Order Of The Arrow Quotes

Damen now knew the precise number of arrows Laurent needed to have trained on him in order to shut him up. It was six.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING. I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers. I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive. I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going. I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going. I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing. I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge. I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more. I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to. I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself. I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb. I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going. I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones. I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God. I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge. I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going. I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going. I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds. Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--

The Warrior of the Light knows that it is impossible to live in a state of complete relaxation. He has learned from the archer that, in order to shoot his arrow any distance, he must hold the bow taut. He has learned from the stars that only an inner explosion allows them to shine. The Warrior notices that when a horse is about to jump over a fence, it tenses all its muscles. But he never confuses tension with anxiety.

Keep fighting, you daughters and sons of goats!” Birgitte yelled, loosing arrows at the mercenaries. “I might be dead, but I’m still your bloody commander, and you will obey orders!

A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree which bore golden apples. These apples were always counted, and about the time when they began to grow ripe it was found that every night one of them was gone. The king became very angry at this, and ordered the gardener to keep watch all night under the tree. The gardener set his eldest son to watch; but about twelve o'clock he fell asleep, and in the morning another of the apples was missing. Then the second son was ordered to watch; and at midnight he too fell asleep, and in the morning another apple was gone. Then the third son offered to keep watch; but the gardener at first would not let him, for fear some harm should come to him: however, at last he consented, and the young man laid himself under the tree to watch. As the clock struck twelve he heard a rustling noise in the air, and a bird came flying that was of pure gold; and as it was snapping at one of the apples with its beak, the gardener's son jumped up and shot an arrow at it. But the arrow did the bird no harm; only it dropped a golden feather from its tail, and then flew away. The golden feather was brought to the king in the morning, and all the council was called together. Everyone agreed that it was worth more than all the wealth of the kingdom: but the king said, 'One feather is of no use to me, I must have the whole bird.

It was surely well for man that he came late in the order of creation. There were powers abroad in earlier days which no courage and no mechanism of his could have met. What could his sling, his throwing-stick, or his arrow avail him against such forces as have been loose tonight? Even with a modern rifle it would be all odds on the monster.

How come love sounds so violent? You fall head over heels. You’re struck by Cupid’s arrow. You take the risk of having your heart broken. From an outside perspective, it sounds impossibly painful, not worth the trouble. And yet we do it every day. We keep coming back for more. Why? If it weren’t so perilous, maybe we wouldn’t crave it so much. Maybe it has to be brutal, in order to work. People come in so many shapes and sizes that it takes a bit of force in order to fit together perfectly. But you know what they say about a break that heals: it’s always stronger than before.

Plagues reshape our familiar social order, require us to disperse and live apart, wreck economies, replace trust with fear and suspicion, invite some to blame others for their predicament, embolden liars, and cause grief. But plagues also elicit kindness, cooperation, sacrifice, and ingenuity.

Time if the inner form of animal sense that animates events-the still frames-of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures-a series of spatial states-into an order, into the 'current' of life. Motion is created in our minds by running "film cells" together. Remember that everything you perceive-even this page-is actively, repeatedly, being constructed inside your head. It's happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain. If your mind could stop its "motor" for a moment, you'd get a freeze frame, just as the movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momentum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial states.

If I have a bow and arrow, Commander, I don't shoot a padded shaft to my target's left in order to express my annoyance. I fire a steel-tipped arrow into his leg.

The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.

Our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is therefore determined within our brain by the thermodynamic arrow of time. Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can’t have a safer bet than that!

And the other sight, five leagues nearer than Cair Paravel, was Roonwit the Centaur lying dead with a Calormene arrow in his side. I was with him in his last hour and he gave me this message to your Majesty: to remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.

It is wrong to say that schoolmasters lack heart and are dried-up, soulless pedants! No, by no means. When a child's talent which he has sought to kindle suddenly bursts forth, when the boy puts aside his wooden sword, slingshot, bow-and-arrow and other childish games, when he begins to forge ahead, when the seriousness of the work begins to transform the rough-neck into a delicate, serious and an almost ascetic creature, when his face takes on an intelligent, deeper and more purposeful expression - then a teacher's heart laughs with happiness and pride. It is his duty and responsibility to control the raw energies and desires of his charges and replace them with calmer, more moderate ideals. What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools? In young beings there is something wild, ungovernable, uncultured which first has to be tamed. It is like a dangerous flame that has to be controlled or it will destroy. Natural man is unpredictable, opaque, dangerous, like a torrent cascading out of uncharted mountains. At the start, his soul is a jungle without paths or order. And, like a jungle, it must first be cleared and its growth thwarted. Thus it is the school's task to subdue and control man with force and make him a useful member of society, to kindle those qualities in him whose development will bring him to triumphant completion.

turned to Kayla. “You can’t hear this arrow talking?” Judging from her wide eyes, I guessed the answer was, No, and does hallucinating run in the family? “Never mind.” I looked at the arrow. “What would you suggest, O Wise Missile of Dodona? My quiver is empty.” The arrow’s point dipped toward the statue’s left arm. LO, THE ARMPIT DOTH HOLD THE ARROWS THOU NEEDEST! Kayla yelled, “Colossus is heading for the cabins!” “Armpit!” I told Austin. “Flieth—er, fly for the armpit!” That wasn’t an order one heard much in combat,

Why do we need to be pardoned? What are we to be pardoned for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should we ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, break-bone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count with no one saying, “Enough!” which would at least have granted some meaning to their deaths, a meaning no one ever sought for them, the dead of all times, who are now dying once again, but now in order to live? Should we ask pardon from those who deny us the right and capacity to govern ourselves? From those who don’t respect our customs and our culture and who ask us for identification papers and obedience to a law whose existence and moral basis we don’t accept? From those who oppress us, torture us, assassinate us, disappear us from the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not too big and not too small, but just a simple piece of land on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it?

Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals.

That night in my apartment, and other nights, too, burrowed under the covers, I watch the shadows on the wall and think of meeting men, meeting men like in movies, and meeting men like Alice and her mysterious friends seem to - seem to at least in Alice’s stories - men met on buses between stops, in the frozen foods aisle, at Woolworth’s when buying a spool of thread, at the newsstand, perusing Look, in hotel lobbies, at supper clubs, while hailing cabs or looking in shop windows. Men with smooth felt hats and pencil mustaches, men with Arrow shirts and shiny hair, men eager to rush ahead for the doors and to steady your arm as you step over a wet patch on the road, men with umbrellas just when you need them, men who hold you up with a firm grip as the bus lurches before you can reach a seat, men with flickering eyes who seem to know just which coat you are trying to reach off the rack in the coffee shop, men with smooth cheeks smelling of tangy lime aftershave who would order you a gin and soda before you even knew you wanted one.

In order to penetrate the subject matter there must be, in addition, the love of teaching and the love of learning, the give and take between teacher and student, example and imitation. Beyond the technical problem, there is a personal encounter similar to that of a savage training his sons in the use of bow and arrow, or of an animal guiding its young. I am firmly convinced that one of the high orders of the universe is a pedagogical order.

With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.

a wise man should always enter those paths trodden by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if one’s own virtue does not match theirs, at least it will have the smell of it. He should do as those prudent archers do* who, aware of the strength of their bow when the target at which they are aiming seems too distant, set their sights much higher than the designated target, not in order to reach such a height with their arrow, but instead to be able, by aiming so high, to strike their target.

Could I see that God wanted to transform my life from a somewhat ugly, useless branch to an arrow, a tool usable in His hands, for the furtherance of His purposes?....To be thus transformed, was I willing - am I till willing - for the whittling, sandpapering, stripping, processes necessary in my Christian life? The ruthless pulling off of leaves and flowers might include doing without a television set or washing machine, remaining single in order to see a job done, re-evaluating the worthiness of the ambition to be a "good" doctor (according to my terms an values). The snapping of thorns might include drastic dealing with hidden jealousies and unknown prides, giving up prized rights in leadership and administration. The final stripping of the bark might include lessons to be learned regarding death to self - self-defence,self-pity, self-justification, self-vinidication, self-sufficiency, all the mechanisms of preventing the hurt of too deep involvment. Am I prepared for the pain, which may at times seem like sacrifice, in order to be made a tool in His service? My willingness will be a measure of the sincerity of my desire to express my heartfelt gratitude to Him for his so-great salvation. Can I see such minor "sacrifices" in light of the great sacrifice of Calvary, where Christ gave all for me?

In the elementary equations of the world,13 the arrow of time appears only where there is heat.* The link between time and heat is therefore fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved. In every sequence of events that becomes absurd if projected backward, there is something that is heating up.

And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading, acts that Henry and I were preforming simultaneously. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I’d read it, when it had seemed as swift and pure as the Winding Arrow, the river that divides Calormen from Archenland.

Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together. It's the least I could do. I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. The only people who don't seek me out are like Chaucer and Dante and those ancient Greeks. For whatever reason. And then there are the titles. The Sound and the Fury? Mine. Infinite Jest? Mine. Proust, Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie all have titles that are me-inspired. Brave New World? Not just the title, but half the plot has to do with my work. Even Edgar Allan Poe named a character after my Tempest's Prospero (though, not surprisingly, things didn't turn out well for him!). I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every hawk and gillyflower ... oh, I don't even know what I'm talking about half the time. I just run with it, creating some of the SEMINAL TOURS DE FORCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. You're welcome.

according to the Second Law, there is an inescapable loss of energy in the universe. And, if the world machine is really running down and approaching the heat death, then it follows that one moment is no longer exactly like the last. You cannot run the universe backward to make up for entropy. Events over the long term cannot replay themselves. And this means that there is a directionality or, as Eddington later called it, an “arrow” in time.

Interpretation of Complex Systems Kenyon B. De Greene All systems evolve, although the rates of evolution may vary over time both between and within systems. The rate of evolution is a function of both the inherent stability of the system and changing environmental circumstances. But no system can be stabilized forever. For the universe as a whole, an isolated system, time’s arrow points toward greater and greater breakdown, leading to complete molecular chaos, maximum entropy, and heat death. For open systems, including the living systems that are of major interest to us and that interchange matter and energy with their external environments, time’s arrow points to evolution toward greater and greater complexity. Thus, the universe consists of islands of increasing order in a sea of decreasing order. Open systems evolve and maintain structure by exporting entropy to their external environments.

In the elementary equations of the world,13 the arrow of time appears only where there is heat.* The link between time and heat is therefore fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved. In every sequence of events that becomes absurd if projected backward, there is something that is heating up. If I watch a film that shows a ball rolling, I cannot tell if the film is being projected correctly or in reverse. But if the ball stops, I know that it is being run properly; run backward, it would show an implausible event: a ball starting to move by itself. The ball’s slowing down and coming to rest are due to friction, and friction produces heat. Only where there is heat is there a distinction between past and future. Thoughts, for instance, unfold from the past to the future, not vice versa—and, in fact, thinking produces heat in our heads. . . .

There, in my murder theater, young Roman gladiators offered up their lives for my amusement; and all the deaths that took place there not only had to overflow with blood but also had to be performed with all due ceremony. I delighted in all forms of capital punishment and all implements of execution. But I would allow no torture devices nor gallows, as they would not have provided a spectacle of outpouring blood. Nor did I like explosive weapons, such as pistols or guns. So far as possible I chose primitive and savage weapons—arrows, daggers, spears. And in order to prolong the agony, it was the belly that must be aimed at. The sacrificial victim must send up longdrawn- out, mournful, pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the unutterable loneliness of existence. Thereupon my joy of life, blazing up from some secret place deep within me, would finally give its own shout of exultation, answering the victim cry for cry. Was this not exactly similar to the joy ancient man found in the hunt?

Geralt looked around, and quickly and easily found what he was hunting for. A second, identical arrow, lodged in the trunk of a pine tree, around six paces behind the corpse. He knew what had happened. The boy had not understood the warning, and hearing the whistle and thud of the arrow had panicked and begun to run the wrong way. Towards the one who had ordered him to stop and withdraw at once. The hissing, venomous, feathered whistle and the short thud of the arrowhead cutting into the wood. Not a step further, man, said that whistle and that thud. Begone, man, get out of Brokilon at once. You have captured the whole world, man, you are everywhere. Everywhere you introduce what you call modernity, the era of change, what you call progress. But we want neither you nor your progress here. We do not desire the changes you bring. We do not desire anything you bring. A whistle and a thud. Get out of Brokilon! Get out of Brokilon, thought Geralt. Man. No matter that you are fifteen and struggling through the forest, insane with fear, unable to find your way home. No matter that you are seventy and have to gather brushwood, because otherwise they will drive you from the cottage for being useless, they will stop giving you food. No matter that you are six and you were lured by a carpet of little blue flowers in a sunny clearing. Get out of Brokilon! A whistle and a thud. Long ago, thought Geralt, before they shot to kill, they gave two warnings. Even three. Long ago, he thought, continuing on his way. Long ago. Well, that’s progress.

It is said that when Darius first learned what had happened he gave no thought to the Ionians, knowing full well that they would be made to pay for their revolt; but he asked who the Athenians were, and then, on being told, called for his bow. Taking it up, he set an arrow on the string, shot it into the air, and said, “Grant, O Zeus, that I may punish the Athenians.” Then he ordered one of his servants every day, when his dinner was served, to repeat to him three times the words, “Master, remember the Athenians.

Sometimes pausing and listening to the flow of her distress the way one leans over to hear the sweet and incessant lament of a wellspring, she would muse about her atrocious dilemma: one alternative being her future shame, which would lead to the despair of her loved ones; the other alternative (if she did not give in) being her eternal sorrow; and she would curse herself for having so expertly dosed her love with the pleasure and the pain that she had not managed to reject immediately as an unbearable poison or to recover from subsequently. First she cursed her eyes, or perhaps before them her detestable curiosity and coquettishness, which had made her eyes blossom like flowers in order to tempt this young man, and had then exposed her to his glances, some of which were like arrows and more invincibly sweet than injections of morphine would have been. She also cursed her imagination; it had nurtured her love so tenderly that Françoise sometimes wondered if her imagination alone had given birth to this love, which now tyrannized and tortured its birth-giver.

Then Finnick suddenly grins. “Lucky thing we’re allies. Right?” Sensing a trap, I’m about to let my arrow fly, hoping it finds his heart before the trident impales me, when he shifts his hand and something on his wrist catches the sunlight. A solid-gold bangle patterned with flames. The same one I remember on Haymitch’s wrist the morning I began training. I briefly consider that Finnick could have stolen it to trick me, but somehow I know this isn’t the case. Haymitch gave it to him. As a signal to me. An order, really. To trust Finnick.

You must, in order that it shall speak to you, take a thing during a certain time as the only one that exists, as the only phenomenon which through your diligent and exclusive love finds itself set down in the center of the universe. . . . Don’t be frightened at the expression “fate” … I call fate all external events (illnesses, for example, included) which can inevitably step in to interrupt and annihilate a disposition of mind and training that is by nature solitary. . . . That went through me like an arrow, when I learned it, but like a flaming arrow that, while it pierced my heart through, left it in a conflagration of clear sight. There are few artists in our day who grasp this stubbornness, this vehement obstinacy. But I believe that without it one remains always at the periphery of art, which is rich enough as it is to allow us pleasant discoveries, but at which, nevertheless, we halt only as a player at the green table who, while he now and again succeeds with a “coup”, remains none the less at the mercy of chance, which is nothing but the docile and dexterous ape of the law.

If I could forget you! Is my love then a work of memory? Even if time expunged everything from its tablets, expunged even memory itself, my relation to you would stay just as alive, you would still not be forgotten. If I could forget you! What then should I remember? For after all, I have forgotten myself in order to remember you: so if I forgot you I would come to remember myself; but the moment I remembered myself I would have to remember you again. If I could forget you! What would happen then? There is a picture from antiquity. It depicts Ariadne. She is leaping up from her couch and gazing anxiously after a ship that is hurrying away under full sail. By her side stands Cupid with unstrung bow and drying his eyes. Behind her stands a winged female figure in a helmet. It is usually assumed this is Nemesis. Imagine this picture, imagine it changed a little. Cupid is not weeping and his bow is not unstrung; or would you have become less beautiful, less victorious, if I had become mad? Cupid smiles and bends his bow. Nemesis does not stand inactive by your side; she too draws her bow. In that other picture we see a male figure on the ship, busily occupied. It is assumed it is Theseus. Not so in my picture. He stands on the stern, he looks back longingly, spreads his arms. He has repented, or rather, his madness has left him, but the ship carries him away. Cupid and Nemesis both aim at him, an arrow flies from each bow; their aim is true; one sees that, one understands, they have both hit the same place in his heart, a sign that his love was the Nemesis that wrought vengeance." ―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_

There are three groups of people. There are the rich who are never satisfied because their wealth is never enough for them—these citizens are totally useless for the city. Then there are the poor who, because their daily bread is never enough, are dangerous because they are deceived by the tongues of crooked politicians and by their own envy and so they aim the arrows of their hatred towards the rich. And then, between these two, there is a third. This one is between them. It’s there to keep the order, it’s there to keep the city safe. —EURIPIDES, Suppliants

His hands came to her wrists, squeezed reflexively, before he got quickly to his feet. "You're mixing things up." Panic arrowed straight into his heart. "I told you sex complicates things." "Yes,you did.And of course since you're the only man I've been with, how could I knew the difference between sex and love? Then again, that doesn't take into account that I'm a smart and self-aware woman, and I know the reason you're the only man I've been with is that you're the only man I've loved.Brian..." She stepped toward him, humor flashing into her eyes when he stepped back. "I've made up my mind.You know how stubborn I am." "I train your father's horses." "So what? My mother groomed them." "That's a different matter." "Why? Oh, because she's a woman.How foolish of me not to realize we can't possibly love each other, build a life with each other.Now if you owned Royal Meadows and I worked here, then it would be all right." "Stop making me sound ridiculous." "I can't." She spread her hands. "You are ridiculous.I love you anyway. Really, I tried to approach it sensibly.I like doing things in a structured order that makes a beeline for the goal.But..." She shrugged, smiled. "It just doesn't want to work that way with you.I look at you and my heart,well, it just insists on taking over.I love you so much,Brian. Can't you tell me? Can't you look at me and tell me?" He skimmed his fingertips over the bruise high on her temple. He wanted to tend to it, to her. "If I did there'd be no going back." "Coward." She watched the heat flash into his eyes,and thought how lovely it was to know him so well. "You won't push me into a corner." Now she laughed. "Watch me," she invited and proceeded to back him up against the steps. "I've figured a lot of things out today,Brian.You're scared of me-of what you feel for me. You were the one always pulling back when we were in public, shifting aside when I'd reach for you.It hurt me." The idea quite simply appalled him. "I never meant to hurt you." "No,you couldn't.How could I help but fall for you? A hard head and a soft heart.It's irresistable. Still, it did hurt. But I thought it was just the snob in you.I didn't realize it was nerves." "I'm not a snob, or a coward." "Put your arms around me.Kiss me. Tell me." "Damn it." he grabbed her shoulders, then simply held on, unable to push her back or draw her in. "It was the first time I saw you, the first instant. You walked in the room and my heart stopped. Like it had been struck by lightning.I was fine until you walked into the room." Her knees wanted to buckle.Hard head, soft heart, and here, suddenly, a staggering sweep of romance. "Why didn't you tell me? Why did you make me wait?" "I thought I'd get over it." "Get over it?" Her brow arched up. "Like a head cold?" "Maybe." He set her aside, paced away to stare out at the hills. Keeley closed her eyes, let the breeze ruffle her hair, cool her cheeks. When the calm descended, she opened her eyes and smiled. "A good strong head cold's tough to shake off.

Destiny Enchanted cloud castle in which we're suspended... Who knows if we have not already moved through many heavens with glazed eyes? We, who are banished from time and thrust from space, we, who are refugees in the night and exiled. Who knows if we have not flown past God, for we fly off, swift as an arrow, without seeing Him and only cast our seeds wider in order to live on through darker lineage, suspended and guilty. Who knows if we died recently or long ago? The fireball containing us strains ever higher. The thin air today makes the hands lame. And what if our voice should snap and our breathing stop? Does enchantment remain for final instants?

The thing people don’t understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking.

Now, let's look again at the partial reflection of light by a layer of glass. How does it work? I talked about light reflected from the front surface and the back surface. This idea of surfaces was a simplification I made in order to keep things easy at the beginning. Light is really not affected by surfaces. An incoming photon is scattered by the electrons in the atoms inside the glass, and a new photon comes back up to the detector. It's interesting that instead of adding up all the billions of tiny arrows that represent the amplitude for all the electrons inside the glass to scatter an incoming photon, we can add just two arrows-for the "front surface" and "back surface" reflections-and come out with the same answer. Let's see why.

It won’t take long. And you know what you can do in the meantime? You can tell my friend here all about your doll.” “What?” Bellamy shot her a look. “I’m coming with you.” “No extraneous activity for you. Doctor’s orders.” Bellamy rolled his eyes, then sighed and turned to the little girl. “So…” she heard him say as she hurried off. “What’s your doll’s favorite way to hunt? Does she like spears or bows and arrows?” Clarke grinned to herself as she imagined the look of confusion on the little girl’s face, then took another flight of stairs down and turned in the direction she assumed led to the bedrooms, but the layout of this floor was different than the one above. She backtracked and tried going the other way but ended up even more turned around. The

[Chang Yu relates the following anecdote of Kao Tsu, the first Han Emperor: “Wishing to crush the Hsiung-nu, he sent out spies to report on their condition. But the Hsiung-nu, forewarned, carefully concealed all their able-bodied men and well-fed horses, and only allowed infirm soldiers and emaciated cattle to be seen. The result was that spies one and all recommended the Emperor to deliver his attack. Lou Ching alone opposed them, saying: “When two countries go to war, they are naturally inclined to make an ostentatious display of their strength. Yet our spies have seen nothing but old age and infirmity. This is surely some ruse on the part of the enemy, and it would be unwise for us to attack.” The Emperor, however, disregarding this advice, fell into the trap and found himself surrounded at Po-teng.”] 19.  Thus one who is skillful at keeping the enemy on the move maintains deceitful appearances, according to which the enemy will act. [Ts’ao Kung’s note is “Make a display of weakness and want.” Tu Mu says: “If our force happens to be superior to the enemy’s, weakness may be simulated in order to lure him on; but if inferior, he must be led to believe that we are strong, in order that he may keep off. In fact, all the enemy’s movements should be determined by the signs that we choose to give him.” Note the following anecdote of Sun Pin, a descendent of Sun Wu: In 341 B.C., the Ch’i State being at war with Wei, sent T’ien Chi and Sun Pin against the general P’ang Chuan, who happened to be a deadly personal enemy of the later. Sun Pin said: “The Ch’i State has a reputation for cowardice, and therefore our adversary despises us. Let us turn this circumstance to account.” Accordingly, when the army had crossed the border into Wei territory, he gave orders to show 100,000 fires on the first night, 50,000 on the next, and the night after only 20,000. P’ang Chuan pursued them hotly, saying to himself: “I knew these men of Ch’i were cowards: their numbers have already fallen away by more than half.” In his retreat, Sun Pin came to a narrow defile, with he calculated that his pursuers would reach after dark. Here he had a tree stripped of its bark, and inscribed upon it the words: “Under this tree shall P’ang Chuan die.” Then, as night began to fall, he placed a strong body of archers in ambush near by, with orders to shoot directly they saw a light. Later on, P’ang Chuan arrived at the spot, and noticing the tree, struck a light in order to read what was written on it. His body was immediately riddled by a volley of arrows, and his whole army thrown into confusion. [The above is Tu Mu’s version of the story; the SHIH CHI, less dramatically but probably with more historical truth, makes P’ang Chuan cut his own throat with an exclamation of despair, after the rout of his army.] ] He sacrifices something, that the enemy may snatch at it. 20.  By holding out baits, he keeps him on the march; then with a body of picked men he lies in wait for him. [With an emendation suggested by Li Ching, this then reads, “He lies in wait with the main body of his troops.”] 21.  The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, and does not require too much from individuals.

When only in her novitiate, she received as a Christmas gift from Christ a very painful heart-trouble, which lasted for the whole period of her ordained life. But God showed her inwardly its purpose: it was to atone for the decay of the spirit of the Order, and especially for the sins of her fellow sisters. But what made this trouble most painful to her was the gift which she had possessed from youth, of seeing with her mind’s eye the inner nature of man as he really was. She felt the heart-trouble physically, as if her heart were continually pierced by arrows.36 These arrows—and for her this was a far worse spiritual torment—she recognized as the thoughts, schemings, secret gossipings, misunderstandings, and uncharitable slanders with which her fellow sisters, wholly without reason and conscience, plotted against her and her God-fearing way of life.

The entropy of the world in the far past appears very low to us. But this might not reflect the exact state of the world: it might regard the subset of the world’s variables with which we, as physical systems, have interacted. It is with respect to the dramatic blurring produced by our interactions with the world, caused by the small set of macroscopic variables in terms of which we describe the world, that the entropy of the universe was low. This, which is a fact, opens up the possibility that it wasn’t the universe that was in a very particular configuration in the past. Perhaps instead it is us, and our interactions with the universe, that are particular. We are the ones who determine a particular macroscopic description. The initial low entropy of the universe, and hence the arrow of time, may be more down to us than to the universe itself. This is the basic idea.

He looks more like an elf than he does his own flesh and blood. I wouldn’t count on his loyalty any more than the Urgals’.” The third man spoke up again: “Have you noticed, he’s always freshly shaven, no mater how early in the morning we break camp?” “He must use magic for a razor.” “Goes against the natural order of things, it does. That and all the other spells being tossed around nowadays. Makes you want to hide in a cave somewhere and let the magicians kill each other off without any interference from us.” “I don’t seem to recall you complaining when the healers used a spell instead of a pair of tongs to remove that arrow from your shoulder.” “Maybe, but the arrow never would have ended up in my shoulder if it weren’t for Galbatorix. And it’s him and his magic that’s caused this whole mess.” Someone snorted. “True enough, but I’d bet every last copper I have that, Galbatorix or no, you still would’ve ended up with an arrow sticking out of you. You’re too mean to do anything other than fight.” “Eragon saved my life in Feinster, you know,” said Svern. “Aye, and if you bore us with the story one more time, I’ll have you scrubbing pots for a week.” “Well, he did…

was dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man the capstan-bars. I might have been twice as weary, yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and interesting to me—the brief commands, the shrill note of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the glimmer of the ship's lanterns. "Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave," cried one voice. "The old one," cried another. "Aye, aye, mates," said Long John, who was standing by, with his crutch under his arm, and at once broke out in the air and words I knew so well: "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—" And then the whole crew bore chorus:— "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" And at the third "Ho!" drove the bars before them with a will. Even at that exciting moment it carried me back to the old Admiral Benbow in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows; soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping to flit by on either side; and before I could lie down to snatch an hour of slumber the HISPANIOLA had begun her voyage to the Isle of Treasure. I am not going to relate that voyage in detail. It was fairly prosperous. The ship proved to be a good ship, the crew were capable seamen, and the captain thoroughly understood his business. But before we came the length of Treasure Island, two or three things had happened which require to be known. Mr. Arrow, first of all, turned out even worse than the captain had feared. He had no command among the men, and people did what they pleased with him. But that was by no means the worst of it, for after a day or two at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red cheeks, stuttering tongue, and other marks of drunkenness. Time after time he was ordered below in disgrace. Sometimes he fell and cut himself; sometimes he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of the companion; sometimes for a day or two he would be almost sober and attend to his work at least passably. In the meantime, we could never make out where he got the drink. That was the ship's mystery. Watch him as we pleased, we could do nothing to solve it; and when we asked him to his face, he would only laugh if he were drunk, and if he were sober deny solemnly that he ever tasted anything but water. He was not only useless as an officer and a bad influence amongst the men, but it was plain that at this rate he must soon kill himself outright, so nobody was much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark night, with a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more. "Overboard!" said the captain. "Well, gentlemen, that saves the trouble of putting him in irons." But there we were, without a mate; and it was necessary, of course, to advance one of the men. The boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest man aboard, and though he kept his old title,

Are we to treat persons known for liars and strife-makers as the children of the devil or not? Are we to turn away from them, and refuse to acknowledge them, rousing an ignorant strife of tongues concerning our conduct? Are we guilty of connivance, when silent as to the ambush whence we know the wicked arrow privily shot? Are we to call the traitor to account? or are we to give warning of any sort? I have no answer. Each must carry the question that perplexes to the Light of the World. To what purpose is the spirit of God promised to them that ask it, if not to help them order their way aright? One thing is plain—that we must love the strife-maker; another is nearly as plain—that, if we do not love him, we must leave him alone; for without love there can be no peace-making, and words will but occasion more strife. To be kind neither hurts nor compromises. Kindness has many phases, and the fitting form of it may avoid offence, and must avoid untruth. We must not fear what man can do to us, but commit our way to the Father of the Family. We must be nowise anxious to defend ourselves; and if not ourselves because God is our defence, then why our friends? is he not their defence as much as ours? Commit thy friend's cause also to him who judgeth righteously. Be ready to bear testimony for thy friend, as thou wouldst to receive the blow struck at him; but do not plunge into a nest of scorpions to rescue his handkerchief. Be true to him thyself, nor spare to show thou lovest and honourest him; but defence may dishonour: men may say, What! is thy friend's esteem then so small? He is unwise who drags a rich veil from a cactus-bush.

Azriel and Cassian were there in an instant, their colored shields shrinking back into their Siphons. The three of them forces of nature in the pine forest, Rhysand didn’t even look at me as he ordered Cassian, “Take her to the palace, and stay there until I’m back. Az, you’re with me.” Cassian reached for me, but I stepped away. “No.” “What?” Rhys snarled, the word near-guttural. “Take me with you,” I said. I didn’t want to go to that moonstone palace to pace and wait and wring my fingers. Cassian and Azriel, wisely, kept their mouths shut. And Rhys, Mother bless him, only tucked in his wings and crossed his arms—waiting to hear my reasons. “I’ve seen ash arrows,” I said a bit breathlessly. “I might recognize where they were made. And if they came from the hand of another High Lord … I can detect that, too.” If they’d come from Tarquin … “And I can track just as well on the ground as any of you.” Except for Azriel, maybe. “So you and Cassian take the skies,” I said, still waiting for the rejection, the order to lock me up. “And I’ll hunt on the ground with Azriel.” The wrath radiating through the snowy clearing ebbed into frozen, too-calm rage. But Rhys said, “Cassian—I want aerial patrols on the sea borders, stationed in two-mile rings, all the way out toward Hybern. I want foot soldiers in the mountain passes along the southern border; make sure those warning fires are ready on every peak. We’re not going to rely on magic.” He turned to Azriel. “When you’re done, warn your spies that they might be compromised, and prepare to get them out. And put fresh ones in. We keep this contained. We don’t tell anyone inside that court what happened. If anyone mentions it, say it was a training exercise.

Little Robin had been brought by Lord Orthallen—although he had the feeling that his lord did not realize it. The boy was a part of his household, though Orthallen seemed to have long since forgotten the fact; and when the order came to pack up the household and move to the Border, Robin found himself in the tail of the baggage train, with no small bewilderment. He'd been at a loss in the encampment, wandering about until someone had seen him and realized that a small child had no place in a camp preparing for warfare. So he was sent packing; first off with Elspeth, then pressed into service by the Healers. They'd set him to fetching and carrying for Dirk, thinking that the child was far too young to be able to pick anything up from the casual talk around him, and that Dirk wouldn't think to interrogate a child as young as he. They were wrong on both counts. Robin was very much aware of what was going on—not surprising, since it concerned his adored Talia. He was worried sick, and longing for an adult to talk to. And Dirk was kind and gentle with him—and had he but known it, desperate enough for news to have questioned the rats in the walls if he thought it would get him anywhere. Dirk knew all about Robin and his adoration of Talia. If anyone knew where she was being kept and what her condition was, that boy would. Dirk bided his time. Eventually the Healers stopped overseeing his every waking moment. Finally there came a point when they began leaving him alone for hours at a time. He waited then, until Robin was sent in alone with his lunch—alone, unsupervised, and more than willing to talk—and put the question to him. Dirk had no intention of frightening the boy, and his tone was gentle, "I need your help. The Healers won't answer my questions, and I need to know about Talia." Robin had turned back with his hand still on the doorknob; at the mention of Talia's name, his expression was one of distress. "I'll tell you what I know, sir," he replied, his voice quavering a little. "But she's hurt real bad and they won't let anybody but Healers see her." "Where is she? Do you have any idea who's taking care of her?" The boy not only knew where she was, but the names and seniority of every Healer caring for her—and the list nearly froze Dirk's heart. They'd even pulled old Farnherdt out of retirement—and he'd sworn that no case would ever be desperate enough for them to call on him.

He was taking his time on his way to the arena, which meant there was likely something he was waiting for. He didn’t intend to actually fight me, obviously, just as I didn’t intend to fight him. If all was going according to plan, and Yma had slipped the contents of the vial into the calming tonic he drank with his breakfast, the iceflowers were already swimming through his body. The timing would not be exact; that depended on the person. I would have to be ready for the potion to surprise me, or fail entirely. “You’re dawdling,” I said, hoping that calling him out would speed him up. “What is it you’re waiting for?” “I am waiting for the right blade,” Ryzek said, and he dropped down to the arena floor. Dust rose up in a cloud against his feet. He rolled up his left sleeve, baring his kill marks. He had run out of space on his arm, and started a second row next to the first, near his elbow. He claimed every kill that he ordered as his own, even if he himself had not brought about the death. Ryzek drew his currentblade slowly, and as he raised his arm, the crowd around us exploded into cheers. Their roar clouded my thoughts. I couldn’t breathe. He didn’t look pale and unfocused, like he had actually consumed the poison. He looked, if anything, more focused than ever. I wanted to run at him with blade extended, like an arrow released from a bow, a transport vessel breaking through the atmosphere. But I didn’t. And neither did he. We both stood in the arena, waiting. “What are you waiting for, sister?” Ryzek said. “Have you lost your nerve?” “No,” I said. “I’m waiting for the poison you swallowed this morning to settle in.” A gasp rattled through the crowd, and for once--for the first time--Ryzek’s face went slack with shock. I had finally truly surprised him. “All my life you’ve told me I have nothing to offer but the power that lives in my body,” I said. “But I am not an instrument of torture and execution; I am the only person who knows the real Ryzek Noavek.” I stepped toward him. “I know how you fear pain more than anything else in this world. I know that you gathered these people here today, not to celebrate a successful scavenge, but to witness the murder of Orieve Benesit.” I sheathed my blade. I held my hands out to my sides so the crowd could see that they were empty. “And the most important thing I know, Ryzek, is that you can’t bear to kill someone unless you drug yourself first. Which is why I poisoned your calming tonic this morning.” Ryzek touched his stomach, as if he could feel the hushflower eating away at his guts through his armor. “You made a mistake, valuing me only for my currentgift and my skill with a knife,” I said. And for once, I believed it.

8:00am The sun is shining, the cows are mooing, and I am ready for the mines. I hope I find something awesome today. Steve has told me about some pretty crazy things I had no idea existed. According to him, I must find empty tombs in the desert. That’s where the real treasures are. For today, I will stick to regular mining. Who knows, maybe I will come across an abandoned mine shaft; could be my lucky day.   12:30pm I was forced to come home for lunch today because I had too much stuff to carry. I was getting low on my iron ore, gold, and lapis lazuli stocks before this mine trip. It’s amazing how quick lapis goes when you are busy enchanting everything but the kitchen sink. I’d enchant that too if I had one. I wonder what an enchanted kitchen sink would do. Would it do my dishes for me? That would be so cool.   I have plenty of both now. I can make some new armor and enchant it! I love mining.   Steve decided to join me for lunch and we ate a couple of pork chops and some cake. I love cake! We ate until no more food could fill us up. Then, Steve had the guts to brag about how, when he mines, he takes a horse with extra storage so he can stay down there all day long. Well fancy you, Steve.   He also went on to tell me about how well the crops are doing these days. He thinks it’s because he is looking after them half of the time. What he doesn’t know is I throw bone marrow on them when I am working. Makes my job faster and gives me more free time so whatever you need to tell yourself, Steve.   Life may be easier switching every day between mines and farming, but it still doesn’t make me his biggest fan. I just don’t think he needs to fall in a hole, either. At least… Not right now. I would consider us to be frienemies; Friendly enemies. Yes. At times we pretend to get along, but most of the time, we are happiest doing our own thing.   6:00pm Mining this afternoon was super fun… Not! I got attacked by a partially hidden skeleton guy. I couldn’t see him enough to strike back until half of my life hearts were gone. I must not have made the space bright enough. Those guys are nasty. They are hard to kill too. If you don’t have a bow and arrow you might as well surrender. Plus, they kind of smell like death. Yuck.   Note to self: Bring more torches on the next mining day.   On the other hand, I came back with an overshare of Redstone, too much iron for my own good, and oddly, quite a few diamonds. I won’t be sharing the diamonds with anyone. They are far too precious. They will go to some new diamond pickaxes, and maybe some armor. Hmm, I could enchant those too! The iron and Redstone though, I am thinking a trip to the village may be in order. See what those up-tight weirdos are willing to trade me.   For now, it’s bedtime.   6:10pm You can only sleep at night. You can only sleep at night. You can only sleep at night.   6:11pm That stupid rule gets me every time. Why can’t I decide when it’s bed time?   First, I will go eat a cookie, then I will go to sleep. Day Thirty-Three   3:00am I just dreamt that our world was made of cookies.

After an arrow from the walls of the besieged city of Nishapur killed his son-in-law, Genghis Khan allowed his widowed daughter to decide the fate of the city: “She reportedly decreed death for all. . . . According to widely circulated but unverified stories, she ordered soldiers to pile the heads . . . in three separate pyramids—one each for the men, the women, and the children. Then she supposedly ordered that the dogs, the cats . . . be put to death so that no living creature would survive the murder [sic] of her husband” (emphasis added).5 Personally, I find it unsettling to see the victims of Genghis Khan shrugged off as easily as Holocaust-deniers ignore the Jews, and then to realize that hundreds of years from now, some historians will be rehabilitating Hitler’s reputation.

After hovering in the ethereal world of mathematics and geometry, economics was forced to crash-land and take its place in the real world of political debate. Do economists wish to pursue the Good Society in the spirit of the social contract tradition which started some time in ancient Greece, reasserted itself in Europe with J.-J.Rousseau and found its apotheosis in John Rawls? Or do they wish for a social contract which effectively rules the State out as anything other than a provider of order and security—a tradition which began with Thomas Hobbes and culminated in Robert Nozick’s theory? Or, indeed can economists think of something in between? Thus economics is back into the mire courtesy of Arrow’s third theorem, which dispels any hopes of a Rational Society springing from some form of advanced utility maximisation. Economics can no longer escape the political, philosophical debates which resonate across the humanities—from literature to sociology and from politics to moral philosophy. This is a good thing. At last, economics can become interesting again after a century of continuous pedantry.

I lay there, and I thought grumpy thoughts that were only partly generated by my waking up so recently. I grumbled, and it might even be said that I pouted. But eventually a small but potent voice sounded in the depths of my very being, that tiny nagging whisper that has so often guided me, the righteous glowing arrow that always points my way, lights my footsteps, and sends me down the right path, no matter what. There is no denying this Voice when it speaks, for it is never wrong and never out of order. It spoke to me now, softly but insistently, and what it said was, I’m hungry.

As if this wasn’t enough, word spread of a new peril. Enemy troops masquerading as refugees were said to be infiltrating the lines. From now on, the orders ran, all women were to be challenged by rifle. What next? wondered Lance Bombardier Gentry; Germans in drag! Fear of Fifth Columnists spread like an epidemic. Everyone had his favorite story of German paratroopers dressed as priests and nuns. The men of one Royal Signals maintenance unit told how two “monks” visited their quarters just before a heavy bombing attack. Others warned of enemy agents, disguised as Military Police, deliberately misdirecting convoys. There were countless tales of talented “farmers” who cut signs in corn and wheat fields pointing to choice targets. Usually the device was an arrow; sometimes a heart; and in one instance the III Corps fig leaf emblem. The

Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” Is there a prayerless father reading this? May God let the arrow go down into your soul! Make up your mind that, God helping you, you will get the children in. God’s order is to the father first, but if he isn’t true to his duty, then the mother should be true, and save the children from the wreck. Now is the time to do it while you have them under your roof. Exert your parental influence over them.

It was ... more easier, sir. Than being a copper, I mean. I mean you're a soldier, right, and the other buggers is the enemy. You march into some big field somewhere and all form up into them oblongs, and then a bloke with a feathery helmet gives the order, and you all forms up into big arrows -" [...] ... anyway, it's just a case of watching your back and walloping any bloke in the wrong uniform. But ...", Fred Colon's face screwed up in agonized thought, "well, when you're a copper, well, you dunno the good guys from the bad guys without a map, miss, and that's a fact.

But ... there's military law, isn't there?" "Well, yes ... but when it's pissing with rain and when you're up to your tonk– your waist in dead horses and someone gives you an order, that ain't the time to look up the book of rules, miss. Anyway, of it's about when you're allowed to get shot, sir." "Oh, I'm sure there's more to it than that, sergeant." "Oh, prob'ly, sir," Colon conceded diplomatically. "I'm sure there's lots of stuff about not killing enemy soldiers who've surrendered, for instance." "Oh, yerss, there's that, captain. Doesn't say you can't duff 'em up a bit, of course. Give 'em a little something to remember you by." "Not torture?" said Angua. "Oh, no, miss. But ... " Memory Lane for Colon had turned into a bad road through a dark valley "... well, when your best mate's got an arrow in his eye an' there's blokes and horses screamin' all around you and you're scared shi– you're really scared, an' you come across one of the enemy ... well, for some reason or other you've got this kinda urge to give him a bit of a ... nudge, sort of thing. Just ... you know ... like, maybe in twenty years' time his leg'll twinge a bit on frosty days and he'll remember what he done, that's all.

The Religious Man or Woman is a popular story option in which we try to reduce the wildness of life by constructing a system of promises and rewards, a contract that will obligate God to grant us exemption from the Arrows. It really doesn’t matter what the particular group bargain is—doctrinal adherence, moral living, or some sort of spiritual experience— the desire is the same: taming God in order to tame life. Never mind those deep yearnings of the soul; never mind the nagging awareness that God is not cooperating. If the system isn’t working, it’s because we’re not doing it right.

Roaring he swept back over the town. A hail of dark arrows leaped up and snapped and rattled on his scales and jewels, and their shafts fell back kindled by his breath burning and hissing into the lake. No fireworks you ever imagined equalled the sights that night. At the twanging of the bows and the shrilling of the trumpets the dragon’s wrath blazed to its height, till he was blind and mad with it. No one had dared to give battle to him for many an age; nor would they have dared now, if it had not been for the grim-voiced man (Bard was his name), who ran to and fro cheering on the archers and urging the Master to order them to fight to the last arrow.

Attack!” the general ordered. Nar’s eyes went wide and he ducked back inside the tunnel just in time to avoid a volley of arrows aimed directly at him.

Carroll and other physicists believe that order is intimately connected to the “arrow” of time. In particular, the forward direction of time is determined by the movement of order to disorder.

Take for instance a phenomenon called frustrated spontaneous emission. It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with. In fact, it involves the decay of radioactive particles, which ordinarily takes place at a predictably random rate. The exception, however, is when radioactive material is placed in an environment that cannot absorb the photons that are emitted by decay. In that case, decay ceases—the atoms become “frustrated.” How do these atoms “know” to stop decaying until conditions are suitable? According to Wharton, the unpredictable decay of radioactive particles may be determined in part by whatever receives their emitted photons in the future.20 Decay may not really be random at all, in other words. Another quantum mystery that arguably becomes less mysterious in a retrocausal world is the quantum Zeno effect. Usually, the results of measurements are unpredictable—again according to the famous uncertainty believed to govern the quantum kingdom—but there is a loophole. Persistent, rapid probing of reality by repeating the same measurement over and over produces repetition of the same “answer” from the physical world, almost as if it is “stopping time” in some sense (hence the name of the effect, which refers to Zeno’s paradoxes like an arrow that must first get halfway to its target, and then halfway from there, and so on, and thus is never able to reach the target at all).21 If the measurement itself is somehow influencing a particle retrocausally, then repeating the same measurement in the same conditions may effectively be influencing the measured particles the same way in their past, thereby producing the consistent behavior. Retrocausation may also be at the basis of a long-known but, again, hitherto unsatisfyingly explained quirk of light’s behavior: Fermat’s principle of least time. Light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination, which means taking the shortest available path through different media like water or glass. It is the rule that accounts for the refraction of light through lenses, and the reason why an object underwater appears displaced from its true location.22 It is yet another example of a creature in the quantum bestiary that makes little sense unless photons somehow “know” where they are going in order to take the most efficient possible route to get there. If the photon’s angle of deflection when entering a refractive medium is somehow determined by its destination, Fermat’s principle would make much more sense. (We will return to Fermat’s principle later in this book; it plays an important role in Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the wonderful precognition movie Arrival.) And retrocausation could also offer new ways of looking at the double-slit experiment and its myriad variants.

The explosion came with the birth of the skyscraper. When structures began to rise not in tier on ponderous tier of masonry, but as arrows of steel shooting upward without weight or limit, Henry Cameron was among the first to understand this new miracle and to give it form. He was among the first and the few who accepted the truth that a tall building must look tall. While architects cursed, wondering how to make a twenty-story building look like an old brick mansion, while they used every horizontal device available in order to cheat it of its height, shrink it down to tradition, hide the shame of its steel, make it small, safe and ancient—Henry Cameron designed skyscrapers in straight, vertical lines, flaunting their steel and height. While architects drew friezes and pediments, Henry Cameron decided that the skyscraper must not copy the Greeks. Henry Cameron decided that no building must copy any other.

For the director of music. To the tune of “Do Not Destroy.” Of David. A miktam.14 When he had fled from Saul into the cave. Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me, for in you I take refuge. I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed. I cry out to God Most High, to God, who vindicates me. He sends from heaven and saves me, rebuking those who hotly pursue me—15 God sends forth his love and his faithfulness. I am in the midst of lions; I am forced to dwell among ravenous beasts— men whose teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let your glory be over all the earth. They spread a net for my feet— I was bowed down in distress. They dug a pit in my path— but they have fallen into it themselves. My heart, O God, is steadfast, my heart is steadfast; I will sing and make music. Awake, my soul! Awake, harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn. I will praise you, LORD, among the nations; I will sing of you among the peoples. For great is your love, reaching to the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the skies. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let your glory be over all the earth.

Sampath remembered how he had not at any time ever managed to solve a problem put to him by Father Matthew Mathematics, never managed to rake and weed those forests of numbers and letters upon the board into tidy rows following an orderly progression of arrows to a solution that matched the one in the list of answers at the back of the textbook.

Just by quietly listening to my issues last week, and instead of sending me home with another diet and exercise regime, immediately ordered tests to get to the bottom of it. I can't wait to find out what the results were on Monday. It's almost sick when you think about it, wanting for something to be wrong, but struggling a lifetime knowing your complaints are not a figment of your imagination. Beating down doors of doctors and specialists, only to be told it's all in your mind

Cordone, delighted with himself for swindling the gullible Indians out of a fortune in pearls, stood at the railing of his ship smiling down at the pursuers. He was about to order his soldiers to fire upon the Indians when he was struck in the chest by an arrow. He dropped to the deck.

Perhaps writing only arouses the passions in order to allay them, as beaters flush out the game in order to expose it to the hunter's arrows.

I boiled the premise down to the symbols for entropy and syntropy, which are arrows pointing outward and inward, basically representing chaos and order. I had covered the chaos—break things!—and now I wanted to know what the tech powers were going to do to put things back in order.

Are their weapons like my weapons?" continued the ape-man. "There are mine over in the corner of the room; your men took them away from me. Look at them." Even the elder officer seemed interested. "Bring them here," he ordered one of the warriors. The man brought them and laid them on the table before the two officers; the spear, the bow, the quiver of arrows, the grass rope, and the knife. The two men picked them up one by one and examined them carefully. Both seemed interested.

[26:18, 19] Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbor and says, “I was only joking!

Draw an arrow from your stomach to your cunt,” he ordered, picking another fresh spot on my neck to ruin. “Above it, you’re going to write Dump cum here, and then you’re going to fucking beg for me to dump my cum inside you, like a good little slut.

is a result of environment. Our cognitions—our idea of reality—are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses. We think we’re seeing the world as it really is, but you of all people know…it’s all just shadows on the cave’s wall. We’re just as blinkered as our water-dwelling ancestors, the boundaries of our brains just as much an accident of evolution. And like them, by definition, we can’t see what we’re missing. Or…we couldn’t, until now.” Helena remembers Slade’s mysterious smile that night at dinner, so many months ago. “Piercing the veil of perception,” she says. “Exactly. To a two-dimensional being, traveling along a third dimension wouldn’t just be impossible, it’d be something they couldn’t conceive of. Just as our brains fail us here. Imagine if you could see the world through the eyes of more advanced beings—in four dimensions. You could experience events in your life in any order. Relive any memory you want.” “But that’s…it’s…ridiculous. And it breaks cause and effect.” Slade smiles that superior smile again. Still one step ahead. “Quantum physics is on my side here, I’m afraid. We already know that on the particle level, the arrow of time isn’t as simple as humans think it is.” “You really believe time is an illusion?” “More like our perception of it is so flawed that it may as well be an illusion. Every moment is equally real and happening now, but the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one slice at a time. Think of our life like a book. Each page a distinct moment. But in the same way we read a book, we can only perceive one moment, one page, at a time. Our flawed perception shuts off access to all the others. Until now.” “But how?” “You once told me that memory is our only true access to reality. I think you were right. Some other moment, an old memory, is just as much now as this sentence I’m speaking, just as accessible as walking into the room next door. We just needed a way to convince our brains of that. To short-circuit our evolutionary limitations and expand our consciousness beyond our sensory volume.” Her head is spinning.

arrow. Henrich argues that the reason people become so deferential (starstruck) toward prestigious people is that they are motivated to get close to prestigious people in order to maximize their own learning and raise their own prestige by association.

Stay close to those who, when you made a mistake, never said: “I would have done it differently.” They did not make that particular mistake and so are in no position to judge. Avoid those who seek friends in order to maintain a certain social status or to open doors they would not otherwise be able to approach. Stay close to those who are interested in opening only one important door: the door to your heart. They will never invade your soul without your consent or shoot a deadly arrow through that open door.

Blindness is another classic castration symbol, according to Freud, and the template for the “blind prophet” goes back to the ancients, including the mythological backstory of Freud’s favorite tragedy Oedipus the King. That story is in some sense just as relevant to the tragic life of Robertson as it is to that of Freud, but in a very different way. Oedipus’s self-blinding when he realizes his own guilt links him to the blind seer Tiresias, who announces the king’s guilt at the end of the tragedy. Audiences would have known the mythological backstory of the seer and his blindness, just as they knew that of Oedipus. In his younger days, Tiresias had come upon two entwined snakes in the forest and touched them with his staff; upon doing so, he was transformed into a woman. After living as a woman for seven years, Tiresias encountered the snakes again, touched them, and was turned back into a man. Summoned to Mount Olympus to report on his experience, he revealed to Hera, in front of her husband Zeus, that (based on his extensive experience) women get much more enjoyment from sex than men do. Hera blinded him in punishment for revealing this secret, and Zeus gave him prophetic foresight in recompense. Tiresias thus reveals an ancient symbolic association between these two ideas, prophecy and sexual/gender liminality or boundary-crossing.20 The symbolism of the Sphinx, the guardian whose riddle Oedipus had to answer to become King (and thus to marry his mother), is also relevant here. Sphinxes are symbolic guardians of time,21 and not accidentally, sphinx is closely related to the word sphincter: a guardian (literally a “strangler”) designed to mainly admit the passage of things in one direction but sometimes capable of admitting other things traveling in reverse. As I hinted earlier, suggesting that the normal order of causality can be transgressed arouses similar hostile reactions from skeptical guardians of Enlightenment science that the prospect of a phallus—the ultimate “causal arrow”—moving the wrong way through a sphincter arouses in gatekeepers of patriarchal “Christian” morals. In a sense, Oedipus and Tiresias were permutations of the same basic possibility—transgression of some kind of sexual boundary, punished by symbolic castration but also (at least in Tiresias’s case) compensated with foresight. Transgressive enjoyment, which “impossibly” connects the future to the past, is thus what turns precognition into a psychoanalytic problem. As with Tiresias, the point of Oedipus’s story is not merely that he “traveled the wrong way through time” by marrying his mother and killing his father; it is that he committed these crimes and enjoyed them, and only belatedly discovered what it was that he had been enjoying. His guilt was not over his actions but over his enjoyment. Our ignorance as to our enjoyment (that is, our blindness to it) allows both the past and future to affect our lives in uncanny and seemingly “impossible” ways like the kinds of coincidences and twists of fate that seem to have characterized Robertson’s life.

Although it may not be immediately apparent, we have now come to an intriguing point. The second law of thermodynamics seems to have given us an arrow of time, one that emerges when physical systems have a large number of constituents. “For things with many constituents, going from lower to higher entropy—from order to disorder—is easy, so it happens all the time. Going from higher to lower entropy—from disorder to order—is harder, so it happens rarely, at best.

I have found that there is an order of magnitude difference between bearing the ultimate responsibility for decision-making and being either an advisor or student of the process,” he wrote. “It’s one thing to experience an orgasm or an arrow between your ribs and it’s another thing to read about it.

I'd known grief and loss, but I'd never known loneliness.

The story, then, seems rather simple: when iron is cold, the forces of order win out; when hot, the battle goes the other way and chaos rules. But this leaves out the juiciest detail. At some intermediate temperature, the forces of order and chaos must fight to a stalemate. This is the critical point, and in iron, it occurs at 770 degrees Celsius. What happens to the army of arrows at this point? What does it mean for something to be neither organized nor disorganized, but somehow perched on the delicate boundary between the two? The answers to these questions are rather more elusive.

With moist eyes, Rikshavi raised her bow and released an arrow towards the bird. But the arrow missed the bird. The bird simply flew away, shocked by the arrow which zipped past it. Rikshavi desperately shot another arrow in the direction of the flying bird, but in vain. “Hadn’t I told you to ensure that you do not miss the target, Rikshavi?” the Acharya sternly asked, “You purposely missed the target, didn’t you?” “No Acharya, I tried my best. Believe me; I did not do it purposely. Forgive me, Acharya,” Rikshavi tearily said and looked at her mother for validation. “She is not lying, Acharya. I know my daughter,” Bhairavi added. The Acharya suddenly broke into a smile. “I know that, Bhairavi. Rikshavi is not lying. But tell me child, if you had earnestly tried to target the bird, why did you miss it? I have not seen you missing a single target until now.” Rikshavi was confused. She had made up her mind to shoot the bird. Why couldn’t she still hit the target? The Acharya continued, “You are an intuitive archer, my child. Unless your subconscious mind accepts a target, your body will not align itself towards it. Though you had consciously decided to shoot the bird as per my order, your heart felt compassion for it. Hence your subconscious mind did not allow you to shoot it. Even if you try this again, you will not be successful.

As a society, we pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time. We privilege autonomy, and end up bound by rules to which we never assented, and more spied on than any people since the beginning of time. We pursue leisure through technology, and discover that the average working day is longer than ever, and that we have less time than we had before. The means to our ends are ever more available, while we have less sense of what our ends should be, or whether there is purpose in anything at all. Economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash: they promptly crash. We are so eager that all scientific research result in ‘positive findings’ that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable, and therefore discovers less and less that is a truly significant advance in scientific thinking. We grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian, in order to get value for money, and thus render it pointless and, in this form, certainly a waste of resource. We ‘improve’ education by dictating curricula and focussing on exam results to the point where free-thinking, arguably an overarching goal of true education, is discouraged; in our universities many students are, in any case, so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threaten to examine the model critically; and their teachers, who should know better, in a serious dereliction of duty, collude. We over-sanitise and cause vulnerability to infection; we over-use antibiotics, leading to super-bacteria that no antibiotic can kill; we make drugs illegal to protect society, and, while failing comprehensively to control the use of drugs, create a fertile field for crime; we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope with – let alone relish – uncertainty or risk, and are rendered vulnerable. The left hemisphere’s motivation is control; and its means of achieving it alarmingly linear, as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of interactions

There is no limit to the foolishness of men of my age. Our only excuse is that we leave no mark of our own on the girls who pass through our hands: our convoluted desires, our ritualized lovemaking, our elephantine ecstasies are soon forgotten, they shrug off our clumsy dance as they drive straight as arrows into the arms of men whose children they will bear, the young and vigorous and direct. Our loving leaves no mark. Whom will that other girl with the blind face remember: me with my silk robe and my dim lights and my perfumes and oils and my unhappy pleasures, or that other cold man with the mask over his eyes who gave the orders and pondered the sounds of her intimate pain? Whose was the last face she saw plainly on this earth but the face behind the glowing iron? Though I cringe with shame, even here and now, I must ask myself whether, when I lay head to foot with her, fondling and kissing those broken ankles, I was not in my heart of hearts regretting that I could not engrave myself on her as deeply.

captured, their small knives, the only weapons they had, would have been of no use against the arrows of the elves that could hit a bird’s eye in the dark. So they simply stopped dead and sat down and waited—all except Bilbo, who popped on his ring and slipped quickly to one side. That is why, when the elves bound the dwarves in a long line, one behind the other, and counted them, they never found or counted the hobbit. Nor did they hear or feel him trotting along well behind their torch-light as they led off their prisoners into the forest. Each dwarf was blindfold, but that did not make much difference, for even Bilbo with the use of his eyes could not see where they were going, and neither he nor the others knew where they had started from anyway. Bilbo had all he could do to keep up with the torches, for the elves were making the dwarves go as fast as ever they could, sick and weary as they were. The king had ordered them to make haste. Suddenly the torches stopped, and the hobbit had just time to catch them up before they began to cross the bridge. This was the bridge that led across the river to the king’s doors. The water flowed dark and swift and strong beneath; and at the far end were gates before the mouth of a huge cave that ran into the side of a steep slope covered with trees. There the great beeches came right down to the bank, till their feet were in the stream. Across the bridge the elves thrust their prisoners, but Bilbo hesitated in the rear. He did not at all like the look of the cavern-mouth, and he only made up his mind not to desert his friends

There is an old Georgian tale about the old king who was dying. He had twelve sons, and he called them all to his death bed. He gave them a bundle of twelve arrows to break them together. None of them could break the bundle. Then the king separated the bundle and gave each one an arrow, and as was expected, everyone was able to break it. The old king told them that if they would stay together, the enemy could never defeat them as they couldn’t break the bundle. But if they would separate, the enemy could conquer them easily. In a relationship, the enemy is any problem the couple has. Unfortunately, what often happens is that when the couple has arguments, they see each other as enemies, instead of seeing the problem itself as an enemy. It’s not “Me versus you,” it’s “Us versus the problem.” We don’t have to be separated when we have issues, we have to unite in order to resolve the issue.

It was necessary to invent history in order to invent the future. The sense of necessity in Cromwell and Lenin (and even in Jefferson) springs from an obsession with time, change, an obsession with cause and effect that starts to make the effect seem like the cause of its own cause. The future is the cause of the past, and we play antiquarian games to reassure ourselves that the past is past and different so that we can believe that the future will be different too.

At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men...Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.

As the battle began Ivo Taillefer, the minstrel knight who had claimed the right to make the first attack, advanced up the hill on horseback, throwing his lance and sword into the air and catching them before the English army. He then charged deep into the English ranks, and was slain. The cavalry charges of William’s mail-clad knights, cumbersome in manœuvre, beat in vain upon the dense, ordered masses of the English. Neither the arrow hail nor the assaults of the horsemen could prevail against them. William’s left wing of cavalry was thrown into disorder, and retreated rapidly down the hill. On this the troops on Harold’s right, who were mainly the local “fyrd”, broke their ranks in eager pursuit. William, in the centre, turned his disciplined squadrons upon them and cut them to pieces. The Normans then re-formed their ranks and began a second series of charges upon the English masses, subjecting them in the intervals to severe archery. It has often been remarked that this part of the action resembles the afternoon at Waterloo, when Ney’s cavalry exhausted themselves upon the British squares, torn by artillery in the intervals. In both cases the tortured infantry stood unbroken. Never, it was said, had the Norman knights met foot-soldiers of this stubbornness. They were utterly unable to break through the shield-walls, and they suffered serious losses from deft blows of the axe-men, or from javelins, or clubs hurled from the ranks behind. But the arrow showers took a cruel toll. So closely, it was said, were the English wedged that the wounded could not be removed, and the dead scarcely found room in which to sink upon the ground. The autumn afternoon was far spent before any result had been achieved, and it was then that William adopted the time-honoured ruse of a feigned retreat. He had seen how readily Harold’s right had quitted their positions in pursuit after the first repulse of the Normans. He now organised a sham retreat in apparent disorder, while keeping a powerful force in his own hands. The house-carls around Harold preserved their discipline and kept their ranks, but the sense of relief to the less trained forces after these hours of combat was such that seeing their enemy in flight proved irresistible. They surged forward on the impulse of victory, and when half-way down the hill were savagely slaughtered by William’s horsemen. There remained, as the dusk grew, only the valiant bodyguard who fought round the King and his standard. His brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, had already been killed. William now directed his archers to shoot high into the air, so that the arrows would fall behind the shield-wall, and one of these pierced Harold in the right eye, inflicting a mortal wound. He fell at the foot of the royal standard, unconquerable except by death, which does not count in honour. The hard-fought battle was now decided. The last formed body of troops was broken, though by no means overwhelmed. They withdrew into the woods behind, and William, who had fought in the foremost ranks and had three horses killed under him, could claim the victory. Nevertheless the pursuit was heavily checked. There is a sudden deep ditch on the reverse slope of the hill of Hastings, into which large numbers of Norman horsemen fell, and in which they were butchered by the infuriated English lurking in the wood. The dead king’s naked body, wrapped only in a robe of purple, was hidden among the rocks of the bay. His mother in vain offered the weight of the body in gold for permission to bury him in holy ground. The Norman Duke’s answer was that Harold would be more fittingly laid upon the Saxon shore which he had given his life to defend. The body was later transferred to Waltham Abbey, which he had founded. Although here the English once again accepted conquest and bowed in a new destiny, yet ever must the name of Harold be honoured in the Island for which he and his famous house-carls fought indomitably to the end.

Pick an act or task. Think back on your day and choose one self-contained, seemingly insignificant act that you performed. (Hint: pick something you think is routine and boring.) This could be saying hi to another person, smiling at someone, or having a conversation in line for coffee. The key is that you choose an act that happened only once. Try to avoid general actions that span a longer time frame like, “I went to work.” Be very specific. Now, write down what you did or said. Imagine. Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” This is where the fun starts. Start to imagine and follow the “ripple” of the act that you wrote down. Who did and could the act impact? How? Did it change someone’s emotions? Did it change someone’s mind-set? Someone’s perception? Did it change the simple direction they were walking or what flavor latte they ordered? Now, start thinking about one step removed from your act. What changed as a result of the initial change the act caused? Now keep imagining, step by step, how each act builds on the former, describing what and who changed after each successive act. Keep going until you reach a point of global impact. Now, if you’re like me, you will inevitably get to the point of saying to yourself “no way this would ever happen” or “this is so cheesy.” This is the precise barrier you need to break through. Our doubt can consume us and bring us down into a nice, comfortable place called complacency. Map it. As you trace your act, literally draw it out. Draw one arrow or path leading from one effect to the next and write out a short description of each effect as you go. Try to imagine at least ten steps removed from the original act until you reach a global level of impact. The first time you do this, it will be very hard. But do it daily, weekly, or monthly and it can change your thinking. Believe it. Once you finish your map, you’re not done. Now, you have to believe it. Do you believe that this is all possible? What if you did this exercise for every moment in your day? Imagine if just one of those trajectories turned out the way you imagined. One will. I never imagined that when I said, “Hey, how’s it going?” to a fellow student during my summer job it would completely transform her entire life trajectory. But I wish I had every day. My alarm clock would have meant much more.

I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization. There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end.

Autumn Psalm A full year passed (the seasons keep me honest) since I last noticed this same commotion. Who knew God was an abstract expressionist? I’m asking myself—the very question I asked last year, staring out at this array of racing colors, then set in motion by the chance invasion of a Steller’s jay. Is this what people mean by speed of light? My usually levelheaded mulberry tree hurling arrows everywhere in sight— its bow: the out-of-control Virginia creeper my friends say I should do something about, whose vermilion went at least a full shade deeper at the provocation of the upstart blue, the leaves (half green, half gold) suddenly hyper in savage competition with that red and blue— tohubohu returned, in living color. Kandinsky: where were you when I needed you? My attempted poem would lie fallow a year; I was so busy focusing on the desert’s stinginess with everything but rumor. No place even for the spectrum’s introverts— rose, olive, gray—no pigment at all— and certainly no room for shameless braggarts like the ones that barge in here every fall and make me feel like an unredeemed failure even more emphatically than usual. And here they are again, their fleet allure still more urgent this time—the desert’s gone; I’m through with it, want something fuller— why shouldn’t a person have a little fun, some utterly unnecessary extravagance? Which was—at least I think it was—God’s plan when He set up (such things are never left to chance) that one split-second assignation with genuine, no-kidding-around omnipotence what, for lack of better words, I’m calling vision. You breathe in, and, for once, there’s something there. Just when you thought you’d learned some resignation, there’s real resistance in the nearby air until the entire universe is swayed. Even that desert of yours isn’t quite so bare and God’s not nonexistent; He’s just been waylaid by a host of what no one could’ve foreseen. He’s got plans for you: this red-gold-green parade is actually a fairly detailed outline. David never needed one, but he’s long dead and God could use a little recognition. He promises. It won’t go to His head and if you praise Him properly (an autumn psalm! Why didn’t I think of that?) you’ll have it made. But while it’s true that my Virginia creeper praises Him, its palms and fingers crimson with applause, that the local breeze is weaving Him a diadem, inspecting my tree’s uncut gold for flaws, I came to talk about the way that violet-blue sprang the greens and reds and yellows into action: actual motion. I swear it’s true though I’m not sure I ever took it in. Now I’d be prepared, if some magician flew into my field of vision, to realign that dazzle out my window yet again. It’s not likely, but I’m keeping my eyes open though I still wouldn’t be able to explain precisely what happened to these vines, these trees. It isn’t available in my tradition. For this, I would have to be Chinese, Wang Wei, to be precise, on a mountain, autumn rain converging on the trees, a cassia flower nearby, a cloud, a pine, washerwomen heading home for the day, my senses and the mountain so entirely in tune that when my stroke of blue arrives, I’m ready. Though there is no rain here: the air’s shot through with gold on golden leaves. Wang Wei’s so giddy he’s calling back the dead: Li Bai! Du Fu! Guys! You’ve got to see this—autumn sun! They’re suddenly hell-bent on learning Hebrew in order to get inside the celebration, which explains how they wound up where they are in my university library’s squashed domain. Poor guys, it was Hebrew they were looking for, but they ended up across the aisle from Yiddish— some Library of Congress cataloger’s sense of humor: the world’s calmest characters and its most skittish squinting at each other, head to head, all silently intoning some version of kaddish. Part 1

Half-a-dozen men had emerged on foot from the woods on the far side of the road. They were led by a man mounted on a horse – a burly man with long unkempt hair curling from underneath a polished bronze helmet and merging into a great bushy black beard. He wore a burnished breastplate and carried himself with some authority. His companions, clustered behind him, carried an assortment of weaponry, mostly staffs and bows with arrows strung but not drawn. Sister Fidelma had no knowledge of what the man shouted, but it was clearly an order, and it took little guessing that it was an order for her to desist in her task.

Time’s arrow is simply a reflection of the inexorable march from statistically unlikely ordered arrangements to more likely disordered ones. There’s a subtle point here: a movie showing heat flowing back into an oven isn’t showing something that couldn’t happen; it’s showing something that’s extremely unlikely to happen.

Cloud, still on orders, took me directly to Aletha without worrying about stray arrows flying about his head. He stopped in front of her with a pleased swish of the tail and glanced back at me, eyes saying, Didn’t I do good? “You did great,” I praised him, patting him on the neck. “Good horse.

During the era of the Warring States in ancient China, the state of Qi found itself threatened by the powerful armies of the state of Wei. The Qi general consulted the famous strategist Sun Pin (a descendant of Suntzu himself), who told him that the Wei general looked down on the armies of Qi, believing that their soldiers were cowards. That, said Sun Pin, was the key to victory. He proposed a plan: Enter Wei territory with a large army and make thousands of campfires. The next day make half that number of campfires, and the day after that, half that number again. Putting his trust in Sun Pin, the Qi general did as he was told. The Wei general, of course, was carefully monitoring the invasion, and he noted the dwindling campfires. Given his predisposition to see the Qi soldiers as cowards, what could this mean but that they were defecting? He would advance with his cavalry and crush this weak army; his infantry would follow, and they would march into Qi itself. Sun Pin, hearing of the approaching Wei cavalry and calculating how fast they were moving, retreated and stationed the Qi army in a narrow pass in the mountains. He had a large tree cut down and stripped of its bark, then wrote on the bare log, “The general of Wei will die at this tree.” He set the log in the path of the pursuing Wei army, then hid archers on both sides of the pass. In the middle of the night, the Wei general, at the head of his cavalry, reached the place where the log blocked the road. Something was written on it; he ordered a torch lit to read it. The torchlight was the signal and the lure: the Qi archers rained arrows on the trapped Wei horsemen. The Wei general, realizing he had been tricked, killed himself. Sun Pin based his baiting of the Wei general on his knowledge of the man’s personality, which was arrogant and violent. By turning these qualities to his advantage, encouraging his enemy’s greed and aggression, Sun Pin could control the man’s mind. You, too, should look for the emotion that your enemies are least able to manage, then bring it to the surface. With a little work on your part, they will lay themselves open to your counterattack.

Making medical decisions was like being led to a table and forced to select the revolver, the chainsaw, the meat cleaver, the bow and arrow—not which one, but which order.” This is how I would describe our journey with this vile cancer and our decision-making processes as well. You listen to the doctors and believe what they say to be the Gospel, because, what is the alternative? They are the experts. But none of your options are ideal. Do you even call them options? Or are they simply different forms of torture?

Each room had seen several years of princes, running feet, and impatient questions as Mrong Banh explained science and stars to Garan Tamuron’s sons, but the round room most crowded with memories was this one in the middle of the cylinder, its sliding door opening onto a walkway-hall two floors above the ground. A long heavy wooden table stood in the exact center, and a small arrow-chamber off its interior side, curtained away, was where the astrologer often prepared tea for his guests. Shelves and scroll-racks marched in orderly, curved ranks in every direction, crammed with paper and scroll cases of wood, hide, ribbons of jointed bone. Some of the shelves held astrologer’s implements or other scientific junk, and good-luck charms hung from them next to babu and paper models of fantastical machines or structures. The high wooden ceiling was studded with hooks, and sometimes Banh had hung particular models or constellation-shapes from them to teach princes the movements of the Five Winds—or other forces—upon the night sky.

When Trenton Merricks, the UVA philosopher who does not believe in chairs, gave up the fish, he got another arrow in his quiver. “I’m not that shocked,” he told me after I breathlessly informed him of the dissolution of the category. This is exactly what he’s trying to get his students to understand. That we barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet. That we have been wrong before and we will be wrong again. That the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.

Between Xaden’s status, the western line retreating toward Draithus, and growing resentment between the Aretian riders and Navarrians over the debate of whether or not to open our borders, this whole place feels like a bow with its string pulled tight, just waiting for the order to be fired. And we’re the arrows.