Pass The Parcel Quotes

Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.

The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.

This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline: But still the house-affairs would draw her thence: Which ever as she could with haste dispatch, She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse: which I observing, Took once a pliant hour, and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, Whereof by parcels she had something heard, But not intentively: I did consent, And often did beguile her of her tears, When I did speak of some distressful stroke That my youth suffer'd. My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs: She swore, in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange, 'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful: She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me, And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story. And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake: She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd, And I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used: Here comes the lady; let her witness it.

He saw Hitler’s stature within Germany grow to that of a god. Women cried as he passed near; souvenir hunters dug up parcels of earth from the ground on which he stepped. At the September 1936 party rally in Nuremberg, which Dodd did not attend, Hitler launched his audience into near hysteria. “That you have found me … among so many millions is the miracle of our time!” he cried. “And that I have found you, that is Germany’s fortune!

Am I here to play ‘pass the parcel’ with my balls?

Whenever men have been thrust forward by fortune, whenever they have become part and parcel of another's influence, they have found abundant favour, their houses have been thronged, only so long as they themselves have kept their position; when they themselves have left it, they have slipped at once from the memory of men. But in the case of innate ability, the respect in which it is held increases, and not only does honour accrue to the man himself, but whatever has attached itself to his memory is passed on from one to another.

That was the first day of my ongoing friendship with Marlon Brando. When he passed away, I got a phone call that he had left me a parcel of land on his Fiji island. It really threw me

George meanwhile, with his hat on one side, his elbows squared, and his swaggering martial air, made for Bedford Row, and stalked into the attorney’s offices as if he was lord of every pale-faced clerk who was scribbling there. He ordered somebody to inform Mr. Higgs that Captain Osborne was waiting, in a fierce and patronizing way, as if the pekin of an attorney, who had thrice his brains, fifty times his money, and a thousand times his experience, was a wretched underling who should instantly leave all his business in life to attend on the Captain’s pleasure. He did not see the sneer of contempt which passed all round the room, from the first clerk to the articled gents, from the articled gents to the ragged writers and white-faced runners, in clothes too tight for them, as he sate there tapping his boot with his cane, and thinking what a parcel of miserable poor devils these were. The miserable poor devils knew all about his affairs. They talked about them over their pints of beer at their public-house clubs to other clerks of a night. Ye gods, what do not attorneys and attorneys’ clerks know in London! Nothing is hidden from their inquisition, and their families mutely rule our city.

She said, still perplexed at a strange language: "But how can I cease to be troubled? will it leave off coming because I pretend it wants you? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street?" "It is not," he said, "and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet-never mind that now, but you'll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven't you heard it said that we ought to bear one another's burdens?" "But that means-" she began, and stopped. "I know," Stanhope said. "It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you--however sympathetic I may be.

Every morning they made sure that they had removed all clues to their presence, then set off to find another lonely and secluded spot, traveling by Apparition to more woods, to the shadowy crevices of cliffs, to purple moors, gorse-covered mountainsides, and once a sheltered and pebbly cove. Every twelve hours or so they passed the Horcrux between them as though they were playing some perverse, slow-motion game of pass-the-parcel, where they dreaded the music stopping because the reward was twelve hours of increased fear and anxiety.

summit of Notting Hill, across the street from the faded elegance of St. John’s Church. Once Dawn had loved this Victorian house with its pale yellow stucco, its superbly proportioned rooms and beautiful appointments, and for a moment she mourned the passing of such an innocent pleasure. Tonight the windows were dark as she turned into the drive, the blank panes mirroring her car lights. She had managed to beat Karl home, then; she would have a few minutes’ respite. Turning off the engine, she reached for her parcels, then paused, squeezing her eyes shut.

the bigotry and meanness of the world get parceled out, based on how you might, or might not, look or act like everybody else. The way there’s a particular kind of anti-Semitism that gets leveled at people who “look Jewish,” whatever that means. African Americans with darker skin sometimes are on the receiving end of more bigotry than people whose skin is lighter. Gay men who “act gay” get treated one way, those who pass as straight get treated another. It’s a whole pyramid of bigotry, with people who most resemble the dominant culture at the top, and people whose difference makes them stand out at the bottom. It’s inconceivable, if you think about it, the complex ways people have come up with for being horrible to one another.

It seemed the morrow's holding had become a sort of peoples park in the suburbs of Cleveland. The other on the block, those who still lived in the fading jerry-built ranch houses with birdbaths or plaster dwarves on their lawns had appropriated it. I could imagine them gathering there at dusk, their children swaying creakily on the swings as the women planted sunflower seeds and murmured over the day's events. It was slightly criminal, an unfounded claim made by people who were not prospering but only getting by, and as such the property had passed beyond reclamation. To own this parcel of land you would have to wrest it back from those who had learned to care for it. If you leveled their tiny works and put up a new house you would be an invader, not much different from a colonial, and the land would be tainted until your house fell down again. This suburban quarter-acre had returned to its wilder purpose, and could not be redomesticated without a fight that would leave the victor's hands stained.

Old!" she said to herself. "I am not old! I have lived many years, that is all. But I am as timeless as an hour-glass that turns morning and night, and spills the hours of sleep one way, the hours of consciousness the other way, without itself being affected. Nothing in all my life has ever truly affected me.--I believe Cleopatra only tried the asp, as she tried her pearls in wine, to see if it would really, really have any effect on her. Nothing had ever really had any effect on her, neither Caesar nor Antony nor any of them. Never once had she really been lost, lost to herself. Then try death, see if that trick would work. If she would lose herself to herself that way.--Ah, death--!" But Mrs. Witt mistrusted death too. She felt she might pass out as a bed of asters passes out in autumn, to mere nothingness.--And something in her longed to die, at least, positively: to be folded then at last into throbbing wings of mystery, like, a hawk that goes to sleep. Not like a thing made into a parcel and put into the last rubbish-heap.

The whiff of Ben's parcel hovered under the delicious aroma of fish. Suddenly John felt hungry. The men, he saw, were sipping from a ladle which they passed between them. The tallest of the three slurped and smiled. 'Whether or not Miss Lucretia consumes it, the kitchen has discharged its duty,' he declared cheerfully. He towered a whole head over the others. 'A simple broth is most apt for a young stomach, especially a stomach which chooses privation over nourishment. Lampreys. Crab shells ground fine. Stockfish and...' He sniffed then frowned. 'Simple, Mister Underley?' jibed Vanian in a nasal voice. 'If it is simple, then how is it spiced?' 'Came in a parcel this morning,' Henry Palewick offered. 'Down from Soughton. Master Scovell had it out in a moment. Smelled like flowers to me. Whatever it was.' 'Which flowers?' demanded the fourth man of the quartet, in a foreign accent. He pointed a large-nostrilled nose at Henry. 'Saffron, agrimony and comfrey bound the cool-humored plants; meadowsweet, celandine and wormwood the hot.

We were all, I thought, counting on the probability that, simply by living in a big North American city, we would be greeted as warriors on our arrival back home by those who knew us and those who didn’t alike. Greeted as champions. I was a champ for giving up the perks of living with family, among friends whose families had known mine for generations, among people familiar to me from primary school days. I lived now without the deep comfort of neighbours who cooked more food than they needed for themselves so that they could parcel it up and bring you some. I had left behind strangers who, passing on the street, bid each other good day, and people who put off their own chores to lend you a hand. I had given up all of this in the hope that I would no longer have to live a lie, that I could, at last, come into my authentic self. So on this particular occasion I had dressed as I always did, to announce my individuality and assert that I had indeed found authenticity. No one here needed to know the truth or to question whether such authenticity was achievable.

It was a damned near-run thing, I must admit,' said Jack, modestly; then after a pause he laughed and said, 'I remember your using those very words in the old Bellerophon, before we had our battle.' 'So I did,' cried Dundas. 'So I did. Lord, that was a great while ago.' 'I still bear the scar,' said Jack. He pushed up his sleeve, and there on his brown forearm was a long white line. 'How it comes back,' said Dundas; and between them, drinking port, they retold the tale, with minute details coming fresh to their minds. As youngsters, under the charge of the gunner of the Bellerophon, 74, in the West Indies, they had played the same game. Jack, with his infernal luck, had won on that occasion too: Dundas claimed his revenge, and lost again, again on a throw of double six. Harsh words, such as cheat, liar, sodomite, booby and God-damned lubber flew about; and since fighting over a chest, the usual way of settling such disagreements in many ships, was strictly forbidden in the Bellemphon, it was agreed that as gentlemen could not possibly tolerate such language they should fight a duel. During the afternoon watch the first lieutenant, who dearly loved a white-scoured deck, found that the ship was almost out of the best kind of sand, and he sent Mr Aubrey away in the blue cutter to fetch some from an island at the convergence of two currents where the finest and most even grain was found. Mr Dundas accompanied him, carrying two newly sharpened cutlasses in a sailcloth parcel, and when the hands had been set to work with shovels the two little boys retired behind a dune, unwrapped the parcel, saluted gravely, and set about each other. Half a dozen passes, the blades clashing, and when Jack cried out 'Oh Hen, what have you done?' Dundas gazed for a moment at the spurting blood, burst into tears, whipped off his shirt and bound up the wound as best he could. When they crept aboard a most unfortunately idle, becalmed and staring Bellerophon, their explanations, widely different and in both cases so weak that they could not be attempted to be believed, were brushed aside, and their captain flogged them severely on the bare breech. 'How we howled,' said Dundas. 'You were shriller than I was,' said Jack. 'Very like a hyena.

There’s a thing called passing, which is not only about transgender people but about everybody. It has to do with the way the bigotry and meanness of the world get parceled out, based on how you might, or might not, look or act like everybody else. The way there’s a particular kind of anti-Semitism that gets leveled at people who “look Jewish,” whatever that means. African Americans with darker skin sometimes are on the receiving end of more bigotry than people whose skin is lighter. Gay men who “act gay” get treated one way, those who pass as straight get treated another. It’s a whole pyramid of bigotry, with people who most resemble the dominant culture at the top, and people whose difference makes them stand out at the bottom. It’s inconceivable, if you think about it, the complex ways people have come up with for being horrible to one another. Inconceivable. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. As a trans girl, I pass without much effort, thanks in part to the random luck of genetics, and also thanks to my mother getting me on puberty-blocking hormones when I was twelve.

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!

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

Time itself is a gift-curse. Time says: ‘Look here! Here is a precious moment to do something with!’ Then as soon as you try to grasp the moment, it’s gone. And you haven’t done anything. And while you’re thinking about that, there is another moment, and then it too is gone. Cruel, like an eternal game of pass-the-parcel.

The estate had always been this way. A parade of people, joined together by tedium and curiosity, passing other people’s misery around between themselves like a parcel.

Would I have elected to live a life on earth in the firm knowledge that I’d suddenly be torn away from it, and perhaps in the middle of intoxicating happiness? Or would I, even at that early stage, graciously have declined that reckless game of 'pass the parcel'? We come to this world only once. We are let into the great fairytale, only for the story to reach its end!

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Holly Berries A Confederate Christmas Story by Refugitta There was, first, behind the clear crystal pane, a mammoth turkey, so fat that it must have submitted to be killed from sheer inability to eat and move, hung all around with sausage balls and embowered in crisp white celery with its feathered tops. Many a belated housekeeper or father of a family, passing by, cast loving glances at the monster bird, and turned away with their hands on depleted purses and arms full of brown paper parcels. Then there were straw baskets of eggs, white and shining with the delightful prospect of translation into future eggnogs; pale yellow butter stamped with ears of corn, bee hives, and statuesque cows with their tails in an attitude. But these were all substantials, and the principal attraction was the opposition window, where great pyramids of golden oranges, scaly brown pineapples, festoons of bananas, boxes of figs and raisins with their covers thrown temptingly aside, foreign sauces and pickles, cheeses, and gilded walnuts were arranged in picturesque regularity, jut, as it seemed, almost within reach of one’s olfactories and mouth, until a closer proximity realized the fact of that thick plate glass between. Inside it was just the same: there were barrels and boxes in a perfect wilderness; curious old foreign packages and chests, savory of rare teas and rarer jellies; cinnamon odors like gales from Araby meeting you at every turn; but yet everything, from the shining mahogany counter under the brilliant gaslight, up to the broad, clean, round face of the jolly grocer Pin, was so neat and orderly and inviting that you felt inclined to believe yourself requested to come in and take off things by the pocketful, without paying a solitary cent. I acknowledge that it was an unreasonable distribution of favors for Mr. Pin to own, all to himself, this abundance of good things. Now, in my opinion, little children ought to be the shop keepers when there are apples and oranges to be sold, and I know they will all agree with me, for I well remember my earliest ambition was that my papa would turn confectioner, and then I could eat my way right through the store. But our friend John Pin was an appreciative person, and not by any means forgetful of his benefits. All day long and throughout the short afternoon, his domain had been thronged with busy buyers, old and young, and himself and his assistant (a meager-looking young man of about the dimensions of a knitting needle) constantly employed in supplying their demands. From the Southern Illustrated News.

What is it like to burn as the humans do? When one’s existence can be parcelled and measured in the units that the humans use, what was it? Time. Units of time. Ability to calculate, and live through countable units of time in motion. The physicality of time passing, when one’s lifespan is short enough to be able to tangibly experience the passage of time.

The morning of the elopement, a letter had been delivered to Ramsay House, addressed to Beatrix. It was from Prudence. The letter was blotched and angrily scrawled, filled with accusations and dire predictions, and more than a few misspellings. Troubled and guilt-ridden, Beatrix had shown it to Christopher. His mouth twisted as he tore it in half and gave it back to Beatrix. “Well,” he said conversationally, “she’s finally written a letter to someone.” Beatrix tried to look reproving, but a reluctant laugh escaped her. “Don’t make jest of the situation. I feel so awfully guilty.” “Why? Prudence doesn’t.” “She blames me for taking you away from her.” “I was never hers in the first place. And this isn’t some game of pass-the-parcel.” That made her grin. “If you’re the parcel,” she said, giving him a suggestive glance, “I would like to unwrap you.” Christopher shook his head as she leaned forward to kiss him. “Don’t start that, or we’ll never get this done.

She blames me for taking you away from her.” “I was never hers in the first place. And this isn’t some game of pass-the-parcel.” That made her grin. “If you’re the parcel,” she said, giving him a suggestive glance, “I would like to unwrap you.

She was ushered into a passage where the only light came from the tallow taper in the rabbi's hand. The house smelled of chicken soup. In the thousand miles she and Rosa and the children had traveled from Siberia, passed along like parcels from settlement to Jewish settlement, sometimes in houses, often in huts, that smell had been the one constant, as if they had followed its trail by sniffing, like dogs. However poor their hosts, a hen had been killed in their honor because hospitality demanded it.

Well, I, ah, could not help but be impressed with her ladyship’s medical knowledge and I can hardly quell my outrage at the injustice of such a brilliant mind being barred from serving the community.” “Yes, it is an injustice indeed. A fact I am certain she is well aware of. Have you a point in reminding her?” Rafe drummed the fingers of his good hand on the side table. Ignoring his warning tone, Wakley nodded. “Though it is not in my power to make her a real doctor, I can give her the same examination that is received at Oxford and perhaps offer her some training, so that she may at least gain some sense of vindication.” Rafe opened his mouth to refuse, yet the words caught in his throat at the man’s logic and consideration. However, he couldn’t risk further involvement with mortals, for him or Cassandra. Not until her fate was decided. And he still had no notion how he would resolve his predicament. Hell, he hadn’t even told her about the letter from the Elders yet. He coughed. “I—” “Oh, Mr. Wakley!” Cassandra gasped in unabashed delight as she rushed down the stairs. “Would you?” The surgeon nodded. “As long as you understand that it is only a ceremonial gesture.” “I understand.” Cassandra’s voice quavered with hope and gratitude. Rafe hid the wrapped parcel by holding the microscope behind his back before she met his gaze. Slowly, she approached him, her eyes deep pools of abject longing. “Rafael…?” The question hung in the air, tangible as an embrace. He closed his eyes as his mind warred with his heart. She stood so close that her hair brushed his sleeve and he could smell her intoxicating scent. Taking a deep breath, he uttered an impractical reply. “I am certain you shall pass with alacrity.” She could be dead within the month. The least he could do was allow her to touch her dream. Cassandra rose on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips felt like a healing balm on his scars. “Thank you.

The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an autonomously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines, and working for an ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by separating from each other have not yet been reunited.

Suicide’s Note: An Annual I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that I couldn’t today name the gods you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d roast in Hell poor suffering bastards like you, unable to bear the masks of their own faces. With words you sought to shape a world alternate to the one that dared inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you could not, could never fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you inherited. More than once you asked that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your death feel like failure to everybody who ever loved you as if our collective cpr stopped too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten. I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite your best efforts you are every second alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons. We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain. Source: Poetry (September 2012)

Professor Samuel Schoenbaum could not help noting the discrepancy between Shakespeare’s meticulous parceling of his assets and his apparent disregard for his literary legacy: “If Shakespeare was indifferent to the ultimate fate of the plays that immortalized him, he showed no similar nonchalance about assembling and passing down his estate.

How quickly they pass, the pioneering days! There is 'virgin' (unenriched, undamaged) country where never a white man has set his feet. Then come a scattering of nomads: the explorers, the gold-rushers, the bushrangers, the prospectors. Then the landgrabbers, followed soon by civilized machinery that makes their grab their own; and within two generations, a vast area of fertile wilderness has lost its secret and is parcelled out like the main street of a city. As this happens, the aboriginals, possessed of ticking clocks and a taste for liquor, withdraw, fascinated and horrified, into the deeper bush. And on their heels there follow restless whites: those who can never settle down, those who believe it's not yet time to wake up from a dream. Surely in a gigantic continent there's always space to find! So they ride on into the interior, away from the creeping railways and the courthouses, till at last they are washed up beyond the mountains on to the shores of the central desert, hemmed in by the tracts of salty sand before them, and the law behind their backs.

Yet a most discreditable scene it was when he opened the larboard door of the bright-lit gunroom. Here were men, accustomed to bloodshed from their childhood, now running about like a parcel of hens, mopping Jacob's arm with their napkins, giving advice, proffering glasses of water, wine, brandy, loosening his neckcloth, undoing his breeches at the waist and the knee. The purser was literally wringing his hands. 'Pass the word for Poll Skeeping,' cried Stephen in a harsh peremptory tone. He thrust them aside irrespective of rank, whipped out a lancet (always in a side-pocket), slit Jacob's sleeve up to the shoulder, cut the shirt away, uncovered the spurting brachial artery and two other ample sources of blood on the same limb.

There were carolers singing beside King's College Chapel as we passed, their breath smoking with the song. Christmas was everywhere—in the bright window shops, in the parcels done up with string, the Christmas trees and boughs of holly, the sides of ham and poor drooping geese being carried home on shoulders and bicycles by bright-cheeked passers-by.

The “quantum theory” came into being as an effort to cure the wave theory of light of these defects. It has been completely successful. It has shewn that Newton was not wholly wrong in regarding light as corpuscular, for it has proved that a beam of light may be regarded as broken up into discrete units, called “light-quanta” or “photons,” with almost the definiteness with which a shower of rain may be broken up into drops of water, a shower of bullets into separate pieces of lead, or a gas into separate molecules. At the same time, the light does not lose its undulatory character. Each little parcel of light has a definite quantity, of the nature of a length, associated with it. We call this its “wave-length,” because when the light in question is passed through a prism, it behaves exactly as waves of this particular length of wave would do. Light of long wavelength is made up of small parcels, and vice-versa, the amount of energy in each parcel being inversely proportional to this wave-length, so that we can always calculate the energy of a photon from its wave-length, and vice-versa.

The poet is happiest with the simplest of things: sourdough toast and apricot jam, an etymology dictionary, and a biography of Josef Stalin (also a poet, in his younger pre-purge days). He is interested and amused by just about anything lying around: last month’s light bill (especially the four-color chart explaining hot water usage), the Thai menu (with typos) at lunch, an old airplane boarding pass. His ADD serves him well. The poet is an introvert, but not really. He reaches out to every parcel of the planet, because everything is subject to him (he delights in this double meaning).