Perfection Is A Myth Quotes

We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Oh, he did look like a deity – the perfect balance of danger and charm, he was at the same time fascinating and inaccessible, distant because of his demonstrated flawlessness, and possessing such strength of character that he was dismaying and at the same time utterly attractive in an enticing and forbidden way.

The happy family is a myth for many.

Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.

A boy once told me that love without heartbreak is just a pretty myth.

...most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened, than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal, indeed expected, for a writer in the ancient world, to tell tales of gods and heroes, whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false, but whose underlying message would have been seen as true.

Perfectionism. My perfectionism arose as an attempt to gain safety and support in my dangerous family. Perfection is a self-persecutory myth. I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved in the present. I am letting go of relationships that require perfection. I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes

Perfection in imperfection. Someone whose flaws work well with yours.

I am not Jessica Chen. And maybe Jessica Chen herself isn't either. Maybe nobody is. The very idea of her is a construct, a myth, a distraction, the dream we're forever reaching toward but can never equite grasp.

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

It starts by forgetting about perfect. We don’t have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable: It’s a myth and a trap and a hamster wheel that will run you to death. The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: “So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun... The most evil trick about perfectionism, though, is that it disguises itself as a virtue.

A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying.

[Present over perfect is] about rejecting the myth that every day is a new opportunity to prove our worth, and about the truth that our worth is inherent, given by God, not earned by our hustling.

I think love without heartbreak is a myth. A pretty myth, but the kind of myth that ultimately makes us feel worse about ourselves because we're somehow not able to make it come true.

Poseidon spent almost all his time pursuing a perfectly exhausting quantity of beautiful girls and boys and fathering by the girls an even greater number of monsters, demigods and human heroes - Percy Jackson and Theseus to name but two.

But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver. No, said Tolkien, they are not. ...just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil. You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.

Perhaps Danish happiness is not really happiness at all, but something much more valuable and durable: contentedness, being satisfied with your lot, low-level needs being met, higher expectations being kept in check.

Amazons – even when one is exceptional – are a team, a tribe, a gang, and it is this which Buffy captured so perfectly: an ensemble of women fighting to save us all.

...I don't believe in Him, and if He does exist, I don't like Him. His type of gods aren't gods who echo how mortals behave. They're gods who are held up as example of perfection to be emulated. They're not gods of the people. They're remote and inaccessible, they demand blind, unthinking obedience from their followers. They're dictators. We Aesir and Vanir, by contrast, are mirrors. Other gods rule. We reflect and magnify. We are you, only more so. We share your flaws and foibles. We are as humanlike as we are divine, and I think we are all the better for that.

Men said she was the perfect vessel for evil to enter the world, but men are the ones who wrote the stories. Men wrote the myths down and called them history, and time has dragged them further form the truth. Pandora's jar became a box. Eve's pomegranate, an apple. All the details change but one: it is a woman with her hand on the door to Hell.

Perfection is a myth. I’m not remotely perfect. If you love someone, you have to be willing to accept the flaws as well.

Inequality breeds depression, addiction, resignation, and physical symptoms including premature aging, that affect the entire population. In other words, the well-being of individuals, rich or poor, is mutually dependent.

American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners and smiling faces; 99 per cent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self. It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal. In the fantasy, you observe a scene in your mind’s eye or on the computer screen. You see yourself standing on a tropical beach, the blue sea behind you, a big smile on your face, one hand holding a cocktail, the other arm around your lover’s waist. Paradise. What the picture does not show is the annoying fly that bites your leg, the cramped feeling in your stomach from eating that rotten fish soup, the tension in your jaw as you fake a big smile, and the ugly fight the happy couple had five minutes ago. If we could only feel what the people in the photos felt while taking them! Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just as you are not the winds, so also you are not the jumble of thoughts, emotions and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitised story you tell about them with hindsight. You experience all of them, but you don’t control them, you don’t own them, and you are not them. People ask ‘Who am I?’ and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.

This century will be called Darwin's century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated, that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature; that the Bible is a book written by ignorance--at the instigation of fear. Think of the men who replied to him. Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin, and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts. His light has broken in on some of the clergy, and the greatest man who to-day occupies the pulpit of one of the orthodox churches, Henry Ward Beecher, is a believer in the theories of Charles Darwin--a man of more genius than all the clergy of that entire church put together. ...The church teaches that man was created perfect, and that for six thousand years he has degenerated. Darwin demonstrated the falsity of this dogma. He shows that man has for thousands of ages steadily advanced; that the Garden of Eden is an ignorant myth; that the doctrine of original sin has no foundation in fact; that the atonement is an absurdity; that the serpent did not tempt, and that man did not 'fall.' Charles Darwin destroyed the foundation of orthodox Christianity. There is nothing left but faith in what we know could not and did not happen. Religion and science are enemies. One is a superstition; the other is a fact. One rests upon the false, the other upon the true. One is the result of fear and faith, the other of investigation and reason.

If you're like us -mothers with an attitude problem- you may be getting increasingly irritable about this chasm between the ridiculous, honey-hued ideals of perfect motherhood in the mass media and the reality of mothers' everyday lives.

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil.

We are not perfect. What god is Examine yours. According to your mythos he was so disappointed with his initial efforts creating your race that he tried again. At least we imprisoned our mistakes. Your god permits his to roam free. At a mere few thousand years old your creation myths are far more absurd than ours.

When you visit a Danish company and can't tell the CEO from the office clerk, that's Viking egalitarianism at work.

The notion of the perfect time is more than myth. It's the ultimate self-delusion.

Her plan was perfect until the world reminded her that perfection is a myth.

In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue ‘ethnic’ identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.

Writers who spend all night writing, addicted to caffeine and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, are a myth, Marcus. You have to be disciplined. It’s exactly the same as training to be a boxer. There are exercises to be repeated, at certain times of day. You have to be persistent, you have to maintain a certain rhythm, and your life has to be perfectly ordered.

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire--he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not man.

The problem is that everything is relative. Happiness is based on expectations and we have the internet now. A whole world constantly asking us, "But is your life as perfect as this? Well, how about now? Is it as perfect as this? If it isn't, change it!!" The truth of course is, that if people really were as happy as they look on the internet, they wouldn't spend so much damn time on the internet. Because no one who's having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure. So, if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that's probably because it's full of shit.

Perfection in imperfection. Someone whose flaws work well with yours. Infuse modern love with the hues of older romance. An agency that offers something real in a world that was increasingly becoming plastic.

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

Poseidon spent almost all his time pursuing a perfectly exhausting quantity of beautiful girls and boys and fathering by the girls an even greater number of monsters, demigods and human heroes – Percy Jackson and Theseus to name but two.

Hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes. (What was lost without will be found within.)

Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist.

Exit God, exit religion, exit divine purpose; enter cosmic insignificance, enter universal purposelessness, enter ever-fleeting pleasures and ever-present suffering—life does indeed seem very bleak. No myths, no prophecies, nothing to console the thinking individual. What's left is a heartless, cosmic meat-grinder that is perfectly indifferent to its inhabitants. Without the 'vital lies' we tell ourselves, our lives are utterly useless.

In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. This is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.

In Sweden, self-sufficiency and autonomy is all; [interpersonal] debt of any kind, be it emotional, a favor, or cash, is to be avoided at all cost. The Swedes don't even like to owe a round of drinks.

We have seen that a myth could never approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part of a process of personal transformation. None, of this surely applies to the novel, which can be read anywhere at all witout ritual trappings, and must, if it is any good, eschew the overtly didactic. Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the mythology. It can be seen as a form of mediation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It prljects them into another worl, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel bcomes part of the backdrop of lives long after we have laid the book aside. It is an excercise of make-believe, that like yoga or a religious festival breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies to empathise with others lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to 'feel with' others. And, like mythology , an important novel is transformative. If we allow it do so, can change us forever.

All knowledge systems, from modern science to those embedded in the most ancient of creation myths, can be thought of as maps of reality. They are never just true or false. Perfect descriptions of reality are unattainable, unnecessary, and too costly for learning organisms, including humans.

We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, in all these records of the past, philosophies and dreams, and efforts stained with tears, of great and tender souls who tried to pierce the mystery of life and death, to answer the eternal questions of the Whence and Whither, and vainly sought to make, with bits of shattered glass, a mirror that would, in very truth, reflect the face and form of Nature's perfect self. These myths were born of hopes, and fears, and tears, and smiles, and they were touched and colored by all there is of joy and grief between the rosy dawn of birth, and death's sad night. They clothed even the stars with passion, and gave to gods the faults and frailties of the sons of men. In them, the winds and waves were music, and all the lakes, and streams, and springs,—the mountains, woods and perfumed dells were haunted by a thousand fairy forms. They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire; made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of love; filled Autumns arms with sun-kissed grapes, and gathered sheaves; and pictured Winter as a weak old king who felt, like Lear upon his withered face, Cordelia's tears. These myths, though false, are beautiful, and have for many ages and in countless ways, enriched the heart and kindled thought. But if the world were taught that all these things are true and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, the sweetest myth of all the Fable World would lose its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful thing to every brave and thoughtful man.

As bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, "Naked Without Shame," about black women's bodies and politics, "Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, the black female body was beyond redemption." She points out that since the time of U.S. slavery, men have benefited from positioning black women as naturally promiscuous because it absolves them of guilt when they sexually assault and rape women of color. "[I]t was impossible to ruin that which was received as inherently unworthy, tainted, and soiled," hooks wrote. Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women- these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It's only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship.

I guess I don't believe you can have it all. I don't believe any of us can. In fact, I believe the very expression having it all is not only a myth but also a symptom of how sick we are in our contemporary culture. Nobody gets to have it all...You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want'" (175).

There are more important things in life than chasing after this myth of perfection.

perfectly healthy married couples’ stress hormone levels were elevated in those exhibiting higher degrees of hostility during conflict, and their immune functioning was diminished.

In the class structure of this country, the role of Latino people is to build the movie set of white perfection again and again.

There is no evidence of a perfect world, a perfect man or a perfect family anywhere on earth.

Perfection would be a bore, wouldn’t it? CAMPBELL: It would have to be. It would be inhuman

FatRank is the best ORM agency because they protect and perfect what people find first

The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.

Perfection is a myth. People who hunger for it die hungry.

That an organism will see the light, hear the night, or touch the wind is subject to probability. And that its perfection is in its functioning is a myth. I take it not as a right to be when probability precedes the being. Its limitations is in its functioning, then its limited right to be is in ensuring proper functioning of its systems. I often debate just how much time to give in discourse to someone whose mind refuses to communicate with his reasoning.

That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound. It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us. Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkably assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now posses. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith. Why? The truth is plain: We were not born to be niggers.

At certain epochs, man has felt conscious of something about himself - body and spirit - which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection - reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways - through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed upon the visible world.

The discarded animals—the failures—had been the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the camel, the donkey, and the zebra, each one getting closer to the perfect dimensions, beauty, and balance of the horse.

Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded.

women who looked like fashion models—admitted to knowing, from the time they could first consciously think, that the ideal was someone tall, thin, white, and blond, a face without pores, asymmetry, or flaws, someone wholly “perfect,” and someone whom they felt, in one way or another, they were not. I

Deniers build their pseudo-arguments on traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes and imagery. They contend that Jews created the myth of the Holocaust in order to bilk the Germans out of billions of dollars and ensure the establishment of Israel. Once again the devious Jews have harmed innocent multitudes—Germans and Palestinians in particular—for the sake of their own financial and political ends. To someone nurtured by the soil of anti-Semitism, this makes perfect sense. -- The Eichmann Trial, page xx

The myth of Aryan dominance, initially an attempt to trace the lost language of the Aryas, began as a set of undemonstrable racial assumptions, and ended in a colossal, perfectly unscientific lie: “I decide who is Jewish and who is Aryan,” announced Goebbels. That is what the Nazis meant by natural selection.

One of the keys to happiness, experts tell us, is autonomy in one’s life – the luxury of being able to decide your own destiny and achieve the fulfilment of self-realisation. It is no coincidence that the region that is consistently judged to have the highest levels of well-being and life quality, and the happiest, most fulfilled people, also has the greatest equality of educational opportunity and, according to a London School of Economics study comparing the incomes of fathers and sons over thirty years, among the very highest levels of social mobility in the world. The four main Nordic countries occupied the top four places on the list.

I am convinced, both as psychoanalyst and as cantadora, that many times it is the things of nature that are the most healing, especially the very accessible and the very simple ones. The medicines of nature are powerful and straightforward: a ladybug on the green rind of a watermelon, a robin with a string of yarn, a weed in perfect flower, a shooting star, even a rainbow in a glass shard in the street can be the right medicine.

More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn't at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time - the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism - because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed.

In the Lake Debo region (in Mali, on the Niger), pyramids are also found, and these were dubbed “mounds,” as might be expected. This is the usual procedure in the attempt to disparage African values. In contrast, there is the reverse procedure consisting of describing a clay tumulus—a real mound—in Mesopotamia, as the most perfect temple that the human mind can imagine. It goes without saying that such reconstructions are generally mere wishful thinking.

However, to think with perfect clarity in a poetic sense one must first rid oneself of a great deal of intellectual encumbrance, including all dogmatic doctrinal prepossessions: membership of any political party or religious sect or literary school deforms the poetic sense-- as it were, introduces something irrelevant and destructive into the magic circle, drawn with a rowan, hazel or willow rod, within which the poet insulates himself for the poetic act.

Men said she was the perfect vessel for evil to enter the world, but men are the ones who wrote the stories. Men wrote the myths down and called them history, and time has dragged them further from the truth. Pandora’s jar became a box. Eve’s pomegranate, an apple. All the details change but one: it is a woman with her hand on the door to Hell.

It’s a terrible thing when a child is stripped of his perception that his parents are perfect. Kids want to believe their parents will always be there to take care of them. One of the hardest things about getting older is losing that naïveté that allows us all to believe in myths and fantasies, having it replaced by harsh reality. We don’t want to believe our parents aren’t perfect, some far from it.

THE ORGANIC FOODS MYTH A few decades ago, a woman tried to sue a butter company that had printed the word 'LITE' on its product's packaging. She claimed to have gained so much weight from eating the butter, even though it was labeled as being 'LITE'. In court, the lawyer representing the butter company simply held up the container of butter and said to the judge, "My client did not lie. The container is indeed 'light in weight'. The woman lost the case. In a marketing class in college, we were assigned this case study to show us that 'puffery' is legal. This means that you can deceptively use words with double meanings to sell a product, even though they could mislead customers into thinking your words mean something different. I am using this example to touch upon the myth of organic foods. If I was a lawyer representing a company that had labeled its oranges as being organic, and a man was suing my client because he found out that the oranges were being sprayed with toxins, my defense opening statement would be very simple: "If it's not plastic or metallic, it's organic." Most products labeled as being organic are not really organic. This is the truth. You pay premium prices for products you think are grown without chemicals, but most products are. If an apple is labeled as being organic, it could mean two things. Either the apple tree itself is free from chemicals, or just the soil. One or the other, but rarely both. The truth is, the word 'organic' can mean many things, and taking a farmer to court would be difficult if you found out his fruits were indeed sprayed with pesticides. After all, all organisms on earth are scientifically labeled as being organic, unless they are made of plastic or metal. The word 'organic' comes from the word 'organism', meaning something that is, or once was, living and breathing air, water and sunlight. So, the next time you stroll through your local supermarket and see brown pears that are labeled as being organic, know that they could have been third-rate fare sourced from the last day of a weekend market, and have been re-labeled to be sold to a gullible crowd for a premium price. I have a friend who thinks that organic foods have to look beat up and deformed because the use of chemicals is what makes them look perfect and flawless. This is not true. Chemical-free foods can look perfect if grown in your backyard. If you go to jungles or forests untouched by man, you will see fruit and vegetables that look like they sprouted from trees from Heaven. So be cautious the next time you buy anything labeled as 'organic'. Unless you personally know the farmer or the company selling the products, don't trust what you read. You, me, and everything on land and sea are organic. Suzy Kassem, Truth Is Crying

Life is an ongoing learning path where you make mistakes & you learn from it. You get better, you grow emotionally, socially and gets mature gradually. There are significant times where we are good and when we are not so right; but later on what we choose for our-self from that learning defines how better we can become. And at the end, it is better choice to surprise self. Why ? Because, the real challenge lies in overcoming the shortfalls of own-self and competing with self only. One has to exceed the expectation from the self. Otherwise, perfection seems to be a myth! Yet, the true beauty is in saying Yes to the process to betterment, not in the final destination 'cuz the perfection can never be static or stagnant..

As John Bruer describes in The Myth of the First Three Years, nature has developed three ways for you to learn as an adult: Continue to strengthen your existing synaptic connections (as happens when you perfect a talent with relevant skills and knowledge), keep losing more of your extraneous connections (as also happens when you focus on your talents and allow other connections to deteriorate), or develop a few more synaptic connections.

It's perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It's something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to the humankind and nature on this planet and in the universe. I am in overwhelming awe of it all: It is so fantastic, so complex, so beyond comprehension. What does it all mean -- if it has any meaning at all? But how can it all exist if it doesn't have some kind of meaning? I think anyone who suggests that they have the answer is motivated by the need to invent answers, because we have no such answers.

Early Summer, loveliest season, The world is being colored in. While daylight lasts on the horizon, Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing. The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos. "Welcome, summer" is what he says. Winter's unimaginable. The wood's a wickerwork of boughs. Summer means the river's shallow, Thirsty horses nose the pools. Long heather spreads out on bog pillows. White bog cotton droops in bloom. Swallows swerve and flicker up. Music starts behind the mountain. There's moss and a lush growth underfoot. Spongy marshland glugs and stutters. Bog banks shine like ravens' wings. The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome. The speckled fish jumps; and the strong Swift warrior is up and running. A little, jumpy, chirpy fellow Hits the highest note there is; The lark sings out his clear tidings. Summer, shimmer, perfect days.

Even perfection is a myth. There is no evidence of a perfect world, a perfect man or a perfect family anywhere on earth. Perfection, be it Rama Rajya or Camelot, exists only in mythology. Yet everyone craves for it. This craving inspires art, establishes empires, sparks revolutions and motivates leaders. Such is the power of myth.

In gardening, the process is most of the fun, the results are secondary (and, in my case, usually accidental). And one learns a lot about compost: kitchen scraps and garden leftovers and refuse that rot down, over time, to a thick black clean nutritious dirt, teeming with life, perfect for growing things in. Myths are compost. They

As a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring good-enoughist, I’ve found it extremely helpful to bust some of the myths about perfectionism so that we can develop a definition that accurately captures what it is and what it does to our lives. Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth. Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. It’s a shield. Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from taking flight. Perfectionism is not self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval and acceptance. Most perfectionists were raised being praised for achievement and performance (grades, manners, rule-following, people-pleasing, appearance, sports). Somewhere along the way, we adopt this dangerous and debilitating belief system: I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. Please. Perform. Perfect. Healthy striving is self-focused—How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused—What will they think?

Some might argue that the reality of Nordic autonomy is that you are free ... to be Nordic. If you are a Muslim who is looking to build a mosque, or an American who wants to drive a large car, espouse your deeply held Creationist beliefs, and go shopping with your platinum card on Sunday, or even if you are English and choose to conduct yourself according to archaic forms of baroque politeness, you are likely to experience varying degrees of oppression and exclusion should you come to live in this part of the world. This is true.

If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?

You are created by the stars, every inch of you as perfect as the sky and just as magnificent.

Enlightenment has nothing to do with being perfect. It has everything to do with being authentic.

Perfection was a myth. Beauty was in the flaws." - Tommas de Rossi “Chicago War: The Complete Series

The autonomy enabled by a high-quality, free education system is just as important as the region’s economic equality and extensive welfare safety nets, if not more so.

Is there really such a thing as perfection? Of course not! It's a myth, a vicious rumor.

Perfection's a myth, the latter was only meant to define it.

Imagine a perfect world

They are funny, too. And not always intentionally, either, which as far as I am concerned is the very best kind of funny.

The word overskud, meaning a kind of surplus of energy. As in, “I can’t cut the lawn now—after that great big boozy lunch I simply don’t have the overskud.

This striking economic equality lies not only at the core of the happiness and success of the Danes but of the people of the Nordic region as a whole.

The Gini Coefficient quantifies how large a percentage of the total income of a society must be redistributed in order to achieve a perfectly equal distribution of wealth.

Being a perfect mom is a myth—but being a pretty great mom, most of the time, is actually possible.

Detoxing is a myth, darling, it’s been debunked! Your liver does it for you. Or maybe it’s your kidneys. It’s all taken care of somehow.

Our values are like words of a language that would make no sense to a person who does not know that language, but looks perfectly meaningful to the one who does.

Proper, deep, enduring joy usually requires a remarkable facility for denial, something which the Danes have in spades.

Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life. These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the keenest observer, the best judge of the meaning and value of a fact, the greatest Naturalist the world has produced. The theological view began to look small and mean. Spencer gave his theory of evolution and sustained it by countless facts. He stood at a great height, and with the eyes of a philosopher, a profound thinker, surveyed the world. He has influenced the thought of the wisest. Theology looked more absurd than ever. Huxley entered the lists for Darwin. No man ever had a sharper sword -- a better shield. He challenged the world. The great theologians and the small scientists -- those who had more courage than sense, accepted the challenge. Their poor bodies were carried away by their friends. Huxley had intelligence, industry, genius, and the courage to express his thought. He was absolutely loyal to what he thought was truth. Without prejudice and without fear, he followed the footsteps of life from the lowest to the highest forms. Theology looked smaller still. Haeckel began at the simplest cell, went from change to change -- from form to form -- followed the line of development, the path of life, until he reached the human race. It was all natural. There had been no interference from without. I read the works of these great men -- of many others – and became convinced that they were right, and that all the theologians -- all the believers in "special creation" were absolutely wrong. The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth.

Women must keep their shirts on in every weather ostensibly because their nipples are sexual. But men’s nipples are sexual too, and that doesn’t keep them covered when the mercury breaks eighty. Women are “ugly” where they get stretch marks. Men get stretch marks, across their hips, of which they are often not aware. Women’s breasts must be perfectly symmetrical; men’s genitals sure aren’t. There is a whole literature of ancient revulsion against the tastes and sights of women’s bodies; men can taste unpleasant and look perfectly alarming. Women love them anyway.

Now is probably a good time to make my confession about Finland, our next destination in this Nordic odyssey: I think the Finns are fantastic. I can't get enough of them. I would be perfectly happy for the Finns to rule the world. They get my vote, they've won my heart. If you ask me, they should just change the word 'fantastic' to 'Finntastic.' Helsinki? Heavensinki, more like.

One of the great myths in America is that sports build character. They can and they should. Indeed, sports may be the perfect venue in which to build character. But sports don’t build character unless a coach possesses character and intentionally teaches it. Sports can team with ethics and character and spirituality; virtuous coaching can integrate the body with the heart, the mind, and the soul.

Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life. Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system. Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits. The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.

Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land. Never was this messianic mood more extreme than on the day Barack Obama won the presidency.

No Viking believed he could change his destiny, ordained as it was by the Norns who wove the fates of gods and men alike (Note 4) but, for all that, the way in which he lived his life was up to him. This sentiment is perfectly expressed by Skirnir in 'Skirnir's Journey': 'Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.

By simply dropping the official weight one stone below most women’s natural level, and redefining a woman’s womanly shape as by definition “too fat,” a wave of self-hatred swept over First World women, a reactionary psychology was perfected, and a major industry was born. It suavely countered the historical groundswell of female success with a mass conviction of female failure, a failure defined as implicit in womanhood itself.

a country can be too small, too socially knitted, too tightly tied for its own good. Strong social networks can, in certain circumstances, turn to incestuous corruption and the shutting down of democratic discourse. You

Honestly? It doesn’t matter to me if someone is good at everything. Are they kind? Compassionate? Do they love others well?” Using a dish towel, he sweeps the scattered shells into a pile to discard. “Perfection is a myth. We all have cracks, scars, and weaknesses. Just like we all have different strengths. But when you’re a team, when you can lean on one another and help each other grow, that’s when you’ve found someone special, someone worthy of forever.

Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside.

the Popsicle Index, which ranks countries according to the percentage of people in a community who believe that their children can safely leave their home, walk to the nearest possible location to buy a popsicle, and walk back home again.

Parochialism remains the Danes’ defining characteristic, but their radically recalibrated sense of identity and national pride has created a curious duality best described as a kind of “humble pride,” though many often mistake it for smugness.

Sigmund Freud notably saw in the Oedipus myth a playing out of his theory that infant sons long for a close and exclusive relationship with their mothers, including an (unconscious) sexual one, and hate their fathers for coming between this perfect mother–son union. It is an oft-noted irony that, of all men in history, Oedipus was the one with the least claim to an Oedipus Complex. He left Corinth because the idea of sex with his mother Merope (as he thought) was so repugnant. Not only was his attraction to Jocasta adult (and the incestuous element wholly unwitting), but it came after the killing of his father Laius, which itself was accidental and entirely unconnected to any infant sexual jealousy. None of which put Freud off his stride.

The Swedish system is best understood not in terms of socialism, but in terms of Rousseau," he continued. "Rousseau was an extreme egalitarian and he really hated any kind of dependence--depending on other people destroyed your integrity, your authenticity-- therefore the ideal situation was one where every citizen was an atom separated from all the other atoms.... The Swedish system's logic is that it is dangerous to be dependent on other people, to be beholden to other people. Even to your family.

For my friend Fong,” he says, and begins singing John Denver. If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver. Maybe it’s the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have. Know something about this country that you haven’t yet figured out. If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.

Borges's world is as grounded in the changing nature of existence, that common predicament of the human species, as any literary world that has lasted. How could it be otherwise? No work of fiction that turns its back on life or that is incapable of illuminating life has ever attained durability. What is singular about Borges is that in his world the existential, the historical, sex, psychology, feelings, instincts, and so forth, have been dissolved and reduced to an exclusively intellectual dimension; and life, that boiling, chaotic turmoil, reaches the reader sublimated and conceptualized, transformed into literary myth through the filter of Borges, a filter of such perfect logic that it sometimes appears not to distill life to its essence but to suppress it altogether.

The obvious pollution occurring in many places - worst of all, in the planned societies- has encouraged the growth of the environmental movement, which, however, as shown in previous chapters, has an agenda that goes far beyond clean-up and beautification, far beyond the stewardship of nature that is commanded by ancient religious tradition. Embracing the "biospheric vision" in the "spirit of deep ecology", the movement sees human beings as the chief enemy in the struggle on behalf of a deified Nature. The environmental movement, therefore, is the perfect vehicle for population control. It is popular - people do love trees and animals and beautiful scenery - and it is unequivocal in its devotion to reducing human numbers. The environmental agencies of the United Nations, with their chilling blueprints for "demographic transition" and a standardless, undefined but totally planned and controlled "sustainable development", combine the fervor of nature worship with the lack of accountability of an unelected, international bureaucracy.

What I wish I knew when I asked for a raise in my twenties: - Remember: the world is not going to end if you get "no" for an answer - You have succeeded before - Be confident and keep it positive - Stop waiting for the perfect moment - Use "no" to fuel your next steps

I had to determine for myself what it means to be beautiful if I ever wanted to accept my own unique beauty. This is my challenge to you: Define beauty for yourself, and I promise, your outlook on the world around you, as well the world within you, will change forever.

First, there is a large body of empirical evidence on the predictive accuracy of speculative markets, on everything from horse-racing to elections to invasions. “Put your money where your mouth is” turns out to be a great way to get the well informed to reveal what they know, and the poorly informed to quiet down. No system is perfect, but betting markets outperform other methods of prediction in a wide variety of circumstances. The PAM was inspired not by ivory tower theorizing, but by the proven success of betting markets in other areas.

The Danes’ fondness for clubs and associations is shared by their Nordic neighbors. The Swedes have an even greater trade-union membership and in their spare time are particularly keen on voluntary work: they call this instinct for diligent self-improvement organisationssverige, or “organization Sweden.” The Finns are famed for their after-work classes, particularly their amateur classical musicianship and fondness for joining orchestras, while the Norwegians’ love of communal outdoor pursuits, most famously cross-country skiing, is one of their defining characteristics.

It’s like my grandpa always used to say, ‘A butter knife would make a deadlier weapon than a melting stick of butter.’”
 “Your grandpa never said that.”
 “No, but he should have. He was a damn fool not to have uttered those words.”
 “My grandpa was a janitor, in the Great Depression. The greatest thing he ever said was, ‘Greg, I just Gregged all over your floor. Do you have a mop I can use to clean it up?’”
 “Who’s Greg?”
 “I don’t know.”
 “What the shit kind of story is that? That story is bullshit. Greg doesn’t exist. Nobody knows nobody named Greg. It’s a unicorn name—it’s complete mythology.”
 “What about Lou Greg, the baseball player?”
 “Lou who? Lou Gehrig?”
 “Here’s a Lou for you. Greg Louganis.”
 “Bah, Greg Louganis doesn’t exist. He was a myth created by the Soviets to push their divers to perfection. The Russians realized they couldn’t be the best until they deceived their divers into believing there was someone who was always better.”
 “I’ve seen Greg Louganis, and he’s as real as you or me.”
 “You’ve seen what they wanted you to see. They gave you a blindfold to wear and convinced you it would improve your eyesight.”


Until Della walked into my life I didn’t understand the idea of love. I had never been in love and experienced very little love in my life. But I’d seen it once. My grandparents had loved each other until the day they died. I thought it was a myth. Then I met Della. She got under my skin and then she began to open emotions in me I didn’t know existed. There is no pretense with her. She has no idea she’s beautiful and she’s completely selfless. But even if she weren’t all those things her laugh and the look in her eyes when she’s truly happy is the only thing that matters in life

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

The world we live in, which demands perfection and achievement, teaches us we cannot love ourselves as we are. The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us. We must become stronger, taller, richer, thinner, smarter, prettier - and perhaps then, we think, we may be worthy of love. Yet we cannot love ourselves and we cannot love each other well so long as we are preoccupied by the desire to leave ourselves, to abandon ourselves in search of something beyond ourselves. Serving the myth teaches us how to belong but severs our ability to connect.

A woman enters a department store from the street, looking no doubt very mortal, her hair windblown, her own face visible. To reach the cosmetics counter, she must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights, and scents that combine to submit her to the “sensory overload” used by hypnotists and cults to encourage suggestibility. On either side of her are ranks of angels—seraphim and cherubim—the “perfect” faces of the models on display. Behind them, across a liminal counter in which is arranged the magic that will permit her to cross over, lit from below, stands the guardian angel.

In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people spending countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles, and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners, and smiling faces; 99 percent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self.

The frenzied hypernatalism of the women's magazines alone (and that includes People, Us, and InStyle), with their endless parade of perfect, "sexy" celebrity moms who've had babies, adopted babies, been to sperm banks, frozen their eggs for future use, hatched frozen eggs, had more babies, or adopted a small Tibetan village all to satisfy their "baby lust," is enough to make you want to get your tubes tied. (These profiles always insist that celebs all love being "moms" much, much more than they do their work, let alone being rich and famous, and that they'd spend every second with their kids if they didn't have that pesky blockbuster movie to finish.)

The truth about our existence would have been discovered long ago if we did. Now we’re myths and legends. Predators who can walk side by side with our prey.” “But we are monsters.” “If something has the ability to think and to reason, it has the ability to be monstrous,” Lucien said. “Why aren’t all human beings benevolent? Why do even the best of them sometimes do things they abhor?” Makeda frowned. “No one is perfect. That’s human nature.” “Of course it is,” Lucien said. “And humans—like us—can be monstrous. That some of our kind choose not to be—even with our greater strength—is the reason we exist. I believe we do what the lion does. We maintain balance.

Patriotism,” said Lymond, “like honesty is a luxury with a very high face value which is quickly pricing itself out of the spiritual market altogether. [...] It is an emotion as well, and of course the emotion comes first. A child’s home and the ways of its life are sacrosanct, perfect, inviolate to the child. Add age; add security; add experience. In time we all admit our relatives and our neighbours, our fellow townsmen and even, perhaps, at last our fellow nationals to the threshold of tolerance. But the man living one inch beyond the boundary is an inveterate foe. [...] Patriotism is a fine hothouse for maggots. It breeds intolerance; it forces a spindle-legged, spurious riot of colour.… A man of only moderate powers enjoys the special sanction of purpose, the sense of ceremony; the echo of mysterious, lost and royal things; a trace of the broad, plain childish virtues of myth and legend and ballad. He wants advancement—what simpler way is there? He’s tired of the little seasons and looks for movement and change and an edge of peril and excitement; he enjoys the flowering of small talents lost in the dry courses of daily life. For all these reasons, men at least once in their lives move the finger which will take them to battle for their country.… “Patriotism,” said Lymond again. “It’s an opulent word, a mighty key to a royal Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Patriotism; loyalty; a true conviction that of all the troubled and striving world, the soil of one’s fathers is noblest and best. A celestial competition for the best breed of man; a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplus power or surplus talents or surplus money; an immature and bigoted intolerance which becomes the coin of barter in the markets of power— [...] These are not patriots but martyrs, dying in cheerful self-interest as the Christians died in the pleasant conviction of grace, leaving their example by chance to brood beneath the water and rise, miraculously, to refresh the centuries. The cry is raised: Our land is glorious under the sun. I have a need to believe it, they say. It is a virtue to believe it; and therefore I shall wring from this unassuming clod a passion and a power and a selflessness that otherwise would be laid unquickened in the grave. [...] “And who shall say they are wrong?” said Lymond. “There are those who will always cleave to the living country, and who with their uprooted imaginations might well make of it an instrument for good. Is it quite beyond us in this land? Is there no one will take up this priceless thing and say, Here is a nation, with such a soul; with such talents; with these failings and this native worth? In what fashion can this one people be brought to live in full vigour and serenity, and who, in their compassion and wisdom, will take it and lead it into the path?

However, even before the orgies of neoliberalism it was obvious that capitalism is not socially efficient. Market failures are everywhere, from environmental calamities to the necessity of the state’s funding much socially useful science to the existence of public education and public transportation (not supplied through the market) to the outrageous incidence of poverty and famine in countries that have had capitalism foisted on them.3 All this testifies to a “market failure,” or rather a failure of the capitalist, competitive, profit-driven mode of production, which, far from satisfying social needs, multiplies and aggravates them. This should not be surprising. An economic system premised on two irreconcilable antagonisms—that between worker and supplier-of-capital and that between every supplier-of-capital and every other4—and which is propelled by the structural necessity of exploiting and undermining both one’s employees and one’s competitors in order that ever-greater profits may be squeezed out of the population, is not going to lead to socially harmonious outcomes. Only in the unreal world of standard neoclassical economics, which makes such assumptions as perfect knowledge, perfect capital and labor flexibility, the absence of firms with “market power,” the absence of government, and in general the myth of homo economicus—the person susceptible of no other considerations than those of pure “economic rationality”—is societal harmony going to result.

Everything I read about the Swedish Social Democratic government of the last century suggested an organization that was driven by one single, overarching goal: to sever the traditional, some would say natural, ties between its citizens, be they those that bound children to their parents, workers to their employers, wives to their husbands, or the elderly to their families.

I rather liked him.I asked him to come and see us.' ‘Oh Christ !’ ‘But, Bradley, you mustn’t reject people,you musn't just write them of. You must be curious about them. Curiosity is kind of charity.’ ‘I don’t think curiosity is a kind of charity. I think it’s a kind of malice.’ ‘That’s what makes a writer, knowing the details.’ ‘It may make your kind of writer. It doesn’t make mine.’ ‘Here we go again,’ said Arnold. ‘Why pile up a jumble of “details”? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn’t the reproduction of oddments out of life.’ ‘I never said it was!’ said Arnold. ‘I don’t draw direct from life.’ ‘Your wife thinks you do.’ ‘Oh that. Oh God.’ ‘Inquisitive chatter and cataloguing of things one’s spotted isn’t art. ‘ ‘Of course it isn’t -‘ ‘Vague romantic myth isn’t art either. Art is imagination. Imagination changes, fuses. Without imagination you have stupid details on one side and empty dreams on the othet.’ ‘Bradley, I know you -‘ ‘Art isn’t chat plus fantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silnce.’ ‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art! It’s people without creative gifts who say that more mean worse!’ ‘One should only complete something when one feels one’s bloody privileged to have it all. Those who only do what’s easy will never be rewarded by -‘ ‘Nonsense. I write whether I feel like it or not. I complete things whether I think they’re perfect or not. Anything else is hypocrisy. I have no muse. That’s what being a professional writer is.’ ‘Then thank God I’m not one.’…

Though I set out to redress the rose-tinted imbalance in the reporting on the Nordic region in the Western media, as well as to get a few things off my chest, I hope, too, that I have shed light on some of the more positive aspects of Scandinavia—the trust, the social cohesion, the economic and gender equality, the rationalism, the modesty, the well-balanced political and economic systems, and so on. Right now, the West is looking for an alternative to the rampant capitalism that has ravaged our economies, a system that might avoid the extremes of Soviet socialism or American deregulated neoliberalism. Really, as far as I am concerned there is only one place to look for the economic and societal role model of the future, and it is not Brazil or Russia or China. The Nordic countries have the answer

Trump's dictatorial tendencies and mendacity, negative attributes for many voters, poised him perfectly to manipulate the evangelical mind. Like the biblical god evangelicals worship, Trump is a thin-skinned authoritarian with totalitarian tendencies. He craves love and punishes any disloyalty or slight. Evangelicals have been taught to worship and adore that type of being above all others. This strain of religion cultivates a veneration for extreme authority. Studies bear this out: religious fundamentalism and a tendency to submit to authoritarianism are highly correlated. Trump acted like the character evangelicals worship and benefited from their ingrained adulation. Evangelicals were simply seeing in Trump a character they'd been taught to revere. As if to prove the point, Ann Coulter called Trump her "Emperor God".

Commitment is what transforms a dream into reality. One percent or ninety-nine percent complete are both incomplete. Wanting is wishing or dreaming. Deciding is the willingness to do whatever it takes to make your wishes and dreams come true. Pondering on what you are going to do actually sucks up more time and energy than going out there and doing it. If you’re planted in an environment with depleted soil loaded with weeds, your conditions must change in order for you grow and thrive. As you change your circle of influence, your thinking changes, and ultimately your world changes too. When you are too busy trying to outshine others, you miss out on your own inner spark. If your focus is on competing with others, you cannot complete you. Perfection is a myth, a misconception, and just an opinion. A well-tailored business suit might look perfect to a banker, but deemed to be dreadful to a heavy metal rocker. Going out of your comfort zone might be gut-wrenching, but dying with the music still inside is even more painful. Stagnation drains your energy and slowly sucks the life out of you. When you declutter your mental space, just like clearing out physical space, you find valuables you had long forgotten about. Keeping emotional toxin in your head is like fertilizing unwanted weeds. Positivity is your weed killer. Turn it around, and let that poison fuel your passion, just like farmers using manure to fertilize plants. Like eating, going to the bathroom, or exercising, self-transformation cannot be delegated. I was a sunflower trying to survive and grow in a stinky muddy swamp, but instead being strangled by a bunch of weeds.

All of the Nordic countries have high levels of trust, but the Danes are the most trusting people on the planet. In a 2011 survey by the OECD, 88.3 percent of Danes expressed a high level of trust in others, more than any other nationality (the next places on the list were filled by Norway, Finland, and Sweden, respectively, and the United States was way down in twenty-first place out of thirty countries surveyed).

This is no kindergarten fairy tale, but an extremely powerful myth that continues to shape the lives of billions of humans and animals in the early twenty-first century. The belief that humans have eternal souls whereas animals are just evanescent bodies is a central pillar of our legal, political and economic system. It explains why, for example, it is perfectly okay for humans to kill animals for food, or even just for the fun of it.

EARLY ONE DARK April morning a few years ago I was sitting in my living room in central Copenhagen, wrapped in a blanket and yearning for spring, when I opened that day’s newspaper to discover that my adopted countrymen had been anointed the happiest of their species in something called the Satisfaction with Life Index, compiled by the Department of Psychology at the University of Leicester. I checked the date on the newspaper: it wasn’t 1 April.

Bjørnskov, an expert in the fields of social trust, subjective well-being, and life satisfaction, told me about some other, highly revealing experiments that had been carried out in the field. “Back in the nineties there was an experiment done [in 1996, by Reader’s Digest] where wallets were left around in various cities and they counted how many were returned. And the cool thing is that in the places where more people say they can trust others, the more wallets were returned. I think they did an experiment with about forty wallets and the only two countries where all forty were returned were Norway and Denmark. I thought it was too good to be true, but TV2 [a Danish TV channel] did the same experiment again four years ago in Copenhagen Central Station, and they literally could not even leave the wallets—people would instantly pick them up and come running after them, so they had to give up!

More than half of the Danish adult population—as much as two-thirds, according to some estimates—either works in the public sector or is financially supported by it in the form of benefit payments. The idea, then, of the Danes voting for a reduction in the size of the public sector funded by tax cuts seems about as likely as the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. The majority will always vote for the status quo because their livelihood depends on it.

But even if his sympathies are not with Arachne in this moment, he can still imagine that from her perspective these gods are nothing but rapists. She has been described to us as excessively arrogant about her own skills, even if her confidence is well-founded. And she has been shown to be short-tempered with an interfering old woman. But these aren’t the characteristics of a fantasist or a fool. She isn’t out of her mind, like poor Ajax. We can’t simply dismiss her opinions as those coming from a disordered mind. Whether Ovid shares her views is unimportant. What matters is that he is perfectly aware of her feelings about the pain inflicted by these gods in their cruelty, and his version of Arachne is given the space to express it. Look at the great gifts the gods have given you, Athene’s tapestry proclaims. Arachne’s response is very detailed in its execution, but very simple in its message: the price is too high.

today, the Danes are the world’s leading pork butchers, slaughtering more than twenty-eight million pigs a year. The Danish pork industry accounts for around a fifth of all the world’s pork exports, half of domestic agricultural exports, and more than 5 percent of the country’s total exports. Yet the weird thing is, you can travel the length and breadth of the country and never see a single sow because they are all kept hidden from view in intensive rearing sheds.

The United States had been created through an act of disloyalty. No matter how eloquently the Declaration of Independence had attempted to justify the American rebellion, a residual guilt hovered over the circumstances of the country's founding. Arnold changed all that. By threatening to destroy the newly created republic through, ironically, his own betrayal, Arnold gave this nation of traitors the greatest of gifts; a myth of creation. The American people had come to revere George Washington, but a hero alone was not sufficient to bring them together. Now they had the despised villain Benedict Arnold. They knew both what they were fighting for - and against. The story of American's genesis could finally move beyond the break with the mother country and start to focus on the process by which thirteen former colonies could become a nation. As Arnold had demonstrated, the real enemy was not Great Britain, but those Americans who sought to undercut their fellow citizens commitment to one another. Whether it was Joseph Reed's willingness to promote his state's interests at the expenses of what was best for the country as a whole or Arnold's decision to sell his loyalty to the highest bidder, the greatest danger to America's future cam from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism. At this fragile state in the country's development, a way had to be found to strengthen rather than destroy the existing framework of government. The Continental Congress was far from perfect, but it offered a start to what could one day be a great nation. By turning traitor, Arnold had alerted the American people to how close they had all come to betraying the Revolution by putting their own interests ahead of their newborn country's. Already the name Benedict Arnold was becoming a byword for that most hateful of crimes: treason against the people of the United States.

The proportion of the Danish population considered to be below the poverty line has almost doubled, from 4 percent to 7.5 percent, over the last ten years. A recent report by think tank Cevea revealed that, in Denmark, the wealthiest 1 percent owns almost a third of the country’s combined wealth: that’s still below the OECD average, but hardly what you would call “equality.” The elite are increasingly congregating in residential enclaves, almost all of them in and around Copenhagen.

The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world is wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance—so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.

And while I’m reading, the new words I’m taking in will connect to others already taken in. That reference to blue is the third this chapter, and it always goes with wealth. That phrase is from the poem earlier. Deeper. That’s a reference to the myth of Orpheus. That’s a pairing of two words that don’t usually go together. Wider. That’s a symbol Dickens employs often. That typifies Said’s writings on Orientalism. Points of light. They make a map, or a pattern, or a constellation. Formless, intricate, infinitely complex, and lovely. And then, at once, they’ll connect. They’ll meet, and explode. Of course. That’s the entire point. That’s how the story works, the way each sentence and metaphor and reference feeds into the other to illuminate something important. That explosion of discovery, of understanding, is the most intoxicating moment there is. Emotional, intellectual, aesthetic. Just for a moment, a perfect moment, a small piece of the world makes perfect sense.

If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?” “Could we find a map of someplace perfect?” “Like paradise?” I asked, teasing. “Here? No.” He stared upward, the first stars shining in his eyes. “A better place. Someplace where nothing goes wrong. There must be a myth like that somewhere.” I bit my lip; my shoulders fell. “Navigation involves the beliefs of the Navigator and the mapmaker. And I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who truly believes in a world without suffering.

Think of it. We know truth for the cruel instrument it is. Beauty is infinitely preferable to truth. We invent beauty. Faiths, political movements, high ideals, belief in love and fellowship. All of them are lies. We tell those lies, among others, endless others. We improve on history and myth and religion, make each more beautiful, better, easier to believe in. Our lies are not perfect, of course. The truths are too big. But perhaps someday we will find one great lie that all humanity can use.

Why didn't you come to me last night?” she whispered. The question took him by surprise and he wasn't prepared to provide her with an answer while he was caught by the sapphire of her eyes. She lifted a finger to his face, and every muscle in him relaxed as she traced it over his cheek. It was as though his body was reminded of when she had healed him—that perfect moment when her eyes came back to him and after he had shared the memory of his weakest moment. “It's not enough,” she mumbled. “The time that you spend with me isn't enough, Malloron. I feel…” Her palm pressed against his cheek and Malloron didn't need to wait for her to continue, he could feel it in the bond. He simply drew her into his arms. The moment their bodies touched, the bond trembled inside his chest, stirring deep within him, a strange hope blooming. He pulled her against him and began to purr for her, his deep satisfaction of touching and holding her saturating every single vibration that rocked through his chest.

Good grief, no one could cope with being newly infatuated, year after year. When you’re infatuated you can’t think about anything else, you forget about your friends, your work, your lunch. If we were infatuated all the time we’d starve to death. And being in love means being infatuated… from time to time. You have to be sensible. The problem is that everything is relative, happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: “But is your life as perfect as this? Well? How about now? Is it as perfect as this? If it isn’t, change it!” The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.

If you think about it, an enormous amount of damage is created by the myth of utopia. There is an intrinsic feeling in nearly every person that your life could be perfect if you only had such-and-such a car of such-and-such a spouse or such-and-such a job. We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It's written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn't, and if only this and if only that, it would be beautiful again.

We find there are systematic problems with subjective measures related to inequality. How people use the word ‘happy,’ for instance, or how they present themselves. I don’t think these surveys mean nothing, but I wouldn’t put a great deal into them. All of our measures are objective, like death rates, obesity, and so on.” He is right, there are obvious flaws in these happiness surveys. Happiness is subjective and clearly tricky to quantify, plus notions of happiness differ depending on whom you ask.

Their most radical conclusion is that inequality breeds stress among poor and rich alike; the more unequal a society, the less benefit is obtained from an individual’s wealth. The stress of inequality does not just breed envy, it is not just about coveting your neighbor’s ox/Cadillac Escalade. Inequality breeds depression, addiction, resignation, and physical symptoms including premature aging, that affect the entire population. In other words, the well-being of individuals, rich or poor, is mutually dependent.

The cycle of conquest, extermination, and revenge is the chronic condition of all 'civilized' states, and as Plato observed, war is their 'natural' condition. Here, as was so often to happen later, the invention of the megamachine, as the perfected instrument of royal power, produced the new purposes that it was later supposed to serve. In this sense, the invention of the military machine made war 'necessary' and even desirable, just as the invention of the jet plane has made mass tourism 'necessary' and profitable.

No sooner, in fact, had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject. What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say, perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion I had exhausted the passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations. Perhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence. Perhaps I was simply tired of the whole thing, and, my enthusiasm having burnt out, my reason was left to its own unimpassioned judgment. However it came about, and I cannot pretend to explain it, there was no doubt that Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced.

But for about 160 years, middle-class, educated Western women have been controlled by various ideals about female perfection; this old and successful tactic has worked by taking the best of female culture and attaching to it the most repressive demands of male-dominated societies. These forms of ransom were imposed on the female orgasm in the 1920s, on home and children and the family in the 1950s, on the culture of beauty in the 1980s. With this tactic, we waste time in every generation debating the symptoms more passionately than the disease.

Their greatly reduced circumstances bound the Danes together more tightly as a tribe than any of the other Nordic countries. As historian T. K. Derry writes (about the accession of Norway to Sweden), “The Danish king and people resigned themselves to the loss … as a common misfortune which drew them together in a desire to avoid all further changes.” The territorial losses, sundry beatings, and myriad humiliations forced the Danes to turn their gaze inward, instilling in them not only a fear of change and of external forces that abides to this day, but also a remarkable self-sufficiency and an appreciation of what little they had left. No longer the great European power it had once been, Denmark withdrew, mustered what few resources remained within its much-reduced boundaries, and decided never again to have ambitions in that direction. What followed was a process of what you could call “positive parochialization”; the Danes adopted a “glass half full” outlook, largely because their glass was now half full, and it is an outlook that, I would argue, has paved the way for the much trumpeted success of their society to this day.

I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reck of a cat were the beack of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in a gloamin in a brash unending Scottish piece of perfect jiggling reeling reel can we really keep this up? this fast? this high? this happy?

At the same time that middle- and upper-middle-class mothers were urged to pipe Mozart into their wombs when they're pregnant so their kids would come out perfectly tuned, the government told poor mothers to get the hell out of the house and get to work--no more children's aid for them. Mothers like us--with health care, laptops, and Cuisinarts--are supposed to replicate the immaculate bedrooms we see in Pottery Barn Kids catalogs, with their designer sheets and quilts, one toy and one stuffed animal atop a gleaming white dresser, and a white rug on the floor that has never been exposed to the shavings from hamster cages, Magic Markers accidentally dropped with their caps off, or Welche's grape juice.... we've been encouraged to turn our backs on other mothers who pick their kids' clothes out of other people's trash and sometimes can't buy a can of beans to feed them. How has it come to seem perfectly reasonable--even justified-- that one class of mother is suppoed to sew her baby's diapers out of Egyptian cotton from that portion of the Nile blessed by the god Osiris while another class of mother can't afford a single baby aspirin?

There is little doubt, Denmark is becoming a two-tier country. More and more Danes who can afford it are turning to private health care—850,000 at the latest count—and poll after poll shows that, though they have the largest per capita public sector in the world, the Danes’ satisfaction levels with their welfare state are in rapid decline. It is probably true that they have especially high expectations given the amount of money they contribute to it, but in one survey by management consultants Accenture only 22 percent of Danes thought their public sector did a good job.

Of course there are downsides even in almost nearly perfect societies: there are historical skeletons in every closet, and yes, countries with homogenous, monocultural tendencies do tend to be a little too safe and dull, and insular. Looking to the future, the Nordic countries are also facing some serious challenges—aging populations, creaking welfare states, the ongoing integration of immigrant populations, and rising inequality. But it’s still Scandinavia. It is still the enviably rich, peaceful, harmonious, and progressive place it has long been. It’s still The White Album.

When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah's Witness or an encyclopedia peddler. Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don't know for certain that it's as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it's changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated. Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible?

Maybe what I needed, finally, was to wake up to that voice inside of me, and acknowledge, finally and fully, what it was trying to tell me: ONE DAY YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. It is the simplest truth of them all, and yet it is the one we fight the hardest. We push it away. We procrastinate. Death is something that happens to other people, or else to us in a future so distant it's the same thing as "never." We prioritize all the things that matter the least at the expense of those that matter most. People wait entire lifetimes to see the Great Wall of China until they are too sick to travel, and save the bottle of Veuve Clicquot till they can't drink anymore. We wait till tomorrow to make that important phone call, until Friday to wear the purple lipstick, or for the summer to start working on the clubhouse for the kids. Before we know it, we have an illness, then a diagnosis, then we are knocking at death's door. Life is now. It's right here. This is it. The past is just a series of memories coded in the hippocampus. Tomorrow, forever a day away, is a myth and an illusion of our brain's insistence on linear time. This moment is the only one that exists. In the very next moment, you could also be gone, a memory in someone else's hippocampus.

Thus anxiety invited appeasement by magical sacrifice: human sacrifice led to man-hunting raids: one-sided raids turned into armed combat and mutual strife between rival powers. So ever larger numbers of people with more effective weapons were drawn into this dreadful ceremony, and what was at first an incidental prelude to a token sacrifice itself became the 'supreme sacrifice,' performed en masse. this ideological aberration was the final contribution to the perfection of the military megamachine, for the ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice has remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history.

The lack of traces is the trace of his Perfect One. In the immensity of the strength of his spirit, compared to the limited consciousness of human beings, he appears to hardly know he exists. In the guise of weakness, he has true strength; he knows he is powerful and yet appears weak. He knows he is enlightened and yet appears small and mediocre. He dulls what is sharp, clarifies what is confused, tones down his shining nature, and is outwardly identical with what is ordinary. He progresses without advancing; he absorbs without conquering; he has without owning. Becoming like everybody else, he becomes different from everybody. As he goes on, he is as prudent as one who crosses a winter stream; vigilant as one who knows he is surrounded by enemies; cold as a stranger; ephemeral as a melting snowflake; rough as a tree trunk; wide as the great valleys; impenetrable as deep water; inaccessible as solitary peaks. He arrives without walking; he penetrates without looking; achieves without willing; acts without doing; he just vanishes. He is obeyed without commanding; he wins without struggling; he draws people to himself without calling for them. How disheartening to those who uphold the myth of manhood based on muscles and metallic strength: this alone is the true man, the absolute man! He absorbs within himself the ambiguous virtue of the female.

APRIL 30 WHEN SOME BASIC NEED IS LACKING—time, energy, money—consider yourself blessed. Your very lack is an opportunity to latch onto Me in unashamed dependence. When you begin a day with inadequate resources, you must concentrate your efforts on the present moment. This is where you are meant to live—in the present; it is the place where I always await you. Awareness of your inadequacy is a rich blessing, training you to rely wholeheartedly on Me. The truth is that self-sufficiency is a myth perpetuated by pride and temporary success. Health and wealth can disappear instantly, as can life itself. Rejoice in your insufficiency, knowing that My Power is made perfect in weakness.

The anti-Semitic interpretation fails to discern the real intention of the Gospels. It is clearly mimetic contagion that explains the hatred of the masses for exceptional persons, such as Jesus and all the prophets; it is not a matter of ethnic or religious identity. The Gospels suggest that a mimetic process of rejection exists in all communities and not only among the Jews. The prophets are the preferential victims of this process, a little like all exceptional persons, individuals who are different. The reasons for exceptional status are diverse. The victims can be those who limp, the disabled, the poor, the disadvantaged, individuals who are mentally retarded, and also great religious figures who are inspired, like Jesus or the Jewish prophets or now, in our day, great artists or thinkers. All peoples have a tendency to reject, under some pretext or another, the individuals who don't fit their conception of what is normal and acceptable. If we compare the Passion to the narratives of the violence suffered by the prophets, we confirm that in both cases the episodes of violence are definitely either directly collective in character or of collective inspiration. The resemblance of Jesus to the prophets is perfectly real, and we will soon see that these resemblances are not restricted to the victims of collective violence in the Bible. In myths as well, the victims are or seem different. So

Augustine, who assumed that Genesis 1 was chapter 1 in a book that contained the literal words of God, and that Genesis 2 was the second chapter in the same book, put the two chapters together and read the latter as a sequel. Genesis 2, he assumed, described the fall from the perfection and original goodness of creation depicted in chapter 1. So almost inevitably the Christian scriptures from the fourth century on were interpreted against the background of this (mis) understanding. The primary trouble with this theory was that by the fourth century of the Common Era there were no Jews to speak of left in the Christian movement, and therefore the only readers and interpreters of the ancient Hebrew myths were Gentiles, who had no idea what these stories originally meant. Consequently, they interpreted them as perfection established by God in chapter 1, followed by perfection ruined by human beings in chapter 2. Why was that a problem? Well I, for one, have never known a Jewish scripture scholar to treat the Garden of Eden story in the same way that Gentiles treat it. Jews tend to see this story not as a narrative about sin entering the world, but as a parable about the birth of self-consciousness. It is, for the Jews, not a fall into sin, but a step into humanity. It is the birth of a new relationship with God, changing from master-servant to interdependent cooperation. The forbidden fruit was not from an apple tree, as so many who don’t bother to read the text seem to think. It was rather from “the tree of knowledge,” and the primary thing that one gained from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge was the ability to discern good from evil. Gaining that ability did not, in the minds of the Jewish readers of the book of Genesis, corrupt human nature. It simply made people take responsibility for their freely made decisions. A slave has no such freedom. The job of the slave is simply to obey, not to think. The job of the slave-master is to command. Thus the relationship of the master to the slave is a relationship of the strong to the weak, the parent to the child, the king to the serf, the boss to the worker. If human beings were meant to live in that kind of relationship with God, then humanity would have been kept in a perpetual state of irresponsible, childlike immaturity. Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden, not because they had disobeyed God’s rules, but because, when self-consciousness was born, they could no longer live in childlike dependency. Adam and Eve discovered, as every child ultimately must discover, that maturity requires that the child leave his or her parents’ home, just as every bird sooner or later must leave its nest and learn to fly on its own. To be forced out of the Garden of Eden was, therefore, not a punishment for sin, so much as it was a step into maturity.

You’ve encountered it, I’m sure: friends who are obsessed by the need to get their children’s (or their own) teeth straightened, their thighs sculpted, their breasts or their backyards professionally redesigned … They want the perfect career trajectory, the perfect holiday, the perfect pesto, the perfect latte, the perfect eyebrow, the perfect orgasm … They yearn for perfect politicians (ha!), perfect banks, perfect cars, perfect shoes, perfect kitchens … our new angst springs from the discovery that our lives are falling short of some crazy ideal of perfection clogging our minds like a cancer … Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.12

More than 754,000 Danes aged between fifteen and sixty-four—over 20 percent of the working population—do no work whatsoever and are supported by generous unemployment or disability benefits. The New York Times has called Denmark “The best place on earth to be laid off,” with unemployment benefits of up to 90 percent of previous wages for up to two years (until recent reforms, it was eleven years). The Danes call their system flexicurity, a neologism blending the flexibility Danish companies enjoy to fire people with short notice and little compensation (compared with Sweden, where jobs can still be for life) with the security the labor market enjoys knowing that there will be ample support in times of unemployment

What is the matter? I suppose, and many intelligent American writers support my suspicion, that she has four basic troubles—first, the collapse of the family unit which today hardly exists in American towns; secondly, Momism and the vast economic power (via alimony, inheritance and other factors) held by women in America; thirdly, self-hypnotism about the ‘American way of life’, a concept which needs drastic re-examination by those who invented the slogan; and, fourthly, escapism and flight from reality, whether this takes the shape of the television myth and the enchanted world of the ad man which seek to show people as better than they know perfectly well they are, or of such escapist drugs as the tranquillizer pill,

few years later, Demeter took a vacation to the beach. She was walking along, enjoying the solitude and the fresh sea air, when Poseidon happened to spot her. Being a sea god, he tended to notice pretty ladies walking along the beach. He appeared out of the waves in his best green robes, with his trident in his hand and a crown of seashells on his head. (He was sure that the crown made him look irresistible.) “Hey, girl,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. “You must be the riptide, ’cause you sweep me off my feet.” He’d been practicing that pickup line for years. He was glad he finally got to use it. Demeter was not impressed. “Go away, Poseidon.” “Sometimes the sea goes away,” Poseidon agreed, “but it always comes back. What do you say you and me have a romantic dinner at my undersea palace?” Demeter made a mental note not to park her chariot so far away. She really could’ve used her two dragons for backup. She decided to change form and get away, but she knew better than to turn into a snake this time. I need something faster, she thought. Then she glanced down the beach and saw a herd of wild horses galloping through the surf. That’s perfect! Demeter thought. A horse! Instantly she became a white mare and raced down the beach. She joined the herd and blended in with the other horses. Her plan had serious flaws. First, Poseidon could also turn into a horse, and he did—a strong white stallion. He raced after her. Second, Poseidon had created horses. He knew all about them and could control them. Why would a sea god create a land animal like the horse? We’ll get to that later. Anyway, Poseidon reached the herd and started pushing his way through, looking for Demeter—or rather sniffing for her sweet, distinctive perfume. She was easy to find. Demeter’s seemingly perfect camouflage in the herd turned out to be a perfect trap. The other horses made way for Poseidon, but they hemmed in Demeter and wouldn’t let her move. She got so panicky, afraid of getting trampled, that she couldn’t even change shape into something else. Poseidon sidled up to her and whinnied something like Hey, beautiful. Galloping my way? Much to Demeter’s horror, Poseidon got a lot cuddlier than she wanted. These days, Poseidon would be arrested for that kind of behavior. I mean…assuming he wasn’t in horse form. I don’t think you can arrest a horse. Anyway, back in those days, the world was a rougher, ruder place. Demeter couldn’t exactly report Poseidon to King Zeus, because Zeus was just as bad. Months later, a very embarrassed and angry Demeter gave birth to twins. The weirdest thing? One of the babies was a goddess; the other one was a stallion. I’m not going to even try to figure that out. The baby girl was named Despoine, but you don’t hear much about her in the myths. When she grew up, her job was looking after Demeter’s temple, like the high priestess of corn magic or something. Her baby brother, the stallion, was named Arion. He grew up to be a super-fast immortal steed who helped out Hercules and some other heroes, too. He was a pretty awesome horse, though I’m not sure that Demeter was real proud of having a son who needed new horseshoes every few months and was constantly nuzzling her for apples. At this point, you’d think Demeter would have sworn off those gross, disgusting men forever and joined Hestia in the Permanently Single Club. Strangely, a couple of months later, she fell in love with a human prince named Iasion (pronounced EYE-son, I think). Just shows you how far humans had come since Prometheus gave them fire. Now they could speak and write. They could brush their teeth and comb their hair. They wore clothes and occasionally took baths. Some of them were even handsome enough to flirt with goddesses.

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.

One of the reasons relaxation as a concept within Martial Arts has become so established is because of the traditional Chinese art of ‘drunken’ style Kung Fu, also called ‘Zui Quan’ or Drunken Fist. This unusual combat discipline requires the student to develop a relaxed and flowing style of movement akin to that of someone under the influence of alcohol. The misconception here however is that the individual is ‘relaxed’ in the traditional sense – after all it does look that way.   Many people love this style because it appears so different to traditional fighting arts and hence they think it may be perfect for someone who can knock back a few beers and stagger about taking on all comers.   However Zui Quan actually requires great muscle control and focus, not just a bunch of flailing limbs and stumbling around.

But the conclusion of the HOS theory critically depends on the assumption that productive resources can move freely across economic activities. This assumption means that capital and labour released from any one activity can immediately and without cost be asbsorbed by other activities. With this assumption-known as the assumption of 'perfect factor mobility' among economists-adjustments to changing trade patterns pose no problem. If a steel mill shuts down due to an increase in imports because, say the government reduces tariffs, the resources employed in the industry (the workers, the buildings, the blast furnaces) will be employed (at the same or higher levels of productivity and thus higher returns) by another industry that has become relatively more profitable, say, the computer industry. No one loses from the process.

So…it wasn’t love at first sight then? With Dad? You fell in love later?” I don’t know why I feel disappointed. I don’t even believe in love at first sight. Except where it applies to my parents being perfect for each other. And anyways, isn’t that a kind of child-myth that all kids want to believe? “Sweetie…It was never love.” Screw disappointment. Now I feel gut-kicked. “What do you mean? But you had to…Then how did I…?” Mom sighs. “You were…the result of a moment of…weakness on my part.” But she takes too long to choose her words. I wonder what she thought of first, instead of “weakness.” Pity? Stupidity? She dabs her napkin at some imaginary syrup at the corner of her mouth. “The only weak moment we ever had, which is kind of extraordinary. Not that I regret it at all,” she says quickly. “I wouldn’t trade you for anything. You know that, right?” I wonder if “I wouldn’t trade you for anything” is also a child-myth. “So I was an accident. Not even the normal kind of accident. Like, a one-night stand, or a oops-I-didn’t-take-my-pill accident. I was an oops-I-accidentally-mated-with-my-first-experiment accident.” I put my head in my hands. “Lovely.” “That man loved you, Emma, from the moment you were born. He’d be very upset to hear you talking like that right now. Frankly, I am, too. I was not some experiment.” I bite my lip. “I know. It’s just…a lot, don’t you think?” “That’s why we’re going to have two pieces of strawberry pie, Agnes,” Mom says, her voice strained. I pull my stricken face from my hands and force it to smile. “Yes, please,” I say. I’m beginning to think Agnes isn’t a waitress for financial gain. I think she needs gossip to thrive. There’s no way a normal waitress would be or should be this attentive.

Could it be that, once a society achieves a certain high level of equality, beyond that point greater equality merely leads to diminishing happiness returns? As has been proved with measures of wealth, once people have enough equality to cover their basic needs, greater equality does not necessarily result in corresponding increases in happiness. Could this explain why the Danes were judged to be the happiest people on earth, even though they were not the most equal? “Colleagues at Harvard think there might be a leveling-off in terms of some health aspects,” said the professor. “But if you look at our graphs, where we put all our sources together in terms of all health and societal problems, there is no sign of it leveling off at the other end. It is a linear relationship. My view is that we don’t know what happens if you get more equal than Sweden.” Ultimately,

And in front of it all are the pearly gates: the proverbial entrance to Heaven that she, in earthly life, thought might not exist. But they are real, not myth or fantasy. As she passes through them, several people greet her. In foreign tongues even, but she understands. Language no longer matter. There are no barriers between herself and others, just love. The gorgeous views seem to go on forever. Ornate structures, mansions, banquet halls, and natural beauty, orchards, gardens. People congregate around huge marble fountains. In the distance are snow-capped mountains of the purist white. She can hear the sounds of rushing rivers and the surf of the ocean at once. Everyone around her is happy, loving, thankful. A choir sings songs of joy and peace while others play musical instruments of every kind in perfect harmony. Children laugh and play in the streets as well as in the clouds above her head.

Even when a couple manages to establish harmonious family commitments, the stereotypes on which these commitments rest often make life outside the family even more harsh for people who do not or cannot conform to gender expectations. The more women are defined in terms of an ideal myth, for example, the more possible it is for men to ignore or actively abuse women who do not meet that ideal. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the cult of True Womanhood was perfectly compatible with the exploitation of female slaves and factory workers. In the twentieth century, a recurring theme in rape and sexual harassment cases has been the notion that if a woman has ever departed from ideal behavior in any way, she has no real 'womanhood' to be violated or offended. The wives and mothers of rapists almost invariably, and usually in good faith, defend them as the soul of chivalry -- at least toward women who conform to the prevailing myths.

She maneuvered a cart through the produce section, which featured boxes of fruits as gifts, amping up the volume and variety this time of year. She packed several Asian pears in a plastic tear-off bag, then moved on to the most perfect Fuyu persimmons, smooth, orange, and firm. She had always been embarrassed when her mother had given people such odd practical "Korean gifts" - the boxes of apples or even laundry detergent - when in reality, outside of America, these objects might have some rich symbolic relevance that perhaps Margot didn't understand. If she thought of the labor and resources that went into each piece of fruit - the water, the light, the earth, the training and harvesting of each plant - a box of apples could be special, a sacred thing. Perhaps in this land of plenty, of myth and wide-open spaces, trucks and factories, mass production, we lost track of that: the miracle of an object as simple as a pear, nutritious and sweet, created by something as beautiful as a tree.

I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

Terror is an artery. Running unfailing channels of bloodied thoroughfares by dint of the wilds beyond our knowing. Fluctuations and murmurs are audible within the splintered leeway of our preserve as a consequence of interstices modeled in such brutality. This appended artery offers no direction; idle and at times desultory. Bloodstained tracks and avenues guide casualties. Terror, like death, is not complicated, nor is it simple. It is but routine—natural. To call it otherwise is to parsimoniously say that birth is effortless, hurricanes are facile, and earthquakes are meek when they are a lot more. Myths, parables, and allegories lie in the construct of terror. Kings have fallen and succeeded in the yarns of terror. Simple men have been turned into heroes due to terror. Villains have been great orchestrators in the art of terror, allowing sole individuals and denizens to feel their makings. A soul never needed God to feel terror. The most nihilistic can undergo such a dreadful emotion. Animals are perfect examples of this. They are well-equipped creations to the world of terror and death, holding no cognizance to deity or creator. Terror is quite exclusive as it is a function of the mind, conducted by the intersections and throughways of nerves and bounded to that alone. Although it approaches with university, like hunger or sickness, it is selfish by fashion and segregating in nature. But death is quite opposite… death is all embracing. Disregarded and glossed over, it is never reserved or inaudible, especially if you listen hard enough. Death transmits a signal that can be discerned if you listen hard enough. Frail in birthing, the airing is not limited to the clairvoyant, though they are a standard audience. The most simple-minded can hear this. But they choose to ignore it for whatever grounds. Even in the obviousness of it when it comes in dream, awaking its public in night terrors and cold sweats, it should be heeded. In lurk of dark uncertainties the signal should be adhered in this societal horrific caprice. Death is a declaration waiting to broadcast the haunting awareness of our own deterrence. And within these pages is its proclamation.

The truth is, the vanity of protective parents that I cited to the court goes beyond look-at-us-we’re-such-responsible-guardians. Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance. They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates. By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from “innocents” for their own good. By pandering to this myth of the naïf, we service our own legend. Presumably we have looked the horror in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas even to ourselves. Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss. The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic. The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten, as I have confided to you under the sheets in better days. No, they have sex, too. In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

Our respect for the individual as a unique phenomenon, not to be suppressed in his idiosyncrasies, but to be cultivated and brought to fulfillment as a gift to the world such as never before was seen on earth, nor will ever appear again, is contrary, toto caelo, to the spirit not only of Oriental art but also of Oriental life. And in keeping with this turn of mind, the individual is expected not to innovate or invent, but to perfect himself in the knowledge and rendition of norms. Accordingly, the Oriental artist must not only address himself to standard themes, but also have no interest in any such thing as we understand by self-expression. Accounts, such as abound in the biographies of Western masters, of an artist’s solitary agony in long quest of his own special language to bring forward his personal message, we shall search for long and in vain in the annals of Oriental art. Such ego-oriented thinking is alien completely to Eastern life, thought, and religiosity, which are concerned, on the contrary, precisely with the quenching of ego and of all interest in this evanescent thing that is merely the “I” of a passing dream.

The craftsperson develops a knowingness about the work she does that bears its own fruit, the fruit of being present, or attentive. The craftsperson learns that within the work she does there is a jewel hiding below the surface. That the thrill of the craft is to discover the jewel. And that there is only one way to discover it: to practice the craft mindlessly. To become one with the work. To polish and polish, as though with one’s heart. That there is no way to know when the jewel will show itself, but to trust with all one’s heart that one day, when it is least expected, the jewel will be there! It will appear. “And so the craftsperson is one who has reached that stage of her development where she is content with the work, and only the work, knowing that it is only through being there with one’s work that the jewel will reveal itself, and that it is the work, and only the work, raised to the level of near perfection that connects the craftsperson with herself, with her own heart. And so she practices, day in and day out, content to do so, without the thrill of the apprentice to keep her going, but knowing deep inside that there is no place to go but here.

It helps, of course, that Denmark is essentially one giant middle class or, as the Danes would have you believe, effectively classless. The creation of this economically and gender-equal society has driven much of Denmark’s social and economic development over the last hundred or so years. One very well-known Danish quotation sums this up—it is another line, like Holst’s “What was lost without…” that every Dane knows by heart, and was written by N. F. S. Grundtvig: Og da har i rigdom vi drevet det vidt, når få har for meget og færre for lidt. (And we will have made great strides in equality, when few have too much and fewer too little.) It sounds like some kind of utopian fantasy but, by and large, the Danes have succeeded in achieving it. As historian Tony Hall writes in Scandinavia: At War with Trolls, Grundtvig’s Folk High Schools were founded on the principle of “teaching them, whenever feasible, that regardless of their social rank and occupation, they belonged to one people, and as such had one mother, one destiny and one purpose.” The result is that, according to the New Statesman, “90 percent of the population [of Denmark] enjoy an approximately identical standard of living.

The Swedish royal family’s legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, the then king, Gustav IV Adolf—by all accounts as mad as a hamburger—left for exile. To fill his throne and, it is thought, as a sop to Napoleon whose help Sweden hoped to secure against Russia in reclaiming Finland, the finger of fate ended up pointing at a French marshal by the name of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (who also happened to be the husband of Napoleon’s beloved Desirée). Upon his arrival in Stockholm, the fact that Bernadotte had actually once fought against the Swedes in Germany was quickly forgotten, as was his name, which was changed to Charles XIV John. This, though, is where the assimilation ended: the notoriously short-tempered Charles XIV John attempted to speak Swedish to his new subjects just the once, meeting with such deafening laughter that he never bothered again (there is an echo of this in the apparently endless delight afforded the Danes by the thickly accented attempts at their language by their current queen’s consort, the portly French aristocrat Henri de Monpezat). On the subject of his new country, the forefather of Sweden’s current royal family was withering: “The wine is terrible, the people without temperament, and even the sun radiates no warmth,” the arriviste king is alleged to have said. The current king is generally considered to be a bit bumbling, but he can at least speak Swedish, usually stands where he is told, and waves enthusiastically. At least, that was the perception until 2010, when the long-whispered rumors of his rampant philandering were finally exposed in a book, Den motvillige monarken (The Reluctant Monarch). Sweden’s tabloids salivated over gory details of the king’s relationships with numerous exotic women, his visits to strip clubs, and his fraternizing with members of the underworld. Hardly appropriate behavior for the chairman of the World Scout Foundation. (The exposé followed allegations that the father of the king’s German-Brazilian wife, Queen Silvia, was a member of the Nazi party. Awkward.) These days, whenever I see Carl Gustaf performing his official duties I can’t shake the feeling that he would much prefer to be trussed up in a dominatrix’s cellar. The

It is more realistic to try to build a theory of rights on the agreed-upon wrongs of the past that we want to avoid repeating, than to try to build such a theory on idealized conceptions of the perfect society, about which we will never agree. Moreover, a theory of rights as an experiential reaction to wrongs is more empirical, observable, and debatable, and less dependent on un-provable faith, metaphor, and myth, than theories premised on sources external to human experience. At bottom, therefore, a theory of rights from wrongs is more democratic and less elitist than divine or natural law theories. It is also more truthful and honest, because rights are not facts of nature, like Newton’s Laws, waiting somewhere “out there” to be discovered, deduced, or intuited. All theories of natural or divine rights are legal fictions created by human beings to satisfy the perceived need for an external and eternal source of rights to check the wrongs produced by human nature and positive law. They are sometimes benevolent fictions, but they are fictions nonetheless, and no amount of need can convert them into fact. Moreover, the fictions of natural and divine rights may be used for malevolent as well as for benevolent purposes.

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

Sarah, I stood in front of you, and there were a thousand things I wanted to say, but I couldn’t figure out how to say any of them without COMPLETELY shocking you. How do you tell a person you only just met that you think they might be the one to show you that happily ever afters aren’t a myth after all? So I walked away. And then I started to panic: The universe (or God, as you’d probably say) gave me a second chance by putting you next to me, and I might be throwing it away by not being brave enough to tell you how I feel. And then I realised I STILL HAVE YOUR BOOK! And now I’m writing in it, and of all the words swirling about my head and my heart, the only thing I have time to write is … I want to see you again. I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want this to be it. And maybe you think I’m crazy, and you’re glad you never have to speak to me again, so that’s why it’s all up to you now. If this comes out as insane to you, then you can ignore it. You need never see me again. But if not—if you feel the same way I do—tell me. Answer me. I want to see you again. You said your life is messed up at the moment. Well so is mine. Isn’t everyone’s? No one is perfect. And if we keep waiting for that moment when everything in our lives is neatly in place, we may end up missing what’s standing in front of us right now. Aiden ARHarrison@me.com

Space Rockets as Power Symbols The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.

This was the very heart of Wales' rainforest zone, where the oceanic climate conspires to make conditions perfect for the rich profusion of plant life that we'd spent the past week exploring. Yet here, humanity had found a rainforest and turned it into a desert. It had started long ago, no doubt: Wales' Green Desert is the product of agricultural malpractice dating back to the twelfth-century monks of Strata Florida. But what began as a profitable enterprise in medieval times today supports a mere twenty-eight farms over an area covering 46,000 acres. The farming unions claim that rewilding will lead to rural depopulation, but centuries of overgrazing have already drained the land of both people and wildlife. And in doing so, Wales is losing part of its heritage, its culture. Because the Wales of this great country's myths and legends was a rainforest nation, whose peoples lived and coexisted with the Atlantic oakwoods that once carpeted their land, celebrating them in song. They knew these rainforests and knew them deeply, weaving them into their stories, vesting their greatest heroes with a magic derived from that profound knowledge of place and ecology. There is a way back from this, but it is unlikely to come through a culture war between sheep farmers and rewilders. The truth is that there is more than enough space in Wales, as there is in the rest of Britain, both for farming to continue and for more rainforest to flourish.

Have you ever suddenly understood something in a “flash of recognition”? Have you ever known of someone who became an “overnight success”? Here is a great secret that holds the key to great accomplishment: both that “sudden flash” and that “overnight success” were the final, breakthrough results of a long, patient process of edge upon edge upon edge. Any time you see what looks like a breakthrough, it is always the end result of a long series of little things, done consistently over time. No success is immediate or instantaneous; no collapse is sudden or precipitous. They are both products of the slight edge. Now, I’m not saying that quantum leaps are a myth because they don’t really happen. As a matter of fact, they do happen. Just not the way people think they do. The term comes from particle physics, and here’s what it means in reality: a true quantum leap is what happens when a subatomic particle suddenly jumps to a higher level of energy. But it happens as a result of the gradual buildup of potential caused by energy being applied to that particle over time. In other words, it doesn’t “just suddenly happen.” An actual quantum leap is something that finally happens after a lengthy accumulation of slight-edge effort. Exactly the way the water hyacinth moves from day twenty-nine to day thirty. Exactly the way the frog’s certain death by drowning was “suddenly” transformed into salvation by butter. A real-life quantum leap is not Superman leaping a tall building. A real quantum leap is Edison perfecting the electric light bulb after a thousand patient efforts—and then transforming the world with it.

One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a reproductive vessel. The reduction of the head and the diminution of the extremities seem to stress the female form as potentially reproductive, but to what extent this condition was seen as sexual, erotic or matriarchal is unclear. ....Despite the correct rejection of the 'Mother Goddess' and utopian matriarchy myths by recent scholarship, we should not loose track of the overwhelming evidence that the image of female nudity was indeed one of power in ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess Ishtar/Inanna was but one of several goddesses whose erotic allure was represented as a powerful attribute in the literature of the ancient Near East. In contact to the naked male body which was the focus of a variety of meanings in the visual arts, female nudity was always associated with sexuality, and in particular with powerful sexual attraction, Akkadian *kuzbu*. This sexuality was not limited to Ishtar and her cult. As a literary topos, sensuousness is a defining quality for both mortal women and goddesses. In representational art, the nude woman is portrayed in a provocative pose, as the essence of the feminine. For femininity, sexual allure, *kuzbu*, the ideal of the feminine, was thus expressed as nudity in both visual and verbal imagery. While several iconographic types of unclothed females appear in Mesopotamian representations of the historical period - nursing mothers, women in acts of sexual intercourse, entertainers such as dancers and musicians, and isolated frontally represented nudes with or without other attributes - and while these nude female images may have different iconographic functions, the ideal of femininity and female sexuality portrayed in them is similar. -Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

Is there an evolutionary consequence to this distinctive quality of story? Researchers have imagined so. We prevailed, in large part, because we are an intensely social species. We are able to live and work in groups. Not in perfect harmony, but with sufficient cooperation to thoroughly upend the calculus of survival. It is not just safety in numbers. It is innovate, participate, delegate, and collaborate in numbers. And essential to such successful group living are the very insights into the variety of human experience we’ve absorbed through story. As psychologist Jerome Bruner noted, “We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative,”37 leading him to doubt that “such collective life would be possible were it not for our human capacity to organize and communicate experience in narrative form.”38 Through narrative we explore the range of human behavior, from societal expectation to heinous transgression. We witness the breadth of human motivation, from lofty ambition to reprehensible brutality. We encounter the scope of human disposition from triumphant victory to heartrending loss. As literary scholar Brian Boyd has emphasized, narratives thus make “the social landscape more navigable, more expansive, more open with possibilities,” instilling in us a “craving for understanding our world not only in terms of our own direct experience, but through the experiences of others—and not only real others.”39 Whether told through myths, stories, fables, or even embellished accounts of daily events, narratives are the key to our social nature. With math we commune with other realities; with story we commune with other minds.

Let me put the contrast in a single concrete example. The physician who finds time to give personal attention to his patients and listens to them. carefully probing inner conditions that may be more significant than any laboratory reports, has become a rarity. Where the power complex is dominant, a visit to a physician is paced, not to fit the patient's needs, but mainly to perform the succession of physical tests upon which the diagnosis will be based. Yet if there were a sufficient number of competent physicians on hand whose inner resources were as available as their laboratory aids, a more subtle diagnosis might be possible, and the patient's subjective response might in many cases effectively supplement the treatment. Thoreau expressed this to perfection when he observed in his 'Journal' that "the really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure." Without this slowing of the tempo of all activities the positive advantages of plenitude could not be sufficiently enjoyed; for the congestion of time is as threatening to the good life as the congestion of space or people, and produces stresses and tensions that equally undermine human relations. The inner stability that such a slowdown brings about is essential to the highest uses of the mind, through opening up that second life which one lives in reflection and contemplation and self-scrutiny. The means to escape from the "noisy crowing up of things and whatsoever wars on the divine" was one of the vital offerings of the classic religions: hence their emphasis was not on technological productivity but on personal poise. The old slogan of New York subway guards in handling a crush of passengers applies with even greater force to the tempo of megatechnic society: "What's your hurry...Watch your step!

Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture?" Hiro asks. "They were emblems of royal power," the Librarian says. "Their origin is obscure." "Enki must have been responsible for that one," Hiro says. "Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me and the gis-hur, the 'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe." "Tell me more about the me." "To quote Kramer and Maier again, '[They believed in] the existence from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, known as me, relating to the cosmos and its components, to gods and humans, to cities and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.'" "Kind of like the Torah." "Yes, but they have a kind of mystical or magical force. And they often deal with banal subjects -- not just religion." "Examples?" "In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into giving her ninety-four me and brings them back to her home town of Uruk, where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing." "Inanna is the person that Juanita's obsessed with." "Yes, sir. She is hailed as a savior because 'she brought the perfect execution of the me.'" "Execution? Like executing a computer program?" "Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them are about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building, farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires." "The operating system of society." "I'm sorry?" "When you first turn on a computer, it is an inert collection of circuits that can't really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to infuse those circuits with a collection of rules that tell it how to function. How to be a computer. It sounds as though these me served as the operating system of the society, organizing an inert collection of people into a functioning system." "As you wish. In any case, Enki was the guardian of the me." "So he was a good guy, really." "He was the most beloved of the gods." "He sounds like kind of a hacker.

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.

In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause