Peak Book Quotes

Feet sandaled with dreams tread paths of vision leading to wisdom’s sharp peaks.

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate. Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies? Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge. The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.

Goodbye Darcy, goodbye Jean, goodbye stone cottage, scratchy towels, fields of wildflowers; good bye gorgeous Peak District ... OK English People, for your own good, get off the roads, here we come!

That period had been the peak of his life, though he had not realized it then. It had gone by without time for reflection, ending while he was still thinking things were going to get better.

Getting to the top should be a priority, but being aware of the reason for getting there should be the focus!

He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity’s engine.

I have simply forgotten how to be loved. Laura

P.S. I hope BOB doesn’t come tonight.

Just like us, books have a peak period in their lives. That’s when they should be read, but it’s quite common for people to miss that timing.

When you reflect upon what I tell you in the depths of your heart, you profit more than if you had read many books. Oh, if souls would only want to listen to My voice when I am speaking in the depths of their hearts, they would reach the peak of holiness in a short time.

Back then, in 1967, wizards were all, more or less, Merlin and Gandalf. Old men, peaked hats, white beards. But this was to be a book for young people. Well, Merlin and Gandalf must have been young once, right? And when they were young, when they were fool kids, how did they learn to be wizards? And there was my book.

Let go of the heavy pains of yesterday and you will feel lighter to float on top with your values. Arise and float!

Home is a room dappled with firelight: there are pictures and books. And when the rain sighs, and the acorns fall, there are patterns of leaves against the drawn curtains. Home is where I was safe. Home is what I fled from.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, "that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter." There is no doubt: this laughter goes "far beyond joking, jeering, and ridicule." The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing at anything concrete, their laughter has no object; it is an expression of being rejoicing at being... and in this ecstatic laughter he loses all memory, all desire, cries out to the immediate present of the world, and needs no other knowledge.

Change is like a river: nothing is the same, even for an instant. Everything is continually moving through the six stages of change: about to come into being, beginning, expanding, approaching maximum potential, peaking, and finally, passing its peak and flowing into its new condition.

Until you get enough of enough, the "enough" that is never enough, you dare not quit! If your good is better, your better can be best; your best too can become excellent!

I wonder if life is still something I can make up.

On the other hand, when they get all sweet because they want it, that's called PEAK. PEAK is Pre-Ejaculation Ass Kissing. It’s during PEAK that we have the most power. Take advantage of PEAK! PEAK makes men do cRaZZzY things! Just like PMS makes us do crazy shit. Hormones are a bitch. “The Talk” is basically your first round of PEAK with this man. You can get a lot of what you want during PEAK, so don’t be afraid to tell a man what you want or expect. He’s either going to say yes or no. If he denies you what you want, then

To laugh is to live profoundly... The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, "that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter... it is an expression of being rejoicing at being...

Fanfare for the Makers A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what? To the small fire that never leaves the sky. To the great fire that boils the daily pot. To all the things we are not remembered by, Which we remember and bless. To all the things That will not notice when we die, Yet lend the passing moment words and wings. So fanfare for the Makers: who compose A book of words or deeds who runs may write As many who do run, as a family grows At times like sunflowers turning towards the light. As sometimes in the blackout and the raids One joke composed an island in the night. As sometimes one man’s kindness pervades A room or house or village, as sometimes Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes At midnight means to share them, as one man In old age plants an avenue of limes And before they bloom can smell them, before they span The road can walk beneath the perfected arch, The merest greenprint when the lives began Of those who walk there with him, as in default Of coffee men grind acorns, as in despite Of all assaults conscripts counter assault, As mothers sit up late night after night Moulding a life, as miners day by day Descend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kite In an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers play Their fish, as workers work and can take pride In spending sweat before they draw their pay. As horsemen fashion horses while they ride, As climbers climb a peak because it is there, As life can be confirmed even in suicide: To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair. Louis Macneice

The real flight of this hawk is impending. Still,this bird is yet to be tested for real. Though I have leaped over the seas, well,the entire sky is still remaining to fly. And make sure that ,i am gonna do it with all my heart and all my soul. #loveyoourlife #liveyourlife #hvFUN

Sometimes I think he’s just chosen to keep quiet because it is so much more interesting sometimes to just listen to people instead of talking to them.

I wanted to be a tree so that I could listen for trouble in the woods.

Lord Turtle was just sleeping for a bit. So what? Did ya miss me, fool? Well, even if you did, it doesn't matter. In fact, don't even talk to me. I'm germaphobic!

I like the idea of keeping my thoughts all in one place, like a brain you can look into.

It is silly. The whole notion of cause-and-effect is probably superstition. But the same cycle shows a peak in house building right after a peak in marriages.

The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often, as Csikszentmihalyi explained in his 1996 book Creativity, going to extreme lengths to seek them out: It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.

Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.

Sometimes my bedroom is the best place in the world, and other times it is like a place that closes in and suffocates me. I

I am your boat! I am your crew Your rudder and your mast - Your friend, I am your limpet too And your elastoplast. - Tintinnabulum

In great thick dusty books he read And hardly ever went to bed Before it was eleven. - One Day When They Had Settled Down

In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall.

Create a standard for yourself and not a limit. A limit tells where you can reach in life, but standard tells about what you will love to do best at a time!

Never be rigid on an action plan that always fails, freezes and frustrates. Perhaps what you need is a change of your methods you run with the peak velocity!

It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women ... Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds' pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God ... In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms ...

...another comber of far pleasure followed the first, for his books came suddenly before his eyes, row upon row of volumes, row upon priceless row of calf-bound Thought, of philosophy and fiction, of travel and fantasy; the stern and the ornate, the moods of gold or green, of sepia, rose, or black; the picaresque, the arabesque, the scientific - the essays, the poetry and the drama. All this, he felt, he would now re-enter. He could inhabit the world of words, with, at the back of his melancholy, a solace he had not known before.

Life is what it is, a gift that is given to us for a time—like a library book—that must eventually be returned. How should we treat this book? If we are able to remember that it is not ours to begin with—one that we’re entrusted with, to care for, to study and learn from—perhaps it would change the way we treat it while it’s in our possession.

What is love? Is it a lightning bolt that instantaneously unites two souls in utter infatuation and admiration through the meeting of a simple innocent stare? Or is it a lustful seed that is sown in a dark dingy bar one sweaty summer's night only to be nurtured with romantic rendezvous as it matures into a beautiful flower? Is it a river springing forth, creating lifelong bonds through experiences, heartaches, and missed opportunities? Or is it a thunderstorm that slowly rolls in, climaxing with an awesome display of unbridled passion, only to succumb to its inevitable fade into the distance? I define love as education.... It teaches us to learn from our opportunities, and made the stupidest of decisions for the rightest of reasons. It gives us a hint of what "it" should be and feel like, but then encourages us to think outside the box and develop our own understanding of what "it" could be. Those that choose to embrace and learn from love's educational peaks and valleys are the ones that will eventually find true love, that one in a million. Those that don't are destined to be consumed with the inevitable ring around the rosy of fake I love you's and failed relationships. I have been lucky enough to have some of the most amazing teachers throughout my romantic evolution and it is to them that I dedicate this book. The lessons in life, passion and love they taught me have helped shape who I am today and who I will be tomorrow. To the love that stains my heart, but defines my soul....I thank you.....

It was a perfect autumn day. The sky was that deep blue that one sees only in the heart of fall, and the leaves were reaching their peak of color. The sun was shining, the air was crisp, and it was easy to forget there was evil in the world.

this sentence I'm reading is terrific" i can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood. He didn't get it, though. He started walking around the room again, picking up all my personal stuff, and Stradlater's. Finally, I put my book down on the floor. you couldn't read anything with a guy like Ackley around. It was impossible. I slid way the hell down in my chair and watched old Ackley making himself at home. I was feeling sort of tired from the trip to New York and all, and I started yawning. then horsing around a little bit. Sometimes I horse around quite a lot, just to keep from getting bored. what i did was, I pulled the old peak of my hunting hat around to the front, then pulled it way down over my eyes. that way i couldn't see a goddam thing."I think I'm going blind,"I said in this very hoarse voice."Mother darling, everything's getting do dark in here." "You're nuts. I swear to God,"Ackley said. "Mother darling, give me your hand, Why won't you give me your hand?" "For Chrissake, grow up." I started groping around in front of me, like a blind guy, but without getting up or anything. I kept saying,"mother darling, why wont you give me you're hand ?" I was only horsing around, naturally.

Because if I reached ten, I would’ve reached the max, with no more room for love to grow.” He stepped closer still, until our breaths mixed in the air suspended between us. “You’d never be my ten. Because I’d never reach the peak of loving you.

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people’s principal method for filling idle time. Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of literary possibility, a helpful new phenomenon, the book club, had just made its debut. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and was followed the next year by the Literary Guild.

The God who made the stars, the seas, the mountains and its peaks, the universe and its galaxies felt this world would be incomplete without you and without me. Do you see how you are a puzzle piece in the whole—how without you here, there would be a hole? Your body is not just a clay tent that you live in, it’s a piece of the universe you have been given. You are not a small star, you are a reflection of the entire cosmos. Can you hear the big bang in your heart? Eighty times a minute God knocks on the doors of your chest, to remind you that He has never left, and that He is closer to you than the jugular vein in your neck (50:16). Every moment is divinely blessed, for this very moment God is blowing the breath of life through eight billion different human chests. You are not just star dust and dirt, you are a reflection of God’s beauty on Earth. You are not this mortal body that death will one day take. You are an everlasting spirit held in the mortal embrace of clay. You are not a human being meant to be spiritual, you are a spiritual being living this human being miracle.” ARU BARZAK, POET

Reading that book is like looking at the final EKG results of a man who died a long, long time ago. Each word reads like the rapid peaks and falls of his arrhythmic imagination; each sentence steering him toward the stroke of genius that will eventually cause his mind to flatline.

If you don’t drink coffee, you should think about two to four cups a day. It can make you more alert, happier, and more productive. It might even make you live longer. Coffee can also make you more likely to exercise, and it contains beneficial antioxidants and other substances associated with decreased risk of stroke (especially in women), Parkinson’s disease, and dementia. Coffee is also associated with decreased risk of abnormal heart rhythms, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.12, 13 Any one of those benefits of coffee would be persuasive, but cumulatively they’re a no-brainer. An hour ago I considered doing some writing for this book, but I didn’t have the necessary energy or focus to sit down and start working. I did, however, have enough energy to fix myself a cup of coffee. A few sips into it, I was happier to be working than I would have been doing whatever lazy thing was my alternative. Coffee literally makes me enjoy work. No willpower needed. Coffee also allows you to manage your energy levels so you have the most when you need it. My experience is that coffee drinkers have higher highs and lower lows, energywise, than non–coffee drinkers, but that trade-off works. I can guarantee that my best thinking goes into my job, while saving my dull-brain hours for household chores and other simple tasks. The biggest downside of coffee is that once you get addicted to caffeine, you can get a “coffee headache” if you go too long without a cup. Luckily, coffee is one of the most abundant beverages on earth, so you rarely have to worry about being without it. Coffee costs money, takes time, gives you coffee breath, and makes you pee too often. It can also make you jittery and nervous if you have too much. But if success is your dream and operating at peak mental performance is something you want, coffee is a good bet. I highly recommend it. In fact, I recommend it so strongly that I literally feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t developed the habit.

Mount Everest has a “death zone”. When a climber is in that zone, at very high altitude, he’s living on borrowed time. He will almost certainly need a good oxygen supply. All living tissue is starting to die (necrosis) thanks to the cold and the altitude. Unlike climbers, the higher that geniuses ascend, the more invigorated they become, the stronger their flesh and minds become. They experience the opposite of necrosis. They have entered the Life Zone.

I have such an anger and an urge to charge at the sky, to call the wind a liar for never showing itself. An urge to scream at the two who allowed my birth. Cries for help to anyone who will hear them. To scream into the street that there is a lack of miracles in Mother Nature herself. Her divinity is a lie. In

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia

The boar, the stag, and the eagle met on the last craggy peak of the world, look down, and sighed at what they saw. The boar was a king, and he said, "There is not enough people." The stag was a poet, and he said, "There is not enough beauty." The eagle was a cleric, and her said, "There is not enough mystery." Then the wolf, arriving late, looked up instead of down and said, "There is not enough hunger," and promptly ate them all. If the boar was king, the stag was poet, and the eagle was cleric, then what was the wolf?

Still the future of civilization lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of young men like that, he thought.

Time softens a person. Like the mountains at home. The older peaks are not as jagged. Time wears on them, rounds them.

The Readers... We write to inspire, to move and to share. What is a book without someone to read it? Simply words on a page and nothing more. ~Kali Willows~

I don’t want to feed my dreams.

I do not think that hour there told me anything I could not have imagined myself, but being there, in that silence, gave me hope that at least there are no wars after death. I

But as the Count advanced through Essays Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, his goal seemed to recede into the distance. It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of Sahara. And having emptied his canteen, the Count would soon be crawling across its sentences with the peak of each hard-won page revealing but another page beyond.....

Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice. Samuel said that Tom was quavering over greatness, trying to decide whether he could take the cold responsibility. Samuel knew his son’s quality and felt the potential of violence, and it frightened him, for Samuel had no violence—even when he hit Adam Trask with his fist he had no violence. And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly—well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands. John Steinbeck. East of Eden (Kindle Locations 4766-4770). Viking.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life. It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women ... Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds' pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God ... In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms ...

His apartment is small and filled with books from the toilet tank to the top of the fridge. I think he has to keep reading these stories because he so rarely has any stories of his own. I

Only on the hard path can you actualize your potential, grow, mature, have peak human experiences and enjoy epiphanies. The hard path alone allows you to fulfill yourself. The easy path destroys your soul.

Having to amuse myself during those earlier years, I read voraciously and widely. Mythic matter and folklore made up much of that reading—retellings of the old stories (Mallory, White, Briggs), anecdotal collections and historical investigations of the stories' backgrounds—and then I stumbled upon the Tolkien books which took me back to Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake and the like. I was in heaven when Lin Carter began the Unicorn imprint for Ballantine and scoured the other publishers for similar good finds, delighting when I discovered someone like Thomas Burnett Swann, who still remains a favourite. This was before there was such a thing as a fantasy genre, when you'd be lucky to have one fantasy book published in a month, little say the hundreds per year we have now. I also found myself reading Robert E. Howard (the Cormac and Bran mac Morn books were my favourites), Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and finally started reading science fiction after coming across Andre Norton's Huon of the Horn. That book wasn't sf, but when I went to read more by her, I discovered everything else was. So I tried a few and that led me to Clifford Simak, Roger Zelazny and any number of other fine sf writers. These days my reading tastes remain eclectic, as you might know if you've been following my monthly book review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I'm as likely to read Basil Johnston as Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson as Harlan Ellison, Barbara Kingsolver as Patricia McKillip, Andrew Vachss as Parke Godwin—in short, my criteria is that the book must be good; what publisher's slot it fits into makes absolutely no difference to me.

‪The future of civilisation lies in the hands of young men with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy.

What do they think has happened, the old fools, To make them like this ? Do they somehow suppose It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember Who called this morning ? Or that, if they only chose, They could alter things back to when they danced all night, Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September ? Or do they fancy there's really been no change, And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight, Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming Watching light move ? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange: Why aren't they screaming ? At death, you break up: the bits that were you Start speeding away from each other for ever With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true: We had it before, but then it was going to end, And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower Of being here. Next time you can't pretend There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs: Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it: Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines- How can they ignore it ? Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms Inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, Setting down a Iamp, smiling from a stair, extracting A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning, The blown bush at the window, or the sun' s Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live: Not here and now, but where all happened once. This is why they give An air of baffled absence, trying to be there Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear Of taken breath, and them crouching below Extinction' s alp, the old fools, never perceiving How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet. The peak that stays in view wherever we go For them is rising ground. Can they never tell What is dragging them back, and how it will end ? Not at night? Not when the strangers come ? Never, throughout The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well, We shall find out.

When there is a marriage. A union that you were born of, not responsible for. You, child, should be a gift to those who are ready, not a burden like so many others before you. Come back, child, when I am no longer a child myself. Laura

One thing you won’t find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Country, Brave New World and hundreds and hundreds of others. The reason for this is simple: they were banned. Altogether, at its peak, 5,000 titles were forbidden to be imported into the country. By the 1950s this had fallen to a couple of hundred, but it still featured some extraordinary exclusions – Childbirth Without Pain, for instance, whose unflinching candour in describing where babies come from was considered a little too rich for Australian sensibilities. This was just conventional titles, by the way.

He watched her small figure disappear and brought the bag back to his shoulder to continue onward. But before he took another step, he looked at the tall mountain that touched the moon, its peak soaring into the sky as if holding it up. Misty clouds draped softly, but up where the mountain met the moon, Rendi thought he could still see what he expected to be there. There was old Mr. Shan, the Spirit of the Mountain, who sat at the mountain’s tip with the book in his lap.

Meanwhile the castle rolled. Great walls collapsed, one into another. The colours of the tracts were horrible. The vilest green. The most hideous purple. Here the foul shimmering of rotting fungi – there a tract of books alive with mice.

Only later I felt that poetry is like feeling another person lying next to you in the dark. Do you believe in poetry, in the spirit of poetry? I could see poetry in ballads, in the picture of the cathedral on the back of the postcard that my father sent my mother from London, in glaciers, peaks of mountains, river dust, Ian McEwan's covers of his books, cheap thrillers. Running gave me a gravitational pull. Running was my mother love. I was barefoot. There I was dressed in white. Matchstick legs. Hair standing up. I did not feel like a zero. I did not feel like a lost oar, unloved and unwanted, like a plant that needed water. A fleet of paper ships that needed to be mourned. I often felt homesick for the country of my mother.

The universe cannot slide into stasis. It must reach a climax and then begin again. The universe is orgasmic, not “happy”, not “tranquil”. Its job is to achieve peaks, not plateaus and flatlines. If you have peaks, you necessarily have troughs. This really is a rollercoaster ride. It’s inevitable. It’s built into reality. Existence is made of sinusoids, the archetypal rollercoasters, permanently cycling between peaks and troughs. If God is the ultimate peak (zero mental entropy), the Big Bang is the ultimate trough (maximum mental entropy). Do you have the courage and fortitude to be a God? Remember, it’s a rollercoaster ride. You must be ready for the troughs. There are as many snakes as ladders. Everyone’s trying to drag you down.

Or on retiring to Prunesquallors' he might take down one of the Doctor's many books and read, for these days a passion to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind consumed him; but only as a means to an end. He must know all things, for only so might he have, when situations arose in the future, a full pack of cards to play from. He imagined himself occasions when the conversation of one from who he foresaw advancement might turn to astronomy, metaphysics, history, chemistry, or literature, and he realized that to be able to drop into the argument a lucid and exact thought, an opinion based on what might *appear* to be a life-time study, would instantaneously gain more for him than waiting until the conversation turned upon what lay within his scope of experience.

When you surrender you become a valley; when you are an ego you are like a peak. Ego means you are above everyone else, you are somebody. The others may recognize you, may not recognize you – that is another thing. You recognize that you are above everyone. You are like a peak; nothing can enter you. When one surrenders, one becomes like a valley. One becomes depth, not height. Then the whole existence begins to pour into him from everywhere. He is just a vacuum, just a depth, an abyss, bottomless. The whole existence begins to pour from everywhere. You can say godliness runs from everywhere to him, enters him from every pore, fills him totally. This surrender, this becoming a valley, an abyss, can be felt in many ways. There are minor surrenders; there are major surrenders. Even in minor surrenders you feel it. Surrendering to a master is a minor surrender, but you begin to feel it because the master begins to flow into you immediately. If you surrender to a master, suddenly you feel his energy flowing into you. If you cannot feel energy flowing into you, then know well you have not surrendered even in a minor way. There

The road was wet with rain, black and shiny like oilskin. The reflection of the street lamps wallowed like yellow jelly-fish. A bus was approaching - a bus to Piccadilly, a bus to the never-never land - a bus to death or glory. I found neither. I found something which haunts me still. The great bus swayed as it sped. The black street gleamed. Through the window a hundred faces fluttered by as though the leaves of a dark book were being flicked over. And I sat there, with a sixpenny ticket in my hand. What was I doing! Where was I going? ("Same Time, Same Place")

Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration and adopts the `peak-end rule` — it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and assesses the whole experience according to their average. This has far-reaching impact on all our practical decisions.

It was like living half your life in a tiny, scruffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better...and then discovering a little hole in the corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get your finger into, and tease and pull apart at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you... so that you stepped out of the tiny box's confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snow fields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.

At the end of the 1400s, the world changed. Two key dates can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and, following the invention of printing, William Caxton issued the first imaginative book to be published in England - Sir Thomas Malory's retelling of the Arthurian legends as Le Morte D'Arthur. In 1492, Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas opened European eyes to the existence of the New World. New worlds, both geographical and spiritual, are the key to the Renaissance, the 'rebirth' of learning and culture, which reached its peak in Italy in the early sixteenth century and in Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603.

Come with us to the summit of the pyramid, to the perfection of the universe and the perfection of yourself. At the top of the pyramid are the gods and goddesses themselves – fully optimized, perfected minds. They have reached the Hyper Point, the Point Above All. Join us. Join the Society of the Divine. Join the Community of the Gods. Do not worship God. Become God.

Now we can see what makes mathematics unique. Only in mathematics is there no significant correction-only extension. Once the Greeks had developed the deductive method, they were correct in what they did, correct for all time. Euclid was incomplete and his work has been extended enormously, but it has not had to be corrected. His theorems are, every one of them, valid to this day. Ptolemy may have developed an erroneous picture of the planetary system, but the system of trigonometry he worked out to help him with his calculations remains correct forever. Each great mathematician adds to what came previously, but nothing needs to be uprooted. Consequently, when we read a book like A History of Mathematics, we get the picture of a mounting structure, ever taller and broader and more beautiful and magnificent and with a foundation, moreover, that is as untainted and as functional now as it was when Thales worked out the first geometrical theorems nearly 26 centuries ago. Nothing pertaining to humanity becomes us so well as mathematics. There, and only there, do we touch the human mind at its peak.

If we are intent upon answering our most serious questions, from climate change to poverty, and curing diseases to designing new products, we need to work with people who think differently, not just accurately. And this requires us to take a step back and view performance from a fundamentally different vantage point. Consider an irony in the way we traditionally think about success. If you look at science or, indeed, popular literature, the focus is on individuals. How can we improve the knowledge or perceptiveness of ourselves or our colleagues? Fine books such as Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Sources of Power by Gary Klein and Mindset by Carol Dweck have become bestsellers. All examine, in their different ways, how we can improve individual abilities through time.

What we all have to avoid is the notion that we can buy our way out of our problems. Instead, the goal is to reduce our costs by extreme frugality. This is psychologically difficult because if there is one great certain confidence in American society it is this: you can buy your way out of almost anything. Other than a few things that will land you in jail even if you are rich, we tend to look for solutions that involve buying things. Having trouble with your marriage? Take a vacation. Pay a counsellor. Don't want to eat pesticides? Buy organic food! Indebted? Buy a book about how to get out. Worried about Peak Oil? Look at all the things there are to buy. Got a crosscut saw and a year's supply of dry milk yet? Don't want to give up driving and flying? We'll sell you some nice carbon offsets.

As researchers Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool underscore in their book Peak, mastery requires deliberate practice, and lots of it. But if you love it, you do it. Picasso experimented with other forms of art but kept painting as his focus. Michael Jordan did a stint at baseball, but basketball was where he really thrived. Play hardest in your area of strength and you’ll achieve depth, meaning, and satisfaction in your life.

So I spent my birthday alone. I went out to where I go with BOB. It was light out, and everything seemed like an awful dream, until I saw a piece of rope lying at the back of the base of his favorite tree. I got a chill, but forced it away. I tried to look carefully at the tree, to find something that would explain why he picked this place, this tree. There was nothing. I made sure I was alone before I did what I had planned.

Feeling the Wind in Your Hair The peak of the cliff sits tantalizingly close. Your hands rest on your knees as you gasp, willing more oxygen into your lungs. You look back with pride down the way you've come. Just a little farther and you'll be there. Your energy now partially restored, you step on and on. The light wind lifts the closer you get to the peak. A plateau soon falls away abruptly down to the sea, and the sweeping air collects and whips into your face. The view is sublime but the payoff comes as you stand--arms stretched wide in triumph--with your eyes closed as the raging wind buffets your face. This wind, collected and grown above oceans, flitting and crashing its way across the waves, finally reaches the shore and clasps itself around you in a fleeting embrace. The crack of its passing meets your ears and slowly it absorbs you--a streaming current of air caressing your rejoicing face.

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I’m not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn’t impress me, and I don’t care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It’s an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want.

The Anasazi collapse and other southwestern collapses offer us not only a gripping story but also an instructive one for the purposes of this book, illustrating well our themes of human environmental impact and climate change intersecting, environmental and population problems spilling over into warfare, the strengths but also the dangers of complex non-self-sufficient societies dependent on imports and exports, and societies collapsing swiftly after attaining peak population numbers and power.

Or take historians, the quintessential assemblers of existing facts and ideas. Weirdly, they fall way out of the typical range for decline, peaking 39.7 years after career inception, on average. Think what this implies: Say you intend to pursue a career as a professional historian and finish your PhD at thirty-two. The bad news is that in your fifties, you are still pretty wet behind the ears. But here’s the good news: at age seventy-two, you still have half your work to go! Better take care of your health so you can write your best books into your eighties.

Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsia, had she wished to, could have disappeared awkwardly but very suddenly into these fantastic mountains, reached their centre and lain down upon an ancient couch with a picture book at her elbow and been entirely lost to view within a few moments.

Miss Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones, former paid companion to several of the ton’s most successful debutantes of prior seasons, came to Havenhurst to fill the position of Elizabeth’s duenna. A woman of fifty with wiry gray hair she scraped back into a bun and the posture of a ramrod, she had a permanently pinched face, as if she smelled something disagreeable but was too well-bred to remark upon it. In addition to the duenna’s daunting physical appearance, Elizabeth observed shortly after their first meeting that Miss Throckmorton-Jones possessed an astonishing ability to sit serenely for hours without twitching so much as a finger. Elizabeth refused to be put off by her stony demeanor and set about finding a way to thaw her. Teasingly, she called her “Lucy,” and when the casually affectionate nickname won a thunderous frown from the lady, Elizabeth tried to find a different means. She discovered it very soon: A few days after Lucinda came to live at Havenhurst the duenna discovered her curled up in a chair in Havenhurt’s huge library, engrossed in a book. “You enjoy reading?” Lucinda had said gruffly-and with surprise-as she noted the gold embossed title on the volume. “Yes,” Elizabeth had assured her, smiling. “Do you?” “Have you read Christopher Marlowe?” “Yes, but I prefer Shakespeare.” Thereafter it became their policy each night after supper to debate the merits of the individual books they’d read. Before long Elizabeth realized that she’d won the duenna’s reluctant respect. It was impossible to be certain she’d won Lucinda’s affection, for the only emotion the lady ever displayed was anger, and that only once, at a miscreant tradesman in the village. Even so, it was a display Elizabeth never forgot. Wielding her ever-present umbrella, Lucinda had advanced on the hapless man, backing him clear around his own shop, while from her lips in a icy voice poured the most amazing torrent of eloquent, biting fury Elizabeth had ever heard. “My temper,” Lucinda had primly informed her-by way of apology, Elizabeth supposed-“is my only shortcoming.” Privately, Elizabeth thought Lucy must bottle up all her emotions inside herself as she sat perfectly still on sofas and chairs, for years at a time, until it finally exploded like one of those mountains she’d read about that poured forth molten rock when the pressure finally reached a peak.

O Lord, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all.… —Psalm 104:24 (NAS) In her intriguing book What’s Your God Language? Dr. Myra Perrine explains how, in our relationship with Jesus, we know Him through our various “spiritual temperaments,” such as intellectual, activist, caregiver, traditionalist, and contemplative. I am drawn to naturalist, described as “loving God through experiencing Him outdoors.” Yesterday, on my bicycle, I passed a tom turkey and his hen in a sprouting cornfield. Suddenly, he fanned his feathers in a beautiful courting display. I thought how Jesus had given me His own show of love in surprising me with that wondrous sight. I walked by this same field one wintry day before dawn and heard an unexpected huff. I had startled a deer. It was glorious to hear that small, secret sound, almost as if we held a shared pleasure in the untouched morning. Visiting my daughter once when she lived well north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, I can still see the dark silhouettes of the caribou and hear the midnight crunch of their hooves in the snow. I’d watched brilliant green northern lights flash across the sky and was reminded of the emerald rainbow around Christ’s heavenly throne (Revelation 4:3). On another Alaskan visit, a full moon setting appeared to slide into the volcanic slope of Mount Iliamna, crowning the snow-covered peak with a halo of pink in the emerging light. I erupted in praise to the triune God for the grandeur of creation. Traipsing down a dirt road in Minnesota, a bloom of tiny goldfinches lifted off yellow flowers growing there, looking like the petals had taken flight. I stopped, mesmerized, filled with the joy of Jesus. Jesus, today on Earth Day, I rejoice in the language of You. —Carol Knapp Digging Deeper: Pss 24:1, 145:5; Hb 2:14

The role of time has been a refrain in this part of the book. It is logical to describe the life of the experiencing self as a series of moments, each with a value. The value of an episode—I have called it a hedonimeter total—is simply the sum of the values of its moments. But this is not how the mind represents episodes. The remembering self, as I have described it, also tells stories and makes choices, and neither the stories nor the choices properly represent time. In storytelling mode, an episode is represented by a few critical moments, especially the beginning, the peak, and the end. Duration is neglected.

SURELY YOU SEE from this that you shouldn’t take your own experience as the rule of thumb by which you judge other contemplatives. For example, those who must work really hard to reach the peak of contemplation, and then only get there occasionally, might make the mistake of using their own experience as the standard for other contemplatives. We must remember that not everyone has a difficult journey to the exceptional ecstasy. Some walk a simple path, routinely meeting the miraculous in the ordinary. On the other hand, these contemplatives must not make the opposite assumption that their experience is universal. Not everyone feels the joy of contemplation whenever they wish. Avoid both close-minded ways of thinking, for you can’t judge another’s unique contemplative experience by your own. Besides, you can’t know God’s wisdom; someone who has struggled a long time with prayer only to know the extraordinary transcendent moment may one day have these moments whenever they want and as often as they want. Moses is a good example of this. To start with, he only rarely caught a glimpse of the Ark’s form and not without first working awfully hard on the mountain. But later, when the Ark was kept in the valley, Moses could see it as often as he liked.1

Driven by heartache, she beat the eggs even more vigorously until the glossy meringue quickly formed into stiff, bird's beak peaks. "Philippe, do you have any orange liqueur?" Marie asked, rummaging through her brother's pantry. "Here it is," Philippe said, handing a corked bottle to her. "What are you making?" "A bûche de Noël," Danielle said, concentrating on her task. Carefully measuring each rationed ingredient, she combined sugar and flour in another bowl, grated orange zest, added the liqueur, and folded the meringue into the mixture. "It's not Christmas without a traditional Yuletide log." Marie ran a finger down a page of an old recipe book, reading directions for the sponge cake, or biscuit. "'Spread into a shallow pan and bake for ten minutes.'" "I wouldn't know about that," Philippe said. "I don't celebrate your husband's holiday," he said pointedly to Marie. "Let's not dredge up that old argument, mon frère," Marie said, softening her words with a smile. "I converted for love." A knock sounded at the front door. Danielle threw a look of concern toward Philippe, who hurried to answer it. "Then we'll cool it," Danielle said, trying to stay calm. "And brush the surface with coffee liqueur and butter cream frosting, roll it like a log, and decorate." She thought about the meringue mushrooms she had made with Nicky last year, and how he had helped score the frosting to mimic wood grains.

That night, I hated father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply sat there in his ugly arm-chair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head. And when my mother came through the door and asked me whether I had seen her spectacles, I hated her too. I hated the clothes she wore; tasteless and fussy. I hated them deeply. I hated something I had never noticed before; it was the way the heels of her shoes were worn away on their outside edges - not badly, but appreciably. It looked mean to me, slatternly, and horribly human. I hated her for being human - like father. She began to nag me about her glasses and the thread-bare condition of the elbows of my jacket, and suddenly I threw my book down. The room was unbearable. I felt suffocated. I suddenly realised that I must get away. I had lived with these two people for nearly twenty-three years. I had been born in the room immediately overhead. Was this the life for a young man? To spend his evenings watching the smoke drift out of his father's mouth and stain that decrepit old moustache, year after year - to watch the worn-away edges of my mother's heels - the dark-brown furniture and the familiar stains on the chocolate-coloured carpet? I would go away; I would shake off the dark, smug mortality of the place. I would forgo my birthright. What of my father's business into which I would step at his death? What of it? To hell with it. ("Same Time, Same Place")

------The Aqyn's Song------- I have come from the edge of the world. I have come from the lungs of the wind, With a thing I have seen so awesome Even Dzambul could not sing it. With a fear in my heart so sharp It will cut the strongest of metals. In the ancient tales it is told In a time that is older than Qorqyt, Who took from the wood of Syrghaj The first qobyz, and the first song-- It is told that a land far distant Is the place of the Kirghiz Light. In a place where words are unknown, And eyes shine like candles at night, And the face of God is a presence Behind the mask of the sky-- At the tall black rock in the desert, In the time of the final days. If the place were not so distant, If words were known, and spoken, Then the God might be a Gold ikon, Or a page in a paper book. But It comes as the Kirghiz Light-- There is no other way to know It. The roar of Its voice is deafness, The flash of Its light is blindness. The floor of the desert rumbles, And Its face cannot be borne. And a man cannot be the same, After seeing the Kirghiz Light. For I tell you that I have seen It In a place which is older than darkness, Where even Allah cannot reach. As you see, my beard is an ice-field, I walk with a stick to support me, But this light must change us to children. And now I cannot walk far, For a baby must learn to walk. And my words are reaching your ears As the meaningless wounds of a baby. For the Kirghiz Light took my eyes, Now I sense all Earth like a baby. It is north, for a six-day ride, Through the steep and death-gray canyons, Then across the stony desert To the mountain whose peak is a white dzurt. And if you have passed without danger, The place of the black rock will find you. But if you would not be born, Then stay with your warm red fire, And stay with your wife, in your tent, And the Light will never find you, And your heart will grow heavy with age, And your eyes will shut only to sleep.

A river moves from the Himalayas; she is not moving towards the sea, she does not know the sea, where it is, she is not bothered about the sea. The very song of moving in the Himalayas is so beautiful, passing through the valleys, to the peaks, passing through the trees, then coming down to the plains, to people... the very movement is beautiful! And every moment the movement is beautiful, because it is life. The river is not even aware there is a goal or there is a sea. That is not the concern. And if a river becomes too much concerned, then she will be just in the same mess as you are. Then she will stop everywhere and ask where to go: Where is the right path? And she will be afraid whether north will lead, or south, or the east or the west – where to go? And remember, the ocean is everywhere. Whether you move north or east or west makes NO difference. The ocean is everywhere, all around is the ocean. It is always in front of you; wherever you move, it makes no difference.

After placing everything in the backseat, Nadia buckled her seat belt and turned to him. “Corvon,” she addressed him by his in-game persona. “If I were to tell you that you get a prize for besting me, what would you want?” He slid closer, dragging his gaze over her without hiding it. Caleb could see her nipples peaking under her bra. She was as turned on as he was. “Anything I want?” “Perhaps. What would it be?” She wouldn’t commit, which meant she didn’t trust him. It was time to drop the asshole persona. He couldn’t help but let her in. She was his One. “I would want …” He reached for her chin. “...a kiss.” Caleb leaned in so far he could feel her breath on his face. Her pupils were dilated wide, and he ran his thumb over her plush bottom lip. “Would you award me such a prize, Asteria?” She nodded. Closing the distance between them, he claimed her lips. This kiss was even hotter than the one at laser tag, slow and languid, like they had all the time in the world. He wrapped his hand around the base of her head and leaned her body back as her arms wrapped around his waist. Her tongue slid along his in a tantalizing dance that stoked the fire within. She sighed softly into his mouth as he felt the walls between them melt away from the heat. One kiss, that’s all he’d asked for. But he never wanted it to end. This felt dangerous. But so right. Finally, he forced himself to break the kiss, moaning Nadia’s name. She looked dazed, like she was just waking up — or just had the most incredible orgasm. What he wouldn’t give to see Nadia’s afterglow. “Can you drive?” His mouth was bone dry but he managed to get the words out eventually. She nodded and started the motor. He buckled himself in but didn’t stop looking at her. That had been no ordinary kiss. He needed another. As she backed out to turn the truck around, Nadia looked over at him shyly. “I wanna do that again.” “Me, too.” Licking his lips at the idea of tasting her again, he broke the first of his rules. “Come upstairs when we get to my place and we can.

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

Feeling like a displaced person Laura struggles with being defined by her status as a widow. “Distracted by the word widow, which had taken root, budded and bloomed in her mind like a weed in a vacant lot, Laura opened the dictionary on her desk. Flipping past thousands of words, she used in every-day communication with family, friends, and acquaintances – those little black letters, symbols to express thoughts for the ear to hear and the heart to feel – she wondered, What words gave expression to her pain? What words described the sense of something lurking inside her, or the dark shadows stalking her mind? Widow: a five-letter word, preceded by words like wide, and widget and followed by words like widow’s peak, widow’s weeds, and widower. This little word – widow- in small case, had no business masquerading as a noun: a person, place or thing. In contrast, - widget, a small mechanical object, not a feeling thing, just an object – seemed an honest noun. Widow is not an object, she thought. “It’s a word so thin as to be nothing but a wisp of breath passing through one’s vocal cords and disappearing almost imperceptibly between one’s lips. It has no life of its own. It’s a mere label, and it could just as well be a piece of paper saying, chocolate cookies or best before date.

Nor is it only as a sign of greater gentleness or refinement of mind, but as a proof of the best possible direction of this refinement, that the tendency of the Gothic to the expression of vegetative life is to be admired. That sentence of Genesis, 'I have given thee every green herb for meat,' like all the rest of the book, has a profound symbolical as well as literal meaning. It is not merely the nourishment of the body, but the food of the soul, that is intended. The green herb is, of all nature, that which is most essential to the healthy spiritual life of man. Most of us do not need fine scenery; the precipice and the mountain peak are not intended to be seen by all men, — perhaps their power is greatest. over those who are unaccustomed to them. But trees and fields and flowers were made for all, and are necessary for all. God has connected the labour which is essential to the bodily sustenance with the pleasures which are healthiest for the heart; and while He made the ground stubborn, He made its herbage fragrant, and its blossoms fair. The proudest architecture that man can build has no higher honour than to bear the image and recall the memory of that grass of the field which is, at once, the type and the support of his existence; the goodly building is then most glorious when it is sculptured into the likeness of the leaves of Paradise; and the great Gothic spirit, as we showed it to be noble in its disquietude, is also noble in its hold of nature; it is, indeed, like the dove of Noah, in that she found no rest upon the face of the waters, — but like her in this also, 'Lo, in her mouth was an olive branch, plucked off.

Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica. [M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button. Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground. [V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. [W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. [T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that! There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran". [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. [T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure.

*SNEAK PEAK* An Excerpt from Grace Prevailing, to be released TOMORROW!!! :) “Agabus.” Mary smiled warmly as she reached him, her luminous gray eyes twinkling with welcome and a hint of mirth. “How brave of you to join us this evening.” Agabus’ dark eyes met hers, flickering in annoyance. So much for his clever disguise! “I must ask you to lower your voice, please,” the young Pharisee hissed under his breath, wondering how many of her guests had overheard the use of his name. “You needn’t fear, Agabus,” Mary assured him, lowering her dulcet tone to placate him. “None of us wish to give you away.” “One careless slip of the tongue could very well prove ruinous,” Agabus told her, his glittering eyes sweeping cautiously about the room. “Possibly even deadly.” “Not nearly so deadly as rejecting the Way Christ has clearly revealed to you.” “He hasn’t revealed anything to me,” Agabus argued, though his tone was far from convincing. “At least, not personally.” “No?” Mary prompted, her slender brow lifting in question. “Then why are you here? And why do you persist in your questions?” “This is not about me,” Agabus insisted, his voice rising in frustration. When several believers glanced his way, he shifted uncomfortably, pulling his hooded shawl to further obscure his bearded face. “I must speak with you,” he finally concluded, his gaze shifting anxiously about the crowded room. “Alone.” “If you wish to speak, then we may speak here.” “For heaven’s sake, Mary,” Agabus breathed, his frustration mounting. “Go on,” Mary prodded, appearing perfectly composed. Maddeningly aware of the chatter and movement surrounding them, Agabus took a step closer, so close Mary could smell his spice-scented breath. “I come bearing ill tidings.” “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Mary responded, smiling faintly. “What kind of ill tidings?” “It’s about Saul of Tarsus.” “I see,” Mary nodded, her expression sobering beneath her pale blue head covering. “What has he done now?” “It’s what he is about to do,” Agabus warned her, his obsidian eyes growing serious. “At this moment, he is attempting to obtain permission to target churches beyond Jerusalem.” “Preposterous,” Mary declared, her eyes flashing. “He hasn’t the jurisdiction to do so.” “The high priest is seriously considering granting his request,” Agabus told her grimly. “Your sect endangers the very office he holds.” “On what grounds will Saul make his arrests?” “By order of the high priest,” Agabus sighed. “I imagine Jewish men and women will be dragged from other provinces by order of the Great Sanhedrin.” “Women, too?” Mary asked, surprised. “I’m afraid no one is safe,” Agabus replied grimly. “Once within the grasp of the high priest and the Sanhedrin here in Jerusalem, I imagine far more serious political charges will be fabricated against the prisoners, resulting in life in prison—possibly even the death penalty.” Releasing a steadying sigh, Mary brushed cool fingertips across her smooth forehead, deep in thought. “This isn’t good, Mary,” Agabus warned her, daring yet another step closer. “Up to this point, your friends have been safe beyond our borders. But now… if Saul has his way, they cannot run. They cannot hide. In time, they will be hunted down and exterminated one by one. And their cause shall perish with them.” “Never,” Mary said firmly, her eyes flashing. “The gospel will reach the ends of the earth, Agabus. Mark my words.” “There’s just no way,” Agabus countered, shaking his covered head. “God has already made a Way,” Mary told him, her eyes alight with conviction. “And His name is Jesus. Jesus is the Way.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.