Permanently Exhausted Quotes

Exhaustion is temporary. Pain is temporary. But Helene dying because I didn't find a way to get her back on time—that's permanent.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

The problem with driving around Iceland is that you’re basically confronted by a new soul-enriching, breath-taking, life-affirming natural sight every five goddamn minutes. It’s totally exhausting.

I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.

The most serious injury is done in childhood. Our cruel waste of the nerve force of children is only more pathetic than it is absurd. The mere business of growing up... which should be a process unconscious or full of joy and rich accumulation, is made by our ignorant mishandling a confusing, irritating, exhausting process, often leaving permanent injuries to the machine, as well as waste of power.

There are many things in life worth getting temporarily tired for, but there is nothing in life worth getting permanently tired for.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?” “Nature remains.

All these counterproductive ways of thinking about failure manifest themselves most acutely in the phenomenon of perfectionism. This is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not so secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw – yet perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live. (There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.)

perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live.

Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached and the ankle-bones of both feet ached quite excruciatingly. But nothing of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like a strip of lip-colored lead suspended from her poor little nose by two tugging wire-gray wrinkles her persistently conscientious sickroom smile seemed to be whanging aimlessly against her front teeth. The sensation certainly was very unpleasant.

His wife, Genevieve, had her bare feet up on the sofa, exhausted by the responsibility of coordinating the domestic crisis of Christmas in a house with a dreamy husband, four kids, two dogs, a mare in the paddock, a rabbit, and a guinea pig, plus sundry invading mice and rats that kept finding inventive routes into their kitchen. In many ways it was a house weathering a permanent state of siege.

To work your way forward when you are permanently lost means, yes, to be exhausted and adrift, a stranger in a strange land. But... it also means living in a state of endless discovery. The world unfurls itself anew each day with dawn's first cold breath on the city. You re-encounter what you are: lonely likely a body with a gift for burning.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)

Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it need only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce to possessions, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as the space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness, the life, which seems to slumber in each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud and cell, and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and animal existence.

In a successful relationship both partners should be able to uplift, inspire and energize each other. In an Asperger marriage this energy exchange doesn’t seem to take place. Usually the ‘neurotypical’ hands out energy but receives none in return, and thus feels permanently exhausted. Due to the high stress and anxiety levels, the AS partner finds it difficult to sustain his energy and therefore has little left to share. Whatever exists he retains to satisfy any personal requirements. It’s a kind of self-preservation technique. In addition to this, communication problems aggravate the situation by creating an invisible barrier which prevents energy flow.

I believe the reasons we hang on to seemingly insignificant snippets of conversation, the smell of a particular pizza delivered by a particular guy, the shape of certain shadows on a particular wall, is that there may come a day when we are sitting in a hospital room visiting our mother as she lies on an uncomfortable bed, still recovering. And we are asking her questions and feeling nervous about what the doctor has said could be permanent damage caused by a blood clot the size of a pinpoint and we don't know if the way she is struggling to find the right words is a temporary exhaustion or the new reality and all we want to do is tell her we love her in a language no one has used before because we mean it in a way that no one has meant it before. And this will be a difficult time for us. But then, in a break between the words, a commercial may come on the small television hung up in the corner of the room that we did not even know was playing. It may advertise some new drug, some insurance plan, and our mother will smile at the voice of the handsome actor standing in front of a green screen. She will then close her eyes and squeeze our hand, the one that she has been holding since we walked in, and say, "Oh, I used to have such a crush on him." When she does this, our memory will be waiting. Yes, yes, yes. It is love that we feel here. This is the purpose of memory.

At the other end of life are elders with severe dementia. The final stage of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases is marked by extreme apathy and exhaustion. Individuals cease speaking, gesturing, and even swallowing. Has their conscious mind permanently left its abode, a shrunken brain full of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques?

Black holes were invented by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder in 1939. Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions of Einstein's equations that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. This solution of Einstein's equations was profoundly novel. It has had enormous impact on the later development of astrophysics.

Daniel saw in a way he’d never seen anything before: his mind was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening horns, gathering observations that had been distorted along the way, as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light that passed through it. A man who peered out at the world through a telescope would assume that the aberration was real, that the stars actually looked like that—what false assumptions, then, had natural philosophers been making about the evidence of their senses, until last night? Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.

If you ever get twenty-five years [imprisonment] for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground—from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

The great danger to an empire is permanent war. Given global interests, something is always on fire. If the primary response is war, the empire will always be at war. And if it is always at war somewhere, it will always be vulnerable to someone taking advantage of the empire’s preoccupation. Even more important, if the empire doesn’t benefit its citizens, but instead exhausts them and disrupts their lives by war, the political support for the empire will quickly evaporate. Both Rome and Britain survived by using minimal direct force, in favor of other means of managing their empires.

The essence of being in the first beginning reveals itself, i.e., at the same time, essentially occurs inceptually, in emerging, advancing. Only if the basic traits of the inceptuality come to be recollected constantly, above all in their inceptual unity, can the first beginning be surmised. Being is the beginning. The beginning is disconcealment toward unconcealedness (АΛНΘΕІА). Disconcealment is the emerging that goes back into itself, because disconcealment possesses the concealment out of which it emerges. Emergence is φύσις. Emergence is presence (οὐσία). To presence pertain: the nearness—παρά the view—visibility ἰδέα the disburdening—against μὴ ὄν the magic—καλóν. Presence consists in constancy and is then permanence (ἀεί). Presence is then the essential occurrence in the work and as work, wherein is gathered the presentness of rest and motion: ἐνέργεια; ἐντελέχεια. Co-position: ἐνέχεια τò τέλος. Every emerged determination of being can in a certain way stand for the beginning, and all of them can be especially attributed to the beginning. And yet they do not exhaust it, because it itself, as the first beginning, must take over the advancement. Nevertheless, the beginning remains embedded in concealment, but one which itself remains concealed and thus is completely lacking in presence and so must be replaced by “truth” as ὁμοίωσις and as disfigurement of the cognizing human being.

Dr. W. B. Clarke's research into the problems of childhood vaccines, came across the evidence that all vaccines given over a short period of time to an immature immune system deplete the thymus gland, (the primary gland of the immune reactions) of irreplaceable immature immune cells. Each of these cells could have multiplied and developed into an army of valuable cells to combat infection and growth of abnormal cells. When these cells are used up permanent immunity may not appear. Work at the Arthur Research Foundation in Tucson, Arizona estimates that up to 60% of our immune system may be exhausted by multiple mass vaccinations. With naturally acquired immunity, only 10% of immune cells are lost. This constitutes a grave concern for vaccinations ruining the immune system

The Alexandrian culture, to be able to exist permanently, requires a slave class, but with its optimistic view of life it denies the necessity of such a class, and consequently, when its beautifully seductive and tranquilizing utterances about the "dignity of man" and the "dignity of labor" are no longer effective, it gradually drifts toward a dreadful destruction. There is nothing more terrible than a class of barbaric slaves who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice, and now prepare to avenge, not only themselves, but all generations. In the face of such threatening storms, who dares to appeal with any confidence to our pale and exhausted religions, the very foundations of which have degenerated into scholarly religions? Myth, the necessary prerequisite of any religion, is already paralyzed everywhere, and even in this domain the optimistic spirit, which we have just designated as the germ of destruction in our society, has attained the mastery.

The three greatest metaphysicians who ever existed - Plato, Aristotle and St.Thomas Aquinas - had no system in the idealistic sense of the word. Their ambition was not to achieve philosophy once and for all, but to maintain it and to serve it in ours. For us, as for them, the great thing is not to achieve a system of the world as if being could be deduced from thought, but to relate reality, as we know it, to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics and of art have to be solved. A metaphysics of existence cannot be a system wherewith to get rid of philosophy, it is an always open inquiry, whose conclusions are both always the same and always new, because it is conducted under the guidance of immutable principles, which will never exhaust experience, or be themselves exhausted by it. For even though, as is impossible, all that which exists were known to us, existence itself would still remain a mystery. Why, asked Leibniz, is there something rather than nothing ?

The three greatest metaphysicians who ever existed - Plato, Aristotle and St.Thomas Aquinas - had no system in the idealistic sense of the word. Their ambition was not to achieve philosophy once and for all, but to maintain it and to serve it in their own times, as we have to maintain it and to serve it in ours. For us, as for them, the great thing is not to achieve a system of the world as if being could be deduced from thought, but to relate reality, as we know it, to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics and of art have to be solved. A metaphysics of existence cannot be a system wherewith to get rid of philosophy, it is an always open inquiry, whose conclusions are both always the same and always new, because it is conducted under the guidance of immutable principles, which will never exhaust experience, or be themselves exhausted by it. For even though, as is impossible, all that which exists were known to us, existence itself would still remain a mystery. Why, asked Leibniz, is there something rather than nothing ?

Asking for Directions We could have been mistaken for a married couple riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago that last time we were together. I remember looking out the window and praising the beauty of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world with its back turned to us, the small neglected stations of our history. I slept across your chest and stomach without asking permission because they were the last hours. There was a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new Chinese vest that I didn’t recognize. I felt it deliberately. I woke early and asked you to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more, and I said we only had one hour and you came. We didn’t say much after that. In the station, you took your things and handed me the vest, then left as we had planned. So you would have ten minutes to meet your family and leave. I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you through the dirty window standing outside looking up at me. We looked at each other without any expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still. That moment is what I will tell of as proof that you loved me permanently. After that I was a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker which direction to walk to find a taxi.

Amongst human beings the state of the case is as follows: There exist all sorts of intermediate conditions between male and female — sexual transitional forms. In physical inquiries an ideal gas is assumed, that is to say, a gas, the behaviour of which follows the law of Boyle-Guy-Lussac exactly, although, in fact, no such gas exists, and laws are deduced from this so that the deviations from the ideal laws may be established in the case of actually existing gases. In the same fashion we may suppose the existence of an ideal man, M, and of an ideal woman, W, as sexual types although these types do not actually exist. Such types not only can be constructed, but must be constructed. As in art so in science, the real purpose is to reach the type, the Platonic Idea. The science of physics investigates the behaviour of bodies that are absolutely rigid or absolutely elastic, in the full knowledge that neither the one nor the other actually exists. The intermediate conditions actually existing between the two absolute states of matter serve merely as a starting-point for investigation of the types and in the practical application of the theory are treated as mixtures and exhaustively analysed. So also there exist only the intermediate stages between absolute males and females, the absolute conditions never presenting themselves. Let it be noted clearly that I am discussing the existence not merely of embryonic sexual neutrality, but of a permanent bisexual condition. Nor am I taking into consideration merely those intermediate sexual conditions, those bodily or psychical hermaphrodites upon which, up to the present, attention has been concentrated. In another respect my conception is new. Until now, in dealing with sexual intermediates, only hermaphrodites were considered; as if, to use a physical analogy, there were in between the two extremes a single group of intermediate forms, and not an intervening tract equally beset with stages in different degrees of transition. The fact is that males and females are like two substances combined in different proportions, but with either element never wholly missing. We find, so to speak, never either a man or a woman, but only the male condition and the female condition.

Unfortunately, America has trouble repairing its magnificent trails, so that collapsed bridges and washed-out sections are sometimes left unrepaired. We were rich enough to construct many of these trails during the Great Depression, yet we’re apparently too poor in the 21st century even to sustain them. The attraction of wilderness has something to do with continuity. I may now have a GPS device that I couldn’t have imagined when I first hiked, but essential patterns on the trail are unchanging: the exhaustion, the mosquitoes, the blisters, and also the exhilaration at reaching a mountain pass, the lustrous reds and blues of alpine wildflowers, the deliciousness of a snow cone made on a sweltering day from a permanent snowfield and Kool-Aid mix. The trails are a reminder of our insignificance. We come and go, but nature is forever. It puts us in our place, underscoring that we are not lords of the universe but components of it.

I am an obsessive-compulsive reader and a history junkie. I brake by rote at every historical marker, I buy out museum bookstores, and for years my interest in colonial forts and Shaker villages so exhausted my two children that they are now permanently allergic to the past. I can tell you, right down to the hour, everything that happened at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the first week of July 1863, and each setback that Franklin Roosevelt endured during World War II feels like it happened to me.

The experience I had had when I interviewed Agmatir started to haunt me. During the numberless hours before daybreak, I would wake from nightmares. I was physically exhausted. Allowing a serial killer to enter your mind and allowing his perverted sexual fantasies to cloud your own psyche causes mental damage which can become permanent.

More than one thousand people in excess of the July norm were admitted to inpatient units in local hospitals because of heatstroke, dehydration, heat exhaustion, renal failure, and electrolytic imbalances. Those who developed heatstroke suffered permanent damage, such as loss of independent function and multisystem organ failures. Thousands of other stricken by heat-related illnesses were treated in emergency rooms.

One day, however, they had an experience that revealed just how fragile their life had become. Bella developed a cold, causing fluid to accumulate in her ears. An eardrum ruptured. And with that she became totally deaf. That was all it took to sever the thread between them. With her blindness and memory problems, the hearing loss made it impossible for Felix to achieve any kind of communication with her. He tried drawing out letters on the palm of her hand but she couldn’t make them out. Even the simplest matters—getting her dressed, for instance—became a nightmare of confusion for her. Without sensory grounding, she lost track of time of day. She grew severely confused, at times delusional and agitated. He couldn’t take care of her. He became exhausted from stress and lack of sleep. He didn’t know what to do, but there was a system for such situations. The people at the residence proposed transferring her to a skilled nursing unit—a nursing home floor. He couldn’t bear the thought of it. No, he said. She needed to stay at home with him. Before the issue was forced, they got a reprieve. Two and a half weeks into the ordeal, Bella’s right eardrum mended and, although the hearing in her left ear was lost permanently, the hearing in her right ear came back. “Our communication is more difficult,” Felix said. “But at least it is possible.

For the people, pure Maoism means the substitution of an austere and fanatical political mysticism for the legitimate material, intellectual and emotional requirements of human nature, the imposition of a permanent state of mobilisation that is quasi-military, the merciless destruction of all traditional values, a desolating monotony of existence, the establishment of a cultural desert, universal bigotry, aridity and boredom interrupted only by periodic outbreaks of violence and hysterical activism. For the cadres, constantly exposed to criticism, harrassed, frightened, exhausted, Maoism was synonymous with perpetual menace and uncertainty, incessant struggle, tension and insecurity, and they aspired to a more stable, safer and more conventional system of government.

The Fongnam Massage Therapy has its own massage room equipped with a reclining massage bed and a lounger with footstool. Working long hours in front of a computer can cause stress, muscle strain, injury or pain that can leave you physically, mentally or emotionally exhausted. This can negatively affect your social life as well as your work. As the main benefit of massage is stress reduction, massage therapy can improve and maintain overall health and reduce or prevent the negative effects of stress. It can permanently relieve pain, prevent injury and maintain health. It is an important ingredient for staying healthy physically and mentally as it reduces stress, which is responsible for 90% of all illness and pain. Due to the reflex effects of the autonomic nervous system, massage affects internal organs and areas distant from the treated area. It promotes relaxation, relieves pain, elevates mood and mental clarity. Massage can be used for relaxation or stimulation and can be used for rehabilitation after surgery, injury, or health issues. It improves blood and lymphatic circulation, increases natural killer cells and lymphocytes that destroy cancer cells, improves mood by increasing serotonin and dopamine, and relieves pain by increasing analgesic endorphins. Massage can relax the body, lower blood pressure and heart rate, and reduce stress and depression. It can also provide symptomatic relief from acute and chronic conditions such as headaches, facial pain, carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. It realigns and rejuvenates, restoring balance to your body and being so you can face whatever life throws at you at every turn. It promotes digestion, joint mobility, muscle relaxation, relief from spasms and cramps.

The overwhelming responsibility, the permanent exhaustion, the fear: it isn’t something you can ever really explain to someone who hasn’t gone through it.

You will actually gain weight because you did not eat within five hours! As a result of that hyper–insulin response, you feel exhausted and irritable. You are developing a midline paunch, your blood pressure and cholesterol may be rising, and you may be crossing the boundary into the tricky waters of diabetes.

But the maintenance of two entirely different shelves - one real, one virtual - was confusing and exhausting. People became so addicted to looking at their tablets that they stopped going outside and even stopped talking to their real friends and loved ones. The app world save every one of this division by liberating people from their bodies and allowing them a permanent virtual existence.

The general exhaustion of the cerebral functions has been pointed out by many authors. " Hystericals," said M. Fere, " are in a permanent state of psychical fatigue, which is shown by a weakening of sensibility, of motion, of the will." ' " The fundamental factor of hysteria," says M. Oppenheim, *' is irritable feebleness, an abnormal excitability accompanied with exhaustion. These characteristics are especially established in the sphere of the affective phenomena." ' M. Jolly, taking up again M. Oppenheim's conception, speaks also of an extreme nervous feebleness, which allows the exaggeration of the affective phenomena, but he adds that this formula lacks precision and does not sum up particular facts.' We think, as does this author, that it is necessary to define this cerebral weakness with more precision and explain what is meant by it. As the essential functions of the brain are psychological functions, we must show, by the analysis of the moral phenomena, wherein this psychological insufficiency consists.

Moreover, these changes occurred when most American households actually found their real incomes stagnant or declining. Median household income for the last four decades is shown in the chart above. But this graph, disturbing as it is, conceals a far worse reality. The top 10 percent did much better than everyone else; if you remove them, the numbers change dramatically. Economic analysis has found that “only the top 10 percent of the income distribution had real compensation growth equal to or above . . . productivity growth.”14 In fact, most gains went to the top 1 percent, while people in the bottom 90 percent either had declining household incomes or were able to increase their family incomes only by working longer hours. The productivity of workers continued to grow, particularly with the Internet revolution that began in the mid-1990s. But the benefits of productivity growth went almost entirely into the incomes of the top 1 percent and into corporate profits, both of which have grown to record highs as a fraction of GNP. In 2010 and 2011 corporate profits accounted for over 14 percent of total GNP, a historical record. In contrast, the share of US GNP paid as wages and salaries is at a historical low and has not kept pace with inflation since 2006.15 As I was working on this manuscript in late 2011, the US Census Bureau published the income statistics for 2010, when the US recovery officially began. The national poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent, its highest level in nearly twenty years; median household income declined by 2.3 percent. This decline, however, was very unequally distributed. The top tenth experienced a 1 percent decline; the bottom tenth, already desperately poor, saw its income decline 12 percent. America’s median household income peaked in 1999; by 2010 it had declined 7 percent. Average hourly income, which corrects for the number of hours worked, has barely changed in the last thirty years. Ranked by income equality, the US is now ninety-fifth in the world, just behind Nigeria, Iran, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. The UK has mimicked the US; even countries with low levels of inequality—including Denmark and Sweden—have seen an increasing gap since the crisis. This is not a distinguished record. And it’s not a statistical fluke. There is now a true, increasingly permanent underclass living in near-subsistence conditions in many wealthy states. There are now tens of millions of people in the US alone whose condition is little better than many people in much poorer nations. If you add up lifetime urban ghetto residents, illegal immigrants, migrant farm-workers, those whose criminal convictions sharply limit their ability to find work, those actually in prison, those with chronic drug-abuse problems, crippled veterans of America’s recently botched wars, children in foster care, the homeless, the long-term unemployed, and other severely disadvantaged groups, you get to tens of millions of people trapped in very harsh, very unfair conditions, in what is supposedly the wealthiest, fairest society on earth. At any given time, there are over two million people in US prisons; over ten million Americans have felony records and have served prison time for non-traffic offences. Many millions more now must work very long hours, and very hard, at minimum-wage jobs in agriculture, retailing, cleaning, and other low-wage service industries. Several million have been unemployed for years, exhausting their savings and morale. Twenty or thirty years ago, many of these people would have had—and some did have—high-wage jobs in manufacturing or construction. No more. But in addition to growing inequalities in income and wealth, America exhibits

The list of things I thought I wanted, or needed, or should be doing, was inexhaustible. I, on the other hand, was permanently exhausted.

I get ready for bed. I’m exhausted, but any time I still my mind it’s as if twenty pairs of eyes inside my head spring open.

I’m not an early bird or a night owl, I’m some form of permanently exhausted pigeon.

The problem, he thinks, is that when you are here – right here with this unpredictable two-year-old who will not sleep, will not put her coat on, will not get into the car seat and will not get up off the floor – it is all so permanently exhausting. And so you can’t help wishing for the next phase. For a bit. More. Calm.

Dylan, Duende, Death and Lorca Does Bob Dylan have Duende? DUENDE dancers perform moving, unique, unrepeatable performances Does Bob Dylan have duende? Do you have duende? What is duende? Duende is a Spanish word with two meanings. A duende is a goblin or a pixie that probably lives at the bottom of the garden and gives three wishes to old ladies who deserve a break. The duende was best defined by Spain’s great poet Federico García Lorca during a lecture he gave in New York in 1929 on Andalusian music known as cante jondo, or deep voice. ‘The duende,’ he said, ‘is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.’ The difference between a good and a bad singer is that the good singer has the duende and the bad singer doesn’t. ‘There are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned.’ Some critics say Bob Dylan does not have a great voice. But more than any other performer since the birth of recorded music, Dylan has revealed the indefinable, spine-tingling something captured in Lorca’s interpretation of duende. ‘It is an inexplicable power of attraction, the ability to send waves of emotion through those watching and listening to them.’ ‘The duende,’ he continues, ‘resembles what Goethe called the demoniacal. It manifests itself principally among musicians and poets of the spoken word, for it needs the trembling of the moment and then a long silence.’ painting off hell by Hieronymus Bosch Hell & Hieronymus Bosch Four elements can be found in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death and a dash of the diabolical. I agree with Lorca that duende manifests principally among singers, but would say that same magic may touch us when confronted by great paintings: Picasso’s Guernica, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the paintings of heaven and hell by Hieronymus Bosch. The duende is found in the bitter roots of human existence, what Lorca referred to as ‘the pain which has no explanation.’ Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better. Death with Duende It is not surprising that Spain found a need for the word duende. It is the only country where death in the bullring is a national spectacle, the only nation where death is announced by the explosion of trumpets and drums. The bullring, divided in sol y sombre – the light and shade, is the perfect metaphor for life and death, a passing from the light into darkness. Every matador who ever lived had duende and no death is more profound than death in the bullring.

We are permanently mobilised against change, recruited for the defence of the present economic universe. After a generation of New Times we are both exhausted by and inured to job insecurity and continuous availability, obligatory consumption and persistent debt; and we have become complicit in the system which perpetuates and reproduces these situations.

Ayesha’s memories of Syria are fractured. She relives a feeling of constant exhaustion, of feeling unsafe, and then those moments before the injury. Her thoughts shift to the aftermath, the vision of displaced persons flooding over Turkey’s border and back into Syria, even while the conflict peaked. But even after endless painful and traumatic surgeries, Ayesha sits in bed with her schoolbooks and shrugs. “Never give in, never give up,” she stresses, scrolling through her toddler photographs — evidence of the life “before.” “Even when you think hope is lost, it will be back in you.” Nothing is permanent, I think to myself. We may not be able to alter the experience of what has happened to us, but sunshine eventually casts aside even the gloomiest days. If we are willing to ride it out, the prospect of betterment always returns.

The river instantly resumed its thundering way toward the Salton Sea. Cory brought the river back under control on November 4 “by exhausting the capacities of every quarry between Los Angeles and Nogales, four hundred and eighty-five miles to the east.” Yet one month later, the river busted loose again. For Harry Cory, the sixth failed attempt to close the breach was the last straw. The Southern Pacific had poured more than a million dollars “into that hole” and the river had swept it all away. A sustainable repair required not only a dam, but the construction and permanent maintenance of fifteen miles of levees along the west bank, reinforced with concrete and steel to keep the river corralled even at its most violent. These would be the most expensive levees ever built over such a distance—not a job for the Southern Pacific, in his weary judgment. The railroad was the most resourceful, rich, and powerful enterprise in the Southwest, yet the river had brought it to its knees.

his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.

Not that he had not had pretty women, but their charm was always something incidental for him. What drove him toward women was a desire for revenge, or sadness and dissatisfaction, or compassion, or pity: the world of women merged for him with his country's bitter drama, in which he had participated both as persecutor and victim, and had experienced plenty of struggle and no idylls. But this woman had sprung up before him suddenly, separate from all that, separate from his life, she had come from outside, she had appeared to him, appeared not only as a beautiful woman but as beauty itself, and she proclaimed to him that one could live here in a different way and for something different, that beauty is more than justice, that beauty is more than truth, that it is more real, more indisputable, and also more accessible, that beauty is superior to everything else and that it was now permanently lost to him. This beautiful woman had shown herself to him so that he would not go on believing that he knew everything and had exhausted all the possibilities of life here.

These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways.

[Jeff Sessions’] major interest in any given topic tended to be the immigration angle, even when there was no immigration angle. Before disruptions of US-based counterterrorism cases, we would brief him. Almost invariably, he asked the same question about the suspect: “Where’s he from?” The vast majority of suspects are US citizens or legal permanent residents. If we would answer his question, “Sir, he’s a US citizen. He was born here,” Sessions would respond, “Where are his parents from?” The subject’s parents had nothing to do with the points under discussion. We were trying to get him to understand the terrorist threat overall, trying to explore the question: Why are Americans becoming so inspired by radical Islam and terrorist groups such as ISIS that they’re going out and planning acts of terrorism against other Americans right here in this country? That question cannot be exhaustively explored by reference solely to immigration policy.

He was permanently exhausted and beset by all the torments, terrible and trivial, that poverty endures.

When I left New York (in June 1942) I became the permanent guest of Margaret and Gilbert Neiman, at Beverly Glen, Los Angeles. My resources then were completely exhausted. The cabin at Beverly Glen, which is contiguous to Bel Air Estates-- the Gold Coast, so to speak-- was a delightful place. When the Neimans left for Colorado I shared the cabin with John Dudley of Kenosha. It was a bad period for me in many ways, relieved only by the itch to paint. To go to Hollywood and Vine from the Glen was like making a journey to Alaska. To shop, I went to Westwood Village or to Beverly Hills, usually on foot. Twice I was offered the gift of a car but refused. Finally, largely because Dudley was lazy, I bought one for forty dollars. It lasted ten days and then we left it in a ditch beside the road.