Open Plots Quotes

Anyone can plot a course with a map or compass; but without a sense of who you are, you will never know if you're already home.

Simon: You're in a dangerous line of work, Jayne. Odds are you'll be under my knife again, often. So I want you to understand one thing very clearly: No matter what you do or say or plot, no matter how you come down on us, I will never, ever harm you. You're on this table, you're safe... 'cause I'm your medic. And however little we may like or trust each other, we're on the same crew. Got the same troubles, same enemies, and more than enough of both. Now, we could circle each other and growl, sleep with one eye open, but that thought wearies me. I don't care what you've done, I don't know what you're planning on doing, but I'm trusting you. I think you should do the same. 'Cause I don't see this working any other way. River: Also, I can kill you with my brain.

How you are in this place that has been sealed since the time of Caesar Augustus?" one of the archaeologists demanded in amazement. "I was looking for my sister," Dan quipped. "Your sister?" "Oh—here she is." Dan reached through the opening and hauled out an equally grubby Amy.

Jonah spoke what everyone was thinking. "Wouldn't it be Twilight Zone if the door was open, too?" Hamilton tried the knob. It didn't budge. Ian stepped forward and examined the lock. "Natalie's diary has better security than this." He produced a credit card and slipped it between the latch and the jamb. There was a click, and the door swung wide.

When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill. Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.

Beginning with sin instead of creation is like trying to read a book by opening it in the middle: You don’t know the characters and can’t make sense of the plot.

The Children's Hour Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour. I hear in the chamber above me The patter of little feet, The sound of a door that is opened, And voices soft and sweet. From my study I see in the lamplight, Descending the broad hall stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair. A whisper, and then a silence: Yet I know by their merry eyes They are plotting and planning together To take me by surprise. A sudden rush from the stairway, A sudden raid from the hall! By three doors left unguarded They enter my castle wall! They climb up into my turret O'er the arms and back of my chair; If I try to escape, they surround me; They seem to be everywhere. They almost devour me with kisses, Their arms about me entwine, Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine! Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti, Because you have scaled the wall, Such an old mustache as I am Is not a match for you all! I have you fast in my fortress, And will not let you depart, But put you down into the dungeon In the round-tower of my heart. And there will I keep you forever, Yes, forever and a day, Till the walls shall crumble to ruin, And moulder in dust away!

She wasn't all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers. Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius. She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

He crossed the floor to start rifling through one of the supply chests, pulling free a small silver bottle and ripping open the top. "Is this liquor? Because I want to be completely intoxicated when Abba gets wind that his children are plotting a coup in a fucking closet." "That's weapons polish," Ali said quickly

What a disgrace! They were afraid...ashamed...they chose to conceal it...they buried the roots of a Great Civilization...they lacked the courage to go further...and turned their backs on what science had to offer them...and tried to seal away forever the hole they had torn open with their own hands.

There are Mornings" Even now, when the plot calls for me to turn to stone, the sun intervenes. Some mornings in summer, I step outside and the sky opens and pours itself into me as if I were a saint about to die. But the plot calls for me to live, be ordinary, say nothing to anyone. Inside the house, the mirrors burn when I pass.

In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night-- his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell.

But in truth, the world is constantly shifting: shape and size, location in space. It's got edges and chasms, too many to count. They open up, close, reappear somewhere else. Geologists nay have mapped out the planet's tectonic plates -hidden shelves of rock that grind, one against the other, forming mountains, creating continents - but thy can't plot the fault lines that run through our heads, divide out hearts. The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole

It was as if her own heart had been surgically removed from her body and was being kept at a remote location, still connected to her and pumping blood through her veins, but exposed to dangers she couldn't see: her heart in a box somewhere, in the open air, unprotected.

Revealing her plans, explaining herself... It would take some getting used to. But she'd promised she'd try to be more... open about her plotting.

Esperanza leaned around the side of the truck. As they rounded a curve, it appeared as if the mountains pulled away from each other, like a curtain opening on stage, revealing the San Joaquin Valley beyond. Flat and spacious, it spread out like a blanket of patchwork fields. Esperanza could see no end to the plots of yellow, brown, and shades of green. The road finally leveled out on the valley floor, and she gazed back at the mountains from where they'd come. They looked like monstrous lions' paws resting at the edge of ridge.

To avoid a repeat of this near disaster, the Council of Genres took the only course of action open to them to ensure TGC would be too inefficient and unimaginative to pose a threat. They appointed a committee to run it.

But how will I get out?" And all at once the door was open--and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. "How'd you do that?" I said. "I opened the door," he said. "But how?" He shrugged. "I pushed. I just pushed. It was open all the time." And that was when I began to bawl and Mrs. Wishnow took me in her arms and said, "That's okay. Things like this happen. They can happen to anyone.

While some dismiss the Bible as a dusty old book, I view its pages as portals to adventure. Not only is the book chock-full of clever plots and compelling stories, but it’s laced with historical insights and literary beauty. When I open the Scripture, I imagine myself exploring an ancient kingdom . . . With every encounter, I learn something new about their life journeys and am reminded that the Bible is more than a record of the human quest for God: it’s the revelation of God’s quest for us.” - Scouting the Divine

When I open the door, Baz is wheeling an old-fashioned chalkboard in front of our beds. “Where did that come from?” I ask. “A classroom.” “Yeah, but how did it get up here?” “It flew.” “No,” I say, “seriously.” He rolls his eyes. “I Up, up and away-ed it. It wasn’t much work.” “Why?” “Because we’re solving a mystery, Snow. I like to organize my thoughts.” “Is this how you normally plot my downfall?” “Yes. With multicoloured pieces of chalk. Stop complaining.” He opens up his book bag and takes out a few apples and things wrapped in greaseproof paper. “Eat,” he says, throwing one at me. It’s a bacon roll. He’s also got a pot of tea. “What’s all this?” I say. “Tea, obviously. I know you can’t function unless you’re stuffing yourself.” I unwrap the roll and decide to take a bite. “Thanks.” “Don’t thank me,” he says. “It sounds wrong.” “Not as wrong as you bringing me bacon butties.” “Fine, you’re welcome—when’s Bunce getting here?” “Why would she?” “Because you do everything together, don’t you? When you said you’d help, I was counting on you bringing your smarter half.

Covert narcissists blind you with their saccharine sweetness: they present the perfect public image, routinely go on their knees to pray, say their mantras on their yoga mats, preach ‘peace and compassion,’ all the while plotting on how to best stab you in the back. In some ways, covert narcissists are worse than overt ones. At least overt ones are open about how awful they really are.

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.

Lucky you that you can plan and think and plot without pretense. That you can want openly, that you don't have to stuff it all inside yourself to molder. Lucky you that you can lift your eyes to the sky without singeing your wings. Lucky you that you can consider the future without terror.

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.

Chapter 1: Fan Number One Chapter 2: A Portrait of the Author as a Young Girl Chapter 3: Mystery Man Chapter 4: City Kid Chapter 5: The Plot Thickens Chapter 6: Reality Attack Chapter 7: Business Lesson Chapter 8: A Portrait of the Bulldog as a Young Girl Chapter 9: The Agent Chapter 10: The Chosen Grown-Up Chapter 11: Welcome to the Club Chapter 12: In or Out? Chapter 13: Open for Business Chapter 14: Judgment Day Chapter 15: A New Island Chapter 16: Poker, Anyone? Chapter 17: High Stakes, Aces Wild Chapter 18: The Long Arm of the Law Chapter 19: The Red Pencil Blues

Literature is about contemplation not speed-reading for plot or fact. I try to give the reader what I call the startling moment—to take them down to the heartbeat of a character. To open the moment out in all its richness.

I have often plotted my great escape to the beach. To live seaside and to be able to stare possibility and tranquility in the face every day ... I wanted it bad enough to taste. All the while forgetting, I can lap underneath an open sky at any moment and feel awe rush over me. I can bring it close to me like a blanket—if I only remember He is my rest and refuge.

As their eyes became accustomed to the light, the girls were startled to see the figure in front of them. Hunched over, wearing a dark cloak, was an old man. His long, white hair straggled over his shoulders, his skin was covered with grey whiskers and one of his eyes, hooded, drooped below the other bulging one. His mouth hung open and his yellowed teeth did nothing to stop his rank breath pervading the air.

He thought about how he could start, and plotted what he’d say in his head before he opened his mouth. Finally, he was ready. “I was always a greedy kid,” he began, and across the table, he watched Willem lean forward on his elbows, as for the first time in their friendship, he was the listener, and he was being told a story.

Wanting to be through with this quickly, I leaned forward and kissed him. Almost. I lost my nerve halfway there, somewhere around the moment I noticed he had a freckle next to his eye and wondered ridiculously if that was something he would remove if I asked it of him, and instead of a proper kiss, I merely brushed my lips against his. It was a shadow of a kiss, cool and insubstantial, and I almost wish I could be romantic and say it was somehow transformative, but in truth, I barely felt it. But then his eyes came open, and he smiled at me with such innocent happiness that my ridiculous heart gave a leap and would have answered him instantly, if it was the organ in charge of my decision-making. "Choose whenever you wish," he said. "No doubt you will first need to draw up a list of pros and cons, or perhaps a series of bar plots. If you like, I will help you organize them into categories." I cleared my throat. "It strikes me that this is all pointless speculation. You cannot marry me. I am not going to be left behind, pining for you, when you return to your kingdom. I have no time for pining." He gave me an astonished look. "Leave you behind! As if you would consent to that. I would expect to be burnt alive when next I returned to visit. No, Em, you will come with me, and we will rule my kingdom together. You will scheme and strategize until you have all my councillors eating out of your hand as easily as you do Poe, and I will show you everything---everything. We will travel to the darkest parts of my realm and back again, and you will find answers to questions you have never even thought to ask, and enough material to fill every journal and library with your discoveries.

She did ask where he’d been, though, and he obviously told the truth: He’d been helping Bethany, who was half-fictional, find her missing father in a superhero comic, only to be thrown into a Pick the Plot book by a fictional man named Nobody, who had then separated the fictional and nonfictional worlds and sent Owen and Bethany back to the nonfictional world through the last open portal between their worlds, the one that led to Neverland. And since that portal connected to London, that’s where they emerged.

He who kills even one unbeliever of those who rule over us, whether he does it secretly or openly, shall be rewarded by God.

You are my most unexpected plot twist, reminding me to never get caught up in the deadly routine of life. And for the first time, I am not afraid.

Those clothes are Susie's,' my father said calmly when he reached him. Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand. My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and then, without speaking, he gathered the rest of my clothes, which Buckley had piled on the lawn. As he turned in silence toward the house, hardly breathing, clutching my clothes to him, it sparked. I was the only one to see the colors. Just near Buckley's ears and on the tips of his cheeks and chin he was a little orange somehow, a little red. Why can't I use them?' he asked. It landed in my father's back like a fist. Why can't I use those clothes to stake my tomatoes?' My father turned around. He saw his son standing there, behind him the perfect plot of muddy, churned-up earth spotted with tiny seedlings. 'How can you ask me that question?' You have to choose. It's not fair,' my brother said. Buck?' My father held my clothes against his chest. I watched Buckley flare and light. Behind him was the sun of the goldenrod hedge, twice as tall as it had been at my death. I'm tired of it!' Buckley blared. 'Keesha's dad died and she's okay?' Is Keesha a girl at school?' Yes!' My father was frozen. He could feel the dew that had gathered on his bare ankles and feet, could feel the ground underneath him, cold and moist and stirring with possibility. I'm sorry. When did this happen?' That's not the point, Dad! You don't get it.' Buckley turned around on his heel and started stomping the tender tomato shoots with his foot. Buck, stop!' my father cried. My brother turned. You don't get it, Dad,' he said. I'm sorry,' my father said. These are Susie's clothes and I just... It may not make sense, but they're hers-something she wore.' ... You act like she was yours only!' Tell me what you want to say. What's this about your friend Keesha's dad?' Put the clothes down.' My father laid them gently on the ground. It isn't about Keesha's dad.' Tell me what it is about.' My father was now all immediacy. He went back to the place he had been after his knee surgery, coming up out of the druggie sleep of painkillers to see his then-five-year-old son sitting near him, waiting for his eyes to flicker open so he could say, 'Peek-a-boo, Daddy.' She's dead.' It never ceased to hurt. 'I know that.' But you don't act that way.' Keesha's dad died when she was six. Keesha said she barely even thinks of him.' She will,' my father said. But what about us?' Who?' Us, Dad. Me and Lindsey. Mom left becasue she couldn't take it.' Calm down, Buck,' my father said. He was being as generous as he could as the air from his lungs evaporated out into his chest. Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go. 'What?' my father said. I didn't say anything.' Let go. Let go. Let go. I'm sorry,' my father said. 'I'm not feeling very well.' His feet had grown unbelievably cold in the damp grass. His chest felt hollow, bugs flying around an excavated cavity. There was an echo in there, and it drummed up into his ears. Let go. My father dropped down to his knees. His arm began to tingle on and off as if it had fallen asleep. Pins and needles up and down. My brother rushed to him. Dad?' Son.' There was a quaver in his voice and a grasping outward toward my brother. I'll get Grandma.' And Buckley ran. My father whispered faintly as he lay on his side with his face twisted in the direction of my old clothes: 'You can never choose. I've loved all three of you.

... plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

The door swung open. Corbin stood there, eyeing them all suspiciously. “What are you three doing in here?” “Plotting global domination,” said Bailey. “If you were anyone else, I’d think you were joking.

The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.” This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves). In 1924, the Indian Rights Association, which defended the interests of indigenous communities, conducted an investigation into what it described as “an orgy of graft and exploitation.” The group documented how rich Indians in Oklahoma were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner” and how guardianships were “the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls.” Judges were known to say to citizens, “You vote for me, and I will see that you get a good guardianship.” A white woman married to an Osage man described to a reporter how the locals would plot: “A group of traders and lawyers sprung up who selected certain Indians as their prey. They owned all the officials…. These men had an understanding with each other. They cold-bloodedly said, ‘You take So-and-So, So-and-So and So-and-So and I’ll take these.’ They selected Indians who had full headrights and large farms.

He buried her beside her husband. After the services were over and the few mourners had gone, he stood alone in a cold November wind and looked at the two graves, one open to its burden and the other mounded and covered by a thin fuzz of grass. He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been—a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed.

I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.

Listen very carefully. Because I'm only going to lay this out for you once. I'm no longer the easy prey I once was and if you go up against me I will make sure you end up behind bars. You've fraudulently pocketed the money from the video. Our lawyers already have a criminal suit against you ready to go. Unless you're particularly keen on jail, you will leave my family alone, and you will withdraw the video and return all that money to the people you stole it from." Julia opened her mouth, but Trisha held up her hand and she closed it. "And if you do one thing to harm DJ"- because suddenly Trisha was sure Julia had something on DJ; her nineties-Bollywood-plot theory didn't seem so farfetched- "I will make sure that every one of the families you've preyed on to make money off their tragedies gets together and sues your ass until every penny you've ever leeched is gone. Now get out of my office. Get out of my building- which by the way is private property. Soliciting business here is illegal. So the next time you think of setting foot here, know that I will have security throw you out on your cowardly, pathetic ass.

To quote Virginia Woolf, “If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.” Instead, Woolf urged, “open your mind as widely as possible … and it will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other.

But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising--didn't make it to the airport,...--and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I'd seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug as though to disavow responsibility, standing atop a pyramid of dead Arab bodies. Purportedly a caricature of Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel, the drawing was, in fact, a perfectly realistic, unequivocal depiction of a kike as classically represented in the Nazi press. The cartoon was what turned me around. Barely ten minutes out of Jerusalem, I told the driver to take me back to the King David Hotel.

Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co.,

My sort wants the book in its entirety. We need to touch it, to examine the weight of its paper and the way text is laid out on the page. People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains. We consume them.

There was a man in the hall. He turned to face her, desperate and wild-eyed, his white face ghostlike. With his shirt half untucked and hair disheveled, he was almost unrecognizable. But when he spoke, Morrigan could feel the lightning crackle of his panic through the Gossamer. “Don’t let them open the border!” It was Squall.

Quran: Chapter 86: The Nightcomer By the sky and the Nightcomer! What will make you realize what the Nightcomer is? The star shining before dawn! Each soul has a guardian set up over it. So let everyman notice what he has been created from. He was created from a fluid ejected from between his backbone and his ribs. He is Able to revive him On a day when secrets will be tested; So he will have no strength left nor any supporter. By the sky with its cycle, By the earth cracking open, It is a decisive statement! It is no joke. They are hatching some plot While I too am hatching a plot; So put up with disbelievers; Put up with them as long as you can!

This is a plot: I hope he will keep quiet while he looks at them. I dive under the table and push the chest against his patent leather shoes, I put an armload of post cards and photos on his lap: Spain and Spanish Morocco. But I see by his laughing, open look that I have been singularly mistaken in hoping to reduce him to silence. He glances over a view of San Sebastian from Monte Igueldo, sets it cautiously on the table and remains silent for an instant. Then he sighs: 'Ah, Monsieur, you're lucky ... if what they say is true-travel is the best school. Is that your opinion, Monsieur?' I make a vague gesture. Luckily he has not finished. 'It must be such an upheaval. If I were ever to go on a trip, I think I should make written notes of the slightest traits of my character before leaving, so that when I returned I would be able to compare what I was and what I had become. I've read that there are travellers who have changed physically and morally to such an extent that even their closest relatives did not recognize them when they came back.

Waiting was arrogant and cowardly at the same time. It said she couldn’t be satisfied, was always holding out, and was never content. Also cowardly because she was leaving an escape open, never letting anything tie her too closely to a home. And the result? Beauty wasted and lying on a cold wood floor and books with no shelves of her own to hold them.

It would be the twentieth century before the opening of the British Headquarters Papers at the University of Michigan proved what the eighteenth century refused to believe that a young and beautiful woman was capable of helping Benedict Arnold plot the greatest conspiracy of the American Revolution and then completely fooling the astute warriors around her.

According to Hitler, Jews were behind a conspiracy to use black soldiers to rape pure Aryan women as a means of destroying the “white race.” This was also a conspiracy theory shared by the American Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, which fantasized openly about Jews intentionally plotting the mass rape of white women by black men to undermine the white race in the United States.

To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan’s envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.50 As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania’s political future.

Diary entry, summer 1973. It may be there in a distracted glance out of an open window or in the split second of an absent look when you speak to her, or in the guarded inflections of her voice as she replies, or in the subtle chemistry of touch or smell or the taste of her skin in your mouth, or in some unspecified sixth sense that you can’t name, but when love is over, its signals are louder than disclosure, if only you are willing and open enough to acknowledge them. But of course we shake off these feelings as if they were mere irritations, as if they were unimportant and uninvited guests at a feast. “Not now,” you say, fobbing them off with shallow excuses and feigning more urgent business elsewhere. But they linger long after the party, and skulk in a corner where they plot and fester and return to ask their impertinent questions in the still of night, when she’s sleeping and wearing her child’s face. When she looks so beautiful and vulnerable with her mouth slightly open, and her hair a mess on the pillow, but as you reach to touch her, she turns unconsciously away toward the window, and then the questions start again, and you can’t sleep….

In 1586 Elizabeth ordered that Anthony Babington, a wealthy young Catholic who had plotted her assassination, should be made an example of. Babington was hauled down from the scaffold while still conscious and made to watch as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.

There was no good name for this spot. Evie, who had shot like an arrow from school into life, who had never wavered, who had seen clear right from the start where she wanted to get to, had lately found herself more and more in the brambles. Somehow, here she was, no longer certain where she was going. Or even if she wanted to get there. The jobs had been won, the beds made, the dishes washed, the children sprouted. The wheel had stopped, and now what? Where, for instance, was the story of a middle-aged orphan with the gray streak in her hair, the historian who had rustled thirteenth-century women's lives out of fugitive pages, who believed more than most that there was no such thing as the certainty of a plot in the story of a life, in fact who taught this to students year in and year our, and yet who found herself lately longing, above all else for just that? Longing, against reason, for some kind of clear direction, for the promise of a pattern. For this relief--she pulled against the shoulder strap of her satchel--the unbearable relief of an omniscient narrator. Adolescence, she reflected, pushing open the classroom door with a kind of savage glee, had nothing on this.

He smiled, a bright, open expression that Kash wasn’t used to seeing on Taggart’s face. “Complete and total dependence. I’m joking. Though that is what I feel when she leaves me alone with the kids. Sometimes I think that’s her way of letting me know what hell on earth is like. I’m ready to drop to my knees and beg her to never leave me and all she did was go buy groceries. Yeah, that’s a clever plan of hers. That’s my girl. She’s always plotting.

forgiveness. It is not in denying the hopeless days that take place when others reject us or turn on us. It is not in minimizing the pain we experience at the hands of those who seem bent on ruining our lives. People turn on people. They betray one another. Crass unkindness, vicious plottings, horrible and intentional antagonisms are shown, and calling it a hopeless day hardly describes the extended season of struggle that many of us face at times. But there is a lesson at Calvary. Forgive everyone—anyone—whom you think has failed you, hurt you, offended you. If you think they’ve done anything to ruin your day, ruin your life, ruin your opportunities, ruin your dreams, or block your goals—forgive them. Forgiving others is the key to living in the liberty of the freeing forgiveness Jesus has given us, and it’s the first step toward finding hope for a hopeless day, not to mention opening the door to new days unimagined.

In trying to comprehend and judge moral dilemmas of this scale, people often resort to one of four methods. The first is to downsize the issue. To understand the Syrian civil war as though it were occurring between two foragers, for example, one imagines the Assad regime as a lone person and the rebels as another person; one of them is bad and one of them is good. The historical complexity of the conflict is replaced by a simple, clear plot.4 The second method is to focus on a touching human story that ostensibly stands for the whole conflict. When you try to explain to people the true complexity of the conflict by means of statistics and precise data, you lose them, but a personal story about the fate of one child activates the tear ducts, makes the blood boil, and generates false moral certainty.5 This is something that many charities have understood for a long time. In one noteworthy experiment, people were asked to donate money to help a poor seven-year-old girl from Mali named Rokia. Many were moved by her story and opened their hearts and purses. However, when in addition to Rokia’s personal story the researchers also presented people with statistics about the broader problem of poverty in Africa, respondents suddenly became less willing to help. In another study, scholars solicited donations to help either one sick child or eight sick children. People gave more money to the single child than to the group of eight.6

Ideas never stop, dear S, they're everywhere, in everything - all we have to do is be open to them. And stories tend to arrive with their plots intact and reveal the plots in the writing. Often you think you've got a plot only to find, once you start writing, it's doing something else altogether. And the short story is the form most suited to the spatial moment, which is why it so touches us as a form, I think, with our lives so made up every day of the momentousness of the ordinary moment.

I sat there on that Wednesday evening in my pokey fucking living room, looked at myself on the TV screen being a massive, odious cunt, and realised that nothing has really changed. Deep down, like most of us, still now at the age of thirty-eight, I have this empty, black hole inside of me that nothing and no one seems capable of filling. I say like most of us because, well, look around you. Our society, our businesses, our social constructs, habits, pastimes, addictions and distractions are predicated on vast, endemic levels of emptiness and dissatisfaction. I call it self-hatred. I hate who I was, am and have become and, as we are taught to, I constantly chastise myself for the things I do and say. And such are the global levels of intolerance, greed, entitlement and dysfunction it is evidently not just confined to a small, wounded section of society. We are all in a world of pain. If it was ever any different way back in the past, it has, by now, most certainly become normalised. And I am as angry about that as I am about my own past. There is an anger that runs underneath everything, that fuels my life and feeds the animal inside me. And it is an anger that always, always prevents me, despite my best efforts, from becoming a better version of myself. My goddamn head seems to have a life of its own, quite beyond my control, incapable of reason, compassion or bargaining. It shouts at me from deep inside. As a kid the words didn’t make sense. As an adult it’s waiting at the end of my bed and starts talking an hour or two before I wake up so that when my eyes open it is in full-on rage mode, blaring this shit at me about how glad it is I’m finally awake, how fucked I am today, how there won’t be enough time, I’ll fuck everything up, my friends are plotting against me, trust no one, I must try as hard as I can to salvage everything in my life while knowing it’s already a lost cause. I’m exhausted all the time. It’s a kind of toxic ME – corrosive, pervasive, penetrative, negative, all the bad -ives.

In the course of five visits, during which he was able to familiarize himself at first hand with the magnitude of the German war machine, he was ostentatiously entertained by Air Marshal Göring, he was ceremoniously decorated in the name of the Führer, and he expressed quite openly his high regard for Hitler, calling Germany the world’s “most interesting nation” and its leader “a great man.” And all this interest and admiration after Hitler’s 1935 racial laws had denied Germany’s Jews their civil, social, and property rights,

Nor did I affirm it openly, in so many words. I did not deny it, true. Who am I to express judgments on the plots of the Evil One, especially,” he added, and seemed to want to insist on this reason, “in cases where those who had initiated the inquisition, the bishop, the city magistrates, and the whole populace, perhaps the accused themselves, truly wanted to feel the presence of the Devil? There, perhaps the only real proof of the presence of the Devil was the intensity with which everyone at that moment desired to know he was at work. . . .” “Are

Interview on The Skiffy and Fanty Show 2010. In response to query that young adults may not be open to the nuances/realism in Moorehawke: ‘(In fact)young adult readers seem to (be very inclined)to reading the (Moorehawke) books thematically. Some (not all) adult reviewers ... tend to be very plot oriented. Because the books are a slow release of information and very character driven ... (they) don’t reward impatient reading ... but young adults seem to be very patient readers. They’re very analytical as well. I get very analytical responses from my young adult readers.

All the books and instructions insist that the selection of the soil is the most important part of gardening. No doubt it is. But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before he opens the book, what remedy is there? All the books lay stress on the need of "a deep, friable loam full of nitrogen." This I have never seen. My own plot of land I found on examination to contain nothing but earth. I could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence of loam. There may be such a thing. But I am admitting now in all humility of mind that I don't know what loam is.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? - Ode to a Nightingale

For all their shared boundaries, the experiences of fiction and nonfiction are fundamentally different. In the traditional short story or novel, a fictive space is opened up that allows you the reader to disappear into the action, even to the point of forgetting you are reading. In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you’re always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out. This is certainly true for the essay, but it is also true, I think, for classic nonfiction in general, be it Thucydides or Pascal or Carlyle, which follows an organizing principle that can be summarized as “tracking the consciousness of the author.” What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself. The other element that keeps me reading nonfiction happily is an evolved, entertaining, elegant, or at least highly intentional literary style. The pressure of style should be brought to bear on every passage. “Consciousness plus style equals good nonfiction” is one way of stating the formula.

Ants, which perished almost as soon as they were born, were permitted to pair off under the sunlight and rain; birds, which lived out in the open, were allowed to find safe harbor surrounded by branches. Among all things that existed between the earth and sky, he had been born peerless and lonely, but there wasn't even the tiniest fragment of space meant for him. Everyone feared him, offered him deference, plotted against him, or even schemed incessantly to bring about his death. Having been born from brutality, mercilessness, and Chaos itself, it was inevitable that he was sometimes unable to rein in the violence within his heart.

In literature, plays, and cinema, substitutionary sacrifice is always the most riveting and moving plot point. In the movie The Last of the Mohicans, British major Duncan Heyward asks his Indian captors if he might die in the flames so that Cora, whom he loves, and Nathaniel can go free. When, as he is being dragged away, Duncan cries, “My compliments, sir! Take her and get out!” we are electrified by his unflinching willingness to die to save others, one of whom has been his rival. He dies with his arms bound and stretched out, as if he were on a cross. In Ernest Gordon’s memoir of being a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, he recounts how at the end of a day of forced labor the guards counted the shovels, and one was apparently missing. A furious guard threatened the British POWs that unless the guilty person confessed, he would kill them all. He cocked his gun to start shooting them one by one. At that moment, one prisoner stepped forward calmly and said, “I did it.” He stood quietly at attention, and “he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53: 7) as he was beaten to death. When they all got back to the camp and counted the shovels again, it turned out that they were all there. The man had sacrificed himself to save them all. In the first Harry Potter novel, the evil Lord Voldemort can’t touch Harry without being burned. Later Dumbledore explains it to him. “Your mother died to save you. . . . Love as powerful [as that] . . . leaves its own mark. . . . [T]o have been loved so deeply . . . will give us some protection forever.” Why do these stories move us? It’s because we know from the mundane corners of life to the most dramatic that all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice. We know that anybody who has ever done anything that really made a difference in our lives made a sacrifice, stepped in and gave something or paid something or bore something so we would not have to.

She said and then she added under breath To Nicholas, ‘Hush … we shall laugh to death!’ This Absalon went down upon his knees; ‘I am a lord!’ he thought, ‘And by degrees There may be more to come; the plot may thicken.’ ‘Mercy, my love!’ he said, ‘Your mouth, my chicken!’ She flung the window open then in haste And said, ‘Have done, come on, no time to waste, The neighbours here are always on the spy.’ Absalon started wiping his mouth dry. Dark was the night as pitch, as black as coal, And at the window out she put her hole, And Absalon, so fortune framed the farce, Put up his mouth and kissed her naked arse Most savorously before he knew of this.

something's knocking at the door     a great white light dawns across the continent as we fawn over our failed traditions, often kill to preserve them or sometimes kill just to kill. it doesn’t seem to matter: the answers dangle just out of reach, out of hand, out of mind.     the leaders of the past were insufficient, the leaders of the present are unprepared. we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait. it is a waiting without hope, more like a prayer for unmerited grace.     it all looks more and more like the same old movie. the actors are different but the plot’s the same: senseless.     we should have known, watching our fathers. we should have known, watching our mothers. they did not know, they too were not prepared to teach. we were too naive to ignore their counsel and now we have embraced their ignorance as our own. we are them, multiplied. we are their unpaid debts. we are bankrupt in money and in spirit.     there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the edge and will at any moment tumble down to join the rest of us, the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly corrupt.     a great white light dawns across the continent, the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind, as grotesque and ultimately unlivable our 21st century struggles to be born.

This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs. I'm not sure if there is any pattern to these selections. I did not spend a lot of time with those that seemed afraid to tell stories, that handled plot as if it were a hair in the soup, unwelcome and embarrassing. I also tended not to revisit stories that seemed bleak without having earned it, where the emotional notes were false, or where the writing was tricked out or primped up with fashionable devices stressing form over content. I do know that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response. I read Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body" clenched from head to toe by tension as her suicidal, drug-addled protagonist moves through the Manhattan night toward an unforgivable betrayal. I shed tears over two stories of childhood shadowed by unbearable memory: "The Hare's Mask," by Mark Slouka, with its piercing ending, and Claire Keegan's Irishinflected tale of neglect and rescue, "Foster." Elizabeth McCracken's "Property" also moved me, with its sudden perception shift along the wavering sightlines of loss and grief. Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Young Widows" opened with a gasp-inducing act of unexpected violence and evolved into an ethical Rubik's cube. A couple of stories made me laugh: Tom Bissell's "A Bridge Under Water," even as it foreshadows the dissolution of a marriage and probes what religion does for us, and to us; and Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall," a deftly comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life, and a lifetime. Some stories didn't call forth such a strong immediate response but had instead a lingering resonance. Of these, many dealt with love and its costs, leaving behind indelible images. In Megan Mayhew Bergman's "Housewifely Arts," a bereaved daughter drives miles to visit her dead mother's parrot because she yearns to hear the bird mimic her mother's voice. In Allegra Goodman's "La Vita Nuova," a jilted fiancée lets her art class paint all over her wedding dress. In Ehud Havazelet's spare and tender story, "Gurov in Manhattan," an ailing man and his aging dog must confront life's necessary losses. A complicated, only partly welcome romance blossoms between a Korean woman and her demented

the murderous look in his eyes made her legs turn to jelly. 'Don't,' he spat out, 'make the mistake of getting me angry.' 'You're not angry now?' she croaked in disbelief. He let her go abruptly and smiled, cocking a brow as she slid down into a crouch. 'Not at all,' he said smoothly. 'I merely wanted to set some ground rules.' Henry's mouth fell open. The man was insane. 'First of all, no more devious little plots to try to get rid of me.' Her throat worked convulsively. 'And no lies!' She gasped for breath. 'And-' He paused to look down at her. 'Oh, Christ. Don't cry.' She bawled. ... 'I haven't cried in years.' He believed her ... Dunford looked around frantically, as if the green hills would somehow tell him how to get her to stop crying.

Knowing the truth about Eleanor’s family, look back through the book to revisit her exchanges with her mother. Did you see what was ahead? How did Honeyman lay the groundwork for the final plot twist? What are the different ways that the novel’s title could be interpreted? What do you think happens to Eleanor after the book ends? Eleanor says, “These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted” (p. 227). Do you agree? What does Raymond find appealing about Eleanor? And why does Eleanor feel comfortable opening up to Raymond?

He would open the door of the drawing-room or the nursery, I thought, and find her among her children perhaps, or with a piece of embroidery on her knee at any rate, the center of some different order in the system of life, and the contrast between this world and his own, which might be the law courts or the House of Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there would follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilized anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her.

wide open falsehood the clandestine truths rival till the end in a series of duels pardon the drapery language I choose Waltz in Vienna has taught me to use every tall room a fiction leatherbound treasure books up to the ceiling gold spine upon spine the guile and the treason the faith and allegiance wide open falsehood the clandestine truths rival till the end in a series of duels pardon the drapery language I choose the author grew fat to imagine his lead pen careening gave voice to the scheming an Aryan cabale to dethrone the guile and the treason the faith and allegiance to the empire unknown the baron and his mistress dine in a fine banquet hall as rebel insurgents plot in the attic space crawl the guile and the treason the faith and allegiance now lie in my hand

In the film Death and the Maiden, there is a point during which Sigourney Weaver has duct-taped Ben Kingsley to a chair in her living room. The characters are re-enacting a reverse torture scene. To move the plot of a woman tortured toward its desire: to torture the torturer. To extract a confession. The chair is a prop. A prop is a stage object that supports the drama. If the audience suspends their disbelief the chair transforms itself in time and space. If the audience is left unconvinced the chair is silly and imaginable in anyone’s living room. In the film Romeo is Bleeding Lena Olin sits in a chair and spreads her legs so that her cunt can be seen/scene. Her nationality keeps slipping; she is what we want her to be in a million ways. Her severed arm our severed arms. Her mouth opening like a country. In the film Exotica Atom Egoyan has the male lead (primary actor, financial draw) sit in a chair immobile while a child-stripper dances excruciatingly close to his body. His hands on his thighs. His mouth open. His mind seated. Torture. In the film Barbarella Jane Fonda is trapped inside of a science fiction sexual orgasm chair. This is before her politics come. In the film Breaker Morant two men mutated soldiers lost are executed—shot through the chest—while seated in chairs. In my kitchen I jack my father off while he sits in a chair, my hand smally domestic, the back of the chair holding his back, the legs of the chair forgiving his weight, the wood of the chair blonde, the hair of the girl blonde, the room magnified to cinematic proportions.

So he closed his eyes and imagined Artimé, the way it had been, he way he wanted it to be again. His hands reached out to include the entire plot of land. "Imagine," he said in a soft voice, picturing it all, room by room, the lawn with the fountains, the trees, the creatures. When he was certain he'd imagined it, he want on. "Believe. " He believed with all his heart that Artimé could exist again. Believed that when he was finished with the spell and he opened his eyes, it would be there. "Whisper." Alex imagined Mr. Today whispering these words over the desolate plot of land so many years ago, calling it to live a new, vibrant life, and he realized that he'd been whispering the words all along. "Breathe." Alex took in a deep, satisfying breath and let it out slowly. He didn't forget it this time. He pictured himself breathing life into the world, giving it the air it needed to flourish once again. And then: "Commence." The command to make it all happen. The beginning of everything. [...] he remembered the clue. Utter in order, repeat times three. [...] When he finished the second round, he started one last time, his voice remaining soft. "Imagine. Believe. Whisper. Breathe." He hesitated, swallowing hard before the last one. And finally: "Commence." Nothing happened. All was deathly silent. Alex remained very still, eyes closed, arms outstretched, feeling a sort of calmness inside him that he hadn't felt ever before. It almost seemed like he was beginning to float, peacefully alone in the world. And then something did happen. The light through his closed lids grew pinkish-white, bright, and soon lights swirled around him, faster and faster, with colors joining in and growing stronger. He opened his eyes just as the land in front of him turned a luscious green and, with a great rumble, the enormous fountain broke through the ground, spewing up from the earth, the growing expanse of lawn rippling and resettling around it. The land spread farther, making Unwanteds along the shore lose their footing and tumble to the ground. Trees popped up to dot the lawn and for the jungle on the opposite side of Artimé. The gray shack spun and grew into the enormous mansion once again. The heat dissipated in an instant, and a cool breeze rushed in from the sea. Alex gaped. "I did it," he whispered. And then he yelled at the top of his voice, "I did it!

She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot—the drama, the actions, the tension—will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?

It came as a surprise to us, as I suspect it does to many, that marriage changed us. We’d felt as though we’d always had those rings, wrapped about our fingers, like the scraggly garlands of those first, revelatory conversations. But those real rings, wooden as they were, began to set their roots, and that settling, the calming feeling of having been planted into the same plot to flourish, was a relief from that once-nagging question of loneliness. No matter what happened now, even if we’d found ourselves lonelier than we’d ever been, we’d know that that plot of land was our own to cultivate. Each moment was now a dual-moment, each of our lives a dual-life. The open road, that atlas, the open-faced moon and that wine were the first conscious recognitions of our floating life. One that perhaps we’d have created on our own, but now no longer had to.

Does God get what God wants? That’s a good question. An interesting question. And it’s an important question that has given us much to discuss. But there’s a better question. One that we actually can answer. One that takes all of the speculation about the future, which no one has been to and returned with hard empirical evidence, and brings it back to one absolute we can depend on in the midst of all of this which turns out to be another question. It’s not, “Does God get what God wants?” but “Do we get what we want?” and the answer to that is a resounding, affirming, sure and certain yes. Yes, we get what we want, God is that loving. If we want isolation, despair, and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given power and strength to make the world in our own image, God allows us that freedom and we have that kind of license to do that. If we want nothing to do with light, love, hope, grace, and peace God respects that desire on our part and we are given a life free from any of those realities. The more we want nothing to do with what God is, the more distance and space is created. If we want nothing to do with love, we are given a reality free from love. If, however, we crave light, we’re drawn to truth, we’re desperate for grace, we’ve come to the end of our plots and schemes and we want someone else’s path, God gives us what we want. If we have this sense that we have wandered far from home and we want to return, God is there standing in the driveway arms open, ready to invite us in. If we thirst for Shalom and we long for the peace that transcends all understanding, God doesn’t just give, they are poured out on us lavishly, heaped until we are overwhelmed. It’s like a feast where the food and wine do not run out. These desires can start with the planting of an infinitesimally small seed in our heart, or a yearning for life to be better, or a gnawing sense that we are missing out, or an awareness that beyond the routine and grind of life there is something more, or the quiet hunch that this isn’t all there is. It often has it’s birth in the most unexpected ways, arising out of our need for something we know we do not have, for someone we know we are not. And to that, that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire God says, “Yes!”. Yes there is water for that thirst, food for that hunger, light for that darkness, relief for that burden. If we want hell, if we want heaven then they are ours. that’s how love works, it can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says, “yes”, we can have what we want because love wins.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Plants Fed On by Fawns" All the flowers: the pleated leaves of the hellebore; And the false blossom of the calla, a leaf like a petal— The white flesh of a woman bathing— a leaf over- Shadowing the small flowers hidden in the spadix; And fly poison, tender little flower, whose cursed root Pounded into a fine white powder will destroy flies. But why kill flies? They do not trouble me. They Are like the fruit the birds feed on. They are like The wind in the trees, or the sap that threads all things, The blue blood moving through branch and vine, Through the wings of dead things and living things.... If I lift my hand? If I write to you? The letters Can be stored in a box. Can they constitute the shape Of a love? Can the paper be ground? Can the box Be altar and garden plot and bed? Can there rise From the bed the form of a two-headed creature, A figure that looks both forward and back, keeping Watch always, one head sleeping while the other wakes, The bird head sleeping while the lion head wakes, And then the changing of the guard?.... No, The flies do not trouble me. They are like the stars At night. Common and beautiful. They are like My thoughts. I stood at midnight in the orchard. There were so many stars, and yet the stars, The very blackness of the night, though perfectly Cold and clear, seemed to me to be insubstantial, The whole veil of things seemed less substantial Than the thing that moved in the dark behind me, An unseen bird or beast, something shifting in its sleep, Half-singing and then forgetting it was singing: Be thou always ravished by love, starlight running Down and pulling back the veil of the heart, And then the water that does not exist opening up Before one, dark as wine, and the unveiled figure Of the self stepping unclothed, sweetly stripped Of its leaf, into starlight and the shadow of night, The cold water warm around the narrow ankles, The body at its most weightless, a thing so durable It will— like the carved stone figures holding up The temple roof— stand and remember its gods Long after those gods have been forsaken.

Flour on the floor makes my sandals slip and I tumble into your arms. Too hot to bake this morning but blueberries begged me to fold them into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb plotted a whole pie. The windows are blown open and a thickfruit tang sneaks through the wire screen and into the home of the scowly lady who lives next door. Yesterday, a man in the city was rescued from his apartment which was filled with a thousand rats. Something about being angry because his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug, over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops and pip through each cabinet, snip at the stumpy bags of sugar, the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter. So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet the angry voices next door, if only for a brief whiff. I want our summers to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked with love, a table overflowing with baked goods warming the already warm air. After all the pots are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess.

Lymond knelt. The Tsar lifted his head and unlooking, let the staff go. It fell unregarded, with a crack, bouncing on the thin carpet. Ivan leaned forward and, stretching both hands, gripped the bright hair on either side of his Voevoda’s cool face, the thin skin lightly browned by the sun. ‘You are not afraid,’ said Ivan. He pulled one hand sharply away and Adashev, Viscovatu, Sylvester saw Lymond’s lips tighten, but he did not call out or speak, as Ivan opened his palm and showed a feathering of snatched yellow hair. There was blood at the side of the Voevoda’s brushed head. ‘You are not afraid,’ repeated the Tsar. ‘You are not afraid of the boyars. You are not afraid of me, but for me.… ‘I am twenty-six,’ said the Tsar. He put out his hand, letting the lock fall from his palm, and gripped Lymond’s shoulder. ‘I confessed. I confessed to my rages, my sins against my people, and Dmitri my firstborn was taken from me, and my friends quarrelled and plotted about me when they thought I lay dying. I have no friends.’ ‘You have the men in this room,’ Lymond said. ‘The men in this room are afraid of me. All except you,’ the Tsar said.

As Joss showed up to start work on the new season, Barr gathered everyone on staff and made a speech about how the tabloids were obsessed with her and had sources among the crew feeding them details of her personal life. Joss, who had heard about tabloid drama and the staff conflicts, anticipated a speech that would bring everybody closer: “It’s us against the world, and dammit, we’ve got good work to do here, let’s all get it done.” Instead, Roseanne told the writers they had better keep their mouths shut or they would all be fired. It was a plot twist that he wasn’t expecting. “It made me realize … that every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things— connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect,” Joss said. “Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to them, even if I’m firing them…. People can be treated with respect. That is one of the most important things a show runner can do, is make everybody understand that we’re all involved, that we’re all on the same level.

As Frances had learned to do in times of uncertainty, she created a project over which she had total control and began writing a book “Dedicated to the memory of Irving Thalberg as a tribute to his vision and genius.” How to Write and Sell Film Stories was written for “serious students of film technique.” She filled the straightforward textbook with anecdotes from her films and others’ to convey the lessons on the development of plot, motivation, and characters she had learned with Thalberg. She had come to believe that because of increased censorship and the limited number of adaptable plays and novels, “eighty percent of the motion pictures produced will be soon be stories written exclusively for the screen” and the time was right for a book on original screenplays. The audience for the book was immediate; universities ordered copies before it was published and it quickly went into several printings. The book led to her taking on an advice column on screen writing for Cinema Progress, a serious educational film magazine published by the American Institute of Cinematography based at the University of Southern California. She opened her house to roundtable discussions with students and sponsored a scenario contest with the winners serving as studio “apprentices.

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end. Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam: How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the race of Time, Till time stands fix'd. But it will be a related comfort. In our world the material for an eschatology is more elusive, harder to handle. It may not be true, as the modern poet argues, that we must build it out of 'our loneliness and regret'; the past has left us stronger materials than these for our artifice of eternity. But the artifice of eternity exists only for the dying generations; and since they choose, alter the shape of time, and die, the eternal artifice must change. The golden bird will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes. In my next talk I shall be trying to explain some of the ways in which that song changes, and talking about the relationship between apocalypse and the changing fictions of men born and dead in the middest. It is a large subject, because the instrument of change is the human imagination. It changes not only the consoling plot, but the structure of time and the world. One of the most striking things about it was said by Stevens in one of his adages; and it is with this suggestive saying that I shall mark the transition from the first to the second part of my own pattern. 'The imagination,' said this student of changing fictions, 'the imagination is always at the end of an era.' Next time we shall try to see what this means in relation to our problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.

THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENCE Many theories have been proposed as to why humans developed greater intelligence, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. According to one theory, the evolution of the human brain probably took place in stages, with the earliest phase initiated by climate change in Africa. As the weather cooled, the forests began to recede, forcing our ancestors onto the open plains and savannahs, where they were exposed to predators and the elements. To survive in this new, hostile environment, they were forced to hunt and walk upright, which freed up their hands and opposable thumbs to use tools. This in turn put a premium on a larger brain to coordinate tool making. According to this theory, ancient man did not simply make tools—“tools made man.” Our ancestors did not suddenly pick up tools and become intelligent. It was the other way around. Those humans who picked up tools could survive in the grasslands, while those who did not gradually died off. The humans who then survived and thrived in the grasslands were those who, through mutations, became increasingly adept at tool making, which required an increasingly larger brain. Another theory places a premium on our social, collective nature. Humans can easily coordinate the behavior of over a hundred other individuals involved in hunting, farming, warring, and building, groups that are much larger than those found in other primates, which gave humans an advantage over other animals. It takes a larger brain, according to this theory, to be able to assess and control the behavior of so many individuals. (The flip side of this theory is that it took a larger brain to scheme, plot, deceive, and manipulate other intelligent beings in your tribe. Individuals who could understand the motives of others and then exploit them would have an advantage over those who could not. This is the Machiavellian theory of intelligence.) Another theory maintains that the development of language, which came later, helped accelerate the rise of intelligence. With language comes abstract thought and the ability to plan, organize society, create maps, etc. Humans have an extensive vocabulary unmatched by any other animal, with words numbering in the tens of thousands for an average person. With language, humans could coordinate and focus the activities of scores of individuals, as well as manipulate abstract concepts and ideas. Language meant you could manage teams of people on a hunt, which is a great advantage when pursuing the woolly mammoth. It meant you could tell others where game was plentiful or where danger lurked. Yet another theory is “sexual selection,” the idea that females prefer to mate with intelligent males. In the animal kingdom, such as in a wolf pack, the alpha male holds the pack together by brute force. Any challenger to the alpha male has to be soundly beaten back by tooth and claw. But millions of years ago, as humans became gradually more intelligent, strength alone could not keep the tribe together.

Jane and Mr. Nobley entered the great hall, the ceiling dazzling with thousands of real candles that put fire into the white dresses and cravats. Five musicians were seated on a dais--a cello and two violins (or maybe a viola?), a harpsichord, and some kind of wind instrument. From keys and strings, they coaxed a grand prelude to the minuet. Jane looked at everything, smiling at the amusement park novelty of it all. She looked at Mr. Nobley. He was beaming at her. At last. “You are stunning,” he said, and every inch of him seemed to swear that it was true. “Oh,” she said. He kissed her gloved fingers. He was still smiling. There was something different about him tonight, and she couldn’t place what it was. Some new plot twist, she presumed. She was eager to roll around in all the plot she could on her last night, though once or twice her eyes strayed to spot Martin. Mr. Nobley stood opposite her in a line of ten men. She watched Amelia and Captain East perform the figures. They held each other’s gazes, they smiled with the elation of new love. All very convincing. Poor Amelia, thought Jane. It was a bit cruel, now that she thought about it, all these actors who made women fall in love with them. Amelia seemed so tenderhearted, and Miss Charming and her heaving breasts so delighted with this world. Jane caught sight of a very striking Colonel Andrews who, now that she watched him dance, might just be gay. Jane felt a thrumming of foreboding. All the ladies were so happy and open-hearted and eager to love. What would happen to them in the dregs of tomorrow?

Jesus Christ!" Foraker's shocked exclamation burned across the bridge like a buzzsaw, and Caslet's mouth fell open as his plot suddenly changed. One instant, his ship was charging into the teeth of two opponents' fire; the next instant, there were no opponents. The warships' acceleration had carried them within less than three hundred thousand clicks of the Manty merchantman, which had suddenly rolled back down to present her own broadside to them. Eight incredibly powerful grasers smashed out from the "unarmed freighter" like the wrath of God, and the second raider destroyer simply vanished. A single pair of hits on the light cruiser burned through her sidewall as if it hadn't even existed, and her after third blew apart in a hurricane of splintered and vaporized plating. Three of Shannon's shipboard lasers added their own fury to her damage, chewing huge holes in what was left of her hull, but they were strictly an afterthought, for that ship was already a helpless hulk. "We're being hailed, Skipper," Lieutenant Dutton said shakenly from Communications. Caslet just looked at him, unable to speak, then looked back down at his plot and swallowed as the unmistakable impeller signatures of a full dozen LACs drifted up from the "freighter's" gravitic shadow and locked their weapons on his ship. "Speaker," he rasped. "Unknown cruiser, this is Captain Honor Harrington of Her Majesty's Armed Merchant Cruiser Wayfarer," a soprano voice said quietly. "I appreciate your assistance, and I wish I could offer you the reward your gallantry deserves, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to surrender.

Colin. Just the name made Alessandro’s gut burn. He knew the man wanted his wife, even if Brianna was too blind to see it. The moron had been cuckolded by the paragon of supposed virtue, his wife Carrie and now he had finally opened his eyes and seen what Alessandro had known all along. Brianna put every other woman in New York to shame. No woman could come near her beauty, her passion, her fire. Colin had tossed her aside for the angelic Carrie and now he was changing his mind. Oh no you don’t, you miserable fucker. “Her friend indeed,” Bernardo drawled, his Italian accent thick with unmistakable implication. “Dat’s da truth. He no make her cry all da time.” That was directed at Alessandro, with small dark accusatory eyes. “He nice.” Alessandro couldn’t look at those eyes without feeling a sickening pang of guilt. She’s mine! He wanted to scream. Mine! Mine! Mine! “Oh yes. Very nice. He was very nice when he held her at the cemetery and very nice when he was dancing with her at Adresca.” That made Alessandro’s head lift in surprise. “Oh yes, my boy. She’s been there, cleaning up the rubble and word is that she’s working on re-opening it. Her friend Colin has been quite helpful in that endeavour.” “I don’ like how you say dat,” Will said scowling. “Really young William, I only speak the truth,” Bernardo taunted. Alessandro’s mind was racing. NO! Not Colin. He could not let that imbecile take Brianna away from him. He’d have to be eliminated somehow. Alessandro began to plot all the different ways he could ensure that Colin Neally stayed away from his wife, permanently. They all involved grisly, violent methods. He could not be allowed to win Brianna.

On the evening of Wednesday, June 22, 1955, there was an official re-election ceremony being held on the open porch behind the Executive Mansion. As usual it was hot and steamy in Monrovia and without air-conditioning the country’s President and several members of his administration were taking in the cooler, but still damp, night air. Without warning, several shots were fired in the direction of the President. In the dark all that could be seen were the bright flashes from a pistol. Two men, William Hutchins, a guard, and Daniel Derrick, a member of the national legislature, fell wounded, but fortunately President Tubman had escaped harm and was hurried back into the building. In the dark no one was certain, but Paul Dunbar was apparently seen by someone in the garden behind the mansion. James Bestman, a presidential security agent, subdued and apprehended the alleged shooter in the Executive Pavilion, best known for its concrete painted animals. It was said that Bestman had used his .38 caliber “Smith and Wesson,” revolver. Members of the opposition party were accused of participating in the assassination plot and a dragnet was immediately cast to round up the alleged perpetrators. It didn’t take long before the son of former President William Coleman, Samuel David Coleman, was indicted, as was his son John. The following day, warrants for the arrest of Former President Barclay, and others in opposition to Tubman, were also issued for allegedly being accomplices. Coleman and his son fled to Clay-Ashland, a township 15 miles north of Monrovia in the St. Paul River District of Montserrado County. Photo Caption: The (former) Liberian Executive Mansion.

So you’re saying,” I interjected, “that there is no organized, conspiratorial evil in the world, no satanic plot to which we fall prey?” “None. There is only human fear and the bizarre ways that humans try to ward it off.” “What about the many references in sacred texts and scriptures to Satan?” “This idea is a metaphor, a symbolic way of warning people to look to the divine for security, not to their sometimes tragic ego urges and habits. Blaming an outside force for everything bad was perhaps important at a certain stage in human development. But now it obscures the truth, because blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility. And we tend to use the idea of Satan to project that some people are inherently evil so we can dehumanize the ones we disagree with and write them off. It is time now to understand the true nature of human evil in a more sophisticated way and then to deal with it.” “If there is no satanic plot,” I said, “then ‘possession’ doesn’t exist.” “That’s not so,” Wil said emphatically. “Psychological ‘possession’ does exist. But it is not the result of a conspiracy of evil; it is just energy dynamics. Fearful people want to control others. That’s why certain groups try to pull you in and convince you to follow them, and ask you to submit to their authority, or fight you if you try to leave.” “When I was first drawn into that illusory town, I thought I had been possessed by some demonic force.” “No, you were drawn in because you made the same mistake you made earlier: you didn’t just open up and listen to those souls; you gave yourself over to them, as if they automatically had all the answers, without checking to see if they were connected and motivated by love. And unlike the souls who are divinely connected, they didn’t back away from you. They just pulled you into their world, the same way some crazy group or cult might do in the physical dimension if you don’t discriminate.” Wil paused as if in thought, then continued. “All this is more of the Tenth Insight; that’s why we’re seeing it. As communication between the two dimensions increases, we’ll begin to have more encounters with souls in the Afterlife. This part of the Insight is that we must discern between those souls who are awake and connected with the spirit of love and those who are fearful and stuck in an obsessive trance of some kind. But we must do so without invalidating and dehumanizing those caught in such fear dramas by thinking they are demons or devils. They are souls in a growth process, just like us.

The Pakistani film International Gorillay (International guerillas), produced by Sajjad Gul, told the story of a group of local heroes - of the type that would, in the language of a later age, come to be known as jihadis, or terrorists - who vowed to find and kill an author called "Salman Rushdie" . The quest for "Rushdie" formed the main action of the film and "his" death was the film's version of happy ending. "Rushdie" himself was depicted as a drunk, constantly swigging from a bottle, and a sadist. He lived in what looked very like a palace on what looked very like an island in the Philippines (clearly all novelists had second homes of this kind), being protected by what looked very like the Israeli Army (this presumably being a service offered by Israel to all novelists), and he was plotting the overthrow of Pakistan by the fiendish means of opening chains of discotheques and gambling dens across that pure and virtuous land, a perfidious notion for which, as the British Muslim "leader" Iqbal Sacranie might have said, death was too light a punishment. "Rushdie" was dressed exclusively in a series of hideously coloured safari suits - vermilion safari suits, aubergine safari suits, cerise safari suits - and the camera, whenever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably started at his feet and then panned [sic] with slow menace up to his face. So the safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film the fashion insult wounded him deeply. It was, however, oddly satisfying to read that one result of the film's popularity in Pakistan was that the actor playing "Rushdie" became so hated by the film-going public that he had to go into hiding. At a certain point in the film one of the international gorillay was captured by the Israeli Army and tied to a tree in the garden of the palace in the Philippines so that "Rushdie" could have his evil way with him. Once "Rushdie" had finished drinking form his bottle and lashing the poor terrorist with a whip, once he had slaked his filthy lust for violence upon the young man's body, he handed the innocent would-be murderer over to the Israeli soldiers and uttered the only genuinely funny line in the film. "Take him away," he cried, "and read to him from The Satanic Verses all night!" Well, of course, the poor fellow cracked completely. Not that, anything but that, he blubbered as the Israelis led him away. At the end of the film "Rushdie" was indeed killed - not by the international gorillay, but by the Word itself, by thunderbolts unleashed by three large Qurans hanging in the sky over his head, which reduced the monster to ash. Personally fried by the Book of the Almighty: there was dignity in that.

She thinks no one would ever marry ‘a reckless society miss’ and a ‘troublemaker.’” He winced to hear his own words thrown back at him. Celia was all that…and so much more. Not that he dared tell her. Bad enough that he’d revealed too much of how he felt yesterday. For now, she could chalk it up to mere desire. If he started paying her compliments, she might guess how far his feelings went, and that wouldn’t do. So he tempered his remarks. “Your grandmother is merely worried that you will waste yourself on some man who doesn’t deserve you.” Like a bastard Bow Street Runner. “I suspect that if you tell her you’re going to marry the duke, she won’t be a bit surprised. And she certainly won’t agree to rescind the ultimatum, now that she’s finally achieved what she wanted.” “Yes, I’ve come to that conclusion myself. And besides…well…it wouldn’t be fair to involve him in such a plot behind his back when he’s a genuinely nice man offering marriage. If word got out that he had offered and I’d accepted, only to turn him down, people would assume I’d done it because of the madness in his family. That would just be cruel.” Now that Jackson knew she wasn’t actually going to marry the duke, he could be open-minded. “It certainly wouldn’t be kind,” he agreed. “But I’d be more worried that if word got out, you’d be painted as the worst sort of jilt.” She shrugged that off. “I wouldn’t care, as long as it freed me from Gran’s ultimatum.” It took him a moment to digest that. “So you lied when you said at our first discussion of your suitors that you had an interest in marriage?” “Of course I didn’t lie.” Her cheeks pinkened again. “But I want to marry for love, and not because Gran has decided I’m taking too long at it. I want my husband to genuinely care for me.” Her voice shook a little. “And not just my fortune.” She cut him a sidelong glance. “Or my connections.” He stiffened in the saddle. “I understand.” Oh yes, he understood all right. Any overtures he made would be construed as mercenary. Her grandmother had made sure of that by telling her of his aspirations. Not that it mattered. If he married her, he risked watching her lose everything. A Chief Magistrate made quite a lofty sum for someone of Jackson’s station, but for someone of hers? It was nothing. Less than nothing. “So what do you plan to do?” he asked. “About your grandmother’s ultimatum, I mean.” She shook her head. “If presenting her with an offer and begging her forbearance didn’t work, my original plan was just to marry whichever of the three gentlemen had offered.” “And now?” “I can’t bring myself to do it.” He stopped clenching the reins. “Well, that’s something then.” “So I find myself back where I started. I suppose I shall have to drum up some more suitors.” She slanted a glance at him. “Any ideas?

At the end of this Sabbath encounter with the religious leaders Mark records a remarkable sentence that sums up one of the main themes of the New Testament, “Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.” The Herodians were the supporters of Herod, the nastiest of the corrupt kings who ruled Israel, representing the Roman occupying power and its political system. In any country that the Romans conquered, they set up rulers. And wherever the Romans went, they brought along the culture of Greece—Greek philosophy, the Greek approach to sex and the body, the Greek approach to truth. Conquered societies like Israel felt assaulted by these immoral, cosmopolitan, pagan values. In these countries there were cultural resistance movements; and in Israel that was the Pharisees. They put all their emphasis on living by the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures and putting up big hedges around themselves to prevent contamination by the pagans. See what was going on? The Herodians were moving with the times, while the Pharisees upheld traditional virtues. The Pharisees believed their society was being overwhelmed with pluralism and paganism, and they were calling for a return to traditional moral values. These two groups had been longtime enemies of each other—but now they agree: They have to get rid of Jesus. These two groups were not used to cooperating, but now they do. In fact, the Pharisees, the religious people, take the lead in doing so. That’s why I say this sentence hints at one of the main themes of the New Testament. The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can’t be co-opted by either moralism or relativism. The “traditional values” approach to life is moral conformity—the approach taken by the Pharisees. It is that you must lead a very, very good life. The progressive approach, embodied in the Herodians, is self-discovery—you have to decide what is right or wrong for you. And according to the Bible, both of these are ways of being your own savior and lord. Both are hostile to the message of Jesus. And not only that, both lead to self-righteousness. The moralist says, “The good people are in and the bad people are out—and of course we’re the good ones.” The self-discovery person says, “Oh, no, the progressive, open-minded people are in and the judgmental bigots are out—and of course we’re the open-minded ones.” In Western cosmopolitan culture there’s an enormous amount of self-righteousness about self-righteousness. We progressive urbanites are so much better than people who think they’re better than other people. We disdain those religious, moralistic types who look down on others. Do you see the irony, how the way of self-discovery leads to as much superiority and self-righteousness as religion does? The gospel does not say, “the good are in and the bad are out,” nor “the open-minded are in and the judgmental are out.” The gospel says the humble are in and the proud are out. The gospel says the people who know they’re not better, not more open-minded, not more moral than anyone else, are in, and the people who think they’re on the right side of the divide are most in danger.

One: A Book Is A Universe and the Universe is a Book. Inside a book, any Physiks or Magical Laws or Manners or Histories may hold sway. A book is its own universe and while in it, you must play by their rules. More or less. Some of the more modern novels are lenient on this point and have very few policemen to spare. This is why sometimes, when you finish a book, you feel strange and woozy, as though you have just woken up. Your body is getting used to the rules and your own universe again. And your own universe is just the biggest and longest and most complicated book ever written—except for all the other ones. This is also why books along the walls make a place feel different—all those universes, crammed into one spot! Things are bound to shift and warp and hatch schemes! Two: Books Are People. Some are easy to get along with and some are shy, some are full of things to say and some are quiet, some are fanciful and some are plainspoken, some you will feel as though you've known forever the moment you open the cover, and some will take years to grow into. Just like people, you must be introduced properly and sit down together with a cup of something so that you can sniff at each other like tomcats but lately acquainted. Listen to their troubles and share their joys. They will have their tempers and you will have yours, and sometimes you will not understand a book, nor will it understand you—you can't love all books any more than you can love every stranger you meet. But you can love a lot of them. And the love of a book is a precious, subtle, strange thing, well worth earning, And just like people, you are never really done with a book—some part of it will stay with you, gently changing the way you see and speak and know. Three: People Are Books. This has two meanings. The first is: Every person is a story. They have a beginning and a middle and an end (though some may have sequels and series).They have motifs and narrative tricks and plot twists and daring escapes and love lost and love won. The rules of books are the rules of life because a book must be written by a person alive, and an alive person will usually try to tell the truth about the world, even if they dress it up in spangles and feathers. The other meaning is: When you read a book, it is not only a story. It is never only a story. Exciting plots may occur, characters suffer and triumph, yes, It is a story. But it is also a person speaking to you, directly to you. A person far away, perhaps in time, perhaps in space, perhaps both. A person who wanted to say something so loud that everyone could hear it. A book is a time-travelling teleportation machine. And there's millions and millions of them! When you read a book, you have a conversation with the person who wrote it. And that conversation is never quite the same twice. Every single reader has a different chat, because they are different people with different histories and ideas in their heads. Why, you cannot even have the same conversation with the same book twice! If you read a book as a child, and again as a Grown-Up, it will be something altogether other. New things will have happened to you, new folk will have come into your life and taught you wild and wonderful notions you never thought of before. You will not be the same person—and neither will the book. When you read, know that someone somewhere wrote those very words just for you, in hopes that you would find something there to take with you in your own travels through time and space.

In the entire endless evening his serenity received a jolt only a few times. The first was when someone who didn’t know who he was confided that only two months ago Lady Elizabeth’s uncle had sent out invitations to all her former suitors offering her hand in marriage. Suppressing his shock and loathing for her uncle, Ian had pinned an amused smile on his face and confided, “I’m acquainted with the lady’s uncle, and I regret to say he’s a little mad. As you know, that sort of thing runs,” Ian had finished smoothly, “in our finest families.” The reference to England’s hopeless King George was unmistakable, and the man had laughed uproariously at the joke. “True,” he agreed. “Lamentably true.” Then he went off to spread the word that Elizabeth’s uncle was a confirmed loose screw. Ian’s method of dealing with Sir Francis Belhaven-who, his grandfather had discovered, was boasting that Elizabeth had spent several days with him-was less subtle and even more effective. “Belhaven,” Ian said after spending a half hour searching for the repulsive knight. The stout man had whirled around in surprise, leaving his acquaintances straining to hear Ian’s low conversation with him. “I find your presence repugnant,” Ian had said in a dangerously quiet voice. “I dislike your coat, I dislike your shirt, and I dislike the knot in your neckcloth. In fact, I dislike you. Have I offended you enough yet, or shall I continue?” Belhaven’s mouth dropped open, his pasty face turning a deathly gray. “Are-are you trying to force a-duel?” “Normally one doesn’t bother shooting a repulsive toad, but in this instance I’m prepared to make an exception, since this toad doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut!” “A duel, with you?” he gasped. “Why, it would be no contest-none at all. Everyone knows what sort of marksman you are. It would be murder.” Ian leaned close, speaking between his clenched teeth. “It’s going to be murder, you miserable little opium-eater, unless you suddenly remember very vocally that you’ve been joking about Elizabeth Cameron’s visit.” At the mention of opium the glass slid from his fingers and crashed to the floor. “I have just realized I was joking.” “Good,” Ian said, restraining the urge to strangle him. “Now start remembering it all over this ballroom!” “Now that, Thornton,” said an amused voice from Ian’s shoulder as Belhaven scurried off to begin doing as bidden, “makes me hesitate to say that he is not lying.” Still angry with Belhaven, Ian turned in surprise to see John Marchman standing there. “She was with me as well,” Marchman sad. “All aboveboard, for God’s sake, so don’t look at me like I’m Belhaven. Her aunt Berta was there every moment.” “Her what?” Ian said, caught between fury and amusement. “Her Aunt Berta. Stout little woman who doesn’t say much.” “See that you follow her example,” Ian warned darkly. John Marchman, who had been privileged to fish at Ian’s marvelous stream in Scotland, gave his friend an offended look. “I daresay you’ve no business challenging my honor. I was considering marrying Elizabeth to keep her out of Belhaven’s clutches; you were only going to shoot him. It seems to me that my sacrifice was-“ “You were what?” Ian said, feeling as if he’d walked in on a play in the middle of the second act and couldn’t seem to hold onto the thread of the plot or the identity of the players. “Her uncle turned me down. Got a better offer.” “Your life will be more peaceful, believe me,” Ian said dryly, and he left to find a footman with a tray of drinks.

The tactical situation seems simple enough. Thanks to Marx’s prophecy, the Communists knew for certain that misery must soon increase. They also knew that the party could not win the confidence of the workers without fighting for them, and with them, for an improvement of their lot. These two fundamental assumptions clearly determined the principles of their general tactics. Make the workers demand their share, back them up in every particular episode in their unceasing fight for bread and shelter. Fight with them tenaciously for the fulfilment of their practical demands, whether economic or political. Thus you will win their confidence. At the same time, the workers will learn that it is impossible for them to better their lot by these petty fights, and that nothing short of a wholesale revolution can bring about an improvement. For all these petty fights are bound to be unsuccessful; we know from Marx that the capitalists simply cannot continue to compromise and that, ultimately, misery must increase. Accordingly, the only result—but a valuable one—of the workers’ daily fight against their oppressors is an increase in their class consciousness; it is that feeling of unity which can be won only in battle, together with a desperate knowledge that only revolution can help them in their misery. When this stage is reached, then the hour has struck for the final show-down. This is the theory and the Communists acted accordingly. At first they support the workers in their fight to improve their lot. But, contrary to all expectations and prophecies, the fight is successful. The demands are granted. Obviously, the reason is that they had been too modest. Therefore one must demand more. But the demands are granted again44. And as misery decreases, the workers become less embittered, more ready to bargain for wages than to plot for revolution. Now the Communists find that their policy must be reversed. Something must be done to bring the law of increasing misery into operation. For instance, colonial unrest must be stirred up (even where there is no chance of a successful revolution), and with the general purpose of counteracting the bourgeoisification of the workers, a policy fomenting catastrophes of all sorts must be adopted. But this new policy destroys the confidence of the workers. The Communists lose their members, with the exception of those who are inexperienced in real political fights. They lose exactly those whom they describe as the ‘vanguard of the working class’; their tacitly implied principle: ‘The worse things are, the better they are, since misery must precipitate revolution’, makes the workers suspicious—the better the application of this principle, the worse are the suspicions entertained by the workers. For they are realists; to obtain their confidence, one must work to improve their lot. Thus the policy must be reversed again: one is forced to fight for the immediate betterment of the workers’ lot and to hope at the same time for the opposite. With this, the ‘inner contradictions’ of the theory produce the last stage of confusion. It is the stage when it is hard to know who is the traitor, since treachery may be faithfulness and faithfulness treachery. It is the stage when those who followed the party not simply because it appeared to them (rightly, I am afraid) as the only vigorous movement with humanitarian ends, but especially because it was a movement based on a scientific theory, must either leave it, or sacrifice their intellectual integrity; for they must now learn to believe blindly in some authority. Ultimately, they must become mystics—hostile to reasonable argument. It seems that it is not only capitalism which is labouring under inner contradictions that threaten to bring about its downfall …