Parcels To Go Quotes

We residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little - handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get 'done' and 'through' and go somewhere else. The result is they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl.

An inclination to play God was part and parcel of wanting to go out and terraform other worlds, but good practice was to at least play nicely with the rest of the pantheon.

Tod stammered, hand to his throat, eyes wide and filled with panic. Then he shrieked, “The custom order baby blue, aqua and teal M&M’s have already arrived! There’s nine pounds of them already parceled out and ribboned up for wedding gifts! What am I going to do with nine pounds of baby blue, aqua and teal M&M’s?

As Maia turned to go, hardly believing that there could be such happiness, she heard a loud splash. Miss Minton was leaning over the side, watching the parcel she had held on her knees floating away downriver. “What was that?” asked Maia. Miss Minton straightened herself. If you must know,” she said, “it was my corset.

You know, this always happens. Whenever I go away, I always think I'll come back to mountains of exciting posts, with parcels and telegrams and letters full of scintillating news - and I'm always disappointed. In fact, I really think someone should set up a company called holidaypost.com which you would pay to write you loads of exciting letters, just so you had something to look forward to when you got home.

I can stand you all being a lot worse now, because I can always go there. It's when I haven't got anywhere to go that I get mad straight away. But if I go there for half an hour it's beautiful to come back.

But just as a vaccine company facing bankruptcy will ultimately survive not by making the world's greatest vaccine but, rather, the world's worst virus, so, too, did bodyguard and security firms need the world's most evil terrorists in order to prosper, not the greatest security experts. That was capitalism, Hanja understood how the world could curl around and bite its own tail like the uroboros serpent. And he knew how to translate that into business and extract the maximum revenue. There was no better business model than owning both the virus and the vaccine. With one hand you parceled out fear and instability, and with the other you guaranteed safety and peace. A business like that would never go under.

I was thinking that if I'd had the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this prison guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids now. It would be nice, living by the sea with piles of kids and pigs and chickens, wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee.

If I was going to kill myself, I think I'd take sleeping pills or jump off a bridge...but that would be pretty scary. How would you want to go, Dalton?" "I'd wanna be catapulted into a tree shredder, then put in different parcels and mailed to all the people I hate.

True imagination and creativity don’t come from thinking outside the box or letting ourselves go wild, just as true spontaneity does not come from dancing on a table on the weekend while you remain in your tedious job. They don’t come out of great disruptive moments that break forth from an otherwise ordinary, drab life. They are part and parcel of how we live our every day; all moments can be creative and spontaneous when we experience the entire world as an open and expansive place. We get there by constantly cultivating our ability to imagine transcending our own experience.

only to reminisce about his high school career, which included a failed stint at quarterback. Finally, Parcells said, “We’re going to come

Oh, pfft. I manage. With any paper one sticks under their nose and plenty of self-possession, one can get through, Especially a woman. Sometimes I take an armload of parcels and bags and drop every single one as I try to find my identity cards, chatting all the while, and they wave me through out of sheer irritation.' Lili exhaled a long steam of smoke. 'To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring. I think that's why women are good as it. Our lives are already boring. We jump an Uncle Edward's offer because we can't stand the thought of working in a file room anymore, or teaching a class full of runny-nosed children their letters. Then we discover this job is deadly dull as well, but at least there's the enlivening thought that someone might put a Luger to the back of our necks. It's still better than shooting ourselves, which we know we're going to do if we have to type one more letter or pound one more Latin verb into a child's ivory skull.

Labeled like parcels—Caroline Wendy Willow and Nicholas Peter Willow—only with no address to be sent to. None of them, not even the teachers, knew where they were going. “That’s part of the adventure,” Carrie’s mother had said, and not just to cheer them up; it was her nature to look on the bright side. If she found herself in hell, Carrie thought now, she’d just say, “Well, at least we’ll be warm.

In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made. I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.

I have a thin skin. I think this is part and parcel of depression and anxiety - to be precise - being a person quite likely to get depression and anxiety … I don’t fight it. I accept things more. This is who I am. And besides, fighting it actually makes it worse. The trick is to befriend depression and anxiety. To be thankful for them, because you can deal with them a lot better. And the way I have befriended them is by thanking them for my thin skin. Sure, without a thin skin I would have never known those terrible days of nothingness. Those days of either panic, or intense, bone-scorching lethargy. The days of self-hate, or drowning under invisible waves. I sometimes felt, in my self-pity, too fragile for a world of speed and right angles and noise. (I love Jonathan Rottenberg’s evolutionary theory of depression, that is to do with the being unable to adapt to the pendent: 'An ancient mood system has collided with a highly novel operating environment created by a remarkable species.’) But would I go along to a magical mind spa and ask for a skin-thickening treatment? Probably not. You need to feel life’s terror to feel its wonder.

And we were in our thirties. Well into the Age of Boredom, when nothing is new. Now, I’m not being self-pitying; it’s simply true. Newness, or whatever you want to call it, becomes a very scarce commodity after thirty. I think that’s unfair. If I were in charge of the human life span, I’d make sure to budget newness much more selectively, to ration it out. As it is now, it’s almost used up in the first three years of life. By then you’ve seen for the first time, tasted for the first time, held something for the first time. Learned to walk, talk, go to the bathroom. What have you got to look forward to that can compare with that? Sure, there’s school. Making friends. Falling in love. Learning to drive. Sex. Learning to trade. That has to carry you for the next twenty-five years. But after that? What’s the new excitement? Mastering your home computer? Figuring out how to work CompuServe? “Now, if it were up to me, I’d parcel out. So that, say, at thirty-five we just learned how to go on the potty. Imagine the feeling of accomplishment! They’d have office parties. "Did you hear? The vice president in charge of overseas development just went a whole week without his diaper. We’re buying him a gift." It’d be beautiful.

By a mad miracle I go intact Among the common rout Thronging sidewalk, street, And bickering shops; Nobody blinks a lid, gapes, Or cries that this raw flesh Reeks of the butcher’s cleaver, Its heart and guts hung hooked And bloodied as a cow’s split frame Parceled out by white-jacketed assassins.

Hence we may, with proper precautions, regard a certain humility as the overall characteristic of medieval art. Of the art; not always of the artists. Self-esteem may arise within any occupation at any period. A chef, a surgeon, or a scholar, may be proud, even to arrogance, of his skill; but his skill is confessedly the means to an end beyond itself, and the status of the skill depends wholly on the dignity or necessity of that end. I think it was then like that with all the arts. Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims. Perhaps they might not all have fully agreed with the statement that poetry is infima inter omnes doctrinas.17 But it awoke no such hurricane of protest as it would awake today. In this great change something has been won and something lost. I take it to be part and parcel of the same great process of Internalisation18 which has turned genius from an attendant daemon into a quality of the mind. Always, century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to the subject’s. And now, in some extreme forms of Behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we ‘go from that’ is a dark question.

She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica's store sells in April.. there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida... but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrink-wrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica's little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then trows them in the same trash bin where her corn husks and citrus rinds go.

Publication – is the Auction (788) Publication – is the Auction Of the Mind of Man – Poverty – be justifying For so foul a thing Possibly – but We – would rather From Our Garret go White – unto the White Creator – Than invest – Our Snow – Thought belong to Him who gave it – Then – to Him Who bear It's Corporeal illustration – sell The Royal Air – In the Parcel – Be the Merchant Of the Heavenly Grace – But reduce no Human Spirit To Disgrace of Price –

It's a tiny, inexpungable parcel of fear, yet not incapacitating nor even a source of much worry. He never feels dread or anxiety with Odo, never anything so lingering. It rather goes like this: The ape appears without the least sound, seemingly out of nowhere, and among the emotions Peter feels--the surprise, the wonder, the pleasure, the joy--there is a pulse of fear.He can do nothing about it except wait for the pulse to go away. That is a lesson he has learned, to treat fear as a powerful but topical emotion. He is afraid only when he needs to be.

Everything happens for a reason,” can fuck off to a frigid cave, I am more than willing to extend my feelings around birth on to death, the other big thing we all get to do. We don’t know what will happen and it’s not our job to know. Just go for the ride, baby! If it weren’t cool, (literally) everyone wouldn’t be doing it. Death is a bridge. And just like a little baby coming into the world brings with it a secret parcel of knowledge you can’t get anywhere else, you’ll only get to know what’s on the other side of that bridge when you’re ready (and dead).

How many miles have we done in her?” she asked. “More than a hundred and fifty thousand,” said Arthur. “Have you checked we’ve got enough fuel?” “She’s as ready for us as we are for her.” “Then let’s go.” Arthur opened the boot and placed the suitcases inside. Then, from the workbench, he picked up the hosepipe and, using parcel tape, attached one end to the exhaust pipe and the other to a crack in the side window, padding the rest of the gap with an old beach towel. Finally, he climbed into the van to join June and turned on the ignition. “Where do you fancy going then?” June asked as the engine chugged. “We never made it to Barcelona and I always wanted to climb the steps up La Sagrada Família. It looks so beautiful in photographs.” “Then let’s go there first.” She reached out her hand to entwine her fingers around his. His eyes welled as he offered his wife a grin as broad as any he had given her during their lifetime together. Then he wiped the tears away and closed his eyes. “It’s you and me to the end, girl,” Arthur whispered. “You and me,” she repeated, and he could smell her apple blossom shampoo as she leaned her head onto his shoulder. And together, they set off on their final adventure together.

The truth is that, properly understood, confession is a key strength of the Christian faith and a vital part of countering hypocrisy. For a start, open, voluntary confession is part and parcel of a strong and comprehensive view of truth, and therefore of realism and responsibility. Whatever we do and have done, whether right or wrong, is a matter of record and reality. Responsibly owning up to it therefore aligns us to reality and to truth in a way that liberates. And far from being weak or an act of surrender, confession is the expression of rare moral courage, for in confessing a person demonstrates the strength of character to go on record against himself or herself.

The air was steeped with the heady fragrance of roses, as if the entire hall had been rinsed with expensive perfume. "Good Lord!" she exclaimed, stopping short at the sight of massive bunches of flowers being brought in from a cart outside. Mountains of white roses, some of them tightly furled buds, some in glorious full bloom. Two footmen had been recruited to assist the driver of the cart, and the three of them kept going outside to fetch bouquet after bouquet wrapped in stiff white lace paper. "Fifteen dozen of them," Marcus said brusquely. "I doubt there's a single white rose left in London." Aline could not believe how fast her heart was beating. Slowly she moved forward and drew a single rose from one of the bouquets. Cupping the delicate bowl of the blossom with her fingers, she bent her head to inhale its lavish perfume. Its petals were a cool brush of silk against her cheek. "There's something else," Marcus said. Following his gaze, Aline saw the butler directing yet another footman to pry open a huge crate filled with brick-sized parcels wrapped in brown paper. "What are they, Salter?" "With your permission, my lady, I will find out." The elderly butler unwrapped one of the parcels with great care. He spread the waxed brown paper open to reveal a damply fragrant loaf of gingerbread, its spice adding a pungent note to the smell of the roses. Aline put her hand over her mouth to contain a bubbling laugh, while some undefinable emotion caused her entire body to tremble. The offering worried her terribly, and at the same time, she was insanely pleased by the extravagance of it. "Gingerbread?" Marcus asked incredulously. "Why the hell would McKenna send you an entire crate of gingerbread?" "Because I like it," came Aline's breathless reply. "How do you know this is from McKenna?" Marcus gave her a speaking look, as if only an imbecile would suppose otherwise. Fumbling a little with the envelope, Aline extracted a folded sheet of paper. It was covered in a bold scrawl, the penmanship serviceable and without flourishes. No miles of level desert, no jagged mountain heights, no sea of endless blue Neither words nor tears, nor silent fears will keep me from coming back to you. There was no signature... none was necessary. Aline closed her eyes, while her nose stung and hot tears squeezed from beneath her lashes. She pressed her lips briefly to the letter, not caring what Marcus thought. "It's a poem," she said unsteadily. "A terrible one." It was the loveliest thing she had ever read. She held it to her cheek, then used her sleeve to blot her eyes. "Let me see it." Immediately Aline tucked the poem into her bodice. "No, it's private." She swallowed against the tightness of her throat, willing the surge of unruly emotion to recede. "McKenna," she whispered, "how you devastate me.

There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short market-gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown-paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting. The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out of their local stagnation many such creatures, blind and helpless, like moles disinterred. Valentin was a skeptic in the severe style of France, and could have no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and this one might have provoked pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had to be careful, because he had something made of real silver "with blue stones" in one of his brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness with saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham with all his parcels, and came back for his umbrella.

Well, happy birthday anyway.” “Wow--that’s right, I forgot! I’m seventeen!” Harry seized the wand lying beside his camp bed, pointed it at the cluttered desk where he had left his glasses, and said, “Accio Glasses!” Although they were only around a foot away, there was something immensely satisfying about seeing them zoom toward him, at least until they poked him in the eye. “Slick,” snorted Ron. Reveling in the removal of his Trace, Harry sent Ron’s possessions flying around the room, causing Pigwidgeon to wake up and flutter excitedly around his cage. Harry also tried tying the laces of his trainers by magic (the resultant knot took several minutes to untie by hand) and, purely for the pleasure of it, turned the orange robes on Ron’s Chudley Cannons posters bright blue. “I’d do your fly by hand, though,” Ron advised Harry, sniggering when Harry immediately checked it. “Here’s your present. Unwrap it up here, it’s not for my mother’s eyes.” “A book?” said Harry as he took the rectangular parcel. “Bit of a departure from tradition, isn’t it?” “This isn’t your average book,” said Ron. “It’s pure gold: Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches. Explains everything you need to know about girls. If only I’d had this last year I’d have known exactly how to get rid of Lavender and I would’ve known how to get going with…Well, Fred and George gave me a copy, and I’ve learned a lot. You’d be surprised, it’s not all about wandwork, either.

Perhaps the heritability of IQ implies something entirely different, something that once and for all proves that Galton’s attempt to discriminate between nature and nurture is misconceived. Consider this apparently fatuous fact. People with high IQ s, on average, have more symmetrical ears than people with low IQ s. Their whole bodies seem to be more symmetrical: foot breadth, ankle breadth, finger length, wrist breadth and elbow breadth each correlates with IQ. In the early 1990s there was revived an old interest in bodily symmetry, because of what it can reveal about the body’s development during early life. Some asymmetries in the body are consistent: the heart is on the left side of the chest, for example, in most people. But other, smaller asymmetries can go randomly in either direction. In some people the left ear is larger than the right; in others, vice versa. The magnitude of this so-called fluctuating asymmetry is a sensitive measure of how much stress the body was under when developing, stress from infections, toxins or poor nutrition. The fact that people with high IQs have more symmetrical bodies suggests that they were subject to fewer developmental stresses in the womb or in childhood. Or rather, that they were more resistant to such stresses. And the resistance may well be heritable. So the heritability of IQ might not be caused by direct ‘genes for intelligence’ at all, but by indirect genes for resistance to toxins or infections – genes in other words that work by interacting with the environment. You inherit not your IQ but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances. How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture? It is frankly impossible.

The children slept late, and washed and dressed almost in silence. Both of them were afraid to speak. Maia packed her belongings in an old canvas bag and stroked the dog. “I’ll come over in a minute to say good-bye,” said Finn. The Carters’ boat was ready to leave, breakfast tidied away, ropes coiled. The professor was sorting out the firebox and feeding in fresh logs. Miss Minton, sitting in the stern, had a parcel wrapped in burlap on her knees. “I’m ready,” said Maia, trying to keep her voice steady. She mustn’t cry. Above all, she mustn’t sulk. “Finn’s coming over to say good-bye.” “No need,” said Miss Minton. “He’d like to.” “All the same, there is no need.” Maia looked at her governess. Miss Minton seemed different…Softer? Rounder? More at peace? “Why?” she asked. “Why is there no need?” “Because we’re coming with you. We’re going on. Get back on the Arabella and tell Finn we’ll follow three lengths behind.” As Maia turned to go, hardly believing that there could be such happiness, she heard a loud splash. Miss Minton was leaning over the side, watching the parcel she had held on her knees floating away downriver. “What was that?” asked Maia. Miss Minton straightened herself. If you must know,” she said, “it was my corset.

Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They could not separate them against their wills, she said. Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers, and tied the parcel almost without looking, sitting beside him, he thought, as if all her petals were about her. She was a flowering tree; and through her branches looked out the face of a lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest. Staggering he saw her mount the appalling staircase, laden with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to Court, men who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion; who different in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw another), yet judges they were; who mixed the vision and the sideboard; saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. “Must” they said. Over them she triumphed. “There!” she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get at them. She would put them away. And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down beside him and called him by the name of that hawk or crow which being malicious and a great destroyer of crops was precisely like him. No one could separate them, she said.

After this interlude we return to the question of the parcel. Yes, says the Postmaster, it has been here – actually here in the office! But it is here no longer. It has been removed to the custody of the Customs. Monsieur B. must realize that parcels are subject to Customs dues. B. says that it is personal wearing apparel. The Postmaster says: ‘No doubt, no doubt; but that is the affair of the Customs.’ ‘We must, then, go to the Customs office?’ ‘That will be the proper procedure,’ agrees the Postmaster. ‘Not that it will be any use going today. Today is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays the Customs are closed.’ ‘Tomorrow, then?’ ‘Yes, tomorrow the Customs will be open.’ ‘Sorry,’ says B. to Max. ‘I suppose it means I shall have to come in again tomorrow to get my parcel.’ The Postmaster says that certainly Monsieur B. will have to come in tomorrow, but that even tomorrow he will not be able to get his parcel. ‘Why not?’ demands B. ‘Because, after the formalities of the Customs have been settled, the parcel must then go through the Post Office.’ ‘You mean, I shall have to come on here?’ ‘Precisely. And that will not be possible tomorrow, for tomorrow the Post Office will be closed,’ says the Postmaster triumphantly. We go into the subject in detail, but officialdom triumphs at every turn. On no day of the week, apparently, are both the Customs and the Post Office open!

The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

We all go through periods of dryness in our prayers, don’t we? I doubt (but ask your directeur) whether they are necessarily a bad symptom. I sometimes suspect that what we feel to be our best prayers are really our worst; that what we are enjoying is the satisfaction of apparent success, as in executing a dance or reciting a poem. Do our prayers sometimes go wrong because we insist on trying to talk to God when He wants to talk to us? Joy tells me that once, years ago, she was haunted one morning by a feeling that God wanted something of her, a persistent pressure like the nag of a neglected duty. And till mid-morning she kept on wondering what it was. But the moment she stopped worrying, the answer came through as plain as a spoken voice. It was “I don’t want you to do anything. I want to give you something”; and immediately her heart was full of peace and delight. St. Augustine says “God gives where He finds empty hands”. A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift. Perhaps these parcels are not always sins or earthly cares, but sometimes our own fussy attempts to worship Him in our way. Incidentally, what most often interrupts my own prayers is not great distractions but tiny ones—things one will have to do or avoid in the course of the next hour. . . . Yes—it is sometimes hard to obey St. Paul’s “Rejoice”. We must try to take life moment by moment. The actual present is usually pretty tolerable, I think, if only we refrain from adding to its burden that of the past and the future. How right Our Lord is about “sufficient to the day”. Do even pious people in their reverence for the more radiantly divine element in His sayings, sometimes attend too little to their sheer practical common-sense? . . . Let us by all means pray for one another: it is perhaps the only form of “work for re-union” which never does anything but good. God bless you.

I’ll tell you what’s true,’ said Weston presently. ‘What?’ ‘A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody’s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother’s dead body is laid out–and then runs away and has bad dreams. An enormous grandmother, you understand.’ ‘What do you mean by saying that’s truer?’ ‘I mean that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide.’ Ransom said nothing. ‘Lots of things,’ said Weston presently. ‘Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night, and the grown-ups tell them not to be silly: but the children know better than the grown-ups. People in Central Africa doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night–and missionaries and civil servants say it’s all superstition. Well, the blacks know more about the universe than the white people. Dirty priests in back streets in Dublin frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. You’d say they are unenlightened. They’re not: except that they think there is a way of escape. There isn’t. That is the real universe, always has been, always will be. That’s what it all means.’ ‘I’m not quite clear–’ began Ransom, when Weston interrupted him. ‘That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now–a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then–the real universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre–to live one week, one day, one half hour longer–that’s the only thing that matters. Of course you don’t know it: but every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. You say “What difference does a short reprieve make?” What difference!!’ ‘But nobody need go there,’ said Ransom. ‘I know that’s what you believe,’ said Weston. ‘But you’re wrong. It’s only a small parcel of civilised people who think that. Humanity as a whole knows better. It knows–Homer knew–that all the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. All witless, all twittering, gibbering, decaying. Bogeymen. Every savage knows that all ghosts hate the living who are still enjoying the rind: just as old women hate girls who still have their good looks. It’s quite right to be afraid of the ghosts. You’re going to be one all the same.’ ‘You don’t believe in God,’ said Ransom. ‘Well, now, that’s another point,’ said Weston. ‘I’ve been to church as well as you when I was a boy. There’s more sense in parts of the Bible than you religious people know. Doesn’t it say He’s the God of the living, not of the dead? That’s just it. Perhaps your God does exist–but it makes no difference whether He does or not. No, of course you wouldn’t see it; but one day you will. I don’t think you’ve got the idea of the rind–the thin outer skin which we call life–really clear. Picture the universe as an infinite glove with this very thin crust on the outside. But remember its thickness is a thickness of time. It’s about seventy years thick in the best places. We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe–He’s outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn’t follow us in. You would express it by saying He’s not in time–which you think comforting! In other words He stays put: out in the light and air, outside. But we are in time. We “move with the times”. That is, from His point of view, we move away, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was. He may be there in what you call “Life”, or He may not. What difference does it make? We’re not going to be there for long!

In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the many, and, from compromise to compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing—the world is rationally organized to do the rest. But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?" Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's voice? Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy- minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer—"Top! und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way. Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea. The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words: "All is needed and essential—even you with your sick soul and heart. All are one

Eat, woman,” he bellowed, leaning over her, prepared to force the remainder of her meal into her opened mouth. “I would,” she said in a strained voice, “But there is a giant attached to my chin. Perhaps if he would be so gracious as to remove the cured pork from my pack, I would share it with him.” Rautu’s eyes blazed in senseless joy. He released his companion and hastened toward her effects, rummaging through them with great anticipation. He found a small brown parchment parcel and assumed that this was the source of his happiness. He sniffed the outside of the paper and hummed in delight for the exquisite scent. He tore open the barrier between him and his prize and he was compelled to smile when remarking the numerous slices of meat in his hands. He began eating them immediately, leaving no time between one slice and the next to savour that which he had longed to again taste. The superior fare of Frewyn had been the chief of his consolation during the war, and if he was to remain on the islands with all its splendor, all its comforting familiarity, all its temperate climate, and all its horrendous food, he would relish this last ember of bliss before being made to suffer a diet of steamed grains again. “I did say share,” the commander called out. “I am responsible for securing your life,” he replied with a full mouth and without turning around. “And I thanked you accordingly.” The commander’s remonstrations were unanswered, and she scoffed in aversion as she watched the voracious beast consume nearly all the provisions she had been saving for the return journey. “I know you shall not be satisfied until you have all the tribute in the world, but that pork does belong to me, Rau.” “You are not permitted to have meat while taking our medicines,” he said, dismissively. She peered at him in circumspection. “I don’t recall you mentioning that stipulation before. I find it convenient that you should care to do so now.” The giant paused, his cheeks filled with pork. “And?” he said, shoving another slice into his mouth. “And,” she laughed, “You’re going to allow me to starve on your inedible bread while you skulk off with something that was meant for both of us?” “Perhaps.” “Savior, indeed,” the commander fleered. “You have saved me from one means of death only to plunge me into another.

I am in no rush. Let Life happen to me just as Life has planned. Because at the end of the day, when the sun sets there is always a horizon somewhere waiting to call forth another sun, in a paradox of Time. Because at the end of each chapter, the story walks towards its culmination. But just like it is not in the setting or rising of the sun but in the sunshine that one basks, just like it is not the finishing line but the voyage through the storyline where one finds the true understanding of the book, Life is about exploring the voyage all the while knowing full well that each chapter shall find its beginning middle and end just how it's meant to be. It is about the truth that Life is but a dream in Time's illusion and the only sharp truth is to love and be loved, and through that assemble moments in Time that smile beyond Time, to make a garden of experiences through lessons and understandings that Life puts at our journey only to walk us closer to our destination. It is not about the destination rather about the journey, and perhaps about who we share the journey with at each crossroad. And no matter how Time walks by, until and unless we cross all the alleys along the way, until and unless we climb up the peak bit by bit, we cannot reach that destination where we belong. But if we tread along the mountain peak or a winding alley soaking in all the freshness of the air enjoying the crispness of our walk, the journey becomes even more enriching not just to our soul but to all of our senses and our very heart. While if we try to run along the way, we might actually topple down a bad turn, taking in a scar that might demand another cup of our soul's portion to heal. Such is Life. A journey that takes smiles and tears, a voyage that bathes in hope and hopelessness, but in all of it, it never stays stagnant, always tiptoeing to exactly where we are meant to be, at any point of our journey. So when something seems to go stagnant or few things make no sense, I tell myself to pause and pat my soul acknowledging each and every decision or detour of mine as part and parcel of Life's plan. I close my eyes and breathe in the freshness of air that flows in every part of my soul to know, to feel alive to all that this journey has shared with me, while believing in the grace and magnanimity of Time who takes Time but eventually shows and leads us to where we belong. And I hear my heart smiling, Let Life happen to me just as Life has planned. I am in no rush.

children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane. All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference. Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more like a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture; you must trust that you being a very good you matters somehow. That trying to be an honest and tender parent will echo for centuries through your tribe. That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will somehow matter in the social fabric, save a thread or two from unraveling. And you must do all of this with the sure and certain knowledge that you will never get proper credit for it, at all, one bit, and in fact the vast majority of the things you do right will go utterly unremarked; except, perhaps, in ways we will never know or understand, by the Arab Jew who once shouted about his cloak, and may have been somehow also the One who invented and infuses this universe and probably a million others—not to put a hard number on it or anything. Humility, the final frontier, as my late brother Kevin used to say. When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or several at once, sometimes; when we are older we take on other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you and I both know men and women who become trapped in the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to escape who they no longer wish to be; but finally, I think, if we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief, that none among us is actually rich or famous or more beautiful than another; and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and true finally about humility. This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that there is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love. That could be. I wouldn’t know; I am a muddle and a conundrum, shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

to look at Louisa, stroked her cheek, and was rewarded by a dazzling smile. She had been surprised by how light-skinned the child was. Her features were much more like Eva’s than Bill’s. A small turned-up nose, big hazel eyes, and long dark eyelashes. Her golden-brown hair protruded from under the deep peak of her bonnet in a cascade of ringlets. “Do you think she’d come to me?” Cathy asked. “You can try.” Eva handed her over. “She’s got so heavy, she’s making my arms ache!” She gave a nervous laugh as she took the parcel from Cathy and peered at the postmark. “What’s that, Mam?” David craned his neck and gave a short rasping cough. “Is it sweets?” “No, my love.” Eva and Cathy exchanged glances. “It’s just something Auntie Cathy’s brought from the old house. Are you going to show Mikey your flags?” The boy dug eagerly in his pocket, and before long he and Michael were walking ahead, deep in conversation about the paper flags Eva had bought for them to decorate sand castles. Louisa didn’t cry when Eva handed her over. She seemed fascinated by Cathy’s hair, and as they walked along, Cathy amused her by singing “Old MacDonald.” The beach was only a short walk from the station, and it wasn’t long before the boys were filling their buckets with sand. “I hardly dare open it,” Eva said, fingering the string on the parcel. “I know. I was desperate to open it myself.” Cathy looked at her. “I hope you haven’t built up your hopes, too much, Eva. I’m so worried it might be . . . you know.” Eva nodded quickly. “I thought of that too.” She untied the string, her fingers trembling. The paper fell away to reveal a box with the words “Benson’s Baby Wear” written across it in gold italic script. Eva lifted the lid. Inside was an exquisite pink lace dress with matching bootees and a hat. The label said, “Age 2–3 Years.” Beneath it was a handwritten note:   Dear Eva, This is a little something for our baby girl from her daddy. I don’t know the exact date of her birthday, but I wanted you to know that I haven’t forgotten. I hope things are going well for you and your husband. Please thank him from me for what he’s doing for our daughter: he’s a fine man and I don’t blame you for wanting to start over with him. I’m back in the army now, traveling around. I’m due to be posted overseas soon, but I don’t know where yet. I’ll write and let you know when I get my new address. It would be terrific if I could have a photograph of her in this little dress, if your husband doesn’t mind. Best wishes to you all, Bill   For several seconds they sat staring at the piece of paper. When Eva spoke, her voice was tight with emotion. “Cathy, he thinks I chose to stay with Eddie!” Cathy nodded, her mind reeling. “Eddie showed me the letter he sent. Bill wouldn’t have known you were in Wales, would he? He would have assumed you and Eddie had already been reunited—that he’d written with your consent on behalf of you both.” She was afraid to look at Eva. “What are you going to do?” Eva’s face had gone very pale. “I don’t know.” She glanced at David, who was jabbing a Welsh flag into a sand castle. “He said he was going to be posted overseas. Suppose they send him to Britain?” Cathy bit her lip. “It could be anywhere, couldn’t it? It could be the other side of the world.” She could see what was going through Eva’s mind. “You think if he came here, you and he could be together without . . .” Her eyes went to the boys. Eva gave a quick, almost imperceptible nod, as if she was afraid someone might see her. “What about Eddie?” “I don’t know!” The tone of her voice made David look up. She put on a smile, which disappeared the

Quality cannot be tested in” is so cliché it has to be true. From automobiles to software, if it isn’t built right in the first place, then it is never going to be right. Ask any car company that has ever had to do a mass recall how expensive it is to bolt on quality after the fact. Get it right from the beginning or you’ve created a permanent mess. However, this is neither as simple nor as accurate as it sounds. Although it is true that quality cannot be tested in, it is equally evident that without testing, it is impossible to develop anything of quality. How does one decide if what you built is high quality without testing it? The simple solution to this conundrum is to stop treating development and test as separate disciplines. Testing and development go hand in hand. Code a little and test what you built. Then code some more and test some more. Test isn’t a separate practice; it’s part and parcel of the development process itself.

BACK AT THE railway station, Ivan Grigoryevich began to feel that there was no point in wandering about Leningrad any longer. He stood inside the cold, high building and pondered. And it is possible that one or two of the people who passed the gloomy old man looking up at the black departures board may have thought, ‘There – a Russian from the camps, a man at a crossroads, contemplating, choosing which path to follow.’ But he was not choosing a path; he was thinking. During the course of his life dozens of interrogators had understood that he was neither a monarchist, nor a Social Revolutionary, nor a Social Democrat; that he had never been part of either the Trotskyist or the Bukharinist opposition. He had never been an Orthodox Christian or an Old Believer; nor was he a Seventh Day Adventist. There in the station, thinking about the painful days he had just spent in Moscow and Leningrad, he remembered a conversation with a tsarist artillery general who had at one time slept next to him on the bed boards of a camp barrack. The old man had said, ‘I’m not leaving the camp to go anywhere else. It’s warm in here. There are people I know. Now and again someone gives me a lump of sugar, or a bit of pie from a food parcel.’ He had met such old men more than once. They had lost all desire to leave the camp. It was their home. They were fed at regular hours. Kind comrades sometimes gave them little scraps. There was the warmth of the stove. Where indeed were they to go? In the calcified depths of their hearts some of them stored memories of the brilliance of the chandeliers in the palaces of Tsarskoye Selo,37 or of the winter sun in Nice. Others remembered their neighbour, Mendeleyev, coming round to drink tea with them; or they remembered Scriabin, Repin or the young Blok. Others preserved, beneath ash that was still warm, the memories of Plekhanov, Gershuni and Trigoni, of friends of the great Zhelyabov. There had been instances of old men being released from a camp and asking to be readmitted. The whirl of life outside had knocked them off their feet. Their legs were weak and trembling, and they had been terrified by the cold and the solitude of the vast cities. Now Ivan Grigoryevich felt like going back again behind the barbed wire himself. He wanted to seek out those who had grown so accustomed to their barrack stoves, so at home with their warm rags and their bowls of thin gruel. He wanted to say to them, ‘Yes, freedom really is terrifying.’ And he would have told these frail old men how he had visited a close relative, how he had stood outside the home of the woman he loved, how he had bumped into a comrade from his student days who had offered to help him. And then he would have gone on to say to these old men of the camps that there is no higher happiness than to leave the camp, even blind and legless, to creep out of the camp on one’s stomach and die – even only ten yards from that accursed barbed w

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Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, had conservatives frothing at the mouth when he suggested that a few acts of terrorism now and again were basically part and parcel of living in a big cosmopolitan city. I don’t think he meant to make excuses for the terrorists’ actions—though, since he is a man who merrily attends gender-segregated events to suck up to Muslims with regressive social attitudes, who knows? What I think he was getting at was that these occasional horrors were a price worth paying for multiculturalism.

Girls,” Kathleen said sharply, “bring that back here at once!” But it was too late. The receiving room’s double doors closed, accompanied by the click of a key turning in the lock. Kathleen stopped short, her jaw slackening. West and Helen staggered together, overcome with hilarity. “I’ll have you know,” Mrs. Church said in amazement, “it took our two stoutest footmen to bring that crate into the house. How did two young ladies manage to carry it away so quickly?” “Sh-sheer determination,” Helen wheezed. “All I want in this life,” West told Kathleen, “is to see you try to pry that crate away from those two.” “I wouldn’t dare,” she replied, giving up. “They would do me bodily harm.” Helen wiped at a stray tear of mirth. “Come, Kathleen, let’s go see what Mr. Winterborne sent. You too, Mrs. Church.” “They won’t let us into the room,” Kathleen muttered. Helen grinned at her. “They will if I ask.” The twins, busy as squirrels, had already unpacked a multitude of wrapped parcels when they finally allowed everyone into the receiving room.

It was then, after my presentations to thirty-two generals, that I first began to see how similar the approach to leadership problems was throughout our civilization. After two days of presentations, a three-star general, the commander of an entire Army corps—two panzer divisions—stood up and said to me, “You know, one of our problems is that the sergeant-majors coddle the new recruits, and we keep telling them that such helpfulness will not make them very good soldiers in the field.” And then he turned to his fellow officers and said, “But from what Ed has been saying here the past two days, we’re not going to have any more luck changing the sergeant-majors than they are having trying to change the new recruits.” Now this man had three stars on his shoulder; how much more authority would you want? He commanded more weapons of destruction than exploded in all of World War II; how much more power do you need? Yet neither his authority nor his power were enough to ensure a “command presence.” And I began to think about similar frustrations reported to me by imaginative psychiatrists who were frustrated by head nurses, creative clergy who were stymied by church treasurers, aggressive CEOs who were hindered by division chiefs, mothers who wished to take more responsible stands with their children but who were blindsided by their chronically passive husbands, not to mention my experience of watching nine eager Presidents sabotaged by a chronically recalcitrant Congress. Eventually I came to see that this “resistance,” as it is usually called, is more than a reaction to novelty; it is part and parcel of the systemic process of leadership. Sabotage is not merely something to be avoided or wished away; instead, it comes with the territory of leading, whether the “territory” is a family or an organization. And a leader’s capacity to recognize sabotage for what it is—that is, a systemic phenomenon connected to the shifting balances in the emotional processes of a relationship system and not to the institution’s specific issues, makeup, or goals—is the key to the kingdom. My

what she ought to have done as soon as she discovered that Lady Webb was not in London to help her. She was going to find the Earl of Durbury if he was still in town. If he was not, she was going to find out where the Bow Street Runners had their headquarters and go there. She was going to write to Charles. She was going to tell her story to anyone who would listen. She was going to embrace her fate. Perhaps she would be arrested and tried and convicted of murder. Perhaps that would mean a hanging or at the very least transportation or lifelong imprisonment. But she would not give in meekly. She would fight like the very devil to the last moment—but not by running away and hiding. She was going to come out into the open at last and fight. But not just yet. That was the agreement she made with herself as she pulled weeds from about the rosebushes and turned the soil until it was a richer brown. A definite time limit must be set so that she would not continue to procrastinate week after week, month after month. She was going to give herself one month, one calendar month, starting today. One month to be Jocelyn’s mistress, his love, though he would not be aware of the latter, of course. One month to spend with him as a person, as a friend in the den, if he ever returned there, as a lover in the bed upstairs. One month. And then she was going to give herself up. Without telling him. There might be scandal for him, of course, when it became known that he had harbored her at Dudley House for three weeks, or if anyone knew that she had been his mistress here. But she would not worry about that. His life had been one scandal after another. He appeared to thrive on them. She thought he would probably be rather amused by this particular one. One month. Jane leaned back on her heels to inspect her work, but Phillip was approaching from the direction of the house. “Mr. Jacobs sent me, ma’am,” he said, “to tell you that a new pianoforte just arrived and an easel and other parcels too. He wants to know where you want them put.” Jane got to her feet, her heart soaring, and followed him back to the house. One glorious month, in which she would not even try to guard her feelings. One month of love. There followed a week during

This is a special kind of depression. It comes from the great burden laid on our shoulders. A depression you can't shake off, so that it is part and parcel of you all the time you go on with your military activities. This depression leads to melancholy. It's od to point to somebody young and say: there goes a sad man. That is our lot. One of the things that weighs me down most is that it's forbidden to speak of this sadness outside the limits of the army. In fact, I'm forbidden to share it with anyone. The main reason is the secrecy that surrounds everything that has to do with the military. In order to explain the depression, you have to talk about its origins, and that's prohibited, of course. Another reason is that it's almost impossible to explain the nature of this sadness to anyone who doesn't know it; the sadness will always be interpreted as something else. Within itself it's not mentioned-- It exists, but for each man separately. it is never discussed. Thus another factor comes into the picture-- loneliness. But loneliness, sadness and depression are the lot of great masses of people in this world. Well, then, What kind of God-forsaken world are we living in? It contains so much beauty, so much grandeur and nobility- but men destroy everything that is beautiful in the world. It seems, indeed, that from time immemorial we have been forgotten by the gods.

If I had to parcel this project in the Trojan horse of, say, cultural sociology, I might say that it’s my attempt to comprehend the adolescent predisposition to mythology: how coveting the spell of others’ stories allows us to find faith in what our own might become, and keep going.

Anyone who hopes to get on the wealthy side of the thin green line will know where his or her money is and what it will be used for. That person is going to have a goal for the money. On the other side are people for whom money comes in and goes out without any set plan for its use—or worse, with the assumption that the money will always be coming in. That group doesn’t think how money should be parceled out into fictitious buckets until it isn’t there.

Positive feelings flow naturally when negative feelings are not in action. Nothing needs to be done to acquire positive feelings, as they are part and parcel of our natural state.

The Random Book Club is an offshoot of the shop which I set up a few years ago when business was sore and the future looked bleak. For £59 a year subscribers receive a book a month, but they have no say over what genre of book they receive, and quality control is entirely down to me. I am extremely judicious in what I choose to put in the box from which the RBC books are parcelled and sent. Since subscribers are clearly inveterate readers, I always take care to pick books that I think anyone who loves reading for its own sake would enjoy. There is nothing that would require too much technical expertise to understand: a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with the weight slightly towards non-fiction, and some poetry. Among the books going out later this month are a copy of Clive James’s Other Passports, Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, Iris Murdoch’s biography of Sartre, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, and a book called 100+ Principles of Genetics. All the books are in good condition, none is ex-library, and some – several of them each year – are hundreds of years old. I estimate that if the members decided to sell the books on eBay, they would more than make their money back. There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people. Perhaps that is why I came up with the idea in the first place – it is a sort of Groucho Marx approach to clubs. There are about 150 members and, apart from a minimal amount of advertising in the Literary Review, the only marketing I do is to have a web site and Facebook page, neither of which I have updated for some time. Word of mouth seems to have been the best way of marketing it. It has saved me from financial embarrassment during a very difficult time in the book trade.

Not Cancelled Yet Some honorary day if I play my cards right I might be a postage stamp but I won’t be there to lick me and licking is what I liked, in tasty anticipation of the long dark slither from the mailbox, from box to pouch to hand to bag to box to slot to hand: that box is best whose lid slams open as well as shut, admitting a parcel of daylight, the green top of a tree, and a flickering of fingers, letting go.

A road sign up ahead. He veered off, crossing the Port-Jérôme industrial zone with his windows shut and the AC going full blast. Even so, the air smelled viscous, heavy with metal shavings and acid. Here, embedded in nature, the big names parceled out the empire of fossil fuels and oils. Total, Exxon Mobil, Air Liquide. The inspector drove nearly two miles in this magma of smokestacks, finally crossing past it into a quieter area, a full-on industrial wasteland. Frozen bulldozers shredded the landscape. He parked just short of the construction site, got out, and loosened his shirt collar. To hell with his jacket—he abandoned it on the passenger seat, along with the sports bag that contained his effects for the hotel. He stretched his legs, which cracked when he bent them. “Jesus…

When we say we want green anarchy, a stateless society, free and in harmony with Nature, people tell us that it’s a nice dream but it’ll never happen as ‘it’s against human nature’. The point is that it has happened – green anarchy was how all people lived for a good 90% of history… how some still live better than we do today. When we point this out, people start pissing and whining about ‘going back to the caves’ and getting protective about their TV’s, cars and other fruits of ‘Progress’, particularly Lefties and ‘anarchists’ who don’t know the difference and who think ‘Progress’ is some inevitable law of Nature and not part and parcel of State society and the self-serving elites ruling it. We’ll demolish those myths.

Eve was beside herself. Whatever this is, Deene had best appreciate—why are you staring at me like that?” He closed the door and stepped closer. The room was unusual, built with a small balcony overlooking a conservatory that might have been added as an afterthought, hence its relative warmth and humidity, and the lush scent of foliage blending with all the other fragrances wafting through the house. “Looking at you like what?” “Like… you just lost your best friend? Won’t it be wonderful to go home to Flint Hall, Elijah?” Elijah was better than my lord, and because she seemed to need it, he lied for her. “Wonderful, indeed. Have you told your parents yet that you’re going to Paris?” He had the sense she was waiting for him to leave Morelands first, unwilling to have his support even tacitly. “Not… not yet.” She set the perfect little gift down. “Louisa says I must, and she grasps tactics with an intuition I can only admire. I wish…” Her gaze went to the elegant little parcel. “I wish…” While Elijah watched, Jenny lost some of that distant, preoccupied quality that had characterized her since they’d finished their paintings. She gazed on that parcel as if it held secrets and treats and even a happy ending or two. Once they completed the twenty-minute walk back to Morelands, they’d have no more private moments ever. He’d leave for London at first light; she’d sail for Paris, probably before the New Year. “What do you wish, Genevieve?” Because whatever it was, he’d give it to her. His heart, his soul, his hands, passage to Paris—passage home from Paris. How he wished she’d ask him for that, but passage home was something she could only give herself. “Will you make love with me, Elijah? You’re leaving tomorrow, I know that, and I shouldn’t ask it. I shouldn’t want it, but I do. I want you, so much. Please?

SpottieOttieDopaliscious [Hook] Damn damn damn James [Verse 1: Sleepy Brown] Dickie shorts and Lincoln's clean Leanin', checking out the scene Gangsta boys, blizzes lit Ridin' out, talkin' shit Nigga where you wanna go? You know the club don't close 'til four Let's party 'til we can't no more Watch out here come the folks (Damn - oh lord) [Verse 2: André 3000] As the plot thickens it gives me the dickens Reminiscent of Charles a lil' discotheque Nestled in the ghettos of Niggaville, USA Via Atlanta, Georgia a lil' spot where Young men and young women go to experience They first li'l taste of the night life Me? Well I've never been there; well perhaps once But I was so engulfed in the Olde E I never made it to the door you speak of, hardcore While the DJ sweatin' out all the problems And the troubles of the day While this fine bow-legged girl fine as all outdoors Lulls lukewarm lullabies in your left ear Competing with "Set it Off," in the right But it all blends perfectly let the liquor tell it "Hey hey look baby they playin' our song" And the crowd goes wild as if Holyfield has just won the fight But in actuality it's only about 3 A.M And three niggas just don' got hauled Off in the ambulance (sliced up) Two niggas don' start bustin' (wham wham) And one nigga don' took his shirt off talkin' 'bout "Now who else wanna fuck with Hollywood Courts?" It's just my interpretation of the situation [Hook] [Verse 3: Big Boi] Yes, when I first met my SpottieOttieDopalicious Angel I can remember that damn thing like yesterday The way she moved reminded me of a Brown Stallion Horse with skates on, ya know Smooth like a hot comb on nappy ass hair I walked up on her and was almost paralyzed Her neck was smelling sweeter Than a plate of yams with extra syrup Eyes beaming like four karats apiece just blindin' a nigga Felt like I chiefed a whole O of that Presidential My heart was beating so damn fast Never knowing this moment would bring another Life into this world Funny how shit come together sometimes (ya dig) One moment you frequent the booty clubs and The next four years you & somebody's daughter Raisin' y'all own young'n now that's a beautiful thang That's if you're on top of your game And man enough to handle real life situations (that is) Can't gamble feeding baby on that dope money Might not always be sufficient but the United Parcel Service & the people at the Post Office Didn't call you back because you had cloudy piss So now you back in the trap just that, trapped Go on and marinate on that for a minute

Charles?  What is wrong?" That rueful little smile still in place, he bent his head, looking down as though he could see the beautiful animal whose broad forehead was pressed to his chest, and whose ears were only a few inches from his nose.  "I cannot ride him," he said softly, with one of his long, slow, blinks that lent him an air of studied sadness.  "As much as he means to me, as much as I've missed him, he is nothing more to me than a pet, now —" He never finished the sentence.  As though he'd taken violent offense at his master's words, the stallion flung up his head, the blow catching Charles squarely beneath the jaw, snapping his head back and sending him reeling backwards into Amy's arms. She staggered under his weight. "Will, help me!" Her brother rushed forward, and together they eased the captain down onto his back in the straw.  He lay unmoving, his lashes still against his cheeks.  Blood gushed from his nose. "Charles!" Amy slid a hand beneath his nape and lifted his head just as his eyes fluttered open. "Oh-h-h-h," he moaned, covering his nose with one hand and trying to stop the bleeding.  "Damn." "Will, get some cold water, quick!" Amy urged.  As her brother ran out of the barn toward the well, Amy helped Charles to sit up.  Cradling him against her body and tipping his head back over her arm, she tore off her neckerchief and pressed it to his nose. "You silly man," she said, in gentle admonishment.  "I would've thought you knew your horse well enough to realize he doesn't take kindly to insults, either to himself or to his master." "I didn't insult him. "  His voice sounded nasally and thick. "You insulted yourself." "I did not." "You did.  You said you couldn't ride him." "I damn well can't." "You damn well will.  My brother didn't go to all the trouble of bringing him back just so you could do nothing more than groom and feed him." "My dear Amy, please be realistic.  I cannot ride him." "Why not?" "Because I can't see." "So you can't.  But there's nothing wrong with your legs —" she blushed hotly, remembering the feel of them hard and strong against her own — "or your balance, or anything else about you.  You simply can't see where you're going.  But Contender can." "I shall not be able to guide him where I wish to go, pull him up when he needs pulling up, anticipate possible dangers to both himself and I." "Then you can go out riding with Mira and me, and we'll anticipate those things for you." "But I shall look the fool, up there on his back." "You shall look splendid." "Amy," he said in a patient, controlled voice, "you do not understand.  If something cannot be done the proper way, it should not be done at all.  Since I cannot ride him the proper way, I should not —" "No, Charles, you don't understand.  Sometimes there is no right way to do something, but a whole parcel of varying ways.  So you can't ride him the way you used to.  You find a different way." "But —" "You're doing it again," she scolded. "Doing what?" "Trying to be perfect.  And taking yourself far too seriously.  Stop it." He began to protest, then grinned and gave her a half-hearted salute.  "Yes, ma'm." At

The difference between the generations of parents and children always exists, yet, ours seemed very sharp. Religious parents, Father a merchant, closely involved with the synagogue and charities, fighting to keep a middle class home going - while the children were growing up under new and different influences. Of course, I looked up to Sali, who was highly intelligent and was part and parcel of a group of high school students, all moving in the direction of socialism. It was the time of the Weimar Republic in Germany, a time of social ferment, of industrialization, of inflation, of unemployment. I moved, unaware of the facts, into a similar direction as Sali.

Writing on this subject in 1904 Freud gave the reason for our unshakable conviction of freedom of choice. He remarked that it is far stronger with trivial decisions than with weighty ones; with the latter we commonly feel that our inner nature compels us, that we really have no alternative. With the former, however, for example the arbitrary choice of a number, we discern no motive and therefore feel it is an uncaused act on the part of our ego. If we now subject the example to a psycho-analysis we discover that the choice has after all been determined, but this time the motive is an unconscious one. We actually leave the matter to be decided by our unconscious mind and then claim the credit for the outcome. If unconscious motivation is taken into account, therefore, the rule of determinism is of general validity. Freud never wavered in this attitude and all his researches into the workings of the mind are entirely based on a belief in a regular chain of mental events. He would have endorsed the views of the great anthropologist Tylor that 'the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of Nature, that our thoughts, will and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of the waves'. When enumerating the essential elements of psycho-analytical theory, in 1924, he included 'the thorough-going meaningfulness and determinism of even the apparently most obscure and arbitrary mental phenomena.

stakeholder capitalism: it allows them to exercise quasi-political power without having to go through the hassle of getting elected. Yet that hassle is part and parcel of democracy itself.

BRIGGS: We’re old friends, Jack and myself. We met at a street corner. I should tell you he’ll deny this account. His story will be different. I was standing at a street corner. A car drew up. It was him. He asked me the way to Bolsover Street. I told him Bolsover Street was in the middle of an intricate one-way system. It was a one-way system easy enough to get into. The only trouble was that, once in, you couldn’t get out. I told him his best bet, if he really wanted to get to Bolsover Street, was to take the first left, first right, second right, third on the left, keep his eye open for a hardware shop, go right round the square, keeping to the inside lane, take the second Mews on the right and then stop. He will find himself facing a very tall office block, with a crescent courtyard. He can take advantage of this office block. He can go round the crescent, come out the other way, follow the arrows, go past two sets of traffic lights and take the next left indicated by the first green filter he comes across. He’s got the Post Office Tower in his vision the whole time. All he’s got to do is to reverse into the underground car park, change gear, go straight on, and he’ll find himself in Bolsover Street with no trouble at all. I did warn him, though, that he’ll still be faced with the problem, having found Bolsover Street, of losing it. I told him I knew one or two people who’d been wandering up and down Bolsover Street for years. They’d wasted their bloody youth there. The people who live there, their faces are grey, they’re in a state of despair, but nobody pays any attention, you see. All people are worried about is their ill-gotten gains. I wrote to The Times about it. Life At A Dead End, I called it. Went for nothing. Anyway, I told him that probably the best thing he could do was to forget the whole idea of getting to Bolsover Street. I remember saying to him: This trip you’ve got in mind, drop it, it could prove fatal. But he said he had to deliver a parcel. Anyway, I took all this trouble with him because he had a nice open face. He looked like a man who would always do good to others himself. Normally I wouldn’t give a fuck. I should tell you he’ll deny this account. His story will be different.

Tuberculosis is an airborne disease. Carried out of the lungs with each cough are thousands of fluid droplets, plumes of minuscule crusaders. Some of them will contain the tiny rod-shaped TB bacteria, each only three-thousandths of a millimetre long. The fluid droplets themselves start off fairly big, perhaps a few tenths of a millimetre. These droplets are being pulled downwards by gravity and once they hit the floor, at least they’re not going anywhere else. But it doesn’t happen quickly, because it’s not just liquids that are viscous. Air is too – it has to be pushed out of the way as things move through it. As the droplets drift downwards, they are bumped and jostled by air molecules that slow their descent. Just as the cream rises slowly through viscous milk to the top of the bottle, these droplets are on course to slide through the viscous air to reach the floor. Except they don’t. Most of that droplet is water, and in the first few seconds in the outside air, that water evaporates. What was a droplet big enough for gravity to pull it through the viscous air now becomes a mere speck, a shadow of its former self. If it was originally a droplet of spit with a tuberculosis bacterium floating about in it, it’s now a tuberculosis bacterium neatly packaged up in some leftover organic crud. The gravitational pull on this new parcel is no match for the buffeting of the air. Wherever the air goes, the bacterium goes. Like the miniaturized fat droplets in today’s homogenized milk, it’s just a passenger. And if it lands in a person with a weak immune system, it might start a new colony, growing slowly until new bacteria are ready to be coughed out all over again.

And we're cheerful, too. You can count on that.' Obligingly she smiled in a neighbourly way at him. 'It will be a relief to leave Earth with its repressive legislation. We were listening OH the FM to the news about the McPhearson Act.' 'We consider it dreadful,' the adult male said. 'I have to agree with you,' Chic said. 'But what can one do?' He looked around for the mail; as always it was lost somewhere in the mass of clutter. 'One can emigrate,' the adult male simulacrum pointed out. 'Um,' Chic said absently. He had found an unexpected heap of recent-looking bills from parts suppliers; with a feeling of gloom and even terror he began to bills from parts suppliers; with a feeling of gloom and even terror he began to sort through them. Had Maury seen these? Probably. Seen them and then pushed them away immediately, out of sight. Frauenzimmer Associates functioned better if it was not reminded of such facts of life. Like a regressed neurotic, it had to hide several aspects of reality from its percept system in order to function at all. This was hardly ideal, but what really was the alternative? To be realistic would be to give up, to die. Illusion, of an infantile nature was essential for the tiny firm's survival, or at least so it seemed to him and Maury. In any case both of them had adopted this attitude. Their simulacra -- the adult ones -- disapproved of this; their cold, logical appraisal of reality stood in sharp contrast, and Chic always felt a little naked, a little embarrassed, before the simulacra; he knew he should set a better example for them. 'If you bought a jalopy and emigrated to Mars,' the adult male said, 'We could be the famnexdo for you.' 'I wouldn't need any family next-door,' Chic said, 'if I emigrated to Mars. I'd go to get away from people. 'We'd make a very good family next-door to you,' the female said. 'Look,' Chic said, 'you don't have to lecture me about your virtues. I know more than you do yourselves.' And for good reason. Their presumption, their earnest sincerity, amused but also irked him. As next-door neighbours this group of sims would be something of a nuisance, he reflected. Still, that was what emigrants wanted, in fact needed, out in the sparsely-populated colonial regions. He could appreciate that; after all, it was Frauenzimmer Associates' business to understand. A man, when he emigrated, could buy neighbours, buy the simulated presence of life, the sound and motion of human activity -- or at least its ​mechanical nearsubstitute to bolster his morale in the new environment of unfamiliar stimuli and perhaps, god forbid, no stimuli at all. And in addition to this primary psychological gain there was a practical secondary advantage as well. The famnexdo group of simulacra developed the parcel of land, tilled it and planted it, irrigated it, made it fertile, highly productive. And the yield went to the it, irrigated it, made it fertile, highly productive. And the yield went to the human settler because the famnexdo group, legally speaking, occupied the peripheral portions of his land. The famnexdo were actually not next-door at all; they were part of their owner's entourage. Communication with them was in essence a circular dialogue with oneself; the famnexdo, it they were functioning properly, picked up the covert hopes and dreams of the settler and detailed them back in an articulated fashion. Therapeutically, this was helpful, although from a cultural standpoint it was a trifle sterile.

Go back to the house.' 'I will,' he said, flashing a grin again. 'After I drop you off at your front door.' At that piece-of-shit apartment she insisted on living in. Across the city. Nesta's eyes- the same as Feyre's and yet wholly different, sharp and cold as steel- went to his hands. What was in them. 'What is that.' Another grin as he lifted the small, wrapped parcel. 'Your Solstice present.' 'I don't want one.' Cassian continued past her, tossing the present in his hands. 'You want this one.' He prayed she would. It had taken him months to find it. ... 'I don't want anything from you.' He made himself arch an eyebrow. 'You sure about that, sweetheart?

In order to ease and simplify our lives, we might dare to ask a very old-fashioned question: what am I reading for? And this time, rather than answering ‘in order to know everything,’ we might parcel off a much more limited, focused and useful goal. We might – for example – decide that while society as a whole may be on a search for total knowledge, all that we really need and want to do is gather knowledge that is going to be useful to us as we lead our own lives. We might decide on a new mantra to guide our reading henceforth: we want to read in order to learn to be content. Nothing less – and nothing more.

For days wagons had been arriving from all directions, loaded with sacks, crocks and crates, tubs of pickled fish; racks dangling with sausages, hams and bacon; barrels of oil, wine, cider and ale; baskets laden with onions, turnips, cabbages, leeks; also parcels of ramp, parsley, sweet herbs and cress. Day and night the kitchens were active, with the stoves never allowed to go cold. In the service yard four ovens, constructed for the occasion, produced crusty loaves, saffron buns, fruit tarts; also sweet-cakes flavoured with currants, anise, honey and nuts, or even cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. One of the ovens produced only pies and pasties, stuffed with beef and leeks, or spiced hare seethed in wine, or pork and onions, or pike with fennel, or carp in a swelter of dill, butter and mushrooms, or mutton with barley and thyme.

The entry to these events is hideously embarrassing. You’re picked up and driven to the venue, where you join a queue of cars some distance away. Someone comes to the window, checks who’s in the car and speaks into a radio. At the appropriate time, your car is allowed to move forward to the drop-off point, and you get out to a barrage of cameras. You then walk the red carpet, where photographers shout at you to look this way and that. It feels very much like being a lesser prize on a game-show conveyor belt. If someone more famous turns up, you’re abandoned, or if you turn up and the person ahead is less famous than you, they abandon them. It all feels coldly brutal, and I genuinely don’t like it, but it’s all part and parcel of going to those events.

happily for a few seconds, then picked up the parcel Hedwig had brought. Inside this, too, there was a wrapped present, a card, and a letter, this time from Hermione. Dear Harry, Ron wrote to me and told me about his phone call to your Uncle Vernon. I do hope you’re all right. I’m on holiday in France at the moment and I didn’t know how I was going to send this to you — what if they’d opened it at customs? — but then Hedwig turned up! I think she wanted to make sure you got something for your birthday for a change. I bought your present by owl-order; there was an advertisement in the Daily Prophet (I’ve been getting it delivered; it’s so good to keep up with what’s going on in the wizarding world). Did you see that picture of Ron and his

Political fundraisers are part and parcel of doing business. You want to thank those who have supported you, you want to support them, but there’s no quid pro quo. Sometimes you organize fundraisers because you want to show your gratitude, you want to go the extra mile.

than she was deep. Her shallow draft let her go up rivers or right onto beaches without damage, but her passage over deeper water left a lot to be desired. She sidled along, with here a dip and there a curtsy, like a bundle-laden farm wife making her way through a crowded market. We seemed to be the sole cargo. A deckhand gave me a couple of apples to share with the horses, but little talk. So after I had parceled out the fruit, I settled myself near them on their straw and took Chade’s advice about resting. The winds were kind to us, and the captain took us in closer to the looming cliffs than I’d have thought possible, but unloading the horses from the vessel was still an unpleasant task. All of Chade’s lecturing and warnings had not prepared me for the blackness of night on the water. The lanterns on the deck seemed pathetic efforts, confusing me more with the shadows they threw than aiding me with their feeble light. In the end, a deckhand rowed Chade to shore in the ship’s dory. I went overboard with the reluctant horses, for I knew Sooty would fight a lead rope and probably swamp the dory. I clung to Sooty and encouraged her, trusting her common sense to take us toward the dim lantern on shore. I had a long line on Chade’s horse, for I didn’t want his thrashing too close to us in the water. The sea was cold, the night was black, and if I’d had any sense, I’d have wished myself elsewhere, but there is something in a boy that takes the mundanely difficult and unpleasant and turns it into a personal challenge and an adventure. I came out of the water dripping, chilled, and completely exhilarated. I kept Sooty’s reins and coaxed Chade’s horse in. By the time I had them both under control, Chade was beside me, lantern in hand, laughing exultantly. The dory man was already away and pulling for the ship. Chade gave me my dry things, but they did little good pulled on over my dripping clothes. “Where’s the path?” I asked, my voice shaking with my shivering. Chade gave a derisive snort. “Path? I had a quick look while you were pulling in my horse. It’s no path, it’s no more than the course the water takes when it runs off down the cliffs. But it will have to do.” It was a little better than he had reported, but not much. It was narrow and steep and the gravel on it was loose underfoot. Chade went before with the lantern. I followed, with the horses in tandem.

Parcells: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.” That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The media don’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, and even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares. And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy. All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

He needn’t have worried. ‘Before long I found myself swimming like a parcel of Escher lizards through the lines of a purple jigsaw of increasing and then decreasing size. “What the hell’s going on?” I asked, crying with laughter. “You’re tripping,” said Joan, with a new vocabulary already. Tripping? Me? … “Are you tripping?” I asked Joan. She nodded lovingly. “We all are,” George said. “Everyone is.”’ As the effects of the double dose peaked, it proved too much for Taylor, who was assailed by disturbing visions and dark thoughts. Harrison, with enough experience to spot the warning signs, and the calmness – despite tripping himself – to provide reassurance, talked Taylor back from his descent into misery. ‘Derek, create and preserve the image of your choice,’ Harrison told him. ‘It’s up to you. The thing is to see what you want to see. Do you want to create something nice? Then look into the fire and see something nice.’ The intervention worked, and much of the remainder of Taylor’s trip was filled with talking, laughter and visions. He and Joan bonded over the shared experience, and led a singalong on Epstein’s grand piano. Late into the night Taylor was cornered by Harrison, who reiterated his words of wisdom: ‘Derek, I love ya. I just want you to know that. I love ya and it’s going to be OK. Create and preserve the image of your choice. Don’t forget, Derek. Gandhi said that. Pick your own trips.

Men,’ said Jack, ‘I know damned well what’s going on. I know damned well what’s going on; and I won’t have it. What simple fellows you are, to listen to a parcel of makee-clever sea-lawyers and politicians, glib, quick-talking coves. Some of you have put your necks into the noose. I say your necks into the noose. You see the Ville de Paris over there?’ Every head turned to the line-of-battle ship on the horizon. ‘I have only to signal her, or half a dozen other cruisers, and run you up to the yardarm with the Rogue’s March playing. Damned fools, to listen to such talk. But I am not going to signal to the Ville de Paris nor to any other king’s ship. Why not? Because the Polychrest is going into action this very night, that’s why. I am not going to have it said in the fleet that any Polychrest is afraid of hard knocks.

Where’s your sling?” “I forgot it this morning. It’s at home.” “Don’t tire yourself, dear, will you? And we’ll need some more drinks whenever you’ve time.” She fished in her handbag and produced a list. “After Jack’s home the owners will start coming again and some of them drink like fish, though I shouldn’t say it, and Jack says he’s going to add it on their bills as medicine for the horses, which you can’t blame him for, can you, dear?” “Er ... no.” She put the list on the counter beside the present, and, saying she had a thousand things to do on her way to the hospital, went light-footedly away. I unwrapped the parcel curiously and found that although it was small in size it couldn’t have been in price. The box inside the glazed white paper had come from a jeweler in Reading, and it contained

Parcells: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.” That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The media don’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, and even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

Harry put the plates of egg and bacon on the table, which was difficult as there wasn’t much room. Dudley, meanwhile, was counting his presents. His face fell. “Thirty-six,” he said, looking up at his mother and father. “That’s two less than last year.” “Darling, you haven’t counted Auntie Marge’s present, see, it’s here under this big one from Mummy and Daddy.” “All right, thirty-seven then,” said Dudley, going red in the face. Harry, who could see a huge Dudley tantrum coming on, began wolfing down his bacon as fast as possible in case Dudley turned the table over. Aunt Petunia obviously scented danger, too, because she said quickly, “And we’ll buy you another two presents while we’re out today. How’s that, popkin? Two more presents. Is that all right?” Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work. Finally he said slowly, “So I’ll have thirty . . . thirty . . .” “Thirty-nine, sweetums,” said Aunt Petunia. “Oh.” Dudley sat down heavily and grabbed the nearest parcel. “All right then.

Is it not possible that conscious effort, forcefulness, and opposing action with the apparent natural world are all in fact natural parts of the natural world? In the context of Taoism, could working against the Dao merely be the Dao working against the Dao for the sake of its perpetuation? Perhaps a further step in the logical path of Taoism, and philosophies like it, involves an even greater surrender that doesn’t even permit one to choose or consider if they are surrendering or not. Rather, one is born into surrender. If in Taoism, the relationship of all things is a cooperative, unified whole, even when things appear in conflict, is not human and nature always in cooperation, even when they seem to oppose each other? If darkness creates light, silence creates sound, beauty creates ugliness, good creates bad, does not forcefulness create non-forcefulness? Does not man create nature? Does not consciousness create unconsciousness? Human is part and parcel of nature, and so, how could human act in any other way? How would manmade material or action ever not be natural? Of course, this is just one counter idea that stems from just one interpretation of an elusive mysterious Taoist idea. And to step back on it a little, there is no question that our conscious observations and logic do often fool us, and we are, in many cases, clearly deviating from what’s best when we force or strive for what we think is. Clearly, there are better ways for things to go, plenty of which would go better if we never got involved. Perhaps the only remaining questions are: when should we and when shouldn’t we? And how does one find out without screwing the whole thing up? Perhaps these questions miss the point. Perhaps the point ignores these questions. Of course, like all ideals of philosophy or religion, Taoism’s concepts are likely just that: ideals, ideals that are not without some level of contradiction or general incompleteness on their own. But regardless of this and the potential limits of its applicability, the concepts suggested by Taoism are nonetheless filled with rich insights that provide worthy useful counterweights to the more common, brutish way of mind and culture. The thinking that things must always be a different way, or must go one’s own way for it to be the right way, that there must always be some better ideal around the corner that isn’t or couldn’t be in this moment, right now; that one needs to seek and strive for what they already have and know.

Mental health patients don't always make for the best conversation, so I spent the majority of my time alone, trying to distract myself from everything going on in my head and in my home.

At the workshop, he presented his view on consciousness: that it has to be part and parcel of all cognitive processes, including those of animals. My own position is slightly different in that I prefer not to make any firm statements about something as poorly defined as consciousness. No one seems to know what it is. But for the same reason, I hasten to add, I’d never deny it to any species. For all I know, a frog may be conscious. Griffin took a more positive stance, saying that since intentional, intelligent actions are observable in many animals, and since in our own species they go together with awareness, it is reasonable to assume similar mental states in other species.

cities?” she asked. “Bound to be if Olivar succeeds. This country is going to be parceled out as a source of cheap labor and cheap land. When people like those in Olivar beg to sell themselves, our surviving cities are bound to wind up the economic colonies of whoever can afford to buy them.

This stratum of well-to-do peasants was not very large: most peasant proprietors possessed a small parcel that barely allowed them to lead a self-sufficient existence. They were often obliged to seek additional income from rural industry, or to go and work elsewhere as seasonal laborers.

go to South Tyrol, a parcel of land occupied by Italy in 1918 and never given back. Like the rest of Tyrol, it is one of the most gorgeous places on Earth, and its Italian occupation is letter-perfect: nobody knows it’s occupied. The Italians have signed treaties and agreements left and right and have cleared every legal issue there ever was. They even gave residents some extra rights so they shut up, and before long the German-speaking South Tyroleans started calling themselves Italian. Which is all nice, fine and dandy.

Oh, Greebo’s coming with us,” said Nanny Ogg. “What? But he’s a cat!” snapped Granny Weatherwax. “You can’t take cats with you! I’m not going travelin’ with no cat! It’s bad enough travelin’ with trousers and provocative boots!” “He’ll miss his mummy if he’s left behind, won’t he,” crooned Nanny Ogg, picking up Greebo. He hung limply, like a bag of water gripped around the middle. To Nanny Ogg Greebo was still the cute little kitten that chased balls of wool around the floor. To the rest of the world he was an enormous tomcat, a parcel of incredibly indestructible life forces in a skin that looked less like a fur than a piece of bread that had been left in a damp place for a fortnight. Strangers often took pity on him because his ears were nonexistent and his face looked as though a bear had camped on it.

Around the campfire good-byes were spoken, a few toasts, even a few regrets. The sky was blacker than it had been before: perhaps it was the contrast of the whiteness of snowy peaks all around. Liir showed up with a parcel of clothing and some sort of musical instrument, and said good-byes too. “Oh, so you’re stopping here, are you?” said Elphie. “Yes,” he said, “with you.” “With the crows, with the monkey, with the bees, with the dog, and with the Witch?” she said. “With me?” “Where else can I go?” he asked. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she answered. “I can take care of the dog,” he said calmly. “I can collect the honey for you.” “It makes no difference to me,” she said. “All right,” he said, and so Liir prepared to enter his father’s house.

Since Parcells joined the NFL in 1980, his off-season workload has multiplied. Downtime eventually almost disappeared thanks to the Senior Bowl, the combine, free agency, the draft, minicamps, and training camp. Coaches also needed to factor in time to deal with unpredictable developments, or as Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense, might call them, known unknowns. Before the twilight of his NFL career, Parcells has especially relished his off-season football activities. But now at sixty-five, he had little appetite to prepare another team, especially given the chance of ultimately being undermined by a player flubbing a routine task in a game's pivotal moment. 'That was what got me,' he says, 'because now it's another year; we've got to go through a whole new cycle, when we were right there. We had a chance to win it and go to Chicago and beat the Bears. They weren't that good.