Perpetual Sadness Quotes

I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have – life itself.

I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word home means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bedroom when you were eight. See, I want to know the first time you felt the weight of hate, and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms or would leave your snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name, and if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you to tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. Tell me, knowing I often picture Gandhi at ten years old beating up little boys at school. If you were walking by a chemical plant where smokestacks were filling the sky with dark black clouds would you holler “Poison! Poison! Poison!” really loud or would you whisper “That cloud looks like a fish, and that cloud looks like a fairy!” Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin? Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea? And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me — how would you explain the miracle of my life to me? See, I wanna know if you believe in any god or if you believe in many gods or better yet what gods believe in you. And for all the times that you’ve knelt before the temple of yourself, have the prayers you asked come true? And if they didn’t, did you feel denied? And if you felt denied, denied by who? I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling good. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling bad. I wanna know the first person who taught you your beauty could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass. If you ever reach enlightenment will you remember how to laugh? Have you ever been a song? Would you think less of me if I told you I’ve lived my entire life a little off-key? And I’m not nearly as smart as my poetry I just plagiarize the thoughts of the people around me who have learned the wisdom of silence. Do you believe that concrete perpetuates violence? And if you do — I want you to tell me of a meadow where my skateboard will soar. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving, and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes from other people’s wounds, and if you dream sometimes that this life is just a balloon — that if you wanted to, you could pop, but you never would ‘cause you’d never want it to stop. If a tree fell in the forest and you were the only one there to hear — if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound, would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist, or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness? And lastly, let me ask you this: If you and I went for a walk and the entire walk, we didn’t talk — do you think eventually, we’d… kiss? No, wait. That’s asking too much — after all, this is only our first date.

In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself

Intensity-seeking is an enslavement of our own perpetuation. When we step out of the delirium of always seeking someone new, and meet the same old sad and lonely child within, our healing journey begins. Exhausting ourselves with novelty is a defense against our deepest pain, one that we cannot outrun. But once we stop and feel our losses, we can begin our healing journey and be the authentic, joyous person we were born to be.

My heart was in a perpetual state of sadness and the only relief I could find were in those cathartic cries. I lived a fragile existence.

Many codependents, at some time in their lives, were true victims—of someone’s abuse, neglect, abandonment, alcoholism, or any number of situations that can victimize people. We were, at some time, truly helpless to protect ourselves or solve our problems. Something came our way, something we didn’t ask for, and it hurt us terribly. That is sad, truly sad. But an even sadder fact is that many of us codependents began to see ourselves as victims. Our painful history repeats itself. As caretakers, we allow people to victimize us, and we participate in our victimization by perpetually rescuing people. Rescuing or caretaking is not an act of love.

The decision to be positive is not one that disregards or belittles the sadness that exists. It is rather a conscious choice to focus on the good and to cultivate happiness--genuine happiness. Happiness is not a limited resource. And when we devote our energy and time to trivial matters, and choose to stress over things that ultimately are insignificant. From that point, we perpetuate our own sadness, and we lose sight of the things that really make us happy and rationalize our way out of doing amazing things.

Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.

Life is Not a perpetual climb towards Greatness. For our family, ourselves, and friends, It is but sad Decay, so, Let every girl die after her Hebé (Ἥβη). And every man after his Aristeia(ἀριστεία).

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

A wise man once said, “A human mind is the place where emotion and reason are locked in perpetual combat. Sadly for our species, emotion always wins.” I really liked that quote. It explained why, even though I was reasonably intelligent, I kept finding myself doing something really stupid. And it sounded much better than “Nevada Baylor, Total Idiot.

Boredom and ineffective attempts to escape tedium are the perpetual lot of humankind.

We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. We are saddled with a dualistic consciousness that weighs us down and plays tricks on us. We have built and seem unable to dismantle a dehumanizing and destructive civilization and mindset that perpetuates deceit and greed. We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable.

When uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience, are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life is apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts: the same words, the same scenes are revolved over and over again, the same mood accompanies them—the end of the year finds them as much what they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to a recurrent series of movements.

Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless. Thus Diogenes, who pottered about by himself, rolling his tub and turning up his nose at the great Alexander, considering us as flies or bags of wind, was really a sharper and more stinging judge, to my taste, than Timon, who was surnamed the hater of men. For what we hate we take seriously. Timon wished us ill, passionately desired our ruin, shunned association with us as dangerous, as with wicked men depraved by nature. Diogenes esteemed us so little that contact with us could neither disturb him nor affect him, and avoided our company, not through fear of association with us, but through disdain of it; he considered us incapable of doing either good or evil.... Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.

It's an ache. A heavy sadness. The kind that is brought on by heartbreak and then perpetuated by everything that reminds you of the way it's broken. The kind that feels impossible to shrug off or tuck away. But there is another feeling, too, surfacing, and soon I discover that it's the kind that makes the heartbreak almost something to savor because it is so simple and true.

In the photograph by my bed my other is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

My friend, still seemingly perplexed, asked me "So if it's not about genitals, what is it about trans women's bodies that you find so attractive?" I paused for a second to consider the question. Then I replied that it is almost always their eyes. When I look into them, I see both endless strength and inconsolable sadness. I see someone who has overcome humiliation and abuses that would flatten the average person. I see a woman who was made to feel shame for her desires and yet had the courage to pursue them anyway. I see a woman who was forced against her will into boyhood, who held on to a dream that everybody in her life desperately tried to beat out of her, who refused to listen to the endless stream of people who told her that who she was and what she wanted was impossible. When I look into a trans woman's eyes, I see a profound appreciation for how fucking empowering it can be to be female, an appreciation that seems lost on many cissexual women who sadly take their female identities and anatomies for granted, or who perpetually seek to cast themselves as victims rather than instigators. In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognised as female, a raw strength that only comes from unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world. In a trans woman's eyes, I see someone who understands that, in a culture that's seemingly fuelled on male homophobic hysteria, choosing to be female and openly expressing one's femininity is not a sign of frivolousness, weakness or passivity, it is a fucking badge of courage. Everybody loves to say that drag queens are "fabulous", but nobody seems to get the fact that trans women are fucking badass!

It's an ache. A heavy sadness. The kind that is brought on by heartbreak and then perpetuated by everything that reminds you of the way it's broken.

A human mind is the place where emotion and reason are locked in perpetual combat. Sadly for our species, emotion always wins.

Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message second-hand. One of Israel's fatal mistakes was their insistence on having a human king rather than resting on the theocratic rule of God over them. We can detect a note of sadness in the word of the Lord, 'they have rejected me from being king over them' (1 Sam. 8:7). The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between. In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change.

The only thing in this world is music–music and books and one or two pictures. I am going to found a colony where there shall be no marrying–unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven–no human element at all, except what comes through Art–nothing but ideal peace and endless meditation. The whole of human beings grows too complicated, my only wonder is that we don’t fill more madhouses: the insane view of life has much to be said for it–perhaps its the sane one after all: and we, the sad sober respectable citizens really rave every moment of our lives and deserve to be shut up perpetually. My spring melancholy is developing these hot days into summer madness.

From my keen observation, it is a very sad fact that the Philippines’ current administration's drug war crisis has fully pressed the pedal of acceleration to more division, hatred, cycles of violence (copycat killings, summary killings, extra judicial killings, collateral victims of drug war), toxic revenge, and perpetual impunity. ~ Angelica Hopes, reflections on Drug War in the Philippines

you feel sad (because you are focused on their lack and activating that within your own vibration), and from your place of sadness you offer them the action of money or food. The vibration that you are transmitting is actually saying to them, I do this for you because I see that you cannot do this for yourself. Your vibration is actually focused upon their lack of Well-Being and therefore, even though you have offered money or food through your action, your dominant offering is perpetuating their lack.

evening harmony behold the times when trembling on their stems the flowers evaporate like thuribles the sounds and scents turn in the evening cool; sad waltz, languid intoxication! the flowers evaporate like thuribles the viol quivers like a heart that's torn sad waltz, languid intoxication! the sky is sad like some memorial. the viol quivers like a heart that's torn a heart that hates the void perpetual! the sky is sad like some memorial the sun has drowned in it's vermillion a heart that hates the void perpetual recalls each glowing moment of times gone! the sun has drowned in it's vermillion; your memory shines my monstrance personal

Yes, Mama. I’m going to try to love the Lord.” At this there sprang into his mother’s face something startling, beautiful, unspeakably sad—as though she were looking far beyond him at a long, dark road, and seeing on that road a traveler in perpetual danger. Was it he, the traveler? or herself? or was she thinking of the cross of Jesus?

The machines of this place are failing, and the woman and I are here all alone. The perpetual motion engine, as brilliant and beautiful as it is, is running down—nothing lasts forever. But before this little world falls out of the sky there still might be time enough for redemption. There is still time for me to say the words that I should have had the courage to say at the beginning. There is still time, perhaps, for one more miracle. Hello, Miranda.

Golden. Like the product of Starfall, I could only hope to touch my vision of her. A missed connection perpetually. I felt like I was alive, only to look for her around every corner, hoping but knowing she would never appear. And she never appeared. And she never would appear, either, not after I killed her.

It's the old who need work. They've lost their spring and their zest for life, and need something to hold on to. It's all wrong, the way we arrange it - making the young work and the old sit idle. It should be the other way about. Girls and boys don't get bored with perpetual holidays; they live each moment of them hard; they would welcome the eternal Sabbath; and indeed I trust we shall all do that, as our youth is to be renewed like eagles. But old age on this earth is far too sad to do nothing in.

But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.

Lincoln’s most prominent feature—the perpetual look of sadness. He’d been to the battle fields, he’d read the prison reports. No wonder he was so burdened with sorrow.

So far away from that gloomy New Orleans corner, from the sad old city festering with secrets in its perpetual Caribbean heat

girls like us are hardly ever wanted, you know we’re used up. and sad. and drunk. and perpetually waiting by the phone for someone to pick up and say “you did good.” well, you did good

The truth is, there are plenty of negative sentiments all around and within us - anger, fear, discontent, distrust, sadness, suspicion, constant self-doubt...but perhaps more than anything, an ongoing apprehension. And existential angst. All these emotions are very much a part of our lives now. Even digital spaces have become primarily emotional spaces. The posts that go viral or the videos that are watched most widely are freighted with emotions. What is equally significant is how this creates a tendency, a habit of mind, that perpetuates itself through space and time.

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unloved life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives - even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available - because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children - it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice - that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we lean, at best, to ironize our wishes - that is, to call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true - and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.(…) There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unloved lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason - and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason - they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are. As we know more now than ever before about the kinds of lives it is possible to live - and affluence has allowed more people than ever before to think of their lives in terms of choices and options - we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the character in Randall Jarrell's poem, that "The ways we miss our lives is life", we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be. We discover these unloved lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in the conscious 9and unconscious) demands we make on our children to become something that was beyond us. And, of course, in our daily frustrations. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage; though at its best it lures us into the future, but without letting us wonder why such lures are required (we become promising through the promises made to us). The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we eve do; and makes of our frustration a secret life of grudges. Even if we set aside the inevitable questions - How would we know if we had realized our potential? If we don't have potential what do we have? - we can't imagine our lives without the unloved lives they contain. We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us. That our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.

The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief. In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what? But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide. The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with little of its past glory remaining or appreciated. The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives. Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five. When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.

Willy's sidekick was a hodgepodge of genetic strains – part collie, part Labrador, part spaniel, part canine puzzle – and to make matters worse, there were burrs protruding from his ragged coat, bad smells emanating from his mouth, and a perpetual bloodshot sadness lurking in his eyes.

Opentoe College had some sort of evangelical mission that involved perpetual kindness and hopelessly outdated uniforms. The Harpooners hated them for it. It was unspeakably infuriating that the one school in the UMSCAC that spent less money on its baseball program than Westish always managed to kick their ass. The Opentoe players never talked even the mildest forms of smack. If you worked a walk, the first baseman would say, "Good eye." If you ripped a three-run triple, the third baseman would say, "Nice rip." They smiled when they were behind, and when they were ahead they looked pensive and slightly sad. Their team name was the Holy Poets.

Redefining moments offer us the opportunity to perpetually re-invent ourselves, and as long as we occupy a human body, these opportunities will continue to present themselves. You were born to be you, to unfold the truth of who you are. The same is true for everyone else. Every moment has the potential to be a redefining moment when we utilize the opportunity to look more deeply into the mystery of the true Self and learn how to actualize Its qualities in our daily lives. The goal is to increase our awareness that, irrespective of where we are or what we are doing, there stands before us a door in every present moment that, when consciously opened, invites us to step into a deeper knowing of who we truly are. In other words, every encounter (chance or otherwise), event, or circumstance, be it good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, is a portal to a redefining moment and who we will choose to be in that situation. The question to consider is, will we be consciously present enough in the moment to recognize the opening when it occurs and step through the door, or will our mind be too full of distractions?

Sadly, the Religious Right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical activism we see today is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement beginning in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself.

Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. “We are good,” G.W. proclaims, “They are evil,” which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them—as well as with the rest of us somewhere over the Beltway—his profound knowledge of Islam’s wiles and ways: “They hate what they see right here in this Chamber.” I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. “Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” At this plangent moment what American’s gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait?

There is one story about letters. A perpetually cheerful Frog pays a visit to Toad but finds Toad glum, sitting on his front porch. "This is my sad time of day," says Toad, "when I wait for the mail to come." "Why is that?" says Frog. "No one has ever sent me a letter. My mailbox is always empty. That is why waiting for the mail is a sad time for me." Then Frog and Toad sit "on the porch, feeling sad together." Frog rescues the situation by running home, writing a letter to Toad, and sending it literally by snail mail. The little snail brings it four days later. Even though Toad saw Frog every day, he longed for the strangeness, the otherness of a letter, for something to come from out there and address him, "Dear Toad." Is that the thrill I feel finding a letter from you in my box? The address of a friend is made into a physical fact and every letter an artifact of the otherwise invisible communion of friendship.

My dearest Lydia I do not wish to disturb your thoughts with sad tidings, and yet to do otherwise than write to you at this time with an honest heart would give cause for you to reproach me in years to come, years when you will live and breathe the warm air while I rest beneath the turf, and the very thought of such reproach grieves my heavy heart as it prepares to beat its last. For I am fading, and henceforth you will not hear word of this frail shell whom once you graced with friendship, except, perhaps, through another's report or distant memory. Whether our encounter in this life has brought me more joy than pain is a question that once I asked myself, but now see as a thing of no concern. My love for you is not to be judged by degrees of pleasure. It is not of the world of matter to be placed on the scale or weighed in the balance. Our flesh, the deeds we commit and things we created may be subject to the measure, but not a love like this. Joy and pain are but the distant resonance, while my love for you is the present song; they are but patterns of dust caught on the edge of the morning light, while my love is the blazing sun that illuminates them. My love abides, my love existed before we met, and my love will continue as the centuries roll by when we and our story are shades forgotten. But my love must perforce now return to its cave, to its sleeping state, whence it emerged that morning long ago by the water's edge, when our eyes met and the spirit took wing. And so farewell in this life, most beautiful of beings, song of my soul, my sunlight, my love. Do not judge me by the deeds of my body, which is frail, finite and blemished. Remember me instead as the soul of all that you cherish, for that I truly aspire to be, and I shall live and shine with you perpetually, in an everlasting embrace. Your devoted friend Godwin Tudor

The sad irony is that the moment we believe we “get it” is not the moment our journey to racial enlightenment comes to an end. “Getting it” should immediately engender humility in recognition of how much we don’t—and likely never will—completely know. Deepening our understanding, building our skills, and demonstrating anti-racist practice are ongoing. Awareness should add new dimensions to the continuing journey: humility and accountability. Awareness that does not lead to sustained engagement is not meaningful.

As leaves fall, I remember the times when love was happier and a lot easier. The countless letters I wrote and kept. The middle bench that may still contain our names carved. The compass that I lost afterwards. As leaves fall, I stand still smiling. Soon enough, a perpetual sadness fills here and there. Like dust that piles up thickly once left unnoticed. That happiness is a memory now. As leaves fall, I realise that not everything stays and sometimes, it's better that way. The words that kept ringing in your head had always said, "Autumn leaves must fall." As leaves fall, I decide to move a step further away. Knowing full well there's no going back anymore. It's time to bid the promised farewell. Until we meet again. A hope. As leaves fall, the revelation dawns on me. The leaves are falling. As it says. The leaves are not dancing with the wind. As it says. The leaves are falling. As distant as you, from me. Me, from you. As leaves fall, I am choosing myself. I may never unlove this person. But I'll soon crystallize everything that belonged to that time and leave. I'm choosing to do that. As leaves fall. - Athira Krishnakumar

I acknowledge, dear God, that I have deserved the greatest of thy wrath and indignation; and that, if thou hadst dealt with me according to my deserving, I had now, at this instant, been desperately bewailing my miseries in the sorrows and horrors of a sad eternity. But thy mercy triumphing over thy justice and my sins, thou hast still continued to me life and time of repentance; thou hast opened to me the gates of grace and mercy, and perpetually callest upon me to enter in, and to walk in the paths of a holy life, that I might glorify thee, and be glorified of thee eternally.

The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence. You never need to learn to drive if you don’t want to. And even if you do drive you can go back to that bar you went to when you were twenty-one, and it will still be there, and it will still be called Molly’s, and the older waitress there will still remember you and let you sit where you want. And five years later, when she is no longer there, when there is just a picture of her above the bar in a place of sad honor, and you know what that means and you don’t want to think about it, guess what: you do not have to. Because no one is driving home, and you’re back again, listening to “Fairytale of New York,” which is still on every jukebox, falling into the same conversations you had with the same friends in the ’90s: about how the internet is going to change culture, and what you are going to do when you grow up.

But what about the spot brokers themselves? A few drifted to banks where they became traders or, more commonly, salesmen. Some simply retired or found work outside finance. Anecdotally, a number of them became London black-cab drivers. In around 2003 I met one who had done just that. I struck up a conversation with him as he took me home from the office; his name was Mickey. ‘I used to be a spot broker,’ he told me after he found out where I worked, ‘it was great.’ We reminisced for a while about the way the FX market had been, then, as we approached my street, he said, a little sadly, ‘But it had to end, we couldn’t beat the computers – they ate us all alive.’ We arrived outside my house where I got out and paid him. As he began to drive off, he slowed down and shouted back at me, ‘They ate us alive – and they’ll do it to everyone!’ With that, he turned the corner and drove out of sight.

What I failed to see was that, by ending my life, I would cause interminable pain to my family and friends. I could not understand the heartbreak it would cause those around me. Nor did I consider that my brother, Joseph, might live the rest of his life in continual rage, or that my sister, Libby, might shut herself off from the world and fall into perpetual depression, silence, and sadness mistakenly blaming themselves for my death as many family members do when they lose someone they love to suicide. I certainly held no understanding of the enormous pain my mother and father would suffer because they lost their oldest son in such a terrifying and devastating way. They would not have a chance to watch me mature, marry, and perhaps have children. Instead, all of their hopes, aspirations, and dreams for me would be destroyed with my decision to end my life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother, but the same beauty bloomed differently in each of them. My mother's fairness was exquisite and untouchable, roaming alone in an abandoned castle. Khalto Bahiya's beauty took you in immediately. Hers was easy and disclosed hordes of laughter stolen from wherever it could be found. Gravity, sun, and time had scrawled on their faces the travails of hard work, childbirth, and destitution. But even these lines disagreed on their faces. Khalto Bahiya's face incorporated them into her joy and her pain, so that lines appeared and hid according to her expressions and provided frames and curves to her tenderness. Gentle folds nestled her lips and made her face open when she smiled - like an orchid. On Mama, the lines had always seemed incongruous - as if her beauty could accept no change or outside interference. The wrinkles on Mama's face had carved her skin like prison bars, behind which one could discern the perpetual plaint of something grand and sad, still alive and wanting to get out.

The candy-colored pavillions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark's fins, golden grilles and honeycombs, the Italian pavillion with its entire facade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit gods, the fountains, the pylons and sundials, the statues of George Washington and Freedom of Speech and Truth Showing the Way to Freedom had been peeled, stripped, prized apart, knocked down, bulldozed into piles, loaded onto truck beds, dumped into barges, towed out past the mouth of the harbor, and sent to the bottom of the sea. It made him sad, not because he saw some instructive allegory or harsh sermon on the vanity of all human hopes and Utopian imaginings in this translation of a bright summer dream into an immense mud puddle freezing over at the end of a September afternoon - he was too young to have such inklings - but because he had so loved the Fair, and seeing it this way, he felt in his heart what he had known all along, that, like childhood, the Fair was over, and he would never be able to visit again.

Sadly, however, it is not serious historians who, for the most part, form the historical consciousness of their times; it is bad popular historians, generally speaking, and the historical hearsay they repeat or invent, and the myths they perpetuate and simplifications they promote, that tend to determine how most of us view the past. However assiduously the diligent, painstakingly precise academical drudge may labor at his or her meticulously researched and exhaustively documented tomes, nothing he or she produces will enjoy a fraction of the currency of any of the casually composed (though sometimes lavishly illustrated) squibs heaped on the front tables of chain bookstores or clinging to the middle rungs of best-seller lists. For everyone whose picture of the Middle Ages is shaped by the dry, exact, quietly illuminating books produced by those pale dutiful pedants who squander the golden meridians of their lives prowling in the shadows of library stacks or weakening their eyes by poring over pages of barely legible Carolingian minuscule, a few hundred will be convinced by what they read in, say, William Manchester’s dreadful, vulgar, and almost systematically erroneous A World Lit Only by Fire. After all, few have the time or the need to sift through academic journals and monographs and tedious disquisitions on abstruse topics trying to separate the gold from the dross. And so, naturally, among the broadly educated and the broadly uneducated alike, it is the simple picture that tends to prevail, though in varying shades and intensities of color, as with any image often and cheaply reproduced.

I will not forget the last time he looked at me. The morning light filled the room, reminding me of so many mornings and of the morning I had first come there. Giovanni sat on the bed, completely naked, holding a glass of cognac between his hands. His body was dead white, his face was wet and grey. I was at the door with my suitcase. With my hand on the knob, I looked at him. Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted. I felt a tremor go through me, like the beginning of an earthquake, and felt, for an instant, that I was drowning in his eyes. His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had no occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body's power over me. Now, as though I had been branded, his body was burned into my mind, into my dreams. And all this time he did not take his eyes from me. He seemed to find my face more transparent than a shop-window. He did not smile, he was neither grave, nor vindictive, nor sad; he was still. He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again - waiting, as one waits at a death-bed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen. I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

Kamimura has been whispering all week of a sacred twenty-four-hour ramen spot located on a two-lane highway in Kurume where truckers go for the taste of true ramen. The shop is massive by ramen standards, big enough to fit a few trucks along with those drivers, and in the midafternoon a loose assortment of castaways and road warriors sit slurping their noodles. Near the entrance a thick, sweaty cauldron boils so aggressively that a haze of pork fat hangs over the kitchen like waterfall mist. While few are audacious enough to claim ramen is healthy, tonkotsu enthusiasts love to point out that the collagen in pork bones is great for the skin. "Look at their faces!" says Kamimura. "They're almost seventy years old and not a wrinkle! That's the collagen. Where there is tonkotsu, there is rarely a wrinkle." He's right: the woman wears a faded purple bandana and sad, sunken eyes, but even then she doesn't look a day over fifty. She's stirring a massive cauldron of broth, and I ask her how long it's been simmering for. "Sixty years," she says flatly. This isn't hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter- feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen. Maruboshi Ramen opened in 1958, and you can taste every one of those years in the simple bowl they serve. There is no fancy tare, no double broth, no secret spice or unexpected toppings: just pork bones, noodles, and three generations of constant simmering. The flavor is pig in its purest form, a milky broth with no aromatics or condiments to mitigate the purity of its porcine essence.

Perhaps, too, some sad-faced, listless, melancholy youth, who feels that the world is very hollow, and that life is like a perpetual funeral service, just as I used to feel myself, may take courage from my example

Some people have a perpetual problem. They always have a sad song. If you allow them, they’ll use you as a trash can to dump all their garbage in. You spend an hour with them and you feel like you’ve run a marathon. They’re energy suckers. You leave them feeling drained and worn out. You cannot continue to deal with them day after day if you expect to reach your highest potential. You won’t lift off. You won’t thrust forward into the good things God has in store if you’re weighted down, letting people dump their loads on you. They’ll make you discouraged and drain your energy. It’s hard enough just to keep yourself cheered up. You’re not responsible for their happiness. Sure, there are times when we need to sow a seed and have a listening ear and take time to love people back into wholeness. But that should be for a season and not an ongoing drama. You shouldn’t spend every day listening to friends complain about their spouses or their neighbors. If you do, your life will be like an episode of Guiding Light, Jersey Shore, and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills all put together. You have enough drama in your life without listening to everyone else’s drama. You can’t allow someone to put that negativity in you day after day if you expect to soar. You need to evaluate the people you’re spending time with. Are they lifters and encouragers? Do they make you feel better? Do you leave their company feeling inspired and happier, or are they dragging you down, making you feel drained, and sapping your energy?

Manmohan Singh’s lost opportunity The anti-corruption agitations of 2011 provided a wonderful opportunity for the prime minister and his government to start the process of purging the system of corruption and retrieving black money illegally stashed away in foreign banks. The government had two options to get our money back. The first, to behave like a responsible, honourable and strong nation and demonstrate political will to fight corruption using the ample machinery available through international and bilateral legal instruments, the Tax Information Exchange Treaties (TIEAs), Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) automatic exchange route. The Swiss have volunteered cooperation; and India can follow the example of the US and UK, and get India’s stolen money back to the country. Or, the government can take the other option and behave like a banana republic and a failed state, plunder capital from their own country through a UPA-sponsored version of imperialism, perpetuate poverty and backwardness by denying the people of this country their rightful development dividend while repeatedly rewarding and incentivizing the looters with amnesty schemes. Mr Singh’s government has continuously concealed information on black money by fooling the people of our country, shielding the corrupt and guilty who have illegal bank accounts in foreign banks, and by creating obstacles for any progress in the matter instead of taking proactive measures to obtain the information from the foreign governments concerned. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have chosen the former option and gone down in history as a great patriot and leader of our country, a pioneer against corruption. But sadly, he has lost the opportunity and chosen such, that history will remember him as having presided over the greatest frauds practised on this poor and gullible nation.

In each person she encountered, she detected a whiff of sad-eyed need, the perpetual desire to be noticed and understood.

I was not perpetually sad – that’s not what depression is. More than ever before, I was tired all the time. I had lost interest in most activities. I was eating whatever, whenever, drinking more and more. I was easily irritated. Despite wanting to do not much more than sleep, I couldn’t sleep. I had developed chronic back pain that even an MRI could not diagnose. These were the individual signs and symptoms of depression I had battled for decades, and now I was experiencing them all at the same time and they were not going away. I was no longer able to hide what I was dealing with from my family and those closest to me. More than anyone, my wife knew that, if she couldn’t find me in my home office, my work for the day was done and I was in our room binge-watching something on the television, anything to get away from the noise of life. On stage, in court, in public and on social media, I remained in character: high energy and high efficiency, just another terrific day. Backstage, away from where you could see me, where only my family and closest friends could see, nothing: an empty shell. That’s no way to exist and it certainly is not living.

Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message secondhand. One of Israel’s fatal mistakes was their insistence upon having a human king rather than resting in the theocratic rule of God over them. We can detect a note of sadness in the word of the Lord, “They have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Sam. 8:7). The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between. In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change. We do not need to observe Western culture very closely to realize that it is captivated by the religion of the mediator.

They don’t understand that some sadness and loss is not just bearable; it’s essential. There is an everyday heroism, if you think about it, in bringing up your children fully aware that they will supplant you. That’s what human civilization is. If it weren’t—if your children were just going to be other beings who perpetually trailed you through infinity by twenty or thirty years—then the most powerful of human connections would in effect be severed.

Apart from the perpetual purr of idiocy that surrounds us, day in, day out, there’s also, sadly, the roar of the masters of stupidity, kings of stupidity—assholes with a capital A. Those assholes, whether you encounter them at work or at home, do not strike you as anecdotal. They hound you and harass you with their obstinacy in crass wrongheadedness, their unjustified arrogance. They prosper, they sign on the dotted line, and they would happily wipe out all of your opinions, emotions, and dignity with one stroke of the pen. They erode your morale and make you doubt there can be any justice in this vile world. No matter how hard you try, you cannot detect a speck of kindred connection in them.

People mess up. We lie, exaggerate, betray, hurt, and abandon each other. When we hear that this has happened, it makes sense to feel anger, pain, confusion, and sadness. But to move immediately to punishment means that we stay on the surface of what has happened. To transform the conditions of the "wrongdoing", we have to ask ourselves and each other, "Why?" Even--especially--when we are scared of the answer. It's easy to decide a person or group is shady, evil, psychopathic. The hard truth (hard because there's no quick fix) is that long-term injustice creates most evil behavior. The percentage of psychopaths in the world is just not high enough to justify the ease with which we assign that condition to others. In my mediations, "why?" is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That's because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetuating against us. "Why?" often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. Also, "Why?" makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances. We don't want to see that.

The deepest wretchedness often results from a perpetual continuation of petty trials.

But where is the onanist who dares avow his infamy? And is not this concealment of crime a proof of guilt? How many have died for not daring to reveal the cause of their disease? In how many letters in the work, Onania do we find this expression: “I had rather die than see you after this confession.” One is in fact, and should be more ready to excuse him who, seduced by that propensity engraved by nature on all hearts, and which is designed to perpetuate the species, is wrong only in not keeping within the bounds prescribed by the law and by health. It is when a man is actuated by passions that he forgets himself, and we are much more ready to forgive him, than one who sins against every law, the opinions of men, and the order of nature. Knowing how much he must be degraded in society should it be known, he is constantly tormented by the idea. “It seems,” says one of these criminals to me in the same letter we have quoted above, “as if every one reads in my countenance the infamous cause of my disease, and this thought unfits me for society.” They become sad and melancholy, (instances of this have been shown in the fourth section of this work,) and are affected by all the evils produced by their long continuance, without having, which is frightful to a criminal, any pretense of justification or one consoling reflection.

The heavenly principalities and powers cannot touch you. But the earthly humans over which we rule can.” Though they had no authority to touch Yahweh’s anointed, they might do so through their human vessels. Jesus trembled with the weight of responsibility that now overwhelmed him. But the pain was lessened when he heard the familiar sound of his favorite angel echo in his mind. Jesus, be strong and courageous. “Jesus, be strong and courageous.” It wasn’t in his mind, it was being spoken to him from behind. “Sound familiar?” Jesus turned. He looked up into the smiling face of Uriel the smallest of three angels now standing before him. Uriel finished his thought, “The words you spoke to Joshua at the threshold of the Promised Land. Funny how it all comes full circle.” Gabriel, the second angel, and Uriel’s constant bickering companion, responded, “Uriel, I think your humor is once again in incredibly poor taste considering his suffering. Where is your compassion?” “Nonsense,” said Uriel. “Jesus has done it. Victory is a cause for celebration, not sadness. He made it forty days without food, which is more than I can say for you, chubby.” Uriel patted Gabriel’s stomach. Gabriel moved away annoyed at the jab. Sure, he was heavier than the lightweight Uriel, but he certainly didn’t see himself as “chubby.” Mikael, the largest and best groomed of the three, was the guardian prince of Israel, and tended to be protective of his ward. He offered a wineskin to Jesus, who took it and gulped with gratitude. After a moment of silence, Jesus wiped his beard of the wine and said, “You need a better sense of humor, Gabriel.” Gabriel pouted with frustration at being ganged up on. Uriel, his perpetual nemesis was one thing. But being teased by the Master was quite another. Jesus said, “And Uriel, you had better deliver on that bread you promised.” Uriel smiled again and held out a loaf of Mary’s best bread. “Baked two hours ago by your mother.” Jesus grabbed it. Mikael said, “Remember, do not eat too quickly. It is bad for your digestion after fasting.” “Thank you for your ministering spirits,” said Jesus, and took a big hungry bite out of the loaf. Uriel muttered, “Your mother should open a bakery. Can I have a bite?” Mikael was not so lighthearted. He knew that the challenge had been declared. The road to war had begun.

He was a small, chubby little man with a perpetual air of sadness about him, making him look like a baby that has dropped its rattle.

just as I am now getting dressed, going out to visit the professor and exchange polite remarks with him – all the opposite of what I really want to do – so most human beings spend their lives acting compulsorily, day after day, hour after hour. Without really wanting to, they pay visits, hold conversations, work fixed office hours – all of it compulsorily, mechanically, against their will. It could all be done just as well by machines, or not done at all. And it is this perpetual mechanical motion that prevents them from criticizing their own lives in the way I do, from realizing and feeling just how stupid and shallow, how horribly, grotesquely questionable, how hopelessly sad and barren their existence is. And oh, how right they are, these people, a thousand times right to live the way they do, playing their little games and pursuing what seems important to them instead of resisting this depressing machinery and staring despairingly into the void as individuals who have gone off the rails do, like me.

Many fall into the trap of championing the exact theology of a saint from the past, which can have errors and imbalances, and then they perpetuate these problems into the modern Christian world. Such believers are sadly being guided more by their zeal and reading of past saints than by their personal walk with the Lord and the guidance of the Spirit of God in their lives.

April 22 The Light That Fails We all with open face beholding . . . the glory of the Lord. 2 Corinthians 3:18 A servant of God must stand so much alone that he never knows he is alone. In the first phases of Christian life disheartenments come, people who used to be lights flicker out, and those who used to stand with us pass away. We have to get so used to it that we never know we are standing alone. “All men forsook me: . . . notwithstanding the Lord stood with me” (2 Timothy 4:16–17). We must build our faith, not on the fading light, but on the light that never fails. When “big” men go we are sad, until we see that they are meant to go; the one thing that remains is looking in the face of God for ourselves. Allow nothing to keep you from looking God sternly in the face about yourself and about your doctrine, and every time you preach see that you look God in the face about things first, then the glory will remain all through. A Christian worker is one who perpetually looks in the face of God and then goes forth to talk to the people. The characteristic of the ministry of Christ is that of unconscious glory that abides. “Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while He talked with him.” We are never called on to parade our doubts or to express the hidden ecstasies of our life with God. The secret of the worker’s life is that he keeps in tune with God all the time.

There is one story about letters. A perpetually cheerful Frog pays a visit to Toad but finds Toad glum, sitting on his front porch. "This is my sad time of day," says Toad, "when I wait for the mail to come." "Why is that?" says Frog. "No one has ever sent me a letter. My mailbox is always empty. That is why waiting for the mail is a sad time for me." Then Frog and Toad sit "on the porch, feeling sad together." Frog rescues the situation by running home, writing a letter to Toad, and sending it literally by snail mail. The little snail brings it four days later. Even though Toad saw Frog every day, he longed for the strangeness, the otherness of a letter, for something to come from out there and address him, "Dear Toad." Is that the thrill I feel finding a letter from you in my box? The address of a friend is made into a physical fact and every letter an artifact of the otherwise invisible communion of friendship.

In Psalm 32:1 David reminded us that the blessed person is the one “whose transgressions are forgiven, / whose sins are covered.” How sad that he learned the lesson through such bitter experience. The word covered in the Hebrew is kasah, and it means “to cover, conceal, hide; to clothe; . . . to forgive; to keep secret; to hide oneself, wrap oneself up.”14 When we try desperately to cover up our sinful ways, we are bound for disaster as sin perpetuates. Only through repentance will God “cover” us and “clothe” us with His loving forgiveness. Only when we run to Him in the nakedness of our sin will He wrap us up with “garments of salvation” and a “robe of righteousness” (Isa. 61:10).

Reflecting on the mind-set in 1960s Washington that gave rise to Vietnam, the literary critic Alfred Kazin once wrote, “Power beyond reason created a lasting irrationality.”21 Kazin’s observation applies in spades to the period following the Cold War. With the collapse of communism, Washington convinced itself that the United States possessed power such as the world had never seen. Democrats and Republicans alike professed their eagerness to exploit that power to the fullest. A sustained bout of strategic irrationality ensued, magnified and reinforced by the events of 9/11. Sadly, the principal achievement of President Obama, who came to office promising something better, has been to perpetuate that irrationality.

Sadly, our society still perpetuates the false ideal that a real man should be all masculine, and a real woman all feminine. Neither is possible, nor desirable.

We encounter this sometimes in our own circles today, as believers often feel obliged to smile in public even if they collapse at home in private despair. Calvin counters, “Such a cheerfulness is not required of us as to remove all feeling of bitterness and pain.” It is not as the Stoics of old foolishly described “the great-souled man”: one who, having cast off all human qualities, was affected equally by adversity and prosperity, by sad times and happy ones—nay, who like a stone was not affected at all. . . . Now, among the Christians there are also new Stoics, who count it depraved not only to groan and weep but also to be sad and care-ridden. These paradoxes proceed, for the most part, from idle men who, exercising themselves more in speculation than in action, can do nothing but invent such paradoxes for us. Yet we have nothing to do with this iron philosophy which our Lord and Master has condemned not only by his word, but also by his example. For he groaned and wept both over his own and others’ misfortunes. . . . And that no one might turn it into a vice, he openly proclaimed, “Blessed are those who mourn.”35 Especially given how some of Calvin’s heirs have confused a Northern European “stiff upper lip” stoicism with biblical piety, it is striking how frequently he rebuts this “cold” philosophy that would “turn us to stone.”36 Suffering is not to be denied or downplayed, but arouses us to flee to the asylum of the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. It is quite unimaginable that this theology of the cross will top the best-seller lists in our “be good–feel good” culture, but those who labor under perpetual sorrows, as Calvin did, will find solidarity in his stark realism: Then only do we rightly advance by the discipline of the cross when we learn that this life, judged in itself, is troubled, turbulent, unhappy in countless ways, and in no respect clearly happy; that all those things which are judged to be its goods are uncertain, fleeting, vain, and vitiated by many intermingled evils. From this, at the same time, we conclude that in this life we are to seek and hope for nothing but struggle; when we think of our crown, we are to raise our eyes to heaven. For this we must believe: that the mind is never seriously aroused to desire and ponder the life to come unless it is previously imbued with contempt for the present life.37

Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.' The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development. [...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.

I lived inscrutable hours, a succession of disconnected moments, in my night-time walk to the lonely shore of the sea. All the thoughts that have made men live and all their emotions that have died passed through my mind, like a dark summary of history, in my meditation that went to the seashore. I suffered in me, with me, the aspirations of all eras, and every disquietude of every age walked with me to the murmuring shore of the sea. What men wanted and didn’t achieve, what they killed in order to achieve, and all that souls have secretly been – all of this filled the feeling soul with which I walked to the seashore. What lovers found strange in those they love, what the wife never revealed to her husband, what the mother imagines about the son she didn’t have, what only had form in a smile or opportunity, in a time that wasn’t the right time or in an emotion that was missing – all of this went to the seashore with me and with me returned, and the waves grandly churned their music that made me live it all in a sleep. We are who we’re not, and life is quick and sad. The sound of the waves at night is a sound of the night, and how many have heard it in their own soul, like the perpetual hope that dissolves in the darkness with a faint plash of distant foam! What tears were shed by those who achieved, what tears lost by those who succeeded! And all of this, in my walk to the seashore, was a secret told me by the night and the abyss. How many we are! How many of us fool ourselves! What seas crash in us, in the night when we exist, along the beaches that we feel ourselves to be, inundated by emotion! All that was lost, all that should have been sought, all that was obtained and fulfilled by mistake, all that we loved and lost and then, after losing it and loving it for having lost it, realized we never loved; all that we believed we were thinking when we were feeling; all the memories we took for emotions; and the entire ocean, noisy and cool, rolling in from the depths of the vast night to ripple over the beach, during my nocturnal walk to the seashore …

Of course bad things had happened to Vikram. No one got a free ride in this troubled world. There were times when he was sad, but those spells were transient and almost always related to the death of someone he loved or admired. For as long as he could remember, he’d understood that happiness was a choice, that there were people who didn’t realize it was theirs to choose or who, for whatever reason, preferred to be perpetually discontented, even angry, even despairing.

...natural selection is not the only process at work in evolution; there is also (among others) random genetic drift, which 'can lead to the elimination of a more fit gene and the fixation of a less fit one.' For example, a genetically based and adaptively favorable trait might arise within a population of sea gulls; perhaps six members of the flock enjoy it. Being birds of a feather, they flock together-sadly enough, at the site of a natural so that all are killed in a tidal wave or volanic eruption or by a large meteorite. The more fit gene thus gets eliminated from the population. (There is also the way in which a gene can be fixed, in a small population, by way of random walk.)...there is no reason to think it inevitable that natural selection will have the opportunity to select for optimal design. For example, an adaptively positive trait might be linked with an adaptively negative trait by pleiotropy (where one gene codes for more than one trait or system); then it could happen that the genes get selected and perpetuated by virtue of its link with the gene. A truly optimal system-one with the positive trait but without the negative-may never show up, or may show up too late to fit in with the current development of the organism.

A wise man once said, “A human mind is the place where emotion and reason are locked in perpetual combat. Sadly for our species, emotion always wins.

She watched him with a hint of sadness. What was it about people who were perpetually happy that tugged at the heart when they grew sorrowful?

I want to bring something new to the vision of the Native experience as seen on the screen. We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story. What we’ve seen is full of the kind of stereotypes that are the reason no one is interested in the Native story in general, it’s too sad, so sad it can’t even be entertaining, but more importantly because of the way its portrayed it looks pathetic, and we perpetuate that, but no, fuck that, excuse my language, but it makes me mad, because the whole picture is not pathetic, and the individual people and stories you come across are not pathetic or weak or in need of pity, and there is real passion there and rage, and that's part of what I'm bringing to the project...

However, as children learn the lessons of darkness and light, we also seek out the light and become fearful of the dark. Our well-meaning parents lit up our rooms with candles or nightlights to withhold the darkness instead of walking us outside into the evening tide to take in the wonder of the stars that we would never see if it was perpetual light, which reaffirmed that we need to fear and therefore banish the night. Similarly, we are taught to shun the darkness inside of us too. Our undesirable, ‘too much’ emotions like anger or sadness are banished to the ‘time-out’ chair or spanked out of us in the favour of more acceptable ‘Pollyanna’ cheeriness. Our mysterious, scary, weird, hard to understand, and fears are locked behind the high walls of our societal and religious beliefs.

water. Where last night it had been a roiling storm, this evening her sadness lapped gently around her, unobtrusive and perpetual. Now it had arrived, she had the feeling it would be her long-term companion.

Dipped cones taste like the first time with her, every time. Like trembling, fumbling limbs and foggy windows and being verbally whipped and then sweetly kissed. Every jam-packed beach with out-of-towners ranging from the jean-clad to the perpetually barefoot all take me back to that summer. To being sad, angry, lost. To being completely in over my head with a girl who was way above my pay grade and never missed a chance to remind me.

Sleeping on the Wing Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness, as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries 'Sleep! O for a long sound sleep and so forget it! ' that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city, veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon does when a car honks or a door slams, the door of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages. Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves, was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity and your position in respect to human love. But here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused. Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face? to travel always over some impersonal vastness, to be out of, forever, neither in nor for! The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing. The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible! and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping too. Those features etched in the ice of someone loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space and speed, your hand alone could have done this. Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead, or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping, you relinquish all that you have made your own, the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake and breathe your warmth in this beloved image whether it's dead or merely disappearing, as space is disappearing and your singularity Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. (University of California Press March 31, 1995)

The sad reality is that the patient with back pain is a prisoner of pervasive fear—and fear is a prime perpetuator of the pain syndrome.

Anger is often called a secondary or “iceberg” emotion because underneath it is often a host of other feelings that are driving it: fear, sadness, embarrassment, rejection, criticism, stress, exhaustion, irritation, and more. Thus, when your child behaves wildly in a public place, embarrassment can set off your anger and trigger a response that perpetuates a pattern passed down in your family through generations.

If you can suspend people in feelings of lack, fear, anger, opposition, prejudice, pain, sadness, and anxiety, they remain dependent on someone or something outside of them to make those feelings go away. If you remain in a perpetual state of busyness, and are always preoccupied in survival emotions, you never actually have the opportunity to believe in yourself

wise man once said, “A human mind is the place where emotion and reason are locked in perpetual combat. Sadly for our species, emotion always wins.” I really liked that quote. It explained why, even though I was reasonably intelligent, I kept finding myself doing something really stupid.

He added, “And we’re having sex tonight, goddammit.” The last of her odd sadness broke apart as she laughed. And there it was, that moment, with happiness dancing in her aquamarine gaze and the air around her effervescent with her Power – that moment was what the dragon would do anything and kill anyone for. That moment was what he lived for. That one, and then the one after that, and the one after that, all grouped together in his mind like luminous pearls on a string. Each one came to him new, a perpetual gift of joyful surprise, and as rich as he was, and as many jewels as he’d acquired, those moments were the sum total of the dragon’s true treasure.

This naked moment may well be apprehended with greater acuity in retrospect, but how can we know if what we view in hindsight will ever have truly been? The uncertainty of it is frightening-but maybe, at the same time, we need not look upon it as a crisis of the human condition. Assimilating this irresoluteness may indeed be our greatest capacity. To live in this perpetual bewilderment and without respite is to be honest, even genuine, with oneself. Perhaps we must embrace the disinterested nature of our anxiety even if we know that it is contrastingly woven from competing threads of self-interest. It is sad that we cannot trust what our senses tell us, trust the information we are given. Or maybe it is beautiful if you see an aesthetic to the indecipherable, to the very thought that even the tiniest shard of logic may pierce at us whilst yet eluding us.

This naked moment may well be apprehended with greater acuity in retrospect, but how can we know if what we view in hindsight will ever have truly been? The uncertainty of it is frightening—but maybe, at the same time, we need not look upon it as a crisis of the human condition. Assimilating this irresoluteness may indeed be our greatest capacity. To live in this perpetual bewilderment and without respite is to be honest, even genuine, with oneself. Perhaps we must embrace the disinterested nature of our anxiety even if we know that it is contrastingly woven from competing threads of self-interest. It is sad that we cannot trust what our senses tell us, trust the information we are given. Or maybe it is beautiful if you see an aesthetic to the indecipherable, to the very thought that even the tiniest shard of logic may pierce at us whilst yet eluding us.

Netanyahu is fundamentally against peace; his dark nobility mandate is to expand Israeli territory beyond Israel’s existing borders, which means perpetual war with its surrounding neighbours that are either Arab or Muslim. - Sadly, this is not the wish of most Israeli citizens.

If we think the purpose of Jesus' stories is essentially to make a point as extractable as the moral at the end of a fable, then the inevitable conclusion is that once you get the point, you can throw the story itself away like the rind of an orange when you have squeezed out the juice. Is that true? How about other people's stories? What is the point of A Midsummer Night's Dream or The Iliad or For Whom the Bell Tolls? Can we extract the point in each case and frame it on the living room wall for our perpetual edification? Or is the story itself the point and truth of the story? Is the point of Jesus' stories that they point to the truth about you and me and our stories? We are the ones who have been mugged, and we are also the ones who pass by pretending we don't notice. Hard as it is to believe, maybe every once in a while we are even the ones who pay an arm and a leg to help. The truth of the story is not a motto suitable for framing. It is a truth that one way or another, God help us, we live out every day of our lives. It is a truth as complicated and sad as you and I ourselves are complicated and sad, and as joyous and as simple as we are too. The stories that Jesus tells are about us. Once upon a time is our time, in other words.

the time has come for us to reclaim our bodies. Our bodies deserve more than to be war-torn and collateral, offering this fuckdom as a pathetic means to say: i only know how to exist when i’m wanted girls like us are hardly ever wanted, you know we’re used up. and sad. and drunk. and perpetually waiting by the phone for someone to pick up and say “you did good.” well, you did good.

Integrate Begs the Pharaoh by Maisie Aletha Smikle Nay Nay Nay says the Lord Nay Nay Nay Let my people go Co-mingle not Entwine not Lest you desist from Heaping hot coals of bitterness On my peoples" heads You plundered You stole You slaughtered You enslaved You bombed You bruised You burned You mutilate With distaste and bitter hate You paid not for your crime You paid not even a dime Now you think that all is fine Come one Come all Integrate and merge like we should You will not get an apology You will get no remorse We will continue the course Of your bitter brutal curse We will not let you go We want to be your Pharaoh Integrate preaches the Pharaoh O thou participants of Holocaust integrate O thou participants of Slavocaust integrate We shaln't let you go unless we go through the red sea You see Pharaohs are born And Pharoahs need to rule But Pharaohs won't be Pharaohs Unless they have people To treat as Peasants and slaves Servants in servitude And people to overbearingly dominate Airing their arrogance of hate Whilst continuing the sad perpetual cycle They preach Integrate Integrate Integrate Dedicated to Nations History Month