intervene, to blame, or to punish. Clergy know about moral agency through pastoral work. Women and families invite us into their lives to listen, reflect, offer sympathy, prayer, or comfort. But when it comes to giving advice, we recognize that we are not the ones to live with the outcome; the patient faces the consequences. The woman bears the medical risk of a pregnancy and has to live with the results. Her determination of the medical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions holds sway. The status of her fetus, when she thinks life begins, and all the other complications are hers alone to consider. Many women know right away when a pregnancy must end or continue. Some need to think about it. Whatever a woman decides, she needs to be able to get good quality medical care and emotional and spiritual support as she works toward the outcome she seeks; she figures it out. That’s all part of “moral agency.” No one is denying that her fetus has a moral standing. We are affirming that her moral standing is higher; she comes first. Her deliberations, her considerations have priority. The patient must be the one to arrive at a conclusion and act upon it. As a rabbi, I tell people what the Jewish tradition says and describe the variety of options within the faith. They study, deliberate, conclude, and act. I cannot force them to think or do differently.

By the time they reached Selchester, Hugo’s leg hurt like hell. It was a gritted-teeth job, and he struggled not to wince every time he had to change gear. Georgia was sitting beside him; she gave her brother a glance or two but didn’t offer any sympathy. She’d said more than once that since his leg was the way it was, he would just have to get used to it, which practical and pragmatic response to his injury rather pleased him. But at the moment he wasn’t thinking of Georgia, or how he’d injured his leg, or regretting what it had done to him. He was just wondering if he could last out until they got to Selchester Castle and he could climb out of the car. They had stopped on the way, more often than he would have done in the old days, but nonetheless it was a four-hour drive from London and the longest stretch of time behind the wheel he’d attempted since he’d been shot.

In his study of eighteenth-century feelings, John Mullan argues that sentimental passion and sympathy offered ‘a more inclusive vocabulary of social coherence’ than politics could provide. This

But now, after the news of Barthelme’s death, this simple fact of presence or absence, which I had begun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone’s opinion, any talent. Is he alive or dead? — just tell me that. The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar. The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have. And when we do guess, we are unfair to them. Even when, as with Barthelme, the dead have died unexpectedly and relatively young, we give them their moment of solemnity and then quickly begin patronizing them biographically, talking about how they “delighted in” x or “poked fun at” y — phrases that by their very singsong cuteness betray how alien and childlike the shades now are to us. Posthumously their motives become ludicrously simple, their delights primitive and unvarying: all their emotions wear stage makeup, and we almost never flip their books across the room out of impatience with something they’ve said. We can’t really understand them anymore. Readers of the living are always, whether they know it or not, to some degree seeing the work through the living writer’s own eyes; feeling for him when he flubs, folding into their reactions to his early work constant subauditional speculations as to whether the writer himself would at this moment wince or nod with approval at some passage in it. But the dead can’t suffer embarrassment by some admission or mistake they have made. We sense this imperviousness and adjust our sympathies accordingly. Yet in other ways the dead gain by death. The level of autobiographical fidelity in their work is somehow less important, or, rather, extreme fidelity does not seem to harm, as it does with the living, our appreciation for the work. The living are “just” writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives, wow wow wow. Egotism, monomania, the delusional traits of Blake or Smart or that guy who painted the electrically schizophrenic cats are all engaging qualities in the dead.

pressure on these lines would hamper Turkish troop movements and might even encourage local resistance once it was clear that the Turks could not long shift men for punitive actions. Even the Hawran Druze might be nudged towards a descent on Dera. Again everything hinged on the Druze. There is nothing of all this in the Seven Pillars beyond a reference to Lawrence’s unquiet state of mind on the eve of his journey: ‘A rash adventure suited my mood’ which, to judge from an all but erased note in his campaign jottings, was almost suicidal.41 Clayton. I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all our sakes try and clear up this show before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie. This is all very perplexing. Soon after, in the Seven Pillars version, Lawrence admitted to the haziest knowledge of what McMahon had offered Hussain and how the boundaries of French and British concessions in the Middle East had been drawn by Sykes and Picot. In the Seven Pillars he also confessed to bewildered shame when Nuri Shalaan proffered ‘a file of British documents’ allegedly filled with official promises, and asked which one he ought to believe. Lawrence remained silent about their contents and who had drawn them up. What is more bewildering is that, in his report to Clayton, Lawrence claimed he met Nuri and his son at el Azraq towards the end of the Syrian trip. Maybe then he briefly succumbed to a mood of despair. It would have been understandable, not in terms of what others had or had not promised the Arabs, but because all his Syrian contacts, including Nuri, had responded to his calls for bold commitment with wary procrastination. Lawrence was taking enormous risks by penetrating enemy territory where pro-Turkish sympathies were still widespread. There was, he claimed, a £5,000 reward for his capture, which, if true, suggests that Turkish intelligence was aware of his activities. In fact, the head money was a general reward first announced some months earlier by Fahreddin Pasha for British officers taken dead or alive.42 Whether he travelled in search of intelligence or whether to get killed

What will you do with Anna?” “I’ve proposed and proposed and proposed.” The earl sighed, surprising himself and apparently his brother with his candor. “She’ll have none of that, though the last time, she put me off rather than turn me down flat.” “Things are a little unsettled,” Dev pointed out dryly. “And marriage would settle them,” the earl shot back. “Married to me, there wouldn’t be any more nonsense from her brother, not for her or Morgan. Her grandmother would be safe, and Stull would be nothing but a bad, greasy memory.” “He is enough to give any female the shudders, though maybe Anna has the right of it.” “What can you possibly mean?” The earl stood up and paced to the French doors. “You and she are in unusual circumstances,” Dev began. “You are protective of her and probably not thinking very clearly about her. She is not a duke’s daughter, as you might be expected to marry, not even a marquis’s sister. She’s beneath you socially and likely undowered and not even as young as a proper mate to you should be.” “Young?” the earl expostulated. “You mean I can get her to drop only five foals instead of ten?” “You have a duty to the succession,” Dev said, his words having more impact for being quietly spoken. “Anna understands this.” “Rot the fucking succession,” Westhaven retorted. “I have His Grace’s permission to marry for love, indeed, his exhortation to marry only for love.” “Are you saying you love her?” Dev asked, his voice still quiet. “Of course I love her,” the earl all but roared. “Why else would I be taking such pains for her safety? Why else would I be offering her marriage more times than I can count? Why else would I have gone to His Grace for help? Why else would I be arguing with you at an hour when most people are either asleep or enjoying other bedtime activities?” Dev rose and offered his brother a look of sympathy. “If you love her, then your course is very easy to establish.” “Oh it is, is it?” The earl glared at his brother. “If you love her,” Dev said, “you give her what she wants of you, no matter how difficult or irrational it may seem to you. You do not behave as His Grace has, thinking that love entitles him to know better than his grown children what will make them happy or what will be in their best interests.” Westhaven sat down abruptly, the wind gone from his sails between one heartbeat and the next. “You are implying I could bully her.” “You know you could, Gayle. She is grateful to you, lonely, not a little enamored of you, and without support.” “You are a mean man, Devlin St. Just.” The earl sighed. “Cruel, in fact.” “I would not see you make a match you or Anna regret. And you deserve the truth.” “That’s what Anna has said. You give me much to think about, and none of it very cheering.” “Well, think of it this way.” Dev smiled as he turned for the door. “If you marry her now, you can regret it at great leisure. If you don’t marry her now, then you can regret that as long as you can stand it then marry her later.

Considerations & Exceptions for Impressive Handshakes • Be mindful of a person’s age; be tender with arthritic hands. In that case, a loose and gentler handshake is a gesture of sensitivity and compassion. • Show interest; even if your right hand is full, offer your left hand. • Demonstrate respect when you are caught in an introduction while seated; try to stand. • Be instinctive about when to allow the length of your handshake to linger to express unity, connection, or sympathy.