Peripheral Vision Quotes

Real life was something happening in her peripheral vision.

I know other worlds exist. I can see them in my peripheral vision.

Squint your eyes and look closer I'm not between you and your ambition I am a poster girl with no poster I am thirty-two flavors and then some And I'm beyond your peripheral vision So you might want to turn your head Cause someday you might find you're starving and eating all of the words you said.

Hi." "Hi." I shrug, as though to say "Whatever." In my peripheral vision I can see Magnus exhale. He looks a teeny bit nervous. "So." "So." I can play this game too. "Poppy." "Poppy. I mean, Magnus." I scowl. He caught me out.

I had to admit the man looked amazing in jeans. The ancient denim clung lightly to his hips and followed the long lines of some remarkable thigh muscles. And although I made a point of not checking out his rear view, my peripheral vision was having a very good day.” ~ Haven Travis on Hardy Cates

To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact that you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That’s where it is. Right at this moment. But don’t look. Keep your eyes here. Now take a deep breath. Go ahead take and even deeper one. Only this time as you start to exhale try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it’s gonna hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with it’s teeth or are they nails?, don’t worry, that particular detail doesn’t matter, because before you have time to even process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms – you sure as hell should be getting rid of this book – you won’t have time to even scream. Don’t look. I didn’t.

Ah, hell. His peripheral vision was working far too well tonight. His slut of a cousin, his cocksucking, suit-wearing, Montblanc-up-the-ass cousin Saxton the Magnificent, was standing next to the queen, looking like a combination of Cary Grant and some model in a goddamn cologne ad. Not that Qhuinn was bitter. Because the guy was sharing Blay's bed. Nah. Nope. Not at all. The Cocksucker- With a wince, he thought maybe he should switch that insult to something a little farther away from what the two of them ... God, he couldn't even go there. Not if he wanted to breathe.

No, Jack, we cain’t sneak by. These aren’t movie bad guys who don’t got no peripheral vision and we can just slip past while they’re lookin’ the other way. You want yer life, you gotta fuckin’ take it.

Out of my peripheral vision, I see Four shove the door open and walk out. Apparently this fight isn't interesting enough for him. Or maybe he's going to figure out why everything's spinning like a top, and I don't blame him; I want to know the answer too.

In horse racing they put these slats on either side of the horse's head, blocking the creature's peripheral vision. They're called blinders. They don't actually blind the horse, but they allow the horse to see only what's right in front of it; otherwise it might freak out and lose the race. People live with blinders too; but ours are invisible, and much more sophisticated. Most of the time we don't even know they're there. Maybe we need them, though, because if we took in everything all at once, we'd lose our minds. Or worse, our souls. We'd see, we'd hear, we'd feel so deeply that we might never resurface. So we make our decisions and base our lives on those decisions, never realizing we're seeing only one-tenth of the whole. Then we cling to our narrow conclusions like our lives depend on it.

Travel Tip: Relax. It's not a crime to want to sit in a cafe and not take a walking our of all those historic monuments in your peripheral vision.

Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.

How did you ever train in this thing at knight camp without peripheral vision?" "Knights don't need peripheral vision. They need chivalry.

One thing about writing this much… her brain never really shifted out of The World of Mages. When she sat down to write, she didn't have to wade back into the story slowly, waiting to get used to the temperature. She was just there, all the time. All day. Real life was something happening in her peripheral vision.

Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas,enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations.

This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue. ... So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision ... it already has the quality of an idea ... unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.

when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on the table between them or in their peripheral vision changes both what they talk about and their degree of connectedness.65

Of course, once I'd wrapped my mind around the fact that it was Cal and not Archer standing in my bedroom, it dawned on me that Cal was standing in my bedroom. "Hey," I breathed, hoping my hair wasn't a huge tangled mess, even though I was ninety-nine percent sure that it was. I mean, I could see it out of my peripheral vision. "Hey." "You're,um,in my room." "I am." "Is that allowed?" "Well,we are engaged," Cal deadpanned. I squinted at him, shoving big handfuls of my hair away from my face. I had no idea if that was supposed to be a joke or not. You could never tell with Cal. "Did you want to watch me sleep or something? Because if that's the case, this engagement is so broken." Cal's lips quirked in what might have been a smile. "Do you have a smart-ass reply for everything? "If at all possible,yeah.

Once you start spending time together, you'll learn things about her that no one else could have told you. Things that you never would have suspected. Like the fact that she snores and has cold feet." He folded his arms and I caught his smile in my peripheral vision. Why was he smiling at me? Hey, was he referring to our nap on the cot? "Maybe you'll learn that she'd make a great doctor or that she has the capacity to care about people she barely knows." He took a dramatic pause, leaning against the wall. "Maybe you'll learn that she's not the spoiled princess you thought she was." Maybe you'll learn that she'd rather have someone speak directly to her than about her," I said, folding my arms and leaning against the wall.

Shoes. I needed to get on my tennis shoes. I scrambled through my things on the floor and found them, shoving my feet in and tying the knots. Of course Kaidan Rowe would know what freesia smelled like. He probably had to take a flower course during lust training. “Going somewhere?” In my peripheral vision I saw him standing in the bathroom door. I wouldn't meet his eyes, afraid they'd be as stormy as they were after our kiss. I stood and looked at the clock. It was nine. “Yeah, I'm going for a run.” “Mind if I join you?” I huffed out a determined breath and looked at him now. “Only if you'll do something for me.” He raised his eyebrows in response. “Teach me to hide my colors.

They were all right here with him still but he missed them with a ferocity that threatened to turn him inside-out. Only Andrew saw the strain in Neil's mask. He crossed the room to stand in front of Neil, a silent demand in his stare. Neil wanted to answer that, but he didn't know how. German was the obvious answer because it would afford them a little bit of privacy, but Romero and Jackson didn't understand German. They wouldn't know what he was saying and they would have to react like he was spilling every dark secret. Neil couldn't allow that. He didn't want to leave Andrew with nothing, but what could he possibly say? "Thank you," he finally said. He couldn't say he meant thanks for all of it: the keys, the trust, the honesty, and the kisses. Hopefully Andrew would figure it out eventually. "You were amazing." He meant it for Andrew's ears only, but Allison was close enough to overhear. She sent Matt a significant look. Neil saw it in his peripheral vision but didn't take his eyes off Andrew to see Matt's reaction. He didn't want to look away, as if by holding Andrew's gaze he could somehow save this moment.

Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.

Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday’s home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn’t. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing.

One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don’t see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we don’t, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your vision—you’ll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of the moving thing.

There will be people who admire your strength and courage. But, there will also be those willing to knock everything you say and do. They think it goes unnoticed, but you have excellent peripheral vision. The trick is to never let them get the best of you. Don't become vulnerable to their deceptive nature. You were born to succeed.

Truth be told, happiness is like the artist's muse. She is very whimsical and loves to play little tricks on us. If we search too hard, happiness will slip away. And then, when we are not really concentrating on capturing her, she will suddenly appear in our peripheral vision wearing a green silk gown, winking at us.

He couldn't escape it. She'd begun re-calibrating his senses the moment she came through that library door. His peripheral vision was now trained for flashes of golden hair: his ears, trained for her melodic laugh. He found himself following the drifting scent of her soap and dusting powder, like a dog panting after the butcher's wife.

Of the four men in Preston Prichard’s cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard’s letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.

I wish I didn't have a to-do list in my peripheral vision at all times...My brain seeks tasks to check off, i's to dot and t's to cross.

Every time Jean saw black clothes in his peripheral vision, he automatically tried to change directions and fall in line.

Tyler wrote: Dearest Marguerite: You've taught me a great deal about stillness. About the many things that can drift into your mind and heart when you shut down the barricades created by noise. Unexpected gifts of insight, revelation and wisdom. <…> But you taught me that love is found in stillness. It is the space between objects. It's the star you can't see if you look directly at it in the night sky, but if you look away, look forward, you see it in your peripheral vision, beside you, watching over you. If you lie down on the earth it's there, beneath you, cradling you.<…> You're my angel, my tormentor, my woman, my love. God, Tyler is such a gentleman! He is gentle AND a gentleman.

Strong, negative emotions (fear, anger, anxiety, hopelessness) tend to narrow our minds—it’s as though our peripheral vision has been cut off because we’re so focused on the peril that’s front and center.

Perhaps some guest editors would keep Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in their peripheral vision. But Sylvia recognized their execution as the most extreme and gruesome example of McCarthy's red-baiting paranoia.

As long as the eyes of our faith are fixed upon our troubles we will not find joy. Until our minds consciously move the Lord from our peripheral vision into the narrow corridor of our focus, joy will elude us.

On the day Contessa Carolina Fantoni was married, only one other living person knew that she was going blind, and he was not her groom. This was not because she had failed to warn them. “I am going blind,” she had blurted to her mother, in the welcome dimness of the family coach, her eyes still bright with tears from the searing winter sun. By this time, her peripheral vision was already gone. Carolina could feel her mother take her hand, but she had to turn to see her face. When she did, her mother kissed her, her own eyes full of pity. “I have been in love, too,” she said, and looked away.

Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just … light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image, the movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just … shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an … an illusion of continuity into your head.

If a person cannot swim across the river, he must take the bridge. He is not afraid of the water or worried that he may drown. But he takes the bridge out of necessity. It is a fact. To fear or worry over necessities (over facts), stills the mind. The stagnant mind only focuses and refocuses on a single point, without peripheral vision—it ponders danger, but it does not prepare for it. The brave man is not bound immobile with caution or lost scouting the fog of hazard calculating insurmountable variables. His sight and sense is not hindered and he may confront danger upon its arrival. To be brave is not to be careless or headstrong, but to act without expectation.

Philippe took his character study very seriously, including the physicality. Trump looms and lurks on a debate stage, so Philippe did too, always hanging out on the edge of my peripheral vision. He wore a suit like Trump’s (a little baggy), a tie like Trump’s (way too long), and actual Trump-brand cuff links and a Trump-brand watch he found on eBay. He wore three-and-a-half-inch shoe heighteners, flailed his arms like Trump, shrugged and mugged like Trump. I didn’t know whether to applaud or fire him.

I am a shadow on her peripheral vision

Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. Think about the visual analogy—when we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision.

Being together, like being able to see certain stars only with your peripheral vision, isn't something you can create. It's just something that happens to you.

It was the thing about loss and trauma. Years might smooth out their rough edges, but their ghost effects remained, just outside the peripheral vision, waiting to haunt again.

115 BPM Fine motor skills deteriorate 145+ BPM Complex motor skills deteriorate 175+ BPM “A warrior can expect to experience auditory exclusion or loss of peripheral vision and depth perception. This initiates a catastrophic failure of cognitive processing capabilities, leading to fatal increases in reaction time or hypervigilance (freezing in place or irrational acts).” p.7-8

A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples of different customs and assumptions meet.... What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility.

And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlesness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness. The lessening from which growing could begin.

There’s movement in my peripheral vision, background noise that seems to hem me in, but Enki binds me like he has from the first moment I saw him, with smiles and dance and eyes that see clearly.

On the day Contess Carolina Fantoni was married, only one other living person knew that she was going blind, and he was not her groom. This was not because she had failed to warn them. 'I am going blind,' she had blurted to her mother, in the welcome dimness of the family coach, her eyes still bright with tears from the searing winter sun. By this time, her peripheral vision was already gone. Carolina could feel her mother take her hand, but she had to turn to see her face. When she did, her mother kissed her, her own eyes full of pity. 'I have been in love, too,' she said, and looked away.

The problem is that stepping away from Brian, leaving him standing under that pergola on Wednesday, is no longer enough to leave behind how he made me feel in that hour. I could leave him there, we could part as strangers, but God, I know that I would look for him. He would live in my peripheral vision, a ghost nudging me to turn and look behind me, only to find a spot that is emptier than empty

Then why do you look like you want to hit someone?” Donna touched his stiff arm. “What’s wrong with you?” He couldn’t lie to her. “I slept with him.” In his peripheral vision, he could see Donna’s mouth falling open.

Whenever Mark takes over the explaining, Brockhoff drops back and takes out her phone. She does not seem rude, just grindingly busy and determined to stay on top of her day. I see her come and go in my peripheral vision, pacing, answering email. She gives the impression of someone for whom idleness is almost physically unbearable. She is gorgeous, articulate, fast-moving, powerful. Lesser humans left blinking in her wake. Brockhoff

He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe’s, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushboys with their rustling racks of furs and trousers. There were sailors and prizefighters; there were bums, sad and menacing, and ladies in piped jackets with dogs in their handbags. Tommy would feel the sidewalks hum and shudder as the trains rolled past beneath him. He heard men swearing and singing opera. On a sunny day, his peripheral vision would be spangled with light winking off the chrome headlights of taxicabs, the buckles on ladies’ shoes, the badges of policemen, the handles of pushcart lunch-wagons, the bulldog ornaments on the hoods of irate moving vans. This was Gotham City, Empire City, Metropolis. Its skies and rooftops were alive with men in capes and costumes, on the lookout for wrongdoers, saboteurs, and Communists. Tommy

As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” People who are scared take in a scene differently. Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech. Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.

Oh, Neil came back," Andrew said. "I didn't think you would." Neil pulled his fist from his pocket and uncurled his fingers. Andrew glanced first at the phone in Neil's palm and then up at Neil's face. Neil didn't return the look but said in German, "I made a different call this time." Andrew laughed and rocked on his feet. His grin was wide enough Neil could see it in his peripheral vision. Neil didn't really expect him to switch languages, because the conversation was likely more entertaining to him when they had an audience, but for now Andrew was willing to play along. "How interesting. How unexpected. Did it hurt a little?" "Not as much as my next conversation with Kevin will.

Right," I said, nodding energetically and trying to determine whether any of the rectangles in my peripheral vision was a box of tissues. Unfortunately, they were all books. The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; and yet-- and this was ironic-- there was veery little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn't yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant or useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.

Nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization. [on Finnegans Wake]

The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colors are affected in the first place,and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four and soon to two colors; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological color is never identifiable with any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions ‘the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities, but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure’.

To reach beyond what you are you must ignore the rules and fashions of the day. Or perhaps better yet cast them way out in your peripheral vision where you can still see them but only as a vague reference point. This doesn’t mean that all the rules are gone. It might mean that you adopt a far tighter code of conduct to ensure the necessary level of intensity and adventure.

The shade of the sky changed ever so slightly in her peripheral vision. She raised her eyes from her toes to the horizon, to witness the sun’s last dance in the daylight as it began to descend slowly, magically into the distant sea. Exotic pastel hues of orange and fuchsia were now painted across the fading expression of the day. It was a calm yet isolating vision to take into her heart, for it made her feel exceedingly small in the grand scheme of things.

The late-afternoon sky, in Paul's peripheral vision, panoramic and mostly unobstructed, appeared rural or suburban, more indicative of forests and fields and lakes—of nature's vast connections, through the air and the soil, to more of itself—than of outer space, which was mostly what Paul thought of when beneath an urban sky, even in daytime, especially in Manhattan, between certain buildings, framing sunless zones of upper atmosphere, as if inviting space down to deoxygenate a city block.

As I understand it, civilization needs something approaching a shared view of reality in order to function. But that norm is inevitably narrow and blinkered. None of us really see, hear, and experience exactly the same thing as our neighbors; we merely agree on a colluded approximation, hoping that if we cling together we won’t get too disoriented. But our peripheral vision functions outside the agreed-upon norm and observes not just parts of but all of our sensory experiences. By bringing this “outside stuff” into focus,

The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are affected in the first place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four and soon to two colours; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological colour is never identifiable with any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions ‘the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities, but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure’.

It must be admitted that the West has reached a level of scientific mastery and outstanding specialisation. In its points of reference, this evolution commands admiration and all civilisations have to benefit from the dynamic of this rationality, as they can derive lessons from the progress achieved. "Benefiting", "deriving lessons" do not, nevertheless, mean submission. In the same way, it must be acknowledged that other civilisations and cultures propose a rich vision of the world, and that some of these have managed to preserve the basic values of life, and glimpses of their fundamental shape are beginning to be seen in the West. It is not a question of suggesting a new wave of "love for exoticism and folklore". On the contrary, it is a question of engaging in an exigent reflection about cultural specificities and possible enrichment starting from within cultures and not at their peripherals.

He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality. Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.

Ian and Rob remained standing. “What did Dougal want?” Ian asked. “Our Lina’s hand, that’s what.” Andrew crossed his arms against his chest. Ian stared at him, resisting an urge to grind his teeth. “In marriage?” Rob asked. “Aye, sure, in marriage,” Andrew said, his thick, dark eyebrows knitting together. “The knave dared to tell me that such a marriage would reunite Clan Farlan. Then he had the gall to ask if I didna want such an end to the trouble and strife of the past two decades. Come to that, I expect it might serve such an end.” Ian felt as if the Fates had kicked the wind out of him. But he gathered enough air to say, “You didn’t . . . that is, you couldn’t have agreed to that.” Rob’s eyebrows shot up then, and Ian’s peripheral vision caught that rare sign of surprise in his friend.

What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like a body submitted to military discipline. Or like a mind, tutored along certain acceptable pathways, so that finally all that lies outside certain avenues of thought begins to assume an air of unreality. The land of course is still there. Only now it has receded into the background. It is what you see in your peripheral vision as you speed down the highway. The complexity of it, the intricate presence of it, has been reduced now to a single word, jungle. If once you breathed its breath or slept surrounded by its dark or wakened with its light, you no longer remember. You tell yourself life has improved. The jungle is in the past. To enter it is to stray from the path, or to be pulled down into some unknown depth. It is an exotic place, intriguing but also unpredictable, uncontrolled, threatening the well-paved order of existence.

Only Andrew saw the strain in Neil's mask. He crossed the room to stand in front of Neil, a silent demand in his stare. Neil wanted to answer that, but he didn't know how. German was the obvious answer because it would afford them a little bit of privacy, but Romero and Jackson didn't understand German. They wouldn't know what he was saying and they would have to react like he was spilling every dark secret. Neil couldn't allow that. He didn't want to leave Andrew with nothing, but what could he possibly say? "Thank you," he finally said. He couldn't say he meant thanks for all of it: the keys, the trust, the honesty, and the kisses. Hopefully Andrew would figure it out eventually. "You were amazing." He meant it for Andrew's ears only, but Allison was close enough to overhear. She sent Matt a significant look. Neil saw it in his peripheral vision but didn't take his eyes off Andrew to see Matt's reaction. He didn't want to look away, as if by holding Andrew's gaze he could somehow save this moment. Then Wymack was motioning for them to head out and Neil had no choice but to turn his back on his teammates.

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

Interestingly, attentional override can also occur without actually focusing the eyes on a single object; you can do it just as well with what some people call luminous eyes, or soft-focused (peripheral-like) vision. It is not necessary to look directly at something to see more deeply into it. As gating researcher Martin Eimer notes . . . Attention can be voluntarily directed to specific objects and locations within the spatial field independent of overt eye movements. Stimuli at attended-to locations are detected with higher speed and accuracy as compared to stimuli presented outside the attentional focus.9

I met him in the hospital.' I saw the eyebrow raise in my peripheral vision. 'Yeah, that hospital. He believes that powerful telepaths are secretly in charge of the planet, and that they're possessing people for their own entertainment.' 'Powerful telepaths...' Lew said. 'Slan,' I said. Lew burst out laughing. 'You mean you didn't know that Slan was nonfiction?' I said. 'Bertrum belongs to an organization that believes that Van Vogt intentionally--' 'What did you say--Van Vaht? It's Van Voh.' 'No, it's not. You've gotta pronounce the T at least.' 'What, Van Vote? Don't be an idiot. I bet you still say Submareener.' 'My point--,' I said. 'And Mag-net-o.' '--is that Bertrum thinks Van Voggatuh used fiction to cloak the truth.' 'As opposed to say, your friend, P.K. Dick, and Whitley Strieber, and--' 'Streeber.' 'And L. Ron Hubbard, who just made shit up and said it was the truth.' 'Exactly.' Lew nodded. 'I find your ideas intriguing and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter. What's the name of this fine organization?' 'It gets better,' I said. "The Human League." 'No way.' 'I'm not sure they realized the name was taken.' 'My god, Lew said. 'It's the perfect cover for an elite fighting force -- an eighties New Wave band! This is so Buckaroo Banzai.

The Quest of the Dragon-gold, the main theme of the actual tale of The Hobbit, is to the general cycle quite peripheral and incidental – connected with it mainly through Dwarf-history, which is nowhere central to these tales, though often important. But in the course of the Quest, the Hobbit becomes possessed by seeming ‘accident’ of a ‘magic ring’, the chief and only immediately obvious power of which is to make its wearer invisible. Though for this tale an accident, unforeseen and having no place in any plan for the quest, it proves an essential to success. On return the Hobbit, enlarged in vision and wisdom, if unchanged in idiom, retains the ring as a personal secret.

As I noted in the previous chapter, we interpret active eyes as a sign of an active mind. But mantis shrimps actually have small, weak brains. The hypermobile nature of their eyes is not a sign of a probing intelligence. But it is the key to understanding how and what they see. Our retinas have cone-rich foveae, where our vision is sharpest and most colorful. We train this zone onto different parts of the world by flicking our eyes from place to place. And when we spot something interesting in our peripheral vision, we redirect our gaze at it to analyze it in detailed color. Mantis shrimps do something similar. The midband sees color, but its view is confined to a thin strip of space. The hemispheres probably only see in black-and-white, but their view is panoramic. As the mantis shrimp moves its eyes around, it looks for movements and objects of interest with the hemispheres. When it spots something, it flicks its eyes across and scans the midbands over the area, as if waving two supermarket scanners along a shelf. Does the mantis shrimp start with a monochrome view, which it gradually paints with colors? “I don’t think so,” Marshall tells me. He suspects that “they never construct a solid two-dimensional representation of color” in their brains. Instead, as they scan with their midbands, they simply wait for anything that excites the right combination of photoreceptors.

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.'s" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. (They were aware, more generally, of the usefulness of tiny type in enhancing the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship: typographical density forces you to crouch like Robert Hooke or Henry Gray over the busyness and intricacy of recorded truth.) They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not, and whether they would read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d'oeuvre. The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries; the rectus externus and internus grow dazed waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school: the footnote functions as a switch, offering the model-railroader's satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted "1" and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels. Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, "essay-like" footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going?

Pull in Friendships and Fresh Adventures: Five men are walking across the Golden Gate Bridge on an outing organized by their wives who are college friends. The women move ahead in animated conversation. One man describes the engineering involved in the bridge's long suspension. Another points to the changing tide lines below. A third asked if they've heard of the new phone apps for walking tours. The fourth observes how refreshing it is to talk with people who aren't lawyers like him. Yes, we tend to notice the details that most relate to our work or our life experience. It is also no surprise that we instinctively look for those who share our interests. This is especially true in times of increasing pressure and uncertainty. We have an understandable tendency in such times to seek out the familiar and comfortable as a buffer against the disruptive changes surrounding us. In so doing we can inadvertently put ourselves in a cage of similarity that narrows our peripheral vision of the world and our options. The result? We can be blindsided by events and trends coming at us from directions we did not see. The more we see reinforcing evidence that we are right in our beliefs the more rigid we become in defending them. Hint: If you are part of a large association, synagogue, civic group or special interest club, encourage the organization to support the creation of self-organized, special interest groups of no more than seven people, providing a few suggestions of they could operate. Such loosely affiliated small groups within a larger organization deepen a sense of belonging, help more people learn from diverse others and stay open to growing through that shared learning and collaboration. That's one way that members of Rick Warren's large Saddleback Church have maintained a close-knit feeling yet continue to grow in fresh ways. imilarly the innovative outdoor gear company Gore-Tex has nimbly grown by using their version of self-organized groups of 150 or less within the larger corporation. In fact, they give grants to those who further their learning about that philosophy when adapted to outdoor adventure, traveling in compact groups of "close friends who had mutual respect and trust for one another.

Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him-by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything. She’d gone and changed her dress. Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin. She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief. Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen. Therefore, he knew he ought to look away. He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in decades. And all this Herculean effort resulting in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable. He looked at her again. Desire swept through his body with starling intensity. And beneath that hot surge of lust, a deeper emotion swelled. It wasn’t something Gray wished to examine. He preferred to let it sink back into the murky depths of his being. An unnamed creature of the deep, let for a more intrepid adventurer to catalog. Instead, he examined Miss Turner’s new frock. The fabric was of fine quality, the sprig pattern evenly stamped, without variations in shape or hue. The dressmaker had taken great pains to match the pattern at the seams. The sleeves of the frock fit perfectly square with her shoulders, in a moment of calm, the skirt’s single flounce lapped the laces of her boots. Unlike that gray serge abomination, this dress was expensive, and it had been fashioned for her alone. But it no longer fit. As she turned, Gray noted how the neckline gaped slightly, and the column of her skirt that ought to have skimmed the swell of her hip instead caught on nothing but air. He frowned. And in that instant, she turned to face him. Their gazes caught and held. Her own smile faded to a quizzical expression. And because Gray didn’t know how to answer the unspoken question in her eyes, and because he hated the fact that he’d banished the giddy delight from her face, he gave her a curt nod and a churlish, “Good morning.” And then he walked away.

I’ll never forget this one night when Daddy had taken us way out to a little church up on a high ridge. There was no kind of instrumentation, and the hymns were all sung a cappella. During the preaching, there was a little more shouting from the congregation than usual. When it came time for us to sing, we were introduced by the preacher, a wiry little man with kind of a fiery look in his eyes. We stepped to the front and took our places on the old wood-plank platform to one side of the pulpit. Softly, I sung a note to get us started because it was decided I could come closest to hitting a key that we could all sing in. We began our songs, just as we had planned. I was aware that the pastor was on the stage behind us, but I didn’t think anything of it. After a while, I could feel Stella nudging me in the ribs, trying not to be noticed. I looked at her, and she motioned with her head slightly back toward where the preacher was standing. He seemed to be totally wrapped up in the spirit, nearly in a trance. I didn’t think too much of it, until I spotted a familiar sight—the back markings of a snake, a cottonmouth moccasin. I had seen them in the woods, usually scurrying across the path toward cover. They were afraid of me, and I was afraid of them. And up to now, we had always managed to keep our distance from each other. Here, apparently, they were a part of the worship service. I could see now, out of my peripheral vision, that the preacher had a full grown cottonmouth by the back of the head and it was twisting and coiling all around his forearm. Some members of the congregation were reaching out as if they wanted to touch it. The preacher was getting more and more worked up, and he reached into a wooden crate by the pulpit and took out two more snakes. This time he seemed to be holding them much more carelessly. He lifted them near his face as if daring them to strike. We sisters just kept on singing, unconsciously moving away from the snakes until we were very near the front of the platform. Just then, I noticed something that struck a note of fear in my heart much greater than that inspired by the snakes. My father had stepped into the back of the church to hear his little girls sing. Whatever he had been drinking didn’t impair his ability to see exactly what the preacher had in his hands. Just at that moment, the man and his snakes took a step toward the congregation, thus toward us. Daddy had seen enough. He charged down the aisle like a wild boar through a thicket. “You get them Goddamn snakes away from my kids!” Daddy bellowed with a force in his voice I had never heard before. It was amazing how quickly that preacher broke his trance and paid heed. He had heard the voice of a higher power, in this case a really pissed-off redneck. Daddy swooped us up and out the front door before we had time to think about what was happening. We didn’t even stop singing until we were almost down the steps into the churchyard. We were glad to be out of there, and I at least was proud that Daddy had come to our rescue. But Daddy obviously felt terrible about it. On the way home in the car, he got to feeling especially bad. “Goddamn! I can’t believe I said Goddamn in church!” he muttered to himself. He finally got so upset he had to stop the car and get out in the woods and, in his way, ask God’s forgiveness. I couldn’t help thinking how badly Mama had always wanted Daddy to walk down the church aisle and declare himself. Now he had certainly done that, although not I’m sure the way Mama had in mind.

What I have been doing lately from my WIP "In Hiding" is available on my website. *Strong language warning* Wayne sat in the hygienic emergency room trying to ignore the bitch of a headache that began radiating at the back of his skull. His worn jeans, a blood-stained t-shirt, and his makeshift bandage sat on a nearby chair. The hysteria created by his appearance in the small hospital ward had died down. A local cop greeted him as soon as he was escorted to the examination room. The conversation was brief, once he revealed he was a bail enforcer the topic changed from investigation to shooting the bull. The experienced officer shook his hand before leaving then joked he hoped this would be their only encounter. The ER doc was a woman about his age. Already the years of long hours, rotating shifts and the rarity of a personal life showed on her face. Her eyelids were pink-rimmed, her complexion sallow; all were earmarks of the effect of long-term exhaustion. Wayne knew it all too well as he rubbed his knuckle against his own grainy eyes. Despite this, she attended to him with an upbeat demeanor and even slid in some ribbing at his expense. He was defenseless, once the adrenaline dropped off Wayne felt drained. He accepted her volleys without a response. All he mustered was a smile and occasional nod as she stitched him up. Across the room, his cell toned, after the brief display of the number a woman’s image filled the screen. Under his breath, he mumbled, “Shit.” He intends for his exclamation to remain ignored, having caught it the doctor glanced his direction with a smile. Without invitation, she retrieved his phone handing it to him without comment. Wayne noted the raised eyebrow she failed to hide. The phone toned again as he glanced at the flat image on the device. The woman’s likeness was smiling brightly, her blue eyes dancing. Just looking at her eased the pain in his head. He swiped the screen and connected the call as the doctor finished taping his injury. Using his free uninjured arm, he held the phone away from him slightly, utilizing the speaker option. “Hey Baby.” “What the hell, Wayne!” Her voice filled the small area, in his peripheral vision he saw the doc smirk. Turning his head, he addressed the caller. “Babe, I was getting ready to call.” The excuse sounded lame, even to him. “Why the hell do I have to hear about this secondhand?” Wayne placed the phone to his chest, loudly he exclaimed; “F***!” The ER doc touched his arm, “I will give you privacy.” Wayne gave her a grateful nod. With a snatch, she grabbed the corner of the thin curtain suspended from the ceiling and pulled it close. Alone again, he refocused on the call. The woman on the other end had continued in her tirade without him. When he rejoined the call mid-rant, she was issuing him a heartfelt ass-chewing. “...bullshit Wayne that I have to hear about this from my cousin. We’ve talked about this!” “Honey...” She interrupts him before he can explain himself. “So what the hell happened?” Wisely he waited for silence to indicate it was his turn to speak. “Lou, Honey first I am sorry. You know I never meant to upset you. I am alright; it is just a flesh wound.” As he speaks, a sharp pain radiates across his side. Gritting his teeth, Wayne vows to continue without having the radiating pain affect his voice. “I didn’t want you to worry Honey; you know calling Cooper first is just business.” Silence. The woman miles away grits her teeth as she angrily brushes away her tears. Seated at the simple dining table, she takes a napkin from the center and dabs at her eyes. Mentally she reminds herself of her promise that she was done crying over this man. She takes an unsteady breath as she returns her attention to the call. “Lou, you still there?” There is something in his voice, the tender desperation he allows only her to see. Furrowing her brow she closes her eyes, an errant tear coursed down her cheek.

I see him moving between the arches of purple and silver balloons and among the lavish decorations that fill the ground floor of my family's home. He speaks to no one, his gaze rarely leaving me. I flit from room to room, watching him from my peripheral vision. He doesn't approach but watches me from afar. A small, enigmatic little smile touching the corners of his lips whenever our eyes meet.

The second tip to reading fast is to practice reading more than one word at a time. Reading word by word is slow and fairly ineffective and can result in incorrect comprehension because you focus on the individual word and not the contextual phrasing or meaning in the text. It’s the classic case of getting bogged down in the trees and not being able to see the overall forest. Start with reading two words together at once. This will require practice, but when you start doing it, you will realize that you can absolutely don’t need to read each word individually. You can think of the two words as a contraction. When you get comfortable with two words at once, you can move onto three and four words, until you can look at a sentence that is ten words and reduce it to the two five-word phrases it contains. That’s the end goal: to be able to synthesize phrases like you would individual words. One of the keys to reading more at once is to make sure that your eyes are widened and dilated as if you are trying to use your peripheral vision.

Windows of homes and office complexes left streaks of yellow in her peripheral vision as she sped past. Headlights glared and flickered from the opposite lane of the road, drivers warning her to stay on her side, to stop veering the pick-up, to stay awake, to stop at red lights. She ignored them. They did not understand that there were no signs on the freeway to help her as they helped them, no Ramp Exit sign navigating her with the words EXIT 3A: ANSWERS, 1/2 MILE. They did not understand that she talked to herself while she drove in order to set things straight just as much as to stay awake. They did not understand that the traffic lights were red with rage and not with warning. Brakes don't work along the road to Hell.

As V lit up and inhaled, he tried not to look at the cop and failed. Fucking peripheral vision. Always did him in.

You can see their horns? You can see them right now?” Tommy nodded and wondered if it was bad etiquette to talk about it. “Yes, sir. When I look out of my peripheral vision I see horns coming out from their heads. Not very clearly. Sort of like transparent horn images. I can see both kinds. The shorter kind that curve back and the longer kind that come out from the sides.” Maximus stared with a perplexed intensity at Tommy. “You can see the horns.” It was more of a statement. Maximus quickly followed with a question. “You see short horns on Andy and Billy and long horns on me, correct?” Maximus’s question reassured Tommy that he wasn’t the only one who could see these apparitions. Tommy smiled, thankful he wasn’t going crazy. “Yes, sir. The short ones mean someone is a slave and the long ones mean he is a master, right?” Maximus nodded slowly. “That is correct.” “You told me when we first met that I would have gaydar for dominant and submissive men. It works really well.” “I did say that,” Maximus conceded as he sat back in his chair.

I lost all that mystery when I was on drugs. Coming out of that din I was able to feel my spiritual connection to the woods again. Drugs will steal you like a crook. Spirituality, over. I could no longer see the things I used to see in my peripheral vision. No periphery, no visions.

Joe nudged Sean’s arm. “I swear, I could tell time by how often Emma looks at you just by counting off the seconds.” Sean resisted the urge to turn and look. “She’s nervous, that’s all.” “That’s not nerves.” “I think I know her better than you do.” Joe laughed. “You’ve known her a week.” “Ten days.” “Hate to burst your bubble, but I’ve known her longer than ten days. Not well, but I’ve run into her at Mike and Lisa’s. Not that it matters. That look on a woman’s face is pretty universal.” “There’s no look.” “Oh, there’s a look,” Kevin said. “There might be a look,” Leo added. “Mike and I can’t see,” Evan added. “We’re facing the wrong way. We could turn around, but she might wonder why we’re all staring at her.” Even though he figured his cousins were pulling his leg, Sean angled his body a little so he could see her in his peripheral vision. Okay, so she was looking at him. A lot. But Joe and Kevin were still full of crap because there was no look.The glances were too quick to read anything into, never mind the kind of message they were implying she was sending. He watched her watching him for a while, and then Aunt Mary told them to get the meat ready so they could fire the grill. Since his cousins made for more than enough chefs stirring the soup and he needed a break from the visual game of tag he and Emma were playing he grabbed a beer and made his way to the big toolshed. It was the unofficial Kowalski man cave, where females feared to tread. Even Aunt Mary would just stand outside and bellow rather than cross the threshold.

No, no one thought that a spontaneous gang rape was going to take place just then on the stage of the Laugh Factory. But the threat of sexual violence never fully leaves women's peripheral vision. The point of Tosh's 'joke' was to remind that woman that she is vulnerable. More importantly, it reinforces the idea that comedy belongs to men. Therefore, men must be correct when they tell us what comedy is.

In other words, the “rigorously scientific” method of predicting the future can be applied only in special cases-where prompt action is not urgent, where the factors involved are largely mechanical, or in circumstances so restricted as to be trivial. By far the greater part of our important decisions depend upon “hunch”–in other words, upon the “peripheral vision” of the mind. Thus

Strangling fear surged up his throat. Amy, skirts flying, blond hair a gleaming target, was running in a straight line for the wagons, Loretta right behind her. Between the opposing forces. The white, spying the women, had stopped shooting, but in his peripheral vision Hunter saw a brave aim his rifle. “Ka, no!” Hunter zigzagged his mount into the man’s line of fire. “No!” With a vicious kick, Hunter sent his black into a mighty forward lunge, gaining several yards on the advancing warriors, many of whom were from another band. They wouldn’t recognize Amy or Loretta. Unless Hunter could stop the shooting, his woman and her little sister would be killed. When he felt certain everyone in the formation could see him, he wheeled his horse to face them and lifted his rifle high overhead, signaling a cease-fire. Still trailing Amy, Loretta spotted Hunter the moment his horse drew out in front of the others. Heaving for air, she stumbled to a stop and glanced over her shoulder. Hunter, broad back to the wagons, sat tall on his stallion, waving his rifle above his head. As if in a dream, she whirled. The sight of Hunter making a target of himself would be painted in full color across the canvas of her mind for the rest of her life.

What a pity that so many of us girls and women have our peripheral vision taken away simply because of unwanted attention. I heartily disagree with the whole “boys will be boys” bullshit. No, raise your boys to see girls as humans, not objects.

But the threat of sexual violence never fully leaves women’s peripheral vision.

Barely daring to breathe, I kept my eyes on the teacher at the front of the room, while watching in my peripheral vision as Ky sat down alongside me. “Okay if I sit here?” he whispered quietly, not wanting to draw any further attention our way.

Peripheral vision appears to be much faster in some measurements, and the science also points towards this. This seems like a pretty great idea from an evolutionary advantage perspective, because it’s more important for you to become aware of threats and opportunities that aren’t already on your radar, more so than it is perhaps to deal with what you are already aware of.

Suddenly, Esteban became aware that in his peripheral vision,

Trying to photograph the transcendental moment when the blazing disk disappeared into the ocean was ridiculous; in staring through a lens, the eye lost its peripheral vision while the scents and sounds that were part of the experience of a sunset were lost in the attempt to capture it.

We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, that allows us to grow. —MARY CATHERINE BATESON, PERIPHERAL VISIONS

The real guide to reality It’s not that pigeons are stupid. Well, they are, but that’s not the point. This gulf between how we see the world and how a pigeon sees the same world reveals something fundamental about our relationship with reality, and how we understand our place in the cosmos. Our eyes powerfully illustrate the fact that our experience is a heavily edited version of reality. Evolution has found a way for us to harvest, process and interpret elementary packets of light in the dark cavities of our skulls. Our minds navigate the many constraints of anatomy to make it work—frame rates, blind spots, faulty cones, colorless peripheral vision. We don’t even notice the limits of our eyes as we construct our subjective world view in our heads. Like all creatures on Earth, our bodies are carefully tuned to ensure our continued survival. But it would be a pointless waste of ego to think that they make us capable of experiencing reality as it really is. We are each locked into our own umwelt, profoundly limited by our senses, constrained by our biology, shackled by the inescapable bounds of our evolutionary history. We’re hopelessly tethered to what we can uncover while stuck on (or perhaps near) this planet, a speck of dust in the vastness of the cosmos. We see only the merest sliver of reality. We’re peering at the universe through a keyhole.

Do not make eye contact. You can use your peripheral vision to keep track of your child’s actions. Whatever you do, just make it clear that you are in no way reacting to your child.

She thought him a kind and decent man from the moment she met him. But he’s lost everything he had, sacrificed everything he owned, lives outside convention, defies the easy path in favor of the righteous one. He does it wisely and he does it quietly. He has no parents to praise him and no children to admire him. He simply conducts himself hidden in society’s peripheral vision where no one knows to look.

With these uneasy thoughts urging me onward, I hurried toward home, praying I would make it in time for dinner and thereby avoid having to answer to my mother. That was the only way my day could get worse. I was forced to adjust that conclusion, however, when I spotted Saadi loitering nearby. The moment he laid eyes on me, I knew he’d been waiting for me, and I groaned. Why couldn’t he leave me alone? “Shaselle!” he called, coming toward me. I gritted my teeth, knowing I could not escape. The traffic on the thoroughfare had thinned, as was generally the case at this time of day, no longer providing the cover I needed to dart past him. He came abreast of me, but I didn’t slow or acknowledge him. “I’m glad I caught you,” he said, and in my peripheral vision, I could see him smoothing that damn bronze hair forward, an impossible task, for as always it kinked upward at the midpoint of his hairline. “Can’t say the same.” “I didn’t take you to my sister.” He sounded like this small mercy should be eliciting gratitude from me. “I realize that.” Saadi exhaled, baffled and exasperated. “How can you be angry with me?” I halted and stared at him in disbelief. “I’m not! You’re the Cokyrian soldier who arrested me when I broke the law. Our relationship ends there. It would be a waste of my time to be angry with you.” “That’s it?” he said, eyebrows rising, and I was sure I detected disappointment. “I thought…I don’t know. I thought you were angry with me before, for not having mentioned I’m Rava’s brother. Weren’t you?” “No,” I lied. I still didn’t understand why it upset me to know that this annoying tag-along was related to the woman I hated with such intensity that my insides burned. But there was no reason to complicate things by letting him know the truth. “Well, I saved you today, didn’t I? Just like I saved you before. You walked out of the Bastion free, without a scratch, and if any Cokyrian but me had caught you with that dagger, you might be drawn and quartered by now.” “You didn’t save me from that butcher,” I said irritably. “But you’re right. About today, I mean.” I could sense his satisfaction, which irritated me all the more. “So accept my thanks, but stay away from me. We’re not friends, you know.” I was nearing my neighborhood and didn’t want anyone to see me with him. He stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop. “We’re not friends yet. But you’ve thought about it. And you just thanked me.” “Are you delusional?” “No. You just said thank you to the faceless Cokyrian soldier who arrested you.” “Don’t you ever stop?” I demanded, trying in vain to move around him. “I haven’t even started.” “What does that mean?

In the animal kingdom, the predators are easy to spot. They all have their eyes in the front of their heads to facilitate an attack. Lions, tigers, and wolves are designed by nature to kill. Antelopes, deer, and rabbit all have their eyes on the side of their heads. These prey animals are designed for flight and their vision allows them to see things coming at them peripherally. In the wild there are no exceptions to this rule. With people, it was a lot harder to tell.