Periphery Quotes

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.

Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, and leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.

A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension. I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow. In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze. I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead. But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning. There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.

Sometimes I feel hunted by my grief. It circles me, stalks me. It's always in my periphery. Sometimes I can fake it out. Sometimes I make myself go so still, it can't sense that I'm there anymore and it goes away. I do that right now.

Sometimes you look up and there just seems to be so many more stars that ever before. More. They burn brighter and they shine longer and they never vanish into your periphery when you turn your head. It's as if they come out for us and to remind us that their light took so long to come to us, that if we never had the patience to wait, we never would have seen them here, tonight, like this. That as much as it hurts, sometimes it's all you can do, wait, endure and keep shining, knowing that eventually, your light will reach where it is supposed to reach and shine for who it is supposed to shine for. It is never easy, but it is always worth it.

I believe that there is luminosity hiding in the shadow of the mundane. And things that hover at the periphery of our vision. If that’s magic, then I believe in it.

How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.

They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.

If there was a God up there, He must be laughing His head off at a human race capable of making atomic bombs and building artificial intelligence, but still uncomfortable with their own mortality and unable to sort out what to do with their dead. How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls--woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.

I eyed Dimitri, recalling a shadow in my periphery back in the ballroom. "You followed when I jumped in front of Lissa, didn't you? Who were you going for? Me or her?" He studied me for several long seconds. He could have lied. He could have given the easy answer by saying he'd intended to push both of us out of the way-if that was even possible, which I didn't recall. But Dimitri didn't lie. "I don't know, Roza. I don't know.

If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, i perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center - instead of that from periphery to periphery - is 'central relatedness'.

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milošević and Karadžić were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina.

If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the center, because the center is built on existing knowledge

Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.

But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery.

When man has reached the periphery of the spiderweb of his own reason and logic, he can find the ropes of revelation upon which he can climb upward forever and ever.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.

As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, “blood,” “folk-ishness”) seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the “little man,” the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. Tailor

To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.

Happiness comes from accepting the present situation, whether it’s something you wish to savor as long as possible or change as quickly as you can. Neither is possible without acceptance as the starting point, because without acceptance, you are living on the periphery of your life. There at the edges, you can’t fully enjoy the god stuff or do anything about the rest

Existentialism is a 'movement' which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger.

Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix.

Always ally yourself with those on the bottom, on the margins, and at the periphery of the centers of power. And in doing so, you will land yourself at the very center of some of the most important struggles of our society and our history.

I can look back and see that I’ve spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push “being kind” to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough—enough accomplishment, money, fame—my neuroses will disappear. I’ve been in this fog certainly since, at least, my own graduation day. Over the years I’ve felt: Kindness, sure—but first let me finish this semester, this degree, this book; let me succeed at this job, and afford this house, and raise these kids, and then, finally, when all is accomplished, I’ll get started on the kindness. Except it never all gets accomplished. It’s a cycle that can go on … well, forever.

It’s hard to admit you’re just in someone’s periphery when you imagined you were closer to the center of their world.

Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.

From somewhere in his mind’s periphery he caught the vestiges of a very Rhodesian sigh—Varona, honestly, like the proverbial chord that David played to annoy the Lord.

In my dream it was very dark, and what dim light there was seemed to be radiating from Edward's skin. I couldn't see his face, just his back as he walked away from me, leaving me in the blackness. No matter how fast I ran, I couldn't catch up to him; no matter how loud I called, he never turned. Troubled, I woke in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep again for what seemed like a very long time. After that, he was in my dreams nearly every night, but always on the periphery, never within reach.

She remained silent. There was nothing left to say. He'd said it all the night before. He had to end it. He could never leave his wife. And, in fact, she had known this. Although she loved him - and truly she did - he wasn't hers. He belonged to his wife. She'd earned him. It didn't matter that he was her first love or that she was his passion. It didn't matter that they had loved one another for more than half their lives. It didn't matter that he had married his wife on the rebound. It didn't matter that he didn't love the woman. It didn't even matter that they had turned into some soap-opera cliche. He was married to someone else and that meant that she was leftovers and destined to remain on the periphery in the shadow of another woman's marriage. But no more. She was well and truly sick of it. 

But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off.

If you have ever prepared for a siege in two days, then you know what the next few days were like. If you haven’t, then you probably don’t. Well…a big formal wedding is about the same (and because we do cakes, I’ve been on the periphery of a few), except that if things go wrong in a siege you’ll all die horribly, and in formal weddings, the stakes are much higher.

Being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can’t help but respond to that state.

Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on.

Soft margins and wide peripheries unfocused, I don't give form to my appreciation, but sit quietly with a quality of blossoms that feels like light.

be a girl from the districts, or at least not Capitol. A second-class citizen. Human, but bestial. Smart, perhaps, but not evolved. Part of a shapeless mass of unfortunate, barbaric creatures that hovered on the periphery of his consciousness. Surely, if there had ever been an exception to the rule, it was Lucy Gray Baird.

When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the “suspension of disbelief” and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.

You haven't forgotten what it feels like to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?" If course I hadn't forgotten that feeling of being abruptly pushed out of a close circle to some distant periphery. Coming second, third, fourth, last. Being treated like someone less knowledgeable, someone inferior.

My impulse, over the past few years, had been to remove myself from my own life, to watch from the periphery and try to see the vectors, the scaffolding, the systems at play. Psychologists might refer to this as dissociation; I considered it the sociological approach. It was, for me, a way out of unhappiness.

I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong on the constructions of society and habit. But she herself- austere and merciless Aphrodite-is a pagan. it is not our brains or instincts which she picks-but our very bones.

Either way, there was the clear sense that we were no longer just background characters in each other’s lives, passing through the periphery with mutual disdain. Our roots had suddenly and irrevocably knotted together.

The periphery is where the future reveals itself. J.G. Ballard

I hail from the land of not belonging, directly beyond the frontier of any nation.” I unabashedly delivered my truth. “Your home is my periphery,” I said.

If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power, and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is built on existing knowledge.

In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it’s the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery.

Let me be very clear. For me geography does not exist! I strongly object to the whole concept of “foreign literature”...and speaking of national identity: that is how dictatorships get started! In literature there is no periphery and no center; there are only writers. The problem is not geographic but rather numeric. In the 19th century there were at least thirty literary geniuses in Russia, Germany, France, England and the United States. Today we are lucky if there are five writers of that caliber in the whole world...Where does one find good literature today? Mostly in third world countries, because adversity, isolation, combat provide good working conditions. It is harder to be a good writer in a so-called “civilized” country, in the so-called “democracies.

But you haven't tried. You haven't tried once. First you refused to admit that there was a menace at all! Then you reposed an absolutely blind faith in the Emperor! Now you've shifted it to Hari Seldon. Throughout you have invariably relied on authority or on the past—never on yourselves." His fists balled spasmodically. "It amounts to a diseased attitude—a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon Wiser. And that's wrong don't you see?" For some reason, no one cared to answer him. Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weight the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?" Again the note of near-pleading in his voice. Again no answer. He went on: "And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad.. We sit here, considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power." And for the third time: "Don't you see? It's galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation!

Tangier and Lucy were the same, I thought. Both unsolvable riddles that refused to leave me in peace. And I had tired of it - of the not knowing, of always feeling as though I were on the outside of things, just on the periphery.

He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it's alive.

To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern. There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core. It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms. I may know, for instance, that a person is angry, even if he does not show it overtly; but I may know him more deeply than that; then I know that he is anxious, and worried; that he feels lonely, that he feels guilty. Then I know that his anger is only the manifestation of something deeper, and I see him as anxious and embarrassed, that is, as the suffering person, rather than as the angry one.

Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery.

A strong offensive is indicated. The stalemate you seem to be satisfied with is fatal. It would be a confession of weakness to all the worlds of the Periphery, where the appearance of strength is all-important, and there’s not one vulture among

Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.

the periphery. It sits, silent, as the motions of the collective us move from frenetic to calm, and back again. It is perception, in the rawest form, made tangible by the characters playing roles invented for just that moment, only to be burned upon completion.

Manila is a city of extremes. The poor are very poor and the rich very rich. They live side by side. The rich live in sprawling houses in residential subdivisions with fancy names like Green Meadows, White Plains, Corinthian Plaza, Bel Air, San Lorenzo, Magallanes and the very exclusive Forbes Park, a leafy enclave that was home to the famous Manila Polo Club. The poor are not far from sight. They live in little pockets on the periphery of these affluent subdivisions. A constant reminder to the rich that there is another side to life.

We are all one tiny truth from screaming madly at the sky and walking home mumbling about trees.

If you have ever prepared for a siege in two days, then you know what the next few days were like. If you haven't, then you probably don't. Well...a big formal wedding is about the same (and because we do cakes, I've been on the periphery of a few), except that if things go wrong in a siege you'll all die horribly, and in formal weddings, the stakes are much higher.

Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims.

From the radiating point of Siwenna, the forces of the Empire reached out cautiously into the black unknown of the Periphery. Giant ships passed the vast distances that separated the vagrant stars at the Galaxy’s rim, and felt their way around the outermost edge of Foundation influence.

Discipline brings freedom. The purpose of meditation is to enable us to hear God more clearly. Meditation is listening, sensing, heeding the life and light of Christ. This comes right to the heart of our faith. The life that pleases God is not a set of religious duties; it is to hear His voice and obey His word. Meditation opens the door to this way of living. To pray is to change. All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives. For those explorers in the frontiers of faith, prayer was no little habit tacked on to the periphery of their lives; it was their lives. It was the most serious work of their most productive years. Prayer – nothing draws us closer to the heart of God. Fasting must forever centre on God. More than any other Discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us. The most difficult problem is not finding time but convincing myself that this is important enough to set aside the time. Disciplines are not the answer; they only lead us to the Answer. We must clearly understand this limitation of the Disciplines if we are to avoid bondage. Humility, as we all know, is one of those virtues that is never gained by seeking it. The more we pursue it the more distant it becomes. To think we have it is sure evidence that we don’t. Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the Cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother.’ If worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change.

At present, however, science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic will founder and break up. For there is an infinite number of points on the periphery of the circle of science, and while we have no way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed, a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters, before the mid-point of his existence, boundary points on the periphery like this, where he stares into that which cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Foreword to Richard Wagner” in The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Cambridge, 2007, 163. (p.114)

At moments like this, his misanthropy sensitized him to the people packed tight around him, no longer fellow travelers but adversaries, competitors in a slow race. And he could not help himself: he was on the lookout for one of those cheats who edge up on the periphery of vision, moving while pretending not to, cutting in with a sly shuffle, a subtle turn of the shoulder. Burdening others by stealing time.

The mere fact that we live in the United States means that we are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door. The racial problem will be solved in America to the degree that every American considers himself personally confronted with it. Whether one lives in the heart of the Deep South or on the periphery of the North, the problem of injustice is his problem; it is his problem because it is America’s problem.

There are big questions science doesn’t answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can’t be a scientific answer to that because it’s the answer that precedes science. There are all sorts of questions like that that which at the periphery of scientic inquiry but which wiggle in the mind like worms: the question “what am I, what is this word ‘I’”? Does it refer to anything? If you try to capture the “I”, you don’t capture it, you capture the object, in which case it’s a nothing, but it’s a nothing on which everything depends. But this nothing on which everything depends thinks of itself as free. This is a philosophical question that worries everyone, but you can’t formulate it.

No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. "Indians were always regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live within white society except on its periphery," according to [Gary] Nash. Native Americans who amassed property, owned European-style homes, perhaps operated sawmills, merely became the first targets of white thugs who coveted their land and improvements. In time of war the position of assimilated Indians grew particularly desperate. Consider Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian War the Susquehannas, living peaceably in white towns, were hatcheted by their neighbors, who then collected bounties from authorities who weren't careful whose scalp they were paying for, so long as it was Indian. Through the centuries and across the country, this pattern recurred.

More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum.

Sometimes you look up and there just seems to be so many more stars than ever before. More. They burn brighter and they shine longer and they never vanish into your periphery when you turn your head. It's as if they come out for us and to remind us that their light took so long to come to us, that if we never had the patience to wait, we never would have seen them here, tonight, like this. That as much as it hurts, sometimes it's all you can do, wait, endure and keep shining, knowing that eventually, your light will reach where it is supposed to reach and shine for who it is supposed to shine for. It is never easy, but it is always worth it.

In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.

I can look back and see that I've spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push "being kind" to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough -- enough accomplishment, money, fame -- my neuroses will disappear.

You all right, sis?” Kaden asked, pausing between heaping spoonfuls of oatmeal. “Of course.” “You look a little stressed.” “You would, too, if you were going to run the country,” I teased. “Sometimes I think about that,” he said, getting all serious. “Like, what if a disease swept over all of Illéa, and you and Mom and Dad and Ahren got sick and died. Then I’d be in charge and have to figure out everything on my own.” In my periphery I saw Dad lean forward, listening to his son. “That’s a little morbid, Kaden.” Kaden shrugged. “It’s always good to plan ahead.” I

. . . it is called 'camel case' or 'intercapping' -- of writing small letters next to large in the same word, as in such popular significations as iPod, eBay, iTunes, etc. which few would argue is a distinct sign of illiteracy.

Glances Two people meet. The sky turns winter, quells whatever they would say. Then, a periphery glance into danger - and an avalanche already on its way. They have been honest all their lives; careful, calm, never in haste; they didn't know what it is to meet. Now they have met: the world is waste. They find they are riding an avalanche feeling at rest, all danger gone. The present looks out of their eyes; they stand calm and still on a speeding stone.

As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me. One such example: my mother never mended my clothes. I remember going to her when I was in the early grades of elementary school, with holes in both socks of my favorite pair. My mom had just had her sixth child and was deeply involved in our church activities. She was very, very busy. Our family had no extra money anywhere, so buying new socks was just out of the question. So she told me to go string thread through a needle, and to come back when I had done it. That accomplished—it took me about ten minutes, whereas I’m sure she could have done it in ten seconds—she took one of the socks and showed me how to run the needle in and out around the periphery of the hole, rather than back and forth across the hole, and then simply to draw the hole closed. This took her about thirty seconds. Finally, she showed me how to cut and knot the thread. She then handed me the second sock, and went on her way. A year or so later—I probably was in third grade—I fell down on the playground at school and ripped my Levi’s. This was serious, because I had the standard family ration of two pairs of school trousers. So I took them to my mom and asked if she could repair them. She showed me how to set up and operate her sewing machine, including switching it to a zigzag stitch; gave me an idea or two about how she might try to repair it if it were she who was going to do the repair, and then went on her way. I sat there clueless at first, but eventually figured it out. Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement. It’s funny, but every time I put those socks on until they were threadbare, I looked at that repair in the toe and thought, “I did that.” I have no memory now of what the repair to the knee of those Levi’s looked like, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. When I looked at it, however, it didn’t occur to me that I might not have done a perfect mending job. I only felt pride that I had done it. As for my mom, I have wondered what

Presence is about how every action can arise from the quality, which we call awareness – the presence of our inner being, the presence of our soul. It is a large difference between working with people from the inner being and working with people from duty or a specific technique. Through working from the inner being, we can touch the soul of the other person, while we can only touch the personality of the other person, his surface and periphery, if we just work from a technique.

There is an endless chain of cities, a circle without beginning or end, over which there breaks unrelentingly a shifting wave of laws. There is the city-jungle and the city where people live in the pillars of tall viaducts that crisscross each other in countless overpasses and underpasses, the city of sounds and nothing else, the city in the swamp, the city of smooth white balls rolling on concrete, the city comprising apartments spread across several continents, the city where sculptures fall endlessly from dark clouds and smash on the paving stones, the city where the moon’s path passes through the insides of apartments. All cities are mutually the center and periphery, beginning and end, capital and colony of each other.

that is sacred which in the first place is attached to the transcendent order, secondly, possesses the character of absolute certainty and, thirdly, eludes the comprehension and power of investigation of the ordinary human mind...The sacred is the presence of the centre in the periphery, of the motionless in the moving; dignity is essentially an expression of it, for in dignity too the centre manifests at the exterior; the heart is revealed in gestures. The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity.

the details of anything you love are always what is most thrilling, most poignant, most important. i loved her as she rose from bed and fell back against it again, and all she did in-between. when you love someone you accept them, you become them in a way, and all they do forms into you. their mannerisms turn into truth- the way she holds her favorite coffee mug, the way she laughs, the way she smells, the way her lips curl after certain words. all of the simple things suddenly become gigantic things and light up the world before you like a flame thrown into the clouds. what a breathtaking display. the way the earth begins to dissolve in your periphery and a human being replaces it. no matter what they tell you- a person is a universe when truly loved and anything less is not love at all.

There is a theory about human behavior called the 10-80-10 principle. I speak of it often when I talk to corporate groups or business leaders. It is the best strategy I know for getting the most out of your team. Think of your team or your organization as a big circle. At the very center of it, the nucleus, are the top 10 percenters, people who give all they've got all the time, who are the essence of self-discipline, self-respect, and the relentless persuit of improvement. They are the elite- the most powerful component of any organization. They are the people I love to coach. Outside the nucleus are the 80 percenters. They are the majority- people who go to work, do a good job, and are relatively reliable. The 80 percenters are for the most part trustworthy and dutiful, but they simply don't have the drive and the unbending will that the nucleus guys do. They just don't burn as hot. The final 10 percenters are uninterested or defiant. They are on the periphery, mostly just coasting through life, not caring about reaching their potential or honoring the gifts they've been given. They are coach killers. The leadership challenge is to move as many of the 80 percenters into the nucleus as you can.

When facing reality, we want to see the big picture. To simplify, it’s important to consider all aspects of our experience. The experience of being in the moment centers us, and being centered puts us in the moment. Recognizing perfection requires us to notice where we are at any given moment. If we are in the center, also look to the periphery. Likewise, if we are on the periphery, recognize where the other rings are and where the center is. Achieving balance is the ability to be centered wherever we are. Ideally, we want to increase the size of the center so that it encompasses as many rings as possible.

To separate the Adivasi from his land is to stop his breathing. If you want to see an Adivasi's extinction, take him away from his land- as it is happening at present. It is a strange irony that when the Adivasi could lead a life of self- reliance, he is being compelled to become disabled and parasitic. The Adivasi, after having been uprooted from his land through the establishment of big projects in the name of public interest and national development, is ending up in slums in the peripheries of modern cosmopolitan cities as an army of landless labourers and domestic servants losing altogether their self- reliance and self- esteem.

The artistically inclined delight in the Game because it provides opportunities for improvisation and fantasy. The strict scholars and scientists despise it – and so do some musicians also – because, they say, it lacks that degree of strictness which their specialties can achieve. Well and good, you will encounter these antinomies, and in time you will discover that they are subjective, not objective – that, for example, a fancy-free artist avoids pure mathematics or logic not because he understands them and could say something about them if he wished, but because he instinctively inclines toward other things. Such instinctive and violent inclinations and disinclinations are signs by which you can recognize the pettier souls. In great souls and superior minds, these passions are not found. Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery. Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian, and at the same time full of imagination and music. One can be a musician or Glass Bead Game player and at the same time wholly devoted to rule and order. The kind of person we want to develop, the kind of person we aim to become, would at any time be able to exchange his discipline or art for any other. He would infuse the Glass Bead Game with crystalline logic, and grammar with creative imagination. That is how we ought to be. We should be so constituted that we can at any time be placed in a different position without offering resistance or losing our heads.

I could say 'I love you'—and I do." Raising his lids, he met her gaze. "But it's not that simple… not for me. I never wanted a wife." He drew in a breath. "I never wanted to love—not you, not any woman. I never wanted to risk it—never wanted to be forced to find out if I could handle the strain. In my family, loving's not easy—it's not a simple sunny thing that makes one merely happy. Love for us—for me—was always going to be dramatic—powerful, unsettling—an ungovernable force. A force that controls me, not the other way about. I knew I wouldn't like it—" His eyes met hers. "And I don't. But… it isn't, it appears, something I have a choice about." His lips twisted. "I thought I was safe—that I had defenses in place, strong and inviolable, far too steely for any mere woman to break through. And none did,“not for years." He paused. "Until you. "I can't remember inviting you in, or ever opening the gates—I just turned around one day and you were there—a part of me." He hesitated, studying her eyes, then his face hardened, his voice deepened. "I don't know what will convince you, but I won't ever let you go. You're mine—the only woman I could ever imagine marrying. You can share my life. You know a hock from a fetlock—you know as much about riding as I do. You can be a partner in my enterprises, not a distant spectator standing at the periphery. You'll stand at the center of it all, by my side.

The true nature of the world is veiled, and if you shine a bright light on it, you can’t expose that truth; it melts away with the shadows in which it was cloaked. The truth is too awesome for us to stare directly at it, and we are meant to glimpse it only at the periphery of our vision. If the landscape of your mind is too dark with fear or doubt or anger, you are blind to all truth. But if your mental landscape is too bright with certitude and arrogance, you are snow-blind and likewise unable to see what lies before you. Only the moonlit mind allows wonder, and it is in the thrall of wonder that you can see the intricate weave of the world of which you are but one thread, one fantastic and essential thread.

Hazel sometimes had a fantasy daydream at school where the teacher walked into the classroom and yelled, ISN’T EVERYTHING HORRIBLE? DOESN’T THE PAIN OF THE WORLD OUTWEIGH THE JOY BY TRILLIONS? WOULD YOU LIKE TO PUSH ALL OF THE DESKS INTO THE CENTER OF THE ROOM AND BURN THEM IN A GIANT BONFIRE? THEN WE CAN RUN AROUND SCREAMING AND WEEPING AMIDST THE SMOKE IN A TRUTHFUL PARADE OF OUR HUMAN CONDITION. SINCE YOU ARE SMALL STATURED, CHILDREN, IT MIGHT HELP OTHERS TO FEEL THE FULL BRUNT OF YOUR AGITATION IF YOU WAVE STICKS AND SHRUBBERY OVER YOUR HEADS ALL THE WHILE. WE DON’T WANT TO KILL ANYTHING WE DON’T HAVE TO KILL; EVERYTHING LIVING THAT WE’VE EVER SEEN OR KNOWN WILL DIE WITHOUT OUR INTERVENTION, OURSELVES INCLUDED; THIS IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL LEAD BLANKET THAT EVEN OUR MOST PERVASIVE MOMENTS OF COMFORT CANNOT CRAWL OUT FROM UNDER AND ONE UNEXTINGUISHABLE SOURCE OF DESPAIR, SO WE WON’T BE PERFORMING ANY RITUALISTIC SACRIFICES; THAT’S NOT THE DIRECTION WE WILL GO IN JUST YET; HOWEVER, ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL LAWRENCE IS ON THE PROWL FOR A ROAD CARCASS WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO USE AS A REPRESENTATIVE PROP BECAUSE NOWHERE IN OUR AUTUMN-THEMED POSTER BOARD DéCOR IS MORBIDITY OR DECAY SYMBOLIZED. OUR SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS CANNOT AGREE ON HOW BEST TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE BOUNDLESSNESS OF HUMAN CRUELTY. IN OUR SOCIETY SOME OF YOU ARE FAR SAFER AND MORE ADVANTAGED THAN OTHERS; AT HOME SOME OF YOU ARE FAR MORE LOVED; SOME OF YOU WILL FIND THAT CONCEPTS LIKE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE WILL BE THIN, FLICKERING HOLOGRAMS ON THE PERIPHERY OF YOUR LIVES. OH, LOOK, CHILDREN—I SEE MR. LAWRENCE IN THE DISTANCE DRAGGING A PORTION OF A HIGHWAY-SLAUGHTERED DEER. LET’S GO HELP HIM LUG IT INSIDE AND BE REMINDED THAT WE TOO INHABIT BODIES MADE OF MEAT-WRAPPED BONES; LET’S MEDITATE ON THIS CORPOREAL TERROR. Whenever her mother had asked, Hazel always told her, School is great.

I imagine a man coming out of an alley and stabbing me a number of times until I die. Face-down, mouth-open in the snow. What would that change about me. Would I love it. Would I think that the stabbing was painful and that I didn’t like it. Does it actually hurt or is it great. I see my killer being given a wreath and a box of candy by the mayor of Chicago at some kind of ceremony (a ceremony for killing me, you see). And people are cheering for him. I see myself stab-holed and crawling out of an alley to join the periphery of the celebration. Then I hold one hand over the stab wounds and with the other hand I give the thumbs-up sign to my killer as he accepts the wreath from the mayor. I pass more people who are out walking. I’m on Ashland Avenue. A lot of times when I encounter someone else out walking or running past me, it feels like we should be more united than we end up acting. We’re both outside at the same time together. Why doesn’t that mean anything to anyone. Goddamn. No, I don’t think I actually care about that. I thought I cared about it just now.

My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old age. Are not the here, the now, the individual and her relationships the casualties of modern life? The present is passed over in the race for the future, the here is neglected in favor of the there, and the individual is dwarfed by the enormity of the mass. America, which as the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future. It may be our special function to emphasize again these neglected realities, not as a retreat from greater responsibilities, but as a first real step toward a deeper understanding and solution of them. When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.

When I first consciously faced my own emptiness, it felt like a sheer drop off a cliff; I could not find the way back up. I was floating in a sea of pain and sorrow that had no words. All I could do was try to welcome what came, weep every day, and let those close to me know what I was going through. I needed to tend and care for this vulnerable place. This well of grief was deeper than anything else I had faced in my life, and the terrain was suffused with emptiness and darkness. There was no one else in this place, no hands to comfort, no arms to hold and support. No other voices could assure me of my connection to the world. I felt utterly alone. Whether or not there is any personal history to this perception is not what is important. What did matter was that I stumbled into this place, and its truth was undeniable. Daily weeping was something I had never experienced before. In fact, I had always been in control of myself emotionally, having shaped a life made up only of the known. I stayed in the well-lit areas, at the shallow end of the pool. I kept other people outside safe peripheries. I had built a strategically controlled life in which I was appreciated and respected. But when I plunged into this place of emptiness, it was like a wall that had been blocking my view was shattered, and I could finally see how I was limiting my life in hopes of avoiding the emptiness.

THE SHEEPDOGS Most humans truly are like sheep Wanting nothing more than peace to keep To graze, grow fat and raise their young, Sweet taste of clover on the tongue. Their lives serene upon Life’s farm, They sense no threat nor fear no harm. On verdant meadows, they forage free With naught to fear, with naught to flee. They pay their sheepdogs little heed For there is no threat; there is no need. To the flock, sheepdog’s are mysteries, Roaming watchful round the peripheries. These fang-toothed creatures bark, they roar With the fetid reek of the carnivore, Too like the wolf of legends told, To be amongst our docile fold. Who needs sheepdogs? What good are they? They have no use, not in this day. Lock them away, out of our sight We have no need of their fierce might. But sudden in their midst a beast Has come to kill, has come to feast The wolves attack; they give no warning Upon that calm September morning They slash and kill with frenzied glee Their passive helpless enemy Who had no clue the wolves were there Far roaming from their Eastern lair. Then from the carnage, from the rout, Comes the cry, “Turn the sheepdogs out!” Thus is our nature but too our plight To keep our dogs on leashes tight And live a life of illusive bliss Hearing not the beast, his growl, his hiss. Until he has us by the throat, We pay no heed; we take no note. Not until he strikes us at our core Will we unleash the Dogs of War Only having felt the wolf pack’s wrath Do we loose the sheepdogs on its path. And the wolves will learn what we’ve shown before; We love our sheep, we Dogs of War. Russ Vaughn 2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment 101st Airborne Division Vietnam 65-66

Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues - wild and free - that stopped at the city walls. In time, the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery. To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice.

Beyond the speculative and often fraudulent froth that characterizes much of neoliberal financial manipulation, there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of ‘the debt trap’ as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Crisis creation, management, and manipulation on the world stage has evolved into the fine art of deliberative redistribution of wealth from poor countries to the rich. I documented the impact of Volcker’s interest rate increase on Mexico earlier. While proclaiming its role as a noble leader organizing ‘bail-outs’ to keep global capital accumulation on track, the US paved the way to pillage the Mexican economy. This was what the US Treasury–Wall Street–IMF complex became expert at doing everywhere. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve deployed the same Volcker tactic several times in the 1990s. Debt crises in individual countries, uncommon during the 1960s, became very frequent during the 1980s and 1990s. Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, ‘over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center’. ‘What a peculiar world’, sighs Stiglitz, ‘in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest.

It has been wished, and wished again, that the universe could hold perfect moments in perfect memory, the clearest remembrance of things left behind. Alas this form of memory is not possible. The camera of the universe affects the actions therein. The ultimate quantum cat scenario, the fates of all mankind walking a quantum plank from a multi-universal ship, blindfolded and screaming for release...or so it seems to certain flawed observers.

I read through mounds of files brought up daily from the archives. They contained mostly reports from men and women who had operated on the periphery of war, about journeys that criss-crossed Europe and later the Middle East, as well as various post-war skirmishes—especially between 1945 and early 1947. I began to realize that an unauthorized and still violent war had continued after the armistice, a time when the rules and negotiations were still half lit and acts of war continued beyond public hearing. On the continent, guerrilla groups and Partisan fighters had emerged from hiding, refusing defeat. Fascist and German supporters were being hunted down by people who had suffered for five or more years. The retaliations and acts of revenge back and forth devastated small villages, leaving further grief in their wake. They were committed by as many sides as there were ethnic groups across the newly liberated map of Europe.

As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance. For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith. Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basis of our faith, for that is supplied by the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself. Even if there were no arguments in defense of the faith, our faith would still have its firm foundation. The more I learn, the more desperately ignorant I feel. Further study only serves to open up to one's consciousness all the endless vistas of knowledge, even in one's own field, about which one knows absolutely nothing. Don't let your doubts just sit there: pursue them and keep after them until you drive them into the ground. We should be cautious, indeed, about thinking that we have come upon the decisive disproof of our faith. It is pretty unlikely that we have found the irrefutable objection. The history of philosophy is littered with the wrecks of such objections. Given the confidence that the Holy Spirit inspires, we should esteem lightly the arguments and objections that generate our doubts. These, then, are some of the obstacles to answered prayer: sin in our lives, wrong motives, lack of faith, lack of earnestness, lack of perseverance, lack of accordance with God’s will. If any of those obstacles hinders our prayers, then we cannot claim with confidence Jesus’ promise, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it”. And so I was led to what was for me a radical new insight into the will of God, namely, that God’s will for our lives can include failure. In other words, God’s will may be that you fail, and He may lead you into failure! For there are things that God has to teach you through failure that He could never teach you through success. So many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is and always will be the true priority for every human being — that is, learning to know God in Christ. My greatest fear is that I should some day stand before the Lord and see all my works go up in smoke like so much “wood, hay, and stubble”. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge of God. People tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God—which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfilment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God.

Do you think Gandhi was interested in Art?" I asked. "Gandhi? No, of course not." "I think you're right," I agreed. "Neither in art nor in science. And that is why we killed him." "We?" "Yes, we. The intelligent, the active, the forward-looking, the believers in Order and Perfection. Whereas Gandhi was a reactionary who believed only in people. Squalid little individuals governing themselves, village by village, and worshiping the Brahman who is also Atman. It was intolerable. No wonder we bumped him off." But even as I spoke I was thinking that that wasn't the whole story. The whole story included an inconsistency, almost a betrayal. This man who believed only in people had got himself involved in the sub-human mass-madness of nationalism, in the would-be superhuman, but actually diabolic, institution of the nation-state. He got himself involved in these things, imagining that he could mitigate the madness and convert what was satanic in the state to something like humanity. But nationalism and the politics of power had proved too much for him. It is not at the center, not from within the organization, that the saint can cure our regimented insanity; it is only from without, at the periphery. If he makes himself a part of the machine, in which the collective madness is incarnated, one or the other of two things is bound to happen. Either he remains himself, in which case the machine will use him as long as it can and, when he becomes unusable, reject or destroy him. Or he will be transformed into the likeness of the mechanism with and against which he works, and in this case we shall see Holy Inquisitions and alliances with any tyrant prepared to guarantee ecclesiastical privileges.

He paused, then, I behind him, arms locked around the powerful ribs, fingers caressing him. To lie with him, to lie with him, burning forgetful in the delicious animal fire. Locked first upright, thighs ground together, shuddering, mouth to mouth, breast to breast, legs enmeshed, then lying full length, with the good heavy weight of body upon body, arching, undulating, blind, growing together, force fighting force: to kill? To drive into burning dark of oblivion? To lose identity? Not love, this, quite. But something else rather. A refined hedonism. Hedonism: because of the blind sucking mouthing fingering quest for physical gratification. Refined: because of the desire to stimulate another in return, not being quite only concerned for self alone, but mostly so. An easy end to arguments on the mouth: a warm meeting of mouths, tongues quivering, licking, tasting. An easy substitute for bad slashing with angry hating teeth and nails and voice: the curious musical tempo of hands lifting under breasts, caressing throat, shoulders, knees, thighs. And giving up to the corrosive black whirlpool of mutual necessary destruction. - Once there is the first kiss, then the cycle becomes inevitable. Training, conditioning, make a hunger burn in breasts and secrete fluid in vagina, driving blindly for destruction. What is it but destruction? Some mystic desire to beat to sensual annihilation - to snuff out one’s identity on the identity of the other - a mingling and mangling of identities? A death of one? Or both? A devouring and subordination? No, no. A polarization rather - a balance of two integrities, changing, electrically, one with the other, yet with centers of coolness, like stars. And there it is: when asked what role I will plan to fill, I say “What do you mean role? I plan not to step into a part on marrying - but to go on living as an intelligent mature human being, growing and learning as I always have. No shift, no radical change in life habits.” Never will there be a circle, signifying me and my operations, confined solely to home, other womenfolk, and community service, enclosed in the larger worldly circle of my mate, who brings home from his periphery of contact with the world the tales only of vicarious experience to me. No, rather, there will be two over-lapping circles, with a certain strong riveted center of common ground, but both with separate arcs jutting out in the world. A balanced tension; adaptible to circumstances, in which there is an elasticity of pull, tension, yet firm unity. Two stars, polarized; in moments of communication that is complete, almost fusing onto one. But fusion is an undesirable impossibility - and quite non-durable. So there will be no illusion of that. So he accuses me of “struggling for dominance”? Sorry, wrong number. Sure, I’m a little scared of being dominated. (Who isn’t? Just the submissive, docile, milky type of individual. And that is Not he, Not me.) But that doesn’t mean I, ipso facto, want to dominate. No, it is not a black-and-white choice or alternative like: “Either-I’m-victorious on-top-or-you-are.” It is only balance that I ask for.

Within each one of us there is a healer. Healing has always been a way and a deep source of joy for me. Healing is basically our own energy, which overflows from our inner being, from the meditative quality within, from the inner silence and emptiness. Healing is pure love in essence. Love is what creates healing. Love is the strongest force there is. The sheer presence of love is, in itself, healing. It is more the absence of love – than the presence of love –, which creates problems. Healing is a quality, which we can freely share without any ownership. Healing is not something that we can claim as our own; healing is to be a medium, a channel, for the whole. Healing is a medium through which we can develop our inner qualities of presence, love, joy, intuition, truth, silence, wisdom, creativity and inner wholeness. Healing comes originally from the silence within, where we are already in contact with the whole, with the divine. Healing is what makes us spread our inner wings of love and silence and soar high on the sky of consciousness and touch the stars. Healing is to be in service of God. People who have a quality of heart and sensitivity are naturally healing. With some people that we meet, we feel naturally uplifted and inspired. With other people that we meet, we become tired and heavy. With people, who can listen without judging and evaluating, it is easy to find the right words to share problems and difficulties. And with other people, it seems almost impossible to find the right words. People, who have a healing presence and quality, can support our own inner source of love, truth and silence through their presence. These people also seem to have an intuitive sensitivity to saying the right words, which lift and inspires us. This is the people whose presence can mirror the inner truth, which we already know deep within ourselves. The human heart is a healer, which heals others and ourselves. It is the hearts quality of love, acceptance and compassion, plus communication through words, that creates healing. A word that comes from the heart creates healing. A silent listening with a quality of presence and an accepting attitude creates space for healing to happen. Without love it is only possible to reach the personality of the other person, to reach the surface and periphery of the other person The gift of healing comes when we see the other person with love and compassion. It is the quality of heart, which creates the love and the genuine caring for the other person. When our words are carried by the quality of heart, you can say almost anything to the other person and he will still be able to be open and receptive. But if our words lack the quality of heart, it also becomes difficult for the other person to continue to be open and receptive. Even if a therapist is very skilful, technically, or has a clear clairvoyant ability, and still lacks the natural roots in the soil of the heart, then his words will not touch the heart of the other person.

His fists balled spasmodically. “It amounts to a diseased attitude—a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon wiser. And that’s wrong, don’t you see?” For some reason, no one cared to answer him. Hardin continued: “It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?” Again the note of near-pleading in his voice. Again no answer. He went on: “And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad. We sit here, considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We’re receding and forgetting, don’t you see? Here in the Periphery they’ve lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they’re to restrict nuclear power.” And for the third time: “Don’t you see? It’s Galaxy-wide. It’s a worship of the past. It’s a deterioration—a stagnation!

Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship. But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in. Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.' Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees. She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand. She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor. She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.