Passage North Quotes

Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to a child–in simple language which is not deceit, of course–we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it.

It was strange how sometimes scenes one has never witnessed could appear before the mind’s eye more profoundly than memories from actual life,

There was a tendency, he knew, when thinking about people from the past, to believe that they’d remained the same while you yourself had evolved,

A hundred and twelve miles to the north, traveling east on Interstate 76, Kittridge had also begun to worry about fuel.

He couldn't help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he'd traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he'd been advancing not from the island's south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.

As my visits with Morrie go on, I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that hold it -so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth. Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all. That is what they believe.

We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire's completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one's life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.

Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.” We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.

For the first time in her life, she read voraciously. Anything that was on Joe's bookshelves she considered to have a worthy seal of approval. She tried authors she'd never heard of and authors she'd always meant to read. Every now and then she read passages twice, three times even, enjoying the wordcraft, the drama - but imagining that Joe had liked the book and wondering when he might be back and if there would be dinners they could share to discuss books they'd both read. [...] Tess was well aware it was escapiscm but what a way to pass another evening on her own.

Complexity and simplicity,” he replied. “Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to a child–in simple language which is not deceit, of course–we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it.

You know the Romans were fond of bloodshed. North Africa was one of many places where the Roman Empire had its arenas. It was their amphitheatre which, with the passage of time, had enlarged with the vanishing of many rocks. But, thank God, man has changed and, after six hundred years, that bloody sport has ended.

The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving.

You've got to find your bearing and stick to it. It's the road to happiness in this life.

It was the fact, above all, that sudden or violent deaths could occur not merely in a war zone or during race riots but during the slow, unremarkable course of everyday life that made them so disturbing and so difficult to accept, as though the possibility of death was contained in even the most routine of actions, in even the ordinary, unnoticed moments of life.

I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.

To yearn on the other hand was to be lost, to lack bearings in the world because one did not know what one was seeking or where it could be found, so that unable to distract oneself, by frenetic activity or single-minded pursuit, from the painful sense of lack, one’s only consolation was to look out across vast distances, as if surely somewhere in the expansiveness of the horizon, across space and sea and sky, some possibility was contained that could make life self-sufficient and devoid of need, some possibility that could bring an end to time.

It was the kind of deep, unspoken resentment that was only possible between people who loved each other intensely and yet sensed the possibility of being hurt by each other, between people who needed each other and were yet unable to fully acknowledge this need to each other for fear of becoming vulnerable. It was a form of cruelty common in families and close friendships, where people are so dependent on each other but also so hemmed in and restricted by each other, and it was a form of cruelty that was an intrinsic part of the dynamic between lovers too.

There was something about the fall colors, the warmth of the dying sun and the chill of the coming winter combined, that spoke of the endless passage of time, of eternal bliss and comfort.

sense of having a destiny in that place he’d never actually lived, fantasizing about what it would be like to walk over the same land his forebears had, to help create out of near annihilation the possibility of some new and compelling future, as though living a life simplified in the way that only war can simplify he too would be able to find something worth surrendering to.

The freedom that Kuttimani desired, the freedom that perhaps all liberation movements sought, was not just the freedom that came when one could move freely over the land on which one’s forbears lived, not just the freedom that came from being able to choose and be responsible for one’s own life, but the freedom that came when one had access to a horizon, when one felt that the possible worlds that glimmered at its edges were within one’s reach.

It no longer mattered whether Rani's death had been planned or accidental, Krishan understood now, there didn't need to be a sharp line between these two kinds of death, a meticulous plan wasn't necessary for a death to have been intended.

To desire, in a sense, was to know or think one knew what one wanted, to know or think one knew the paths by which it might be reached, even if those paths turned out to be too difficult to follow, even if the things they led to, the things one desired, turned out not to provide the liberation one thought.

There was something about twilight that heightened his anxiety, which brought it to the surface of his consciousness and made it palpable, as though with the gradual disappearance of the horizon the last hopes and promises of the day too were disappearing from view, another day coming and going with nothing to show for itself.

Three seconds before the arrival of J.B. Hobson's letter I no more thought of pursuing the unicorn than of attempting the passage of the North Sea. Three seconds after reading the letter of the honorable Secretary of Marine, I felt that my true vocation, the sole end of my life, was to chase this disturbing monster and purge it from the world.

And yet there was a crucial distinction, Krishan knew, between the forgetting that takes place as a result of our consent, which is a forgetting we need in order to reconcile our pasts and presents, and the forgetting that is imposed on us against our own will, which is so often a way of forcing us to accept a present in which we do not want to partake.

Krishan had always thought of death as something that happened suddenly or violently, an event that took place at a specific time and then was over, but thinking now of his grandmother as he sat there on the rocks, it struck him that death could also be a long, dranw-out process, a process that took up a significant portion of the life of the dying person.

It was as if, at such times, he was permanently suspended in the blissful but always vanishing space between desire and satisfaction. In that region of the self that one is no longer anguished by the absence of something one feels to be necessary for one's salvation but not yet saddened by the disappointment that attainment of desire always seemed to bring. For strong desire, desire that radiates outward through all the regions of the body, always seemed to involve the hope or belief that attainment of the object of desire whether a person, place, or situation will change everything completely, will end all absence and yearning, all effort and struggle. That it will stem somehow the slow sad passage of time.

it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.

In some cases, these liberal “progressives” show contempt for their fellow Americans who are lower class, poorly educated, sinking economically—and white. White male privilege is real, but that phrase probably mystifies a fifty-nine-year-old Walmart greeter in southern Ohio. A study by two Princeton researchers shows widespread despair among poor whites that often feeds bigotry, misplaced anger, and the racism that Donald Trump leveraged to his political advantage.15 Apparently, white racism trumps common sense, or even political self-interest in evaluating the fitness for public office of a man like Trump. Carol Anderson documents the unspoken but devastatingly effective strategy of the Republican Party (which I witnessed firsthand in North Carolina) to work white rage through passage of laws that have disadvantaged black Americans.

Long before the fair’s end, people began mourning its inevitable passage. Mary Hartwell Catherwood wrote, “What shall we do when this Wonderland is closed?—when it disappears—when the enchantment comes to an end?” One lady manager, Sallie Cotton of North Carolina, a mother of six children staying in Chicago for the summer, captured in her diary a common worry: that after seeing the fair, “everything will seem small and insignificant.

It had been in those months of waiting probably that he'd first become aware of the absence inside him, the longing for a life that existed beyond the boundaries of the Colombo and Sri Lanka he knew, an absence that he hadn't felt as an absence so much as a kind of willingness to be drawn elsewhere, an absence that made him, paradoxically, more present to the world around him, more delicately aware of its surfaces and textures and moods.

Rudel Correze is far from the first to seek to aid me in my passage to Rian. But I find myself still among the living, and I have discovered that I value this world for itself, not merely as a matter for someone's song. I love it for its heady wines and its battles, for the beauty of its women and their generosity and their pride, for the companionship of brave men and clever ones, the promise of spring in the depths of winter and the even surer promise that Rian and Corannos are waiting for us, whatever we may do. And I find now, your highness, long past the fires of my heart's youth and yours, that there is one thing I love more, even more than the music that remains my release from pain.' 'Love, de Talair? This is a word I did not expect to hear from you. I was told you foreswore it more than twenty years ago. The whole world was speaking of that. This much I am certain I remember. My information, so far distant in our cold north, seems to have been wrong in yet another matter. What is the one thing, then, my lord duke? What is it you still love?' 'Arbonne.

The stone, like the North African redware, the bronze saucepan from Italy, the ivory from India, the pottery water containers, the glass bottle in the shape of a West African head, made in Germany, the curator said, or Egypt — it was all a picture, a sculpture — an incidental passage of time, there upon a shelf on the wall. A line of stones that over time had no sure beginning or end to its construction. It was evidence of the other, that it had once been a bustling sort of city in the middle of nowhere, where different cultures came together.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

The specific path a life took was often decided in ways that were easy to discern, it was true, in the situation into which one was born, one’s race and gender and caste, in all the desires, aspirations, and narratives that one came thereafter to identify with, but people also carried deeper, more clandestine trajectories inside their bodies, their origins often unknown or accidental, their modes of operation invisible to the eye, trajectories which were sometimes strong enough to push people in certain directions despite everything that took place on the surface of their lives.

If you are a North American Christian, the reality of our society’s vast wealth presents you with an enormous responsibility, for throughout the Scriptures God’s people are commanded to show compassion to the poor. In fact, doing so is simply part of our job description as followers of Jesus Christ (Matt. 25:31–46). While the biblical call to care for the poor transcends time and place, passages such as 1 John 3:17 should weigh particularly heavy on the minds and hearts of North American Christians: “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” Of course, there is no “one-size-fits-all” recipe for how each Christian should respond to this biblical mandate. Some are called to pursue poverty alleviation as a career, while others are called to do so as volunteers. Some are called to engage in hands-on, relational ministry, while others are better suited to support frontline workers through financial donations, prayer, and other types of support. Each Christian has a unique set of gifts, callings, and responsibilities that influence the scope and manner in which to fulfill the biblical mandate to help the poor.

My family had been in a refugee camp for a year and I was thirty-one years old when the government of Israel arranged through secret channels to fly all the Jews of Yemen to Israel. It was unofficially called Operation Magic Carpet, and officially called Operation On Wings of Eagles. When our people refused to enter the airplanes out of fear—for especially our brethren from the North had no experience with modernity—our rabbis reminded them of divine passages. “This is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” they said. “The eagles that fly us to the Promised Land may be made of metal, but their wings are buoyed aloft by the breath of God.” Between June 1949 and September 1950 almost fifty thousand Yemenite Jews boarded transport planes and made some 380 flights from Aden to Israel in this secret operation.

To the north of them the great continental glacier had dipped southward, as though straining to encompass the beautiful icy mountains within its overwhelming frozen embrace. They were in the most frigid land on earth, between the glistening mountain tors and the immense northern ice, and it was the depths of winter. The air itself was sucked dry by the moisture-stealing glaciers greedily usurping every drop to increase their bloated, bedrock-crushing mass, building up reserves to withstand the onslaught of summer heat. The battle between glacial cold and melting warmth for control of the Great Mother Earth was almost at a standstill, but the tide was turning; the glacier was gaining. It would make one more advance, and reach its farthest southward point, before it was beaten back to polar lands. But even there, it would only bide its time.

In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely unrelenting, so that even when you weren't being harassed in more explicit verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter the privacy of your house without permission and without even bothering to take off their shoes. You had to employ these psychological resources so constantly over the course of the day, losing even the freedom to think autonomously in your own mind, that by the time you returned home you were always utterly exhausted. The cumulative effect of years of being subject to these gazes was that women who lived in the capital had learned to curb the movement of their own eyes to remarkable degrees, restricting their gazes in public spaces to areas where their eyes couldn't be intercepted, toward their feet or their laps or into the screen of their phones...

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

In the U.S. Articles of Confederation, the federal government gave itself the exclusive right to regulate “the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians.” This power was repeated in the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act, which further refined “trade” and “affairs” to include the purchase and sale of Indian land. The intent of these two pieces of legislation was clear. Whatever powers states were to have, those powers did not extend to Native peoples. Beginning in 1823, there would be three U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee v. Georgia, Worcester v. Georgia—that would confirm the powers that the U.S. government had unilaterally taken upon itself and spell out the legal arrangement that tribes were to be allowed. 1823. Johnson v. McIntosh. The court decided that private citizens could not purchase land directly from Indians. Since all land in the boundaries of America belonged to the federal government by right of discovery, Native people could sell their land only to the U.S. government. Indians had the right of occupancy, but they did not hold legal title to their lands. 1831. Cherokee v. Georgia. The State of Georgia attempted to extend state laws to the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee argued that they were a foreign nation and therefore not subject to the laws of Georgia. The court held that Indian tribes were not sovereign, independent nations but domestic, dependent nations. 1832. Worcester v. Georgia. This case was a follow-up to Cherokee v. Georgia. Having determined that the Cherokee were a domestic, dependent nation, the court settled the matter of jurisdiction, ruling that the responsibility to regulate relations with Native nations was the exclusive prerogative of Congress and the federal government. These three cases unilaterally redefined relationships between Whites and Indians in America. Native nations were no longer sovereign nations. Indians were reduced to the status of children and declared wards of the state. And with these decisions, all Indian land within America now belonged to the federal government. While these rulings had legal standing only in the United States, Canada would formalize an identical relationship with Native people a little later in 1876 with the passage of the Indian Act. Now it was official. Indians in all of North America were property.

By appealing to the moral and philosophical foundation work of the nation, Lincoln hoped to provide common ground on which good men in both the North and the South could stand. “I am not now combating the argument of necessity, arising from the fact that the blacks are already amongst us; but I am combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken where they have never yet been.” Unlike the majority of antislavery orators, who denounced the South and castigated slaveowners as corrupt and un-Christian, Lincoln pointedly denied fundamental differences between Northerners and Southerners. He argued that “they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. . . . When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” And, finally, “when they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them . . . and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives.” Rather than upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.” Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel,” the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.” This, he concluded, was the only road to victory—to that glorious day “when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth.” Building on his rhetorical advice, Lincoln tried to place

Page 25: …Maimonides was also an anti-Black racist. Towards the end of the [Guide to the Perplexed], in a crucial chapter (book III, chapter 51) he discusses how various sections of humanity can attain the supreme religious value, the true worship of God. Among those who are incapable of even approaching this are: "Some of the Turks [i.e., the Mongol race] and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does." Now, what does one do with such a passage in a most important and necessary work of Judaism? Face the truth and its consequences? God forbid! Admit (as so many Christian scholars, for example, have done in similar circumstances) that a very important Jewish authority held also rabid anti-Black views, and by this admission make an attempt at self-education in real humanity? Perish the thought. I can almost imagine Jewish scholars in the USA consulting among themselves, ‘What is to be done?’ – for the book had to be translated, due to the decline in the knowledge of Hebrew among American Jews. Whether by consultation or by individual inspiration, a happy ‘solution’ was found: in the popular American translation of the Guide by one Friedlander, first published as far back as 1925 and since then reprinted in many editions, including several in paperback, the Hebrew word Kushim, which means Blacks, was simply transliterated and appears as ‘Kushites’, a word which means nothing to those who have no knowledge of Hebrew, or to whom an obliging rabbi will not give an oral explanation. During all these years, not a word has been said to point out the initial deception or the social facts underlying its continuation – and this throughout the excitement of Martin Luther King’s campaigns, which were supported by so many rabbis, not to mention other Jewish figures, some of whom must have been aware of the anti-Black racist attitude which forms part of their Jewish heritage. Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of ‘Jewish interest’ (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle – and back – and back again.

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders

Hannah Winter was sixty all of a sudden, as women of sixty are. Just yesterday - or the day before, at most - she had been a bride of twenty in a wine-coloured silk wedding gown, very stiff and rich. And now here she was, all of a sudden, sixty. (...) This is the way it happened! She was rushing along Peacock Alley to meet her daughter Marcia. Anyone who knows Chicago knows that smoke-blackened pile, the Congress Hotel; and anyone who knows the Congress Hotel has walked down that glittering white marble crypt called Peacock Alley. It is neither so glittering nor so white nor, for that matter, so prone to preen itself as it was in the hotel's palmy '90s. But it still serves as a convenient short cut on a day when Chicago's lake wind makes Michigan Boulevard a hazard, and thus Hannah Winter was using it. She was to have met Marcia at the Michigan Boulevard entrance at two, sharp. And here it was 2.07. When Marcia said two, there she was at two, waiting, lips slightly compressed. (...) So then here it was 2.07, and Hannah Winter, rather panicky, was rushing along Peacock Alley, dodging loungers, and bell-boys, and traveling salesmen and visiting provincials and the inevitable red-faced delegates with satin badges. In her hurry and nervous apprehension she looked, as she scuttled down the narrow passage, very much like the Rabbit who was late for the Duchess's dinner. Her rubber-heeled oxfords were pounding down hard on the white marble pavement. Suddenly she saw coming swiftly toward her a woman who seemed strangely familiar - a well-dressed woman, harassed-looking, a tense frown between her eyes, and her eyes staring so that they protruded a little, as one who runs ahead of herself in her haste. Hannah had just time to note, in a flash, that the woman's smart hat was slightly askew and that, though she walked very fast, her trim ankles showed the inflexibility of age, when she saw that the woman was not going to get out of her way. Hannah Winter swerved quickly to avoid a collision. So did the other woman. Next instant Hannah Winter brought up with a crash against her own image in that long and tricky mirror which forms a broad full-length panel set in the marble wall at the north end of Peacock Alley. Passerby and the loungers on near-by red plush seats came running, but she was unhurt except for a forehead bump that remained black-and-blue for two weeks or more. The bump did not bother her, nor did the slightly amused concern of those who had come to her assistance. She stood there, her hat still askew, staring at this woman - this woman with her stiff ankles, her slightly protruding eyes, her nervous frown, her hat a little sideways - this stranger - this murderess who had just slain, ruthlessly and forever, a sallow, high-spirited girl of twenty in a wine-coloured silk wedding gown.

Along the coast runs a wide fertile plain, backed to the east by a north–south spine of hills which in the north become mountains; Jerusalem sits in the middle of the hill country. Before the hills rise to mountains in the north, they curve to the coast, enclosing the Kishon river valley running down to the sea. Through this curve of hills there is only one major north–south pass, guarded by an ancient strongpoint now called Megiddo. This is the chief passage point for land traffic from Egypt north-east to all the lands of the Middle East and beyond, especially the successive civilizations which rose and fell around the great rivers of Iraq, the Tigris and Euphrates. It is not surprising, therefore, that the great powers of the ancient world repeatedly fought over such a strategic place.

just longitude and latitude. Thirty-seven degrees, fifty-six minutes north by one hundred seven degrees, forty-nine minutes west.

Driving toward Gillette on Route 59 north of Bill, Wyoming, Tom Carson felt alien in the rolling landscape. Pronghorn antelope appeared here and there in the hills, grazing in herds, strung out along a stream drinking. Buffalo grazed too in the gently undulant pastures. They weren’t wild herds, he knew. They were ranch buffalo, healthful, destined to be slaughtered and sold in specialty stores. He’d never been anywhere very much until he moved to Wyoming. Lived all his life in Paradise, and his parents too. His mother taught seventh grade at Paradise Junior High. His father ran the Gulf station. The only gas station in the downtown area. He had no military experience. He hadn’t gone to college. He’d joined the cops after working three years for his father. The

DURING THE RIDE back up to Telluride, among tablelands and cañons and red-rock debris, past the stone farmhouses and fruit orchards and Mormon spreads of the McElmo, below ruins haunted by an ancient people whose name no one knew, circular towers and cliffside towns abandoned centuries ago for reasons no one would speak of, Reef was able finally to think it through. If Webb had always been the Kieselguhr Kid, well, shouldn’t somebody ought to carry on the family business—you might say, become the Kid? It might’ve been the lack of sleep, the sheer relief of getting clear of Jeshimon, but Reef began to feel some new presence inside him, growing, inflating—gravid with what it seemed he must become, he found excuses to leave the trail now and then and set off a stick or two from the case of dynamite he had stolen from the stone powder-house at some mine. Each explosion was like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts. Now and then he creaked around in the saddle, as if seeking agreement or clarification from Webb’s blank eyes or the rictus of what would soon be a skull’s mouth. “Just getting cranked up,” he told Webb. “Expressing myself.” Back in Jeshimon he had thought that he could not bear this, but with each explosion, each night in his bedroll with the damaged and redolent corpse carefully unroped and laid on the ground beside him, he found it was easier, something he looked forward to all the alkaline day, more talk than he’d ever had with Webb alive, whistled over by the ghosts of Aztlán, entering a passage of austerity and discipline, as if undergoing down here in the world Webb’s change of status wherever he was now. . . . He had brought with him a dime novel, one of the Chums of Chance series, The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth, and for a while each night he sat in the firelight and read to himself but soon found he was reading out loud to his father’s corpse, like a bedtime story, something to ease Webb’s passage into the dreamland of his death. Reef had had the book for years. He’d come across it, already dog-eared, scribbled in, torn and stained from a number of sources, including blood, while languishing in the county lockup at Socorro, New Mexico, on a charge of running a game of chance without a license. The cover showed an athletic young man (it seemed to be the fearless Lindsay Noseworth) hanging off a ballast line of an ascending airship of futuristic design, trading shots with a bestially rendered gang of Eskimos below. Reef began to read, and soon, whatever “soon” meant, became aware that he was reading in the dark, lights-out having occurred sometime, near as he could tell, between the North Cape and Franz Josef Land. As soon as he noticed the absence of light, of course, he could no longer see to read and, reluctantly, having marked his place, turned in for the night without considering any of this too odd. For the next couple of days he enjoyed a sort of dual existence, both in Socorro and at the Pole. Cellmates came and went, the Sheriff looked in from time to time, perplexed.

They are not in charge of preparing her berth for its next occupant or, like the staff at the nearby control tower, assigning her a shipping lane for the journey out to the North Sea. They wish only to admire her and note her passage. They bring to the study of harbour life a devotion more often witnessed in relation to art, their behaviour implying a belief that creativity and intelligence can be as present in the transport of axles around the tip of the western Sahara as they are in the use of impasto in a female nude. Yet how fickle museum-goers seem by comparison, with their impatient interest in cafeterias, their susceptibility to gift shops, their readiness to avail themselves of benches. How seldom has a man spent two hours in a rain-storm in front of Hendrickje Bathing with only a thermos of coffee for sustenance. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Page 25: …Maimonides was also an anti-Black racist. Towards the end of the [Guide to the Perplexed], in a crucial chapter (book III, chapter 51) he discusses how various sections of humanity can attain the supreme religious value, the true worship of God. Among those who are incapable of even approaching this are: Some of the Turks [i.e., the Mongol race] and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does. Now, what does one do with such a passage in a most important and necessary work of Judaism? Face the truth and its consequences? God forbid! Admit (as so many Christian scholars, for example, have done in similar circumstances) that a very important Jewish authority held also rabid anti-Black views, and by this admission make an attempt at self-education in real humanity? Perish the thought. I can almost imagine Jewish scholars in the USA consulting among themselves, ‘What is to be done?’ – for the book had to be translated, due to the decline in the knowledge of Hebrew among American Jews. Whether by consultation or by individual inspiration, a happy ‘solution’ was found: in the popular American translation of the Guide by one Friedlander, first published as far back as 1925 and since then reprinted in many editions, including several in paperback, the Hebrew word Kushim, which means Blacks, was simply transliterated and appears as ‘Kushites’, a word which means nothing to those who have no knowledge of Hebrew, or to whom an obliging rabbi will not give an oral explanation. During all these years, not a word has been said to point out the initial deception or the social facts underlying its continuation – and this throughout the excitement of Martin Luther King’s campaigns, which were supported by so many rabbis, not to mention other Jewish figures, some of whom must have been aware of the anti-Black racist attitude which forms part of their Jewish heritage. Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of ‘Jewish interest’ (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle – and back – and back again.

For a long time the horror that these images elicited remained buried inside him. A morbid reality he was constantly feeding and yet he was unable to express. As though unable to fully believe or understand what they depicted. It was only when the channel 4 documentary came out in 2011, accusing the government of war crimes and genocide, when later that year the UN published its report, giving an estimate of how many civilians had died that he was finally able to speak about what had happened. To accept that the images he had become obsessed with were not some strange perverted creation of his subconscious life but they represented things that had really happened in the country he was from. Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war. As though he had been hesitating to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor violated stateless people were the ones alleging it. As though he was unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the panel of foreign authority experts, legitimised by a documentary, narrated by a clean shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie.

individuals consumed by love were unable to distinguish between the sentient and the insentient, as though to the individual overcome by passion the whole world was populated by beings whose sole purpose was either to support or thwart their love.

He noted that the same summer that witnessed the Constitutional Convention saw the passage of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery north of the Ohio River.

the story of Kuttimani’s death told in the seventh chapter is based on Rajan Hoole’s account in The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence, and Murder; the documentary described in chapter nine is Beate Arnestad and Morten Daae’s My Daughter the Terrorist; the account in chapter nine of Buddhist women’s poetry is based on a translation from the Pali by Charles Hallisey.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have now entered Holkham Bay, named by Captain George Vancouver in 1794. It has two branches, Tracy Arm to the north, and Endicott Arm to the south. “We are heading first into Tracy Arm, which was named by Lieutenant Commander Mansfield of the U.S. Navy, for Benjamin Franklin Tracy, Secretary of the Navy from 1889 to 1893. Mansfield, commander of the survey vessel, Patterson, in Alaska from 1889 to 1913, also named Sawyer Glacier, which you will see at the head of this arm, and which calves the hundreds of icebergs you will see floating in the waters of the arm. This passage was carved centuries ago during an ice age by a massive glacier which completely filled the channel. You can see the signs of its passing in the scoring of the bare rock walls. Avalanche chutes further scar the walls each spring and, as you can already see ahead of us, these are occupied by spectacular waterfalls. We will shortly stop near one of these so you can view it close up and feel how cold the water is coming directly off an unseen glacier at the top. “After visiting Sawyer Glacier, we will go back and turn up Endicott Arm, named for William Endicott, a member of the Massachusetts legislature and the U.S. Senate, to see Dawes Glacier. He was secretary of war from 1885 to 1891. Part way up Endicott Arm we will come to Ford’s Terror, a branch of Endicott Arm which has very strong tidal currents.

There was a difference between the pleasure that soothed and lulled one to sleep and pleasure that drew the self more widely and vividly into the world, and thinking of his return to Colombo now it seemed to him, as he stood there in front of the window that something vital had been lost over the course of the pervious year, the sense so strong for most of his twenties that his life could be part of some larger thing, part of some movement or vision to which he could give himself up.

The Second Middle Passage was the central event in the lives of African-American people between the American Revolution and slavery's final demise in December 1865. Whether slaves were themselves marched across the continent or were afraid that they, their families, or their friends would be, the massive deportation traumatized black people, both slave and free. Like some great, inescapable incubus, the colossal transfer cast a shadow over all aspects of black life, leaving no part unaffected. It fueled a series of plantation revolutions - cotton across the immense expanse of the Lower South, sugar in the lower Mississippi Valley, hemp in the upper valley - that created new, powerful slave societies. Although the magnitude of the changes and the vastness of the area effected - from the hills of Appalachia to the Texas plains - encouraged an extraordinary variety of social formations, no corner escaped the experience of the staple-producing plantation. Its presence resonated outside the region, eroding slavery on the seaboard South to such an extent that some portions of the Upper South - most prominently the border slave states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri - devolved from slave societies into societies with slaves. Finally, it accelerated the North's evolution from a society with slaves to a free society.

Extended kinship groups - sometimes located on one plantation, more commonly extended over several - became the central units of slave life, ordering society, articulating values, and delineating identity by defining the boundaries of trust. They also became the nexus for incorporating the never-ending stream of arrivals from the seaboard states into the new society, cushioning the horror of the Second Middle Passage, and socializing the deportees to the realities of life on the plantation frontier. Playing the role of midwives, the earlier arrivals transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, melding the polyglot immigrants into one. In defining obligations and responsibilities, the family became the centerpole of slave life. The arrival of the first child provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, pioneer slaves restored the generational linkages for themselves and connected their children with grandparents they would never know. Some pioneer slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation, suggesting how slavery's long history on mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act. Along the same mental pathways that joined the charter and migration generations flowed other knowledge. Rituals carried from Africa might be as simple as the way a mother held a child to her breast or as complex as a cure for warts. Songs for celebrating marriage, ceremonies for breaking bread, and last rites for an honored elder survived in the minds of those forced from their seaboard homes, along with the unfulfilled promise of the Age of Revolution and evangelical awakenings. Still, the new order never quite duplicated the old. Even as transplanted slaves strained their memories to reconstruct what they had once known, slavery itself was being recast. The lush thicket of kin that deportees like Hawkins Wilson remembered had been obliterated by the Second Middle Passage. Although pioneer slaves worked assiduously to knit together a new family fabric, elevating elderly slaves into parents and deputizing friends as kin, of necessity they had to look beyond blood and marriage. Kin emerged as well from a new religious sensibility, as young men and women whose families had been ravaged by the Second Middle Passage embraced one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. A cadre of black evangelicals, many of who had been converted in the revivals of the late eighteenth century, became chief agents of the expansion of African-American Christianity. James Williams, a black driver who had been transferred from Virginia to the Alabama blackbelt, was just one of many believers who was 'torn away from the care and discipline of their respective churches.' Swept westward by the tide of the domestic slave trade, they 'retained their love for the exercises of religion.

The victory over Pakistan unleashed a huge wave of patriotic sentiment. It was hailed as ‘India’s first military victory in centuries’,53 speaking in terms not of India the nation, but of India the land mass and demographic entity. In the first half of the second millennium a succession of foreign armies had come in through the north-west passage to plunder and conquer. Later rulers were Christian rather than Muslim, and came by sea rather than overland. Most recently, there had been that crushing defeat at the hands of the Chinese. For so long used to humiliation and defeat, Indians could at last savour the sweet smell of military success.

So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate gold, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.

So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate golf, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.

When a great deal of later inauthentic imitation has been sifted out, the most compelling of these accounts are more than just edifying guides to do-it-yourself sainthood: they preserve portraits of people in the most extreme of situations, the circumstances of which have released them to behave well beyond convention. Most surprising is the journal of sufferings written in the first decade of the third century by an unusually well-educated, spirited (and Montanist) North African martyr called Perpetua. One of the most remarkable pieces of writing by a woman surviving from the ancient world, its content caused problems to both its editors and to subsequent conventionally minded devotees because it was shot through with her determined individuality and self-assertion. She did not simply defy the authorities but went against the expectations of everyday society (including, of course, Christian everyday society) by disobeying her father, who desperately wanted her to abandon her faith: ‘Father’, I said, ‘for the sake of argument, do you see this vase, or whatever you want to call it, lying here?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I see it’. And I said to him, ‘Can you call it by any other name than what it is?’ And he said ‘No, you can’t’. ‘So’, I said, ‘I cannot call myself anything other than what I am – a Christian’. Merely hearing this word upset my father greatly. He threw himself at me with such violence that it seemed he wanted to tear my eyes out …18 In that charged encounter is a characteristic moment of tension for Christianity: how does one form of authority relate to another, and which is going to prevail? Perpetua was disobedient not just to her father but to the institutional Catholic Church which later enrolled her among its martyrs, because she was a Montanist. Some of the most remarkable passages in her account occur in her description of the second and third dreams or visions that she had in her prison cell.

The earliest blacks to arrive in North America were not the shackled Africans who were forced to migrate from Africa to the New World during the journey called the Middle Passage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of the first Africans or people of African descent to step foot on the American continent were navigators, translators, and other seamen who worked aboard European ships during the Age of Exploration in the fifteenth century. Some who sailed were free, while other were enslaved.

You could say it’s a feeling. An inner voice. A silent whisper that makes you laugh. An energy that enters the room and possesses the body. Call it joy, awe, or elation. When a sense of harmony and fulfillment suddenly prevails. It is an arising of the ecstatic. The ecstatic is our compass, pointing to our true north. It arises genuinely in the process of creation. You’re working and struggling, and suddenly you notice a shift. A revelation. A small tweak is made, a new angle is revealed, and it takes your breath away. It can arise from even the most seemingly mundane detail. The change of a word in a sentence. Instantly, the passage morphs from nonsense to poetry, and everything falls into place.

What can we make of Amundsen? His story is a knot. All his life he had been a man of the north, all his career had been an exploration of the north. He had found a Northwest Passage;

If a person wanted to get lost in the dark passages of her own emotions, well, fine, but he had no time for such things.

Mobile's AfricaTown: Published timelines of African-American history invariably mention that the last slave ship to bring Africans to North America was the *Clotilde* … what they never explain is how this happened 50 years after the United States banned the importation of slaves. The explanation is both trivial and tragic. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipbuilder, made a wager over a few whiskies that he could elude federal agents… …While descendents of the Clotilde captives still hold reunions in the area, there is little physical evidence of this community’s origins, except for the bust of Cudjoe Lewis… …Lewis (who was originally called ‘Kazoola’) died in 1945, possibly the last surviving slave-ship captive in America.

Once she started awake to a sound like the low roll of drums, and to the south she saw an endless congregation of antelope that moved across the nighted plain, raising a cloud of dust behind them that swallowed the stars and turned the moon rusty brown as a scrape of ruined iron. Near dawn, in that darkest hour, she raised her head again and saw to the north the passage of sails. They hovered across the deep like a parade of phantom cavaliers tilted upon hellish steeds. They passed in waves, ranks upon ranks of ghostly warlords bent toward the coming dawn as if to impale the sun itself and set it atop a spike in the blackened sky.

Were we to believe, in fact, the elaborate theories of these eminent scholars, a great part of the historical events of the Old Testament should be transferred from Egypt and Chanaan into Arabia; for, according to the latest speculations of these scholars, many of the passages in the Old Testament which, until recently, were supposed to refer to Egypt (in Hebrew, Misraim) and to Ethiopia (in Hebrew, Kush) do not really apply to them but to two regions of similar names in North Arabia, called in the Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions Musri, or Musrim, and Chush, respectively. They hold that partly by means of editorial manipulation and partly by reason of corruption in the text, and in consequence of the faded memory of long-forgotten events and countries, these two archaic North-Arabian geographical names became transformed into names of similar sound, but better known, belonging to a different geographical area namely, the Egyptian Misraim and the African Chush, or Ethiopia.

one of the duties of the U.S. Navy, going all the way back to the early 1800s, the days of the Barbary pirates of North Africa, involves showing the flag. Safe passage of Navy ships ensures unmolested transit of merchant shipping, always the main conduit of all overseas trade whether in 1800 or 2000. Port calls projected U.S. influence ashore and kept markets open. Freedom of the seas, like all freedoms, must be exercised or it will atrophy.

For almost one hundred years, leaders of the white South managed to freeze race relations and racial ideology in something close to the Confederate pattern, thus demonstrating that the passage of time by itself does not erase a conflicted past. Elite southern men and women created an ideology of the Lost Cause that wrapped antebellum society, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and postwar racism in the mantle of a protective, laudatory myth. The Lost Cause portrayed the white South as cultured, chivalrous, and superior while making the North into the aggressor—crude, unprincipled, and vindictive. [...] Even after 1900 the Lost Cause ideology continued to gain strength under the leadership of a new generation, until most southern whites came to believe that their history and the myth were identical [75—76].

He continued to move forward, skirting a pocket of radiation that had not died in the four years since last he had come this way. They came upon a place where the sands were fused into a glassy sea, and he slowed as he began its passage, peering ahead after the craters and chasms it contained. Three more rockfalls assailed him before the heavens split themselves open and revealed a bright-blue light, edged with violet. The dark curtains rolled back toward the Poles, and the roaring and the gunfire reports diminished. A lavender glow remained in the north, and a green sun dipped toward the horizon at his back. They had ridden it out, and he killed the infras, pushed back his goggles, and switched on the normal night lamps. The desert would be bad enough, all by itself. Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again. To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot.

Unlike other Arab governments, who publicly supported the jihad while privately discouraging their young men from traveling to Afghanistan, North Yemen, then a separate state, sent scores of its best and brightest. For an entire generation of young Yemenis, a trip to the front lines in Afghanistan became a rite of passage.

I went out to the area of drift logs on the shore, looking for dimensional lumber or plywood to repair the cabin’s wood box. Ninety-eight percent of driftwood is logs. They have their own beauty; shades of blond and gray, curved and hollowed and sleeked like a human body – or perhaps we’re like them – aged and smoothed by years of tumbling in the seas and on the rocks.

It was partly sunny, with light winds from the west. The mind and body absorb these things. There was no thinking process like “The wind is blowing the trees. They are bending toward the east. It is a west wind.” Instead, it all osmosed into the subconscious, and the body walked on, skin moist from the air and hair ruffling like an animal’s fur in the wind.

To the east the land was darkening. Night does not fall. It rises from the earth as the sun sinks low, sets, and embraces the land with its shadow. How could I describe this place? Words could only be read and the scene imagined. Even a photo could only be seen. It would not include the sound of the water on the stones, the scent of the spruce trees, the coolness of sea wrack under my hand, or the weary satisfaction of just sitting there after paddling six hours that day, and six weeks before that. The size of these islets and their details of sand, shell and rock beach, grass, driftwood, and flowers, the small woods back of the shore – these are proportioned to kayaks and close-ups, not big cruise ships or ferries. Those get a far outline of the shore, but their only close-ups are of the docks and the towns. This country is made for the pace of a kayak.

Adventure. The word is ad-venture, to venture toward. No big declarations of peril, challenge, daring, conquest. No guarantee of making it. Just trying toward.

In the four days remaining, we worried 24 hours a day to document Titanic photographically. The first close approache with Argo was frightening, as we weren't sure whether Titanic's funnels and rigging were still attached-waiting to ensure our half-million-dollar sled. Gingerly passing Argo above Titanic's decks, we saw that the first funnel was gone, the mast was down, and the rigging was swept away, leaving us clear passage. Argo also showed us that the main forward section of the ship was upright and facing slightly east of north. Not until the last day did we identify the several stern section, lying in a heap and turned in the opposite direction of the bow, which lay nearly 2,000 feet away.

It was the genius of Orseolo to fully understand that Venice's growth, perhaps its very survival, lay far beyond the waters of the lagoon. He had already obtained favorable trading agreements with Constantinople, and, to the disgust of militant Christendom, he dispatched ambassadors to the four corners of the Mediterranean to strike similar agreements with the Islamic world. The future for Venice lay in Alexandria, Syria, Constantinople, and the Barbary Coast of North Africa, where wealthier, more advanced societies promised spices, silk, cotton, and glass — luxurious commodities that the city was ideally placed to sell on into northern Italy and central Europe. The problem for Venetian sailors was that the voyage down the Adriatic was terribly unsafe. The city's home waters, the Gulf of Venice, lay within its power, but the central Adriatic was risky to navigate, as it was patrolled by Croat pirates. Since the eighth century these Slav settlers from the upper Balkans had established themselves on its eastern, Dalmatian shores. This was a terrain made for maritime robbery. From island lairs and coastal creeks, the shallow-draft Croat ships could dart out and snatch merchant traffic passing down the strait. Venice had been conducting a running fight with these pirates for 150 years. The contest had yielded little but defeat and humiliation. One doge had been killed leading a punitive expedition; thereafter the Venetians had opted to pay craven tribute for free passage to the open seas. The Croats were now seeking to extend their influence to the old Roman towns farther up the coast. Orseolo brought to this problem a clear strategic vision that would form the cornerstone of Venetian policy for all the centuries that the Republic lived. The Adriatic must provide free passage for Venetian ships, otherwise they would be forever bottled up. The doge ordered that there would be no more tribute and prepared a substantial fleet to command obedience.

Our daily routine was soon working smoothly, and everyone gave the impression of being eminently fitted for his post. We constituted a little republic on board the “Gjöa.” We had no strict laws. I know myself how irksome this strict discipline is. Good work can be done without the fear of the

deaths could occur not merely in a war zone or during race riots but during the slow, unremarkable course of everyday life that made them so disturbing and so difficult to accept, as though the possibility of death was contained in even the most routine of actions, in even the ordinary, unnoticed moments of life.

some forms of violence could penetrate so deeply into the psyche that there was simply no question of fully recovering. Recovery was something that would take decades, which even then would be partial and ambiguous, and if he wanted to help in a meaningful way it would have to be in a way that was sustainable for him in the long term, without having to abandon all his needs for its sake.

We can direct our gazes toward what lies in the distance whenever we want, toward things that have nothing to do with us and lack the power to affect us, but usually we can hear only what is in our vicinity and has the potential to affect us, so that sound, unlike sight, was associated with the physical presence of a thing and the possibility of interaction with it. It was for this reason perhaps that ghosts and spirits and phantoms were so often depicted as silent presences in films and books, as beings we can glimpse but cannot hear, that can watch but cannot speak, as though to signify that while these beings are in some way present to us they cannot participate in our world, no longer have the power to act and affect us, just as we ourselves are present in some way to them but cannot engage in the world to which they have been cast.

They wanted some kind of verdict on their disappeared sons, husbands, and brothers so they could finally have a measure of peace, one of the women was telling the reporter, so that they could conclusively learn what had happened to the people they loved. Rani had turned to him after the segment was over and told him, shaking her head, that she was grateful for having seen her dead sons’ bodies, for having managed to hold the younger one in her arms for a few seconds, that she didn’t know what she would have done had either of them suddenly gone missing one day, had she been forced to live in uncertainty about whether they were alive or dead. When you didn’t see and hold the body of a dead child you couldn’t understand that they were gone, she told him, and unlike her the relatives of people who’d gone missing were forced as a result to live their lives in a kind of suspended state,

Listening to the sounds breaking gently against the rocks, the birds flapping their wings against the push of the warm breeze, he gradually became less restive, the present ceasing to be a void and becoming instead, for a short period of time, a place he could inhabit comfortably and securely. There were few moods that could persist after all when one was in full view of earth and sky, and even the more deep-seated moods that maintained themselves in the chest against all the conflicting feelings that came one's way while out in the world- even these moods thinned slowly into nothingness when confronted by the immensity of the horizon, so that one could feel, at such moments, if not satisfaction or contentment then the peace at least of a brief inner extinction.

They sat there watching in silence till the very end, listening to the music that played as the credits rolled, and when the video at last came to an end, Anjum closed the laptop gently and they both remained unmoving for a while, reluctant to speak or look at each other in the same way that when a film ended at the cinema and the lights came on, there was a moment in which you were reluctant to make eye contact with the person beside you, as if to do so would be to acknowledge the transience of the world in which you'd just been immersed.

The spell involves simply speaking the biblical passage of Ezekiel 16:6 while passing a hand over the wound to make the blood stop flowing so it can be bound up and heal: “And when I passed by you and saw you polluted in your blood, I said unto you while you were in your blood: Live. Yea, I said unto you while you were in your blood: Live!

the two siblings had remained close, speaking on the phone at least once a month ever since they’d moved to different places.

particular activity to be in that state. But you don’t need to climb the north face of the Eiger. You can enter that state now. Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret. It is certainly not taught in churches and temples. If you go to a church, you may hear readings from the Gospels such as “Take no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,” or “Nobody who puts his hands to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” Or you might hear the passage about the beautiful flowers that are not anxious about tomorrow but live with ease in the timeless Now and are provided for abundantly by God. The depth and radical nature of these teachings are not recognized. No one seems to realize that they are meant to be lived and so bring about a profound inner transformation.

attack, Deep Southerners and Tidewaterites organized their resistance struggle around the one civic institution they still controlled: their churches. The evangelical churches that dominated the three southern nations proved excellent vehicles for those wishing to protect the region’s prewar social system. Unlike the dominant denominations in Yankeedom, Southern Baptists and other southern evangelicals were becoming what religious scholars have termed “Private Protestants” as opposed to the “Public Protestants” that dominated the northern nations, and whom we’ll get to in a moment. Private Protestants—Southern Baptists, Southern Methodists, and Southern Episcopalians among them—believed the world was inherently corrupt and sinful, particularly after the shocks of the Civil War. Their emphasis wasn’t on the social gospel—an effort to transform the world in preparation for Christ’s coming—but rather on personal salvation, pulling individual souls into the lifeboat of right thinking before the Rapture swept the damned away. Private Protestants had no interest in changing society but rather emphasized the need to maintain order and obedience. Slavery, aristocratic rule, and the grinding poverty of most ordinary people in the southern nations weren’t evils to be confronted but rather the reflection of a divinely sanctioned hierarchy to be maintained at all costs against the Yankee heretics. By opposing slavery, one Southern Methodist minister declared, the Yankee “was disloyal to the laws of God and man”—“a wild fanatic, an insane anarchist, a law breaker, [and] a wicked intermeddler in other men’s matters.” Since biblical passages tacitly endorsed slavery, abolitionists were proclaimed guilty of being “more humane than God.” The Episcopal bishop of Alabama,

Anjum had told him at length much later about what it was like for women to move through public spaces in Delhi, about how the gaze of men in Delhi seemed to lack a kind of shame, there was no other explanation, she felt, for the persistence with which men of all classes would try, simply by staring, to pull the inner life out from inside the woman who was their object of interest.

massive pressure was brought to bear on Johnson to mobilize the National Guard to protect the marchers who planned to resume their walk to Montgomery. Pickets surrounded the White House carrying placards designed to shame the president into action: “LBJ, open your eyes, see the sickness of the South, see the horrors of your homeland.” Despite the terrible pressure, Johnson deemed the moment had not yet come. He feared “that a hasty display of federal force at this time would destroy whatever possibilities existed for the passage of voting rights legislation.” As a southerner, he knew well that the sending of federal troops would revive bitter memories of Reconstruction and risk transforming Alabama’s governor George Wallace into a martyr for states’ rights. “We had to have a real victory for the black people,” he insisted, “not a psychological victory for the North.

For drawing attention to these men, the Anti-Defamation League was somehow tarred as a liberal, partisan organization by an elected Jewish Republican—the essence of an assault on a century-old Jewish institution. I did not see any organized effort to rally around the institution. Why is that significant? The question brings to mind a haunting passage from a Jewish newspaper in Berlin, written in 1933 and quoted by Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny. We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do this because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check … and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one’s better self and away from revisiting one’s earlier oppositional posture. * * * Institutions matter, but they do not survive on their own. They must be defended, and at the moment, the Anti-Defamation League is an institution under concerted, partisan attack and is not being defended. Truth also needs to be defended, and groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center try to defend truth as they expose hate. To most of us, at least for now, the notion that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, ran a pedophile ring in the back of Comet Ping Pong, on a busy commercial strip in Washington’s affluent Northwest quadrant, is absurd. So is the tall tale that Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer who was tragically murdered in a gentrifying part of Washington before dawn in 2016, was rubbed out by Democrats because he was leaking emails to the Russians. But in the alternative universe of the alt-right, these stories are taken as truth—not because the haters in the alt-right have found logic in these stories but because they feed the larger narrative of a debauched world of liberalism that needs cleansing by fire. Even after a disturbed man from North Carolina showed up with a gun at Comet Ping Pong to free the enslaved children and nearly caused a real tragedy, the promulgators of Pizzagate like Mike Cernovich offered no mea culpas or apologies. The lies are too valuable to the larger movement.

In 1767, an epidemic broke out on board a crowded emigrant vessel sailing from Belfast to South Carolina; the unscrupulous owners had packed 450 people into its hold and more than 100 died at sea. Another ship bound from Belfast to Philadelphia ran out of food in mid-passage. Forty-six passengers starved to death; the survivors were driven to cannibalism and some even consumed the flesh of their own families. The transatlantic journey became more dangerous in the eighteenth century than it had been in the seventeenth. Mortality in ships sailing from North Britain approached that in the slave trade.17

Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are you and I and everyone else in the South of England written off as “fat and sluggish,” but even water, when it gets north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H2O and becomes something mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its writer is an extremely intelligent man of “advanced” opinions who would have nothing but contempt for nationalism in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as “One Britisher is worth three foreigners,” and he would repudiate it with horror. But when it is a question of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalize.

Environmental historian Valeria Fogleman wrote that perhaps the early Christian colonists saw themselves figuratively as the wolves’ prey based on the New Testament’s anecdote of Jesus sending his followers out as sheep among wolves. Their antipathy and fear toward wolves was a physical manifestation of their spiritual protectiveness, she wrote, for “wolves were considered capable of murdering a person’s soul.” Wolves were also viewed through a religious and cultural lens as animals that made pacts with the devil, thereby garnering them the stigma of being full of trickery and evil. Livestock damages may have been the rational argument for clearing wolves from the woods around settlements, but wolves likely also symbolized a potent religious threat in the minds of some early colonists. The Native Americans did not view wolves so negatively, and some even tattooed images of wolves - along with moose, deer, bears, and birds - on their cheeks and arms, according to William Wood, writing about New England in 1634, described the “ravenous howling Wolfe: Whose meagre paunch suckes like a swallowing gulfe” in a passage that imparts the belief that wolves consumed more prey than was necessary. Wood wished that all the wolves of the country could be replaced by bears, but only on the condition that the wolves were banished completely, because he believed wolves hunted and ate black bears. He also lamented that “common devourer,” the wolf, preying upon moose and deer. No doubt, the colonists wanted the bears, moose, and deer for their own meat and hide supplies. Yet Wood also observed the wolves of New England to be different from wolves in other countries. He wrote that they were not known to attack people, and that they did not attack horses or cows but went after pigs, goats, and red calves. The colonists seemed to believe the wolves mistook calves that were more coppery colored for deer, so much so that a red-colored calf sold for much less than a black one.

Behind him were three Arctic voyages in search of the North-West Passage. Before him were two books of seamanship and six fatal cuts of a Japanese pirate’s sword.

They are composed of what Jefferson actually said and wrote, and of what his friends and fellow founders of the United States of North America, Madison and John Adams and John Quincy Adams and the rest, actually said and wrote. Pound invented nothing, put no words into their mouths. What he did was to select passages, or, more often, phrases, from their correspondence with each other and from their journals or state records, and set them down item by item. Sometimes the source and context is indicated, but often not; and how one item might relate to another is left to the reader to fathom.

2001 when they published a scientific paper that modelled the future collapse of the Cumbre Vieja and the passage of the resulting tsunamis across the Atlantic. Within two minutes of the landslide entering the sea, Ward and Day show that –for a worst case scenario involving the collapse of 500 cubic kilometres of rock –an initial dome of water an almost unbelievable 900 metres high will be generated, although its height will rapidly diminish. Over the next 45 minutes a series of gigantic waves up to 100 metres high will pound the shores of the Canary Islands, obliterating the densely inhabited coastal strips, before crashing onto the African mainland. As the waves head further north they will start to break down, but Spain and the UK will still be battered by tsunamis up to 7 metres high. Meanwhile, to the west of La Palma, a great train of prodigious waves will streak towards the Americas. Barely six hours after the landslide, waves tens of metres high will inundate the north coast of Brazil, and a few hours later pour across the low-lying islands of the Caribbean and impact all down the east coast of the United States. Focusing effects in bays, estuaries, and harbours may increase wave heights to 50 metres or more as Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Miami bear the full brunt of Vulcan and Neptune’s combined assault. The destructive power of these skyscraper-high waves cannot be underestimated. Unlike the wind-driven waves that crash every day onto beaches around the world, and which have wavelengths (wave crest to wave crest) of a few tens of metres, tsunamis have wavelengths that are typically hundreds of kilometres long. This means that once a tsunami hits the coast as a towering, solid wall of water, it just keeps coming –perhaps for ten or fifteen minutes or more –before taking the same length of time to withdraw. Under such a terrible onslaught all life and all but the most sturdily built structures are obliterated.