Posters Sayings Quotes

We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.

It’s about the dream of second chances,” he says finally. He hasn’t raised his eyes from the paper on his desk and I feel him looking at me without looking when he uses his grandfather’s words. “The narrator doesn’t respect the beauty of life and the world around her, so it crushes her into the ground and once she’s dead, she realizes everything she took for granted and didn’t see right in front of her while she was alive. She’s begging for another chance to live again so she can appreciate it this time.” “And does she get that chance?” she asks Josh while I desperately focus on the poster of literary terms on the wall and wait for absolution. When it comes, I barely hear it. “She does.

MAN: Do you have black and white film posters? BOOKSELLER: Yes, we do. They’re over here. MAN: Do you have any posters of Adolf Hitler? BOOKSELLER: Pardon? MAN: Adolf Hitler. BOOKSELLER: Well, he wasn’t a film star, was he. MAN: Yes, he was. He was American. Jewish, I think...

She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she's going to start to cry. I'm standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like 'I think we've all lost some sort of feeling.

She sighed. Loudly. "Physical appearance is not what is important." Yeah right. Tell that to any girl who hasn't bothered to put on a presentable shirt or fix her hair because she's only running into the grocery store to get a quart of milk for her grandmother, and who does she see tending the 7-ITEMS-OR-LESS cash register but the guy of her dreams, except she can't even say hi—much less try to develop a meaningful relationship—since she looks like the poster child for the terminally geeky.

All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.” Morrison laughs derisively. “That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that is has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.

If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary; and after one's original conversion, every time one thinks one has made an advance, that is the test to apply. Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in 'religion' mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better; just as in an illness 'feeling better' is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up. In that sense the outer world is quite right to judge Christianity by its results. Christ told us to judge by results. A tree is known by its fruit; or, as we say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. The war-time posters told us that Careless Talk costs Lives. It is equally true that Careless Lives cost Talk. Our careless lives set the outer world taking; and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself.

I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don't want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.

Nothing says "you're a loser" more than owning a motivational poster about being a winner.

The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man.

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?

Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils – the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time.

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.

Every cell of my body says, ‘Oh god yes! Crime? I can do some crime!’ I want this ship like I’ve never wanted anything in my life. I had a poster of the first-ever Breakbolt model on my bedroom wall when I was nine. It’s like a manifestation of every dream I’ve ever had, everything I’ve ever wanted for myself: a piloting license, a beautiful ship under me, and stars out the viewport. Child Nax says, ‘Do it, do the crime!

The crowd loves her—including the guy with the sign that says Marry Me, Holly. She can’t fucking marry you, douchebag. She’s already married to me. Right then, I realize I’m jealous. For the first time in my life, I’m fucking jealous. And it’s of a teenage boy holding a piece of hot pink fucking poster board.

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

You will not remember much from school. School is designed to teach you how to respond and listen to authority figures in the event of an emergency. Like if there's a bomb in a mall or a fire in an office. It can, apparently, take you more than a decade to learn this. These are not the best days of your life. They are still ahead of you. You will fall in love and have your heart broken in many different, new and interesting ways in college or university (if you go) and you will actually learn things, as at this point, people will believe you have a good chance of obeying authority and surviving, in the event of an emergency. If, in your chosen career path, there are award shows that give out more than ten awards in one night or you have to pay someone to actually take the award home to put on your mantlepiece, then those awards are more than likely designed to make young people in their 20's work very late, for free, for other people. Those people will do their best to convince you that they have value. They don't. Only the things you do have real, lasting value, not the things you get for the things you do. You will, at some point, realise that no trophy loves you as much as you love it, that it cannot pay your bills (even if it increases your salary slightly) and that it won't hold your hand tightly as you say your last words on your deathbed. Only people who love you can do that. If you make art to feel better, make sure it eventually makes you feel better. If it doesn't, stop making it. You will love someone differently, as time passes. If you always expect to feel the same kind of love you felt when you first met someone, you will always be looking for new people to love. Love doesn't fade. It just changes as it grows. It would be boring if it didn't. There is no truly "right" way of writing, painting, being or thinking, only things which have happened before. People who tell you differently are assholes, petrified of change, who should be violently ignored. No philosophy, mantra or piece of advice will hold true for every conceivable situation. "The early bird catches the worm" does not apply to minefields. Perfection only exists in poetry and movies, everyone fights occasionally and no sane person is ever completely sure of anything. Nothing is wrong with any of this. Wisdom does not come from age, wisdom comes from doing things. Be very, very careful of people who call themselves wise, artists, poets or gurus. If you eat well, exercise often and drink enough water, you have a good chance of living a long and happy life. The only time you can really be happy, is right now. There is no other moment that exists that is more important than this one. Do not sacrifice this moment in the hopes of a better one. It is easy to remember all these things when they are being said, it is much harder to remember them when you are stuck in traffic or lying in bed worrying about the next day. If you want to move people, simply tell them the truth. Today, it is rarer than it's ever been. (People will write things like this on posters (some of the words will be bigger than others) or speak them softly over music as art (pause for effect). The reason this happens is because as a society, we need to self-medicate against apathy and the slow, gradual death that can happen to anyone, should they confuse life with actually living.)

My father wrote beautifully,” Esmé interrupted. “I’m saving a number of his letters for posterity.” I said that sounded like a very good idea. I happened to be looking at her enormous-faced, chrono-graphic-looking wristwatch again. I asked if it had belonged to her father. She looked down at her wrist solemnly. “Yes, it did,” she said. “He gave it to me just before Charles and I were evacuated.” Self-consciously, she took her hand off the table, saying, “Purely as a momento, of course.” She guided the conversation in a different direction. “I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.” I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific. “It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that isn’t childish and silly.” She reflected. “I prefer stories about squalor.” “About what?” I said, leaning forward. “Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.

You know that saying, ‘Act now, apologize later?’ I’m pretty much the poster boy.

I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position. At Peterson, I kept an Einstein poster in my room, the one that says 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein. I like to think he would have enjoyed my work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it's hovering over Chicago.

One of my favorite posters says, “Life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been a real life you would have been instructed where to go and what to do.” Whenever I think of this humorous bit of wisdom, it reminds me to not take my life so seriously.

POCKET-SIZED FEMINISM The only other girl at the party is ranting about feminism. The audience: a sea of rape jokes and snapbacks and styrofoam cups and me. They gawk at her mouth like it is a drain clogged with too many opinions. I shoot her an empathetic glance and say nothing. This house is for wallpaper women. What good is wallpaper that speaks? I want to stand up, but if I do, whose coffee table silence will these boys rest their feet on? I want to stand up, but if I do, what if someone takes my spot? I want to stand up, but if I do, what if everyone notices I’ve been sitting this whole time? I am guilty of keeping my feminism in my pocket until it is convenient not to, like at poetry slams or my women’s studies class. There are days I want people to like me more than I want to change the world. There are days I forget we had to invent nail polish to change color in drugged drinks and apps to virtually walk us home at night and mace disguised as lipstick. Once, I told a boy I was powerful and he told me to mind my own business. Once, a boy accused me of practicing misandry. You think you can take over the world? And I said No, I just want to see it. I just need to know it is there for someone. Once, my dad informed me sexism is dead and reminded me to always carry pepper spray in the same breath. We accept this state of constant fear as just another part of being a girl. We text each other when we get home safe and it does not occur to us that our guy friends do not have to do the same. You could saw a woman in half and it would be called a magic trick. That’s why you invited us here, isn’t it? Because there is no show without a beautiful assistant? We are surrounded by boys who hang up our naked posters and fantasize about choking us and watch movies we get murdered in. We are the daughters of men who warned us about the news and the missing girls on the milk carton and the sharp edge of the world. They begged us to be careful. To be safe. Then told our brothers to go out and play.

Apparently, anxious people high on neuroticism are using the self-affirmations and inspirational messages of posters to regulate their tendency to worry about things and become blue. The posters are a visual form of self-medication.

No matter how many posters in the locker room claim hard work pays off, or how many motivational speakers say you can do anything you put your mind to, sometimes you just can’t.

Dumas Malone says it perfectly: “Jefferson’s vision extended farther and comprehended more than that of anybody else in public life, and, thinking of himself as working for posterity, he was more concerned that things should be well started than that they be quickly finished.

The Constitution says: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The meaning of this is simply We, the people of the United States, acting freely and voluntarily as individuals, consent and agree that we will cooperate with each other in sustaining such a government as is provided for in this Constitution. The necessity for the consent of "the people" is implied in this declaration. The whole authority of the Constitution rests upon it. If they did not consent, it was of no validity. Of course it had no validity, except as between those who actually consented. No one's consent could be presumed against him, without his actual consent being given, any more than in the case of any other contract to pay money, or render service. And to make it binding upon any one, his signature, or other positive evidence of consent, was as necessary as in the case of any other-contract. If the instrument meant to say that any of "the people of the United States" would be bound by it, who did not consent, it was a usurpation and a lie. The most that can be inferred from the form, "We, the people," is, that the instrument offered membership to all "the people of the United States;" leaving it for them to accept or refuse it, at their pleasure.

I stare past her at the inspirational kitten posters. There's one of a soaking-wet kitten climbing out of a toilet with the caption "it could be worse!" "Just tell me whatever it is you're thinking," Mrs. Paulsen says. "Whatever is going through your mind right now." "I hope they didn't actually drop a cat in the toilet to get that picture," I choke out. "...Pardon?" "Nothing. Sorry.

The director J. D. Walsh says good stories should be like the poster for Transformers. There’s a huge evil robot on the left side of the poster and a huge, big army on the right side of the poster. And in the middle, at the bottom, there’s just a small family trapped in the middle. Big stories need human stakes.

Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought -- indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else -- is just like the fashions that we wear -- only much longer lived. It's a little like a boy band." "Scientific thought a boy band? How do you figure that?" "Well, every now and then a boy band comes along. We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on TV, idolise them right up until --" ... "-- the next boy band?" I suggested. "Precisely. Aristotle was a boy band. A very good one but only number six or seven. He was the best boy band until Isaac Newton, but even Newton was transplanted by an even newer boy band. Same haircuts -- but different moves." "Einstein, right?" "Right. Do you see what I'm saying?" "I think so." "Good. So try and think of maybe thirty or forty boy bands past Einstein. To where we would regard Einstein as someone who glimpsed a truth, played one good chord on seven forgettable albums." "Where is this going, Dad?" "I'm nearly there. Imagine a boy band so good that you never needed another boy band ever again. Can you imagine that?

Baby, let me tell you what's going to happen. In a few years, there are going to be beautiful posters of Malcolm X, and his photographs will be everywhere. The same people who don't give a damn now will lie and say they always supported him.

In the school library there’s an old Book Week poster that says ‘Get Lost in a Book.’ Well, we do that. We lose ourselves in books for hours and hours—books about all kinds of people and tons of different places. Then we come back, and we bring things with us. When we get lost like that, I think we find all kinds of cool stuff.

posters that say ‘don’t rape’ will prevent precisely zero rapes, because rape is already illegal, and would-be rapists know that. We can scream ‘don’t rape’ until we’re blue in the face, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference. It has to be possible to say simultaneously that rape is reprehensible and that it is OK – in fact, essential – to offer advice that could help to reduce its incidence.

And so many of the indies have partnered with Google to sell ebooks right from their own websites. These stores are embracing the “new technology” instead of hiding from it, because they realize it’s about the story, not the ink on paper. If you want ebooks, your local indie can sell you ebooks. If your local independent is hanging up posters saying that ebooks will kill everything, you should tag that bookstore as a favorite in your GPS doohickey. You’ll get great deals, because that store will have a going-out-of-business sale soon. Yes, even though you try to save it with a letter-writing campaign.

The 2-Man seniorest males’ bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it and a calligraphic poster saying EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT, and the answer to Gately’s knock is a moan,

This is the list you carry in your pocket, of the things you plan to say to Kay, when you find him, if you find him: 1. I’m sorry that I forgot to water your ferns while you were away that time. 2. When you said that I reminded you of your mother, was that a good thing? 3. I never really liked your friends all that much. 4. None of my friends ever really liked you. 5. Do you remember when the cat ran away, and I cried and cried and made you put up posters, and she never came back? I wasn’t crying because she didn’t come back. I was crying because I’d taken her to the woods, and I was scared she’d come back and tell you what I’d done, but I guess a wolf got her, or something. She never liked me anyway. 6. I never liked your mother. 7. After you left, I didn’t water your plants on purpose. They’re all dead. 8. Goodbye. 9. Were you ever really in love with me? 10. Was I good in bed, or just average? 11. What exactly did you mean, when you said that it was fine that I had put on a little weight, that you thought I was even more beautiful, that I should go ahead and eat as much as I wanted, but when I weighed myself on the bathroom scale, I was exactly the same weight as before, I hadn’t gained a single pound? 12. So all those times, I’m being honest here, every single time, and anyway I don’t care if you don’t believe me, I faked every orgasm you ever thought I had. Women can do that, you know. You never made me come, not even once. 13. So maybe I’m an idiot, but I used to be in love with you. 14. I slept with some guy, I didn’t mean to, it just kind of happened. Is that how it was with you? Not that I’m making any apologies, or that I’d accept yours, I just want to know. 15. My feet hurt, and it’s all your fault. 16. I mean it this time, goodbye.

Figure, movement. Everything happens, says Pascal, from figure and movement. To say in this case that everything happens from movement, for every figure is no more than the lingering trace of a movement that has already ceased. Thus the letters that I am forming now, for example, are only the pen's lingering trace of the movement of my hand.

Percy's enjoying work, then? said Harry, sitting down on one of the beds and watching the Chudley Cannons zooming in and out of the posters on the ceiling. 'Enjoying it?' said Ron darkly. 'I don't reckon he'd come home if Dad didn't make him. He's obsessed. Just don't get him onto the subject of his boss. "According to Mr Crouch" ... "as I was saying to Mr Crouch" ... "Mr Crouch is of the opinion" ... "Mr Crouch was telling" ... They'll announcing their engagement any day now.

One boy lost the treasured lunchbox note from his mother saying 'good luck'. He cried, alone in his room, then threw a toy car at his father's framed Coltrane poster. It smashed. He felt better. The father dutifully swept up all the glass and understood.

All those posters and PSAs and health class presentations on body image and the way you can burst blood vessels in your face and rupture your esophagus if you can’t stop ramming those sno balls down your throat every night, knowing they’ll have to come back up again, you sad weak girl. Because of all this, Coach surely can’t tell a girl, a sensitive, body-conscious teenage girl, to get rid of the tender little tuck around her waist, can she? She can. Coach can say anything. And there’s Emily, keening over the toilet bowl after practice, begging me to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of donut sticks, cheese powder, and haribo. I kick, I do. She would do the same for me.

some people had told me racism was a thing of he past, they'd told me not to get involved. But that was nuts. They were nuts. And more to the point---they's all been white people. Well guess what? I'm white too ---and that's exactly why I'm marching. I had to. Because racism was alive and real as shit. It was everywhere and all mixed up in everything, and the only people who aids it wasn't, and the only people was said, "Don't talk about it" were white. Well, stop lying. That's what I wanted to tell those people. Stop lying. Stop Denying. That's why I'm marching. Nothing was going to change unless we did something about it. We! White people! We had to stand up and say something about it goo, because otherwise it was just like what those posters in the crowd outside school said: OUR SILENCE IS ANOTHER KIND OF VIOLENCE.

Caroline nodded. "I understand that. The bayou is a huge part of your life and the local lifestyle. And people might come in here because of the bayou, but they don't fall in love with it and come back because of that. They fall in love and come back because they feel like a part of the family. Because they feel welcome and accepted here. That's what all of this represents." She gestured to encompass all of the photographs they had hanging on the wall. "I think these photographs are key. The posters and sports banners are great, but these photographs need to stay for sure.

Not your fault,” Lorenzo says. But it is. And my fault didn’t start when I signed Morgan’s contract on Thursday. My fault started two decades ago, the first time I didn’t vote, the umpteen times I told Jackie I was too busy to go on one of her marches or make posters or call my congressmen.

Some of our religious people saw Osama bin Laden as a hero. In the bazaar you could buy posters of him on a white horse and boxes of sweets with his picture on them. These clerics said 9/11 was revenge on the Americans for what they had been doing to other people around the world, but they ignored the fact that the people in the World Trade Center were innocent and had nothing to do with American policy and that the Holy Quran clearly says it is wrong to kill.

I am not working for posterity, M. de Charlus replied, I am content with life, it is quite interesting enough, as poor Swann used to say.

I once read that if the folds in the cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex would be if you ironed it out. I thought it might just about cover a family-sized pizza: not bad, but no card-table. I was astonished to realize that nobody seems to know the answer. A quick search yielded the following estimates for the smoothed out dimensions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain. An article in Bioscience in November 1987 by Julie Ann Miller claimed the cortex was a "quarter-metre square." That is napkin-sized, about ten inches by ten inches. Scientific American magazine in September 1992 upped the ante considerably with an estimated of 1 1/2 square metres; thats a square of brain forty inches on each side, getting close to the card-table estimate. A psychologist at the University of Toronto figured it would cover the floor of his living room (I haven't seen his living room), but the prize winning estimate so far is from the British magazine New Scientist's poster of the brain published in 1993 which claimed that the cerebral cortex, if flattened out, would cover a tennis court. How can there be such disagreement? How can so many experts not know how big the cortex is? I don't know, but I'm on the hunt for an expert who will say the cortex, when fully spread out, will cover a football field. A Canadian football field.

The gym where I work out in Tokyo has a poster that says, “Muscles are hard to get and easy to lose. Fat is easy to get and hard to lose.” A painful reality, but a reality all the same.

Only God was able to create a free creature, and freedom could only arise by the act of creation. Freedom is not the result or product of evolution. Freedom and product are disparate ideas. God does not produce or construct. He creates. We used to say the same for artists, for the artist who constructs does not create a personality but rather a poster of man. A personality cannot be constructed. Maybe sooner or later, during this century or after a million years of continued civilization, man will succeed in constructing an imitation of himself, a kind of robot or monster, something similar to its constructor. This human-looking monster may look very much like man, but one thing is certain: it will never have freedom. Without a divine touch, the result of evolution would not have been man, but rather a developed animal, a super-animal, a creature with a human body and intelligence but without a heart and personality.

That unique Moscow mix of tackiness and menace. One time I see a poster advertising a new property development that captures the tone nicely. Got up in the style of Nazi propaganda, it shows two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan "Life is Getting Better". It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it's not quite serious either. It's sort of both. It's saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we're just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we're making money playing it and won't let anyone subvert its rules).

Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine?” “Both,” replied Elizabeth archly; “for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.

His window was open, and a note was taped to the sill that said he’d run off to start a new life with his true love, the poster. It went on to say he knew we wouldn’t understand but he couldn’t fight destiny.

So what is it really like? What happens when people die?" Noor asks Alice Bhatti, who after finishing her shift has changed into a loose maxi and is lying down on a wheelie stretcher, her forearm covering her eyes. A half-torn poster on the wall behind the stretcher says : Bhai, your blood will bring a revolution. Someone has scrawled under it with a marker: And that revolution will bring more blood. Someone has added Insha'allah in an attempt to introduce divine intervention into the proceedings. Some more down-to-earth soul has tried to give this revolution a direction, and drawn an arrow underneath and scribbled, Bhai, the Blood Bank is in Block C.

They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your own thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It's a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.

Andrea Meyer: What do you think your films offer to people today? Agnès Varda: I would say energy. I would say love for filming, intuition. I mean, a woman working with her intuition and trying to be intelligent. It's like a stream of feelings, intuition, and joy of discovering things. Finding beauty where it's maybe not. Seeing. And, on the other hand, trying to be structural, organized; trying to be clever. And doing what I believe is cinécriture, what I always call cine-writing. Which is not a screenplay. Which is not only the narration words. It's choosing the subject, choosing the place, the season, the crew, choosing the shots, the place, the lens, the light. Choosing your attitude towards people, towards actors. Then choosing the editing, the music. Choosing contemporary musicians. Choosing the tune of the mixing. Choosing the publicity material, the press book, the poster. You know, it's a handmade work of filmmaking - that I really believe. And I call that cine-writing.

And truly, God does   not make known his will to us, that the knowledge of it may perish with   us; but that we may be his witnesses to posterity and that they may   deliver the knowledge received through us, from hand to hand, (as we   say,) to their descendants.

for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds.—We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.

I slowly dug a stand-up foxhole up to my neck using my helmet. I don’t think any of us slept that night. It was the first time in my tour when I wasn’t sure I would make it. I’m not ashamed to say I did a lot of thinking about home and a lot of praying to the man upstairs.

It's not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is the exact typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of 'Eyes Wide Shut' and '2001'. 'It's Futura Extra Bold,' explains Tony. 'It was Stanley's favorite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant.' 'Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to talk about?' I asked. 'God, yes,' says Tony. 'Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs.

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS From Ray Bradbury Imagine that you have been dead for a year, ten years, one hundred years, a thousand years. The grave and night have taken and kept you in that silence and dark which says nothing and so reveals absolutely zero. In the middle of all this darkness and being alone and bereft of sense, let us imagine that God comes to your still soul and lonely body and says: I will give you one minute of ife. I will restore you to your body and senses for sixty seconds. Out of all the minutes in your life, choose one, I will put you in that minute, and you will be alive again after a hundred, a thousand years of darkness. Which is it? Think. Speak. Which do you choose? And the answer is: Any minute. Any minute at all! Oh, God, Sweet Christ, oh mystery, give me any minute in all my life. And the further answer is: When I lived I didn't know that every minute was special, precious a gift, a miracle, an incredible thing, an impossible work, an amazing dream. But not, Like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Morn, with snow in the air and the promise of rebirth given, I know what I should have known in my dumb shambles: That all is a lark, and it is a beauty beyond tears, and also a terror. But I dance about, I become a child, I am the boy who runs for the great bird in the window and I am the man who sends the boy running for that bird, and I am the life that blows in the snowing wind along that street, and the bells that sound and say: live, love, for too soon will your name which is shaped in the snow melt, of your soul which is inscribed like a breath of vapor on a cold glass pane fade. Run, run, lad, run, down the middle of Christmas at the center of life.

Both," replied Elizabeth archly; "for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb.

Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don’t want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.

The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.

I was marching. I kept saying it as I scanned the crowd for Jill, pumping myself up, because some people had told me racism was a thing of the past, they's told me not to get involved. But that was nuts. They were nuts. And more to the point - they'd all been white people. Well, guess what? I'm white too - and that's exactly why I was marching. I had to. Because racism was alive and real as shit. It was everywhere and all mixed up in everything, and the only people who said it wasn't, and the only people who said "Don't talk about it" were white. Well, stop lying. That's what I wanted to tell those people. Stop lying. Stop denying. That's why I was marching. Nothing was going to change unless we did something about it. We! White people! We had to stand up and say something about it too, because otherwise it was just like what one of those posters in the crowd outside school said: OUR SILENCE IS ANOTHER KIND OF VIOLENCE

The impulse to scratch when i itch or to pull to pieces when i am inquisitive is immune from the solvent which is fatal to my justice, or honour, or care for posterity. When all that says it is good’ has been debunked, what says 1 want’ remains. it cannot be exploded or ‘seen through’ because it never had any pretentions.

Betty once had self-image problems, but she overcame them. A Morninglight poster decorates her wall. Much-read pamphlets sit in her bathroom. Philip Marquard's audio book on self-actualisation plays in her earphones. Fresh signatures fill the forms on her clipboard. Bottles of Morninglight dietary supplements and nutrient pills fill her medicine cabinet. By her bed is an autographed picture of Philip Marquard, the one she secretly kisses before going to sleep. Every night she dreams of freeing herself from her mortal shell and ascending into the cosmos to soar with the whale-mollusc gods. There are new recruits chained to Betty's walls. She has their signatures. They tested as having self-image problems, as she once had. Smiling, she tells them they are all beautiful. She opens them with a knife, shows them the beauty inside. "Look!" she says, tears streaming. "We are all made of stars!" Then she practises eating stars, waiting for enlightenment to take hold.

Listen Peter,’ he said seriously. ‘What I'm about to say is extremely important, not only for your own good, but for the good of everybody. You've certainly seen the war posters about careless talk costing lives.’ I nodded. ‘What you've just said is an example of careless talk. It's very dangerous. It could even cost your own life.

He pulled a Tupperware container out of the fridge and set it next to the carton of eggs. “Why do I get the feeling you weren’t there to catch a Cubs game?” She ignored his question. “Are those prechopped peppers in that Tupperware container?” Troy cracked an egg into a bowl. “Yeah.” “I’m not sleeping with you.” “Jesus,” he choked out. “How did we arrive here from prechopped peppers?” Ruby pushed back her chair and stood, the poster child for nervous energy. “You must cook for girls pretty often to chop up peppers in advance, that’s all I’m saying. So if there are strings attached to that omelet, I don’t want it. No matter how good it tastes, the answer is no.

But what can we do?’ Otto Quangel says, unnerved by this onslaught. ‘There are so few of us, and all those millions for him, and now, after the victory against France, there will be even more. We can do nothing!’ ‘We can do plenty!’ she whispers. ‘We can vandalize the machines, we can work badly, work slowly, we can tear down their posters and put up others where we tell people the truth about how they are being cheated and lied to.’ She drops her voice further: ‘But the main thing is that we remain different from them, that we never allow ourselves to be made into them, or start thinking as they do. Even if they conquer the whole world, we must refuse to become Nazis.

There are two ways to turn devils into angels: First, acknowledge things about them that you genuinely appreciate. Uncle Morty took you to the beach when you were a kid. Your mom still sends you money on your birthday. Your ex-wife is a good mother to your children. There must be something you sincerely appreciate about this person. Shift your attention from the mean and nasty things they have said or done to the kind and helpful things they have said or done—even if there are just a few or even only one. You have defined this person by their iniquities. You can just as easily—actually, more easily—define them by their redeeming qualities. It’s your movie. Change the script. Perhaps you are still arguing that the person who has hurt you has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She is evil incarnate, Rosemary’s baby conceived with Satan himself, poster child for the dark side of the Force, destined to wreak havoc and horror in the lives of everyone she touches. A nastier bitch never walked the earth. Got it. Let’s say all of this is true—the person who troubles you is a no-good, cheating, lying SOB. Now here’s the second devil-transformer. Consider: How has this person helped you to grow? What spiritual muscles have you developed that you would not have built if this person had been nicer to you? Have you learned to hold your power and self-esteem in the presence of attempted insult? Do you now speak your truth more quickly and directly? Are you now asking for what you want instead of passively deferring? Are you setting healthier boundaries? Have you deepened in patience and compassion? Do you make more self-honoring choices? There are many benefits you might have gained, or still might gain, from someone who challenges you.

I think of published poets that you could know of...I think [Rainer Maria Rilke] probably has the most great published poems of any poet [...] but Rilke himself was an asshole. If you look at his biography, he was probably misogynist; he was a liar, a cheat; he was a terrible father; he was selfish; he put people down; he had no consideration for anyone [...] yet, he transcends that in his greatest poems. There's that ineffable, spiritual quality - that he himself couldn't reach! But somewhere underneath that reptilian exterior, that asshole exterior of Rainer Maria Rilke, there was some good that came through – like these little sunbursts coming through clouds – that had that moment. And he'd write the Duino Elegies, he'd write the New Poems, and somewhere, that came through. And that's an amazing thing: you can have a lot of great people who are great individuals, who are loving and caring – and they can't do that. And that's not to say that their lives are meaningless, but they will never be able to affect anyone past the propinquity of their existence. They are never going to be able to affect someone in China; they are never going to be able to affect someone in 2132 the way Rilke can. And that specialness needs to be acknowledged; that specialness needs to be upheld; it needs to be rewarded, and people need to say, 'Goddamn – that's a good thing! It's a good thing that people make art!

Kilgore here will keep the record straight.” “Kilgore?” “The tape recorder. I name things. If you name things, then you treat them better.” Fiona motioned with her chin to a poster tacked to the opposite wall. “Does she have a name?” “She” was a bikini-clad model spraying a Lamborghini with a garden hose and, no, she didn’t—at least, not one I knew. I lowered my eyes. “We’ll call her Prudence, then,” Fiona said. “Now whenever you wake up, you can say, ‘Good morning, Prudence, how’s tricks? Still in the car washing game, I see.’” “‘How’s tricks’?” “‘How’s things,’” Fiona explained. “Slang from the good ol’ days. I learned it from a kid in a newsie cap.” “A newsie cap?” “We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

I can’t say for certain what the future will hold, but at the risk of sounding like a cheesy motivational poster, know this: life ebbs and flows, and there’s always room for change. Humans have the capacity for growth until they leave this earth, so never feel like it’s too late for you to take another road if you’re unhappy with the one you’re traveling.

Provided that a writer of almanacs has already gained enough authority for people to bother to read his books, examining his words for implications and shades of meaning, he can be made to say anything whatever – like Sybils. There are so many ways of taking anything, that it is hard for a clever mind not to find in almost any subject something or other which appears to serve his point, directly or indirectly. [C] That explains why an opaque, ambiguous style has been so long in vogue. All an author needs to do is to attract the concern and attention of posterity. (He may achieve that not so much by merit as by some chance interest in his subject-matter.) Then, whether out of subtlety or stupidity, he can contradict himself or express himself obscurely: no matter! Numerous minds will get out their sieves, sifting and forcing any number of ideas through them, some of them relevant, some off the point, some flat contradictory to his intentions, but all of them doing him honour. He will grow rich out of his students’ resources – like dons being paid their midsummer fees at the Lendit fair.

And the son bursting into his father's house, killing him, and at the same time not killing him, this is not even a novel, not a poem, it is a sphinx posing riddles, which it, of course, will not solve itself. If he killed him, he killed him; how can it be that he killed him and yet did not kill him--who can understand that? Then it is announced to us that our tribune is the tribune of truth and sensible ideas, and so from this tribune of 'sensible ideas' an axiom resounds, accompanied by an oath, that to call the murder of a father parricide is simply a prejudice! But if parricide is a prejudice, and if every child ought to ask his father, 'Father, why should I love you?'--what will become of us, what will become of the foundations of society, where will the family end up? Parricide--don't you see, it's just the 'brimstone' of some Moscow merchant's wife? The most precious, the most sacred precepts concerning the purpose and future of the Russian courts are presented perversely and frivolously, only to achieve a certain end, to achieve the acquittal of that which cannot be acquitted. 'Oh, overwhelm him with mercy,' the defense attorney exclaims, and that is just what the criminal wants, and tomorrow everyone will see how overwhelmed he is! And is the defense attorney not being too modest in asking only for the defendant's acquittal? Why does he not ask that a fund be established in the parricide's name, in order to immortalize his deed for posterity and the younger generation? The Gospel and religion are corrected: it's all mysticism, he says, and ours is the only true Christianity, tested by the analysis of reason and sensible ideas. And so a false image of Christ is held up to us! With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you,' the defense attorney exclaims, and concludes then and there that Christ commanded us to measure with the same measure as it is measured to us--and that from the tribune of truth and sensible ideas! We glance into the Gospel only on the eve of our speeches, in order to make a brilliant display of our familiarity with what is, after all, a rather original work, which may prove useful and serve for a certain effect, in good measure, all in good measure! Yet Christ tells us precisely not to do so, to beware of doing so, because that is what the wicked world does, whereas we must forgive and turn our cheek, and not measure with the same measure as our offenders measure to us. This is what our God taught us, and not that it is a prejudice to forbid children to kill their own fathers. And let us not, from the rostrum of truth and sensible ideas, correct the Gospel of our God, whom the defense attorney deems worthy of being called merely 'the crucified lover of mankind,' in opposition to the whole of Orthodox Russia, which calls out to him: 'For thou art our God...!

December 22nd STAKE YOUR OWN CLAIM “For it’s disgraceful for an old person, or one in sight of old age, to have only the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this . . . what do you say? Cleanthes said that . . . what do you say? How long will you be compelled by the claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim—something posterity will carry in its notebook.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 33.7

Comparing it to the original,” I say simply, holding the picture beside her face. She almost allows herself to laugh at that. My eyes flick between her and the poster, scanning each feature. I hand it back to her in a matter of seconds. “Not enough freckles.” “Not enough…” Her head whips in my direction, confusion crinkling her brow. “What do you mean, not enough freckles?” “I mean,” I say without looking at her, “they didn’t draw enough freckles.

If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life. The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.

The central fact of biblical history, the birth of the Messiah, more than any other, presupposes the design of Providence in the selecting and uniting of successive producers, and the real, paramount interest of the biblical narratives is concentrated on the various and wondrous fates, by which are arranged the births and combinations of the 'fathers of God.' But in all this complicated system of means, having determined in the order of historical phenomena the birth of the Messiah, there was no room for love in the proper meaning of the word. Love is, of course, encountered in the Bible, but only as an independent fact and not as an instrument in the process of the genealogy of Christ. The sacred book does not say that Abram took Sarai to wife by force of an ardent love, and in any case Providence must have waited until this love had grown completely cool for the centenarian progenitors to produce a child of faith, not of love. Isaac married Rebekah not for love but in accordance with an earlier formed resolution and the design of his father. Jacob loved Rachel, but this love turned out to be unnecessary for the origin of the Messiah. He was indeed to be born of a son of Jacob - Judah - but the latter was the offspring, not of Rachel but of the unloved wife, Leah. For the production in the given generation of the ancestor of the Messiah, what was necessary was the union of Jacob precisely with Leah; but to attain this union Providence did not awaken in Jacob any powerful passion of love for the future mother of the 'father of God' - Judah. Not infringing the liberty of Jacob's heartfelt feeling, the higher power permitted him to love Rachel, but for his necessary union with Leah it made use of means of quite a different kind: the mercenary cunning of a third person - devoted to his own domestic and economic interests - Laban. Judah himself, for the production of the remote ancestors of the Messiah, besides his legitimate posterity, had in his old age to marry his daughter-in-law Tamar. Seeing that such a union was not at all in the natural order of things, and indeed could not take place under ordinary conditions, that end was attained by means of an extremely strange occurrence very seductive to superficial readers of the Bible. Nor in such an occurrence could there be any talk of love. It was not love which combined the priestly harlot Rahab with the Hebrew stranger; she yielded herself to him at first in the course of her profession, and afterwards the casual bond was strengthened by her faith in the power of the new God and in the desire for his patronage for herself and her family. It was not love which united David's great-grandfather, the aged Boaz, with the youthful Moabitess Ruth, and Solomon was begotten not from genuine, profound love, but only from the casual, sinful caprice of a sovereign who was growing old.

This is not very practical,” the minister says, pointing at the ceiling, which is crowded with exposed air ducts, pipes, hanging bald light fixtures, and rough concrete. “All this infrastructure. It is surely not up to code? You know—a code violation?” The rest of the German officials nod in vigorous agreement. Some mutter “code violation” to reinforce her point. “Umm … er … it’s meant to embody the journey of Facebook. To show that we’re only one percent finished. I mean, I understand that before we rented this space, it was finished like those law and lobbyist offices you can see through the window. And then they had to strip back all that luxurious finishing. The carpets and everything.” “You dismantled the furnishing of a proper office to make it look like this? Like it is under construction?” one of the officials inquired, incredulous. “It’s symbolic,” I start to say. This all had sounded much more convincing in California when Sheryl explained it to the New Zealand prime minister. I start to realize that Facebook’s office is reinforcing the idea that Facebook is reckless and feckless and nothing good is going to come from continuing the tour. As the members of the German delegation stare at me in disbelief, with some audibly tutting, I make the executive decision to get to the meeting room as quickly as possible. Better to hurry past all the posters that say things like THINK WRONG, MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS, and IS THIS A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY?

They’re just so stupid,” he says, sighing. “In addition to this stupid, racist feud they have with your family, they’ve got all of these Make America Great Again posters plastered over our windows, and while we were in the living room watching a movie together, they just kept making really shitty homophobic comments. And I had enough.” He sighs again. “And you know, they had the nerve to threaten me, saying if I cost them the race tomorrow, they’ll send me to Texas to live with my grandparents.

A man will commit almost any wrong,—he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,—only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for him to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there!

He’d had the key under the rock in Buxton to worry about for years. Now he had to worry that some eager-beaver new guard would look behind his poster and expose the whole thing, or that he would get another cellmate, or that he would, after all those years, suddenly be transferred. He had all those things on his mind for the next eight years. All I can say is that he must have been one of the coolest men who ever lived. I would have gone completely nuts after awhile, living with all that uncertainty. But Andy just went on playing the game.

I meet up with Jack once I get to the city, the car service dropping me off at his basement apartment. “Nice place,” I say when I step inside, glancing around. It’s tiny, and dim, and reminds me of a cave. Posters wallpaper the place, and my eyes go straight to a Breezeo one. It’s not me. Not even the movie. It’s a poster of the Ghosted cover—same poster Kennedy had on the wall as a teenager. “Thought you weren’t a Breezeo fan.” “Never said that,” Jack says. “I said the movies were shit and you didn’t deserve to be in them. There’s a difference.

that a statesman should devote his life to studying “the science of politics, in order to acquire in advance all the knowledge that it may be necessary for him to use at some future time”; that authority in a state must always be divided; and that of the three known forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy and people—the best is a mixture of all three, for each one taken on its own can lead to disaster: kings can be capricious, aristocrats self-interested, and “an unbridled multitude enjoying unwonted power more terrifying than a conflagration or a raging sea.” Often today I reread On the Republic, and always I am moved, especially by the passage at the end of book six, when Scipio describes how his grandfather appears to him in a dream and takes him up into the heavens to show him the smallness of the earth in comparison to the grandeur of the Milky Way, where the spirits of dead statesmen dwell as stars. The description was inspired by the vast, clear night skies above the Bay of Naples: I gazed in every direction and all appeared wonderfully beautiful. There were stars which we never see from earth, and they were all larger than we have ever imagined. The starry spheres were much greater than the earth; indeed the earth itself seemed to me so small that I was scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point, as it were, upon its surface. “If only you will look on high,” the old man tells Scipio, “and contemplate this eternal home and resting place, you will no longer bother with the gossip of the common herd or put your trust in human reward for your exploits. Nor will any man’s reputation endure very long, for what men say dies with them and is blotted out with the forgetfulness of posterity.

You're the center of my world- and that scares me because I don't want to lose myself in you. I know I'm never going to tell you any of these things because, well, because there are things that I just need to keep. The men who are dying of AIDS have a poster that says SILENCE = DEATH. I think I know what that means. But for a guy like me, silence can be a place where I am free of words. Do you understand that, Dante? Before I met you, I didn't think anything about words. They were invisible to me. But now that words are visible, I think that they're much too strong for me.

But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed. Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it? Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them. I

this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest. I was accustomed to radical Muslim students from my experience as an activist and a politician in Holland. Any time I made a public speech, they would swarm to it in order to shout at me and rant in broken Dutch, in sentences so fractured you wondered how they qualified as students at all. On college campuses in the United States and Canada, by contrast, young and highly articulate people from the Muslim student associations would simply take over the debate. They would send e-mails of protest to the organizers beforehand, such as one (sent by a divinity student at Harvard) that protested that I did not “address anything of substance that actually affects Muslim women’s lives” and that I merely wanted to “trash” Islam. They would stick up posters and hand out pamphlets at the auditorium. Before I’d even stopped speaking they’d be lining up for the microphone, elbowing away all non-Muslims. They spoke in perfect English; they were mostly very well-mannered; and they appeared far better assimilated than their European immigrant counterparts. There were far fewer bearded young men in robes short enough to show their ankles, aping the tradition that says the Prophet’s companions dressed this way out of humility, and fewer girls in hideous black veils. In the United States a radical Muslim student might have a little goatee; a girl may wear a light, attractive headscarf. Their whole demeanor was far less threatening, but they were omnipresent. Some of them would begin by saying how sorry they were for all my terrible suffering, but they would then add that these so-called traumas of mine were aberrant, a “cultural thing,” nothing to do with Islam. In blaming Islam for the oppression of women, they said, I was vilifying them personally, as Muslims. I had failed to understand that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Prophet treated women very well. Several times I was informed that attacking Islam only serves the purpose of something called “colonial feminism,” which in itself was allegedly a pretext for the war on terror and the evil designs of the U.S. government. I was invited to one college to speak as part of a series of

A VALEDICTION: OF THE BOOK I'll tell thee now (dear love) what thou shalt do To anger destiny, as she doth us; How I shall stay, though she eloign me thus, And how posterity shall know it too; How thine may out-endure Sibyl's glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame, And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name. Study our manuscripts, those myriads Of letters, which have past 'twixt thee and me; Thence write our annals, and in them will be To all whom love's subliming fire invades, Rule and example found; There the faith of any ground No schismatic will dare to wound, That sees, how Love this grace to us affords, To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records. This book, as long-lived as the elements, Or as the world's form, this all-graved tome In cypher writ, or new made idiom; We for Love's clergy only are instruments; When this book is made thus, Should again the ravenous Vandals and Goths invade us, Learning were safe; in this our universe, Schools might learn sciences, spheres music, angels verse. Here Love's divines—since all divinity Is love or wonder—may find all they seek, Whether abstract spiritual love they like, Their souls exhaled with what they do not see; Or, loth so to amuse Faith's infirmity, they choose Something which they may see and use; For, though mind be the heaven, where love doth sit, Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it. Here more than in their books may lawyers find, Both by what titles mistresses are ours, And how prerogative these states devours, Transferred from Love himself, to womankind; Who, though from heart and eyes, They exact great subsidies, Forsake him who on them relies; And for the cause, honour, or conscience give; Chimeras vain as they or their prerogative. Here statesmen, (or of them, they which can read) May of their occupation find the grounds; Love, and their art, alike it deadly wounds, If to consider what 'tis, one proceed. In both they do excel Who the present govern well, Whose weakness none doth, or dares tell; In this thy book, such will there something see, As in the Bible some can find out alchemy. Thus vent thy thoughts; abroad I'll study thee, As he removes far off, that great heights takes; How great love is, presence best trial makes, But absence tries how long this love will be; To take a latitude Sun, or stars, are fitliest viewed At their brightest, but to conclude Of longitudes, what other way have we, But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?

And then she walked into the room. Like calling this place a “house” was inadequate, saying she “walked” also seemed far too tame. Accurate, yes. I mean, she didn’t do anything extraordinary. Not really. She didn’t glide into the drawing room or ride in on a white horse or anything like that. But she might as well have. She made an entrance and she made it just by entering. I didn’t say “wow” out loud, but I almost did. We both quickly stood, not because we were being gentlemen, but because something about her entrance demanded it. There, in the flesh, was the talk of the town, the movie poster come to life, Angelica Wyatt. “You

I want to go home,” I say. His arms tighten across my back. “We will,” he says. “You and me. In two days. But first I want to see everything.” “My boobs?” I joke. “Those too,” he says. “But I was thinking more like your boy band posters and embarrassing diaries.” “Joke’s on you,” I say. “The periodic table was my boy band poster.” He groans. “God, you’re such a nerd.” I lace my fingers against the back of his preternaturally warm neck. “But you still like me?” “You,” he says, “are my periodic table.” I laugh into his chest. “I don’t know what that means.” “It means when we get home,” he says, “I’m covering our walls in lewd posters of you.

Exhibit D: The Cots (or, If You Give a Librarian a Closet) If you give a librarian a closet, she will probably fill it with junk. If she fills it with junk, some of the junk will be books in need of repair. If some of the junk is books, and the closet is off of a back room anyway, she will hide more books there, books that she thinks are crap like the Stormy Sisters series, but which her boss thinks the library should keep. If she hides crappy books there, she will be in no rush to clean the closet, since she would then be out a hiding place. If she goes ten months without cleaning it, she will go to great lengths to hide the mess from her alcoholic and temperamental boss. If she wants to hide the mess from her boss, she will stuff the front of the closet with cots that were once used for nap hour of the short-lived library day care, circa 1996. If she stuffs the closet with cots… the closet will fester unopened for months. If the closet festers unopened for months, the librarian will probably decorate the closet door with cartoons and posters in an effort to distract her fellow librarians from the thought of ever opening the closet. If a librarian decorates a closet door, she will use such items as a Conan the Librarian cartoon, a large stocker that says “the world is quiet here,” a poster of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, a CPR chart, and a bookstore café napkin signed by Michael Chabon. If she uses these items, her boss will ask, “What the hell does this mean, ‘The world is quiet here’? Is it political?” And her boss will also ask, “you’re not filing Michael Chabon in the children’s section, are you?” but her boss, distracted by these items, will never think to open the door. If her boss never opens the door, she will forget she has given the librarian a closet and will, by the end of the year, offer the librarian a second closet. If she gives the librarian a second closet, the librarian will probably fill it with junk.

Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he governed France badly. The heirs of Louis XIV were also weak men, and also governed France badly. They also had such and such favourites and such and such mistresses. Besides which, certain persons were at this time writing books. By the end of the eighteenth century there gathered in Paris two dozen or so persons who started saying that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of France people began to slaughter and drown each other. These people killed the king and a good many others. At this time there was a man of genius in France – Napoleon. He conquered everyone everywhere, i.e. killed a great many people because he was a great genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did. Having made himself Emperor he again went to kill masses of people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed a great many. Now in Russia there was the Emperor Alexander, who decided to reestablish order in Europe, and therefore fought wars with Napoleon. But in the year ’07 he suddenly made friends with him, and in the year ’11 quarrelled with him again, and they both again began to kill a great many people. And Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men to Russia and conquered Moscow. But then he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and then the Emperor Alexander, aided by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe to raise an army against the disturber of her peace. All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against Napoleon, who had gathered new forces. The allies conquered Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to renounce the throne, and sent him to the island of Elba, without, however, depriving him of the title of Emperor, and showing him all respect, in spite of the fact that five years before, and a year after, everyone considered him a brigand and beyond the law. Thereupon Louis XVIII, who until then had been an object of mere ridicule to both Frenchmen and the allies, began to reign. As for Napoleon, after shedding tears before the Old Guard, he gave up his throne, and went into exile. Then astute statesmen and diplomats, in particular Talleyrand, who had managed to sit down before anyone else in the famous armchair1 and thereby to extend the frontiers of France, talked in Vienna, and by means of such talk made peoples happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs almost came to blows. They were almost ready to order their troops once again to kill each other; but at this moment Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion, and the French, who hated him, all immediately submitted to him. But this annoyed the allied monarchs very much and they again went to war with the French. And the genius Napoleon was defeated and taken to the island of St Helena, having suddenly been discovered to be an outlaw. Whereupon the exile, parted from his dear ones and his beloved France, died a slow death on a rock, and bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. As for Europe, a reaction occurred there, and all the princes began to treat their peoples badly once again.

Robin caught the door before it closed on the dingy stairwell. An old-fashioned metal staircase spiraled up around an equally antiquated birdcage lift. Concentrating on keeping her high heels from catching in the metalwork stairs, she proceeded to the first landing, passing a door carrying a laminated and framed poster saying Crowdy Graphics, and continued climbing. It was only when she reached the glass door on the floor above that Robin realized, for the first time, what kind of business she had been sent to assist. Nobody at the agency had said. The name on the paper beside the outside buzzer was engraved on the glass panel: C. B. Strike, and, underneath it, the words Private Detective.

In 2014, 54 percent of women described themselves as “unhappy with their body,” and 80 percent said that looking in the mirror “made them feel bad.” These numbers are significantly higher than in previous years. I am sure there are many contributing factors, but one is surely that, more and more, we are being presented with unrealistic standards of beauty. Models and actors are subjected to training and dietary regimens that are often unsustainable, hugely expensive, and extreme. And even then, images are cropped, airbrushed, and recolored so that the final image we end up seeing on a giant poster may not actually be anyone’s actual body but a weird hybrid of one or more people and a whole lot of digital editing.

Shockers take six months of training and still occasionally kill their users. Why did you implant them in the first place?” “Because you kidnapped me.” “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” “Mr. Rogan.” My voice frosted over. “What I put into my body is my business.” Okay, that didn’t sound right. I gave up and marched out the doors into the sunlight. That was so dumb. Sure, try your magic sex touch on me, what could happen? My whole body was still keyed up, wrapped up in want and anticipation. I had completely embarrassed myself. If I could fall through the floor, I would. “Nevada,” he said behind me. His voice rolled over me, tinted with command and enticing, promising things I really wanted. You’re a professional. Act like one. I gathered all of my will and made myself sound calm. “Yes?” He caught up with me. “We need to talk about this.” “There is nothing to discuss,” I told him. “My body had an involuntary response to your magic.” I nodded at the poster for Crash and Burn II on the wall of the mall, with Leif Magnusson flexing with two guns while wrapped in flames. “If Leif showed up in the middle of this parking lot, my body would have an involuntary response to his presence as well. It doesn’t mean I would act on it.” Mad Rogan gave Leif a dismissive glance and turned back to me. “They say admitting that you have a problem is the first step toward recovery.” He was changing his tactics. Not going to work. “You know what my problem is? My problem is a homicidal pyrokinetic Prime whom I have to bring back to his narcissistic family.” We crossed the road to the long parking lot. Grassy dividers punctuated by small trees sectioned the lot into lanes, and Mad Rogan had parked toward the end of the lane, by the exit ramp. “One school of thought says the best way to handle an issue like this is exposure therapy,” Mad Rogan said. “For example, if you’re terrified of snakes, repeated handling of them will cure it.” Aha. “I’m not handling your snake.” He grinned. “Baby, you couldn’t handle my snake.” It finally sank in. Mad Rogan, the Huracan, had just made a pass at me. After he casually almost strangled a woman in public. I texted to Bern, “Need pickup at Galeria IV.” Getting into Rogan’s car was out of the question.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words. Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to an abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye. To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

I know I’m supposed to be so smart, but guess what? I don’t remember any of it! And double-guess what? I’m totally fine now, and have been for nine and a half years. Just take a time-out and ponder that. For two-thirds of my life I’ve been totally normal. Mom and Dad bring me back to Children’s every year for an echocardiogram and X rays that even the cardiologist rolls her eyes at because I don’t need them. Walking through the halls, Mom is always, like, having a Vietnam flashback. We’ll pass some random piece of art hanging on the wall and she’ll grab onto a chair and say, Oh, God, that Milton Avery poster. Or, gulping a big breath, That ficus tree had origami cranes hanging on it that awful Christmas. And then she’ll close her eyes while everyone just stands there, and Dad hugs her really tight, tears flooding his eyes, too.

All right, you said. You had an idea about the questions: you’d be asked to give a good account of yourself, and to admit to your misdeeds, such as they were. You thought you were ready. You hadn’t been perfect, but then, perfection wouldn’t be expected. Surely not, or who would ever get in? Here are the questions, he said. What is your favourite colour? Did you love your cat? Did you ever find a coin on the pavement? Were you happy? Suddenly it’s the present tense. The first question baffles you. Do you have a favourite colour or not? You can’t remember. Everything you’ve been meaning to say in your own defence has gone right out of your head. Now a wind has begun to blow: ripped posters whirl along the street, open mouths, hands, eyes. Perhaps you should open the rucksack. You never had a cat. What do coins have to do with it? There must be some mistake.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and from, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

It is foolish to be in thrall to fame and fortune, engaged in painful striving all your life with never a moment of peace and tranquillity. Great wealth will drive you to neglect your own well-being in pursuit of it. It is asking for harm and tempting trouble. Though you leave behind at your death a mountain of gold high enough to prop up the North Star itself, it will only cause problems for those who come after you. Nor is there any point in all those pleasures that delight the eyes of fools. Big carriages, fat horses, glittering gold and jewels – any man of sensibility would view such things as gross stupidity. Toss your gold away in the mountains; hurl your jewels into the deep. Only a complete fool is led astray by avarice. Everyone would like to leave their name unburied for posterity – but the high-born and exalted are not necessarily fine people, surely. A dull, stupid person can be born into a good house, attain high status thanks to opportunity and live in the height of luxury, while many wonderfully wise and saintly men choose to remain in lowly positions, and end their days without ever having met with good fortune. A fierce craving for high status and position is next in folly to the lust for fortune. We long to leave a name for our exceptional wisdom and sensibility – but when you really think about it, desire for a good reputation is merely revelling in the praise of others. Neither those who praise us nor those who denigrate will remain in the world for long, and others who hear their opinions will be gone in short order as well. Just who should we feel ashamed before, then? Whose is the recognition we should crave? Fame in fact attracts abuse and slander. No, there is nothing to be gained from leaving a lasting name. The lust for fame is the third folly. Let me now say a few words, however, to those who dedicate themselves to the search for knowledge and the desire for understanding. Knowledge leads to deception; talent and ability only serve to increase earthly desires. Knowledge acquired by listening to others or through study is not true knowledge. So what then should we call knowledge? Right and wrong are simply part of a single continuum. What should we call good? One who is truly wise has no knowledge or virtue, nor honour nor fame. Who then will know of him, and speak of him to others? This is not because he hides his virtue and pretends foolishness – he is beyond all distinctions such as wise and foolish, gain and loss. I have been speaking of what it is to cling to one’s delusions and seek after fame and fortune. All things of this phenomenal world are mere illusion. They are worth neither discussing nor desiring.

When we were recording the Ozzmosis album we did a batch of it in New York. There was this occult bookstore...and they had everything in there on Wicca, Catholicism, Satanism, the whole nine yards. I was getting some Aleister Crowley stuff because Jimmy Page owned the castle (Crowley's former home) and the other guys were into him. ...I go to get his poster they had in there, I go "How much for this poster?" and the guy looks at me deadpan and goes "$6.66." I put seven bucks down and say "Keep the goddamn change. I can't take it, dude." So I hang the poster up and the boss man (Ozzy) walks in and he goes "Zakk, who's the guy upon the wall?" . I'm crying laughing and he goes "Zakk, who the fuck is he?!" I said "Ozz, you don't know who that is?" He goes "I don't fucking know, who is it?!" I said "Ozz! It's Aleister Crowley, bro!" He goes "Oh is that what that bald-headed cunt looks like?

Only in the four-poster of the chief spare room did she say to Hubert: “I’ve been up and seen him. D’you know, Hubert, I really believe Dinny will be all right. He’s got charm.” “What on earth,” said Hubert, turning on his elbow, “has that to do with it?” “A lot,” said Jean. “Give me a kiss, and don’t argue . . .” When his strange young visitor had gone, Wilfrid flung himself on the divan and stared at the ceiling. He felt like a general who has won a ‘victory’— the more embarrassed. Having lived for thirty-five years, owing to a variety of circumstances, in a condition of marked egoism, he was unaccustomed to the feelings which Dinny from the first had roused within him. The old-fashioned word ‘worship’ was hardly admissible, but no other adequately replaced it. When with her his sensations were so restful and refreshed that when not with her he felt like one who had taken off his soul and hung it up.

To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

I think this ‘When does life begin’ argument is kind of cute, but it’s dead end. If we let it go long enough somebody will get punched in the nose, or Brittain will have a coronary incident. No offense, Sally, but most of the right-to-lifers I know—and I know a lot of them because they call at our house pretty regularly to say how much they hate my dad—get all wrapped up with life in the womb, and life after death, for that matter, but they don’t give a rip about life after birth. All you have to do is look around to see we’ve got big trouble in that area. People are starving to death all over the world. Their lives are spent trying to get something into their bellies, which they never get, and then they die. And to tell you the truth, the people who seem willing to fight to the death, or who are at least willing to carry a poster in front of the Deaconess clinic, are politically against giving them anything. The second they’re born, they’re on their own.

We love the unexpected, the gloriously chaotic combination of a million different elements. We love things that have history. We’re not looking for perfection. If we love something, we will find a way to make it fit. We love rock ’n’ roll style as well as farmhouse. We love boho and hippie and country. The truth is, we’re a little of all those things combined. You could say we have commitment issues. We love color, but we also love white. We love vintage concert posters mixed with red-lacquered Asian pieces, then combined with chippy, peely farmhouse furniture and maybe topped off with fringed velvet curtains. For us, the design process is a gut-wrenchingly beautiful thing, a deeply meditative process, a cultural exploration of who you are, and it’s one of the most personal things you can do. If a home is set up the right way, there’s something you can feel, and it’s not for anyone else; it’s for yourself. All the stars (or the chandeliers) align, and you just know: It’s right.

Trina, I never expected to fall in love again. I thought I got my shot, and I was okay with that, because I had my girls. I didn’t realize anything was missing. Then came you.” Ms. Rothschild’s hands are covering her mouth. She has tears in her eyes. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Trina.” Ms. Rothschild starts choking on her candy, and Daddy leaps up off his knee and starts pounding her on the back. She’s coughing like crazy. From his tree Peter whispers, “Should I go do the Heimlich on her? I know how to do it.” “Peter, my dad’s a doctor!” I whisper back. “He’s got it.” As her coughing subsides, she stands up straight and wipes her eyes. “Wait. Were you asking me to marry you?” “I was trying to,” Daddy says. “Are you all right?” “Yes!” She claps her hands to her cheeks. “Yes, you’re all right, or yes, you’ll marry me?” Daddy asks her, and he’s only half kidding. “Yes, I’ll marry you!” she screams, and Daddy reaches for her, and they kiss. “This feels private,” I whisper to Kitty. “It’s all part of the show,” she whispers back. Daddy hands Ms. Rothschild the ring box. I can’t quite make out what he says next, but whatever it was, it makes her double over laughing. “What’s he saying?” Kitty asks me, just as Peter says, “What did he say?” “I can’t hear! Both of you be quiet! You’re ruining the video!” Which is when Ms. Rothschild looks over in our direction. Shoot. We all pop back behind our respective trees, and then I hear Daddy’s wry voice call out, “You can come out, guys. She said yes!” We run out from behind the trees; Kitty launches herself into Ms. Rothschild’s arms. They fall over onto the grass, and Ms. Rothschild is laughing breathlessly, her laughter echoing through the woods. I hug Daddy, and meanwhile Peter’s still playing videographer, recording the moment for posterity like the good boyfriend he is. “Are you happy?” I ask, looking up at my dad. His eyes brimming with tears, he nods and hugs me tighter. And just like that, our little family grows bigger.

To sit indoors was silly. I postponed the search for Savchenko and Ludmila till the next day and went wandering about Paris. The men wore bowlers, the women huge hats with feathers. On the café terraces lovers kissed unconcernedly - I stopped looking away. Students walked along the boulevard St. Michel. They walked in the middle of the street, holding up traffic, but no one dispersed them. At first I thought it was a demonstration - but no, they were simply enjoying themselves. Roasted chestnuts were being sold. Rain began to fall. The grass in the Luxembourg gardens was a tender green. In December! I was very hot in my lined coat. (I had left my boots and fur cap at the hotel.) There were bright posters everywhere. All the time I felt as though I were at the theatre. I have lived in Paris off and on for many years. Various events, snatches of conversation have become confused in my memory. But I remember well my first day there: the city electrified my. The most astonishing thing is that is has remained unchanged; Moscow is unrecognizable, but Paris is still as it was. When I come to Paris now, I feel inexpressibly sad - the city is the same, it is I who have changed. It is painful for me to walk along the familiar streets - they are the streets of my youth. Of course, the fiacres, the omnibuses, the steam-car disappeared long ago; you rarely see a café with red velvet or leather settees; only a few pissoirs are left - the rest have gone into hiding underground. But these, after all, are minor details. People still live out in the streets, lovers kiss wherever they please, no one takes any notice of anyone. The old houses haven't changed - what's another half a century to them; at their age it makes no difference. Say what you will, the world has changed, and so the Parisians, too, must be thinking of many things of which they had no inkling in the old days: the atom bomb, mass-production methods, Communism. But with their new thoughts they still remain Parisians, and I am sure that if an eighteen-year-old Soviet lad comes to Paris today he will raise his hands in astonishment, as I did in 1908: "A theatre!

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Epilogue Part I If you listen to my sayings. All your affairs will go forward; In their truth resides their value, Their memory goes on in the speeds of men, Because of the worth of their precepts; If every word is carried on. They will not perish in this land. If advice ıs given for the good, The great will speak accordingly; It is teaching a man to speak to posterity, He who hears it becomes a master-hearer; It is good to speak to posterity, It will listen to it. If a good example is set by him who leads, He will be beneficent for ever, His wisdom being for all time. The wise feeds his ba with what endures, So that it is happy with, him on earth. The wise is known by his wisdom, The great by his good actions; His heart matches his tongue. His lips are straight when he speaks; He has eyes that see, His ears are made to hear what will profit his son. Acting with truth he is free of falsehood. Useful is hearing to a son who hears; If hearing enters the hearer, The hearer becomes a listener. Hearing well is speaking well. Useful is hearing to one who hears, Hearing is better than all else, It creates good will. How good for a son to grasp his father’s words, He will reach old age through them. He who hears is beloved of god, He whom god hates does not hear. The heart makes of its owner a hearer or non-hearer, Man’s heart is his life-prosperity-health! The hearer is one who hears what is said. He who loves to hear is one who does what is said. How good for a son to listen to his father. How happy is he to whom it is said: “The son, he pleases as a master of hearing.” The hearer of whom this is said, He is well-endowed And honored by his father; His remembrance is in the mouth of the living. Those on earth and those who will be. If a man’s son accepts his father's words. No plan of his will go wrong. Teach your son to be a hearer, One who will be valued by the nobles; One who guides his speech by what he was told, One regarded as a hearer. This son excels, his deeds stand out. While failure follows him who hears not. The wise wakes early to his lasting gain, While the foot is hard pressed.

Personally, I would agitate quite adamantly if I suspected that anyone were attempting to help me upward toward the middle class. I would agitate against the bemused person who was attempting to help me upward, that is. The agitation would take the form of many protest marches complete with the traditional banners and posters, but these would say, “End the Middle Class,” “The Middle Class Must Go.” I am not above tossing a small Molotov cocktail or two, either. In addition, I would studiously avoid sitting near the middle class in lunch counters and on public transportation, maintaining the intrinsic honesty and grandeur of my being. If a middle-class white were suicidal enough to sit next to me, I imagine that I would beat him soundly about the head and shoulders with one great hand, tossing, quite deftly, one of my Molotov cocktails into a passing bus jammed with middle-class whites with the other hand. Whether my siege were to last a month or a year, I am certain that ultimately everyone would let me alone after the total carnage and destruction of property had been evaluated.

Why can't we sit together? What's the point of seat reservations,anyway? The bored woman calls my section next,and I think terrible thoughts about her as she slides my ticket through her machine. At least I have a window seat. The middle and aisle are occupied with more businessmen. I'm reaching for my book again-it's going to be a long flight-when a polite English accent speaks to the man beside me. "Pardon me,but I wonder if you wouldn't mind switching seats.You see,that's my girlfriend there,and she's pregnant. And since she gets a bit ill on airplanes,I thought she might need someone to hold back her hair when...well..." St. Clair holds up the courtesy barf bag and shakes it around. The paper crinkles dramatically. The man sprints off the seat as my face flames. His pregnant girlfriend? "Thank you.I was in forty-five G." He slides into the vacated chair and waits for the man to disappear before speaking again. The guy onhis other side stares at us in horror,but St. Clair doesn't care. "They had me next to some horrible couple in matching Hawaiian shirts. There's no reason to suffer this flight alone when we can suffer it together." "That's flattering,thanks." But I laugh,and he looks pleased-until takeoff, when he claws the armrest and turns a color disturbingy similar to key lime pie. I distract him with a story about the time I broke my arm playing Peter Pan. It turned out there was more to flying than thinking happy thoughts and jumping out a window. St. Clair relaxes once we're above the clouds. Time passes quickly for an eight-hour flight. We don't talk about what waits on the other side of the ocean. Not his mother. Not Toph.Instead,we browse Skymall. We play the if-you-had-to-buy-one-thing-off-each-page game. He laughs when I choose the hot-dog toaster, and I tease him about the fogless shower mirror and the world's largest crossword puzzle. "At least they're practical," he says. "What are you gonna do with a giant crossword poster? 'Oh,I'm sorry Anna. I can't go to the movies tonight. I'm working on two thousand across, Norwegian Birdcall." "At least I'm not buying a Large Plastic Rock for hiding "unsightly utility posts.' You realize you have no lawn?" "I could hide other stuff.Like...failed French tests.Or illegal moonshining equipment." He doubles over with that wonderful boyish laughter, and I grin. "But what will you do with a motorized swimming-pool snack float?" "Use it in the bathtub." He wipes a tear from his cheek. "Ooo,look! A Mount Rushmore garden statue. Just what you need,Anna.And only forty dollars! A bargain!" We get stumped on the page of golfing accessories, so we switch to drawing rude pictures of the other people on the plane,followed by rude pictures of Euro Disney Guy. St. Clair's eyes glint as he sketches the man falling down the Pantheon's spiral staircase. There's a lot of blood. And Mickey Mouse ears. After a few hours,he grows sleepy.His head sinks against my shoulder. I don't dare move.The sun is coming up,and the sky is pink and orange and makes me think of sherbet.I siff his hair. Not out of weirdness.It's just...there. He must have woken earlier than I thought,because it smells shower-fresh. Clean. Healthy.Mmm.I doze in and out of a peaceful dream,and the next thing I know,the captain's voice is crackling over the airplane.We're here. I'm home.

Those groans men use passing a woman on the street or on the steps of the subway to tell her she is a female and their flesh knows it, are they a sort of tune, an ugly enough song, sung by a bird with a slit tongue but meant for music? Or are they the muffled roaring of deafmutes trapped in a building that is slowly filling with smoke? Perhaps both. Such men most often look as if groan were all they could do, yet a woman, in spite of herself, knows it's a tribute: if she were lacking all grace they'd pass her in silence: so it's not only to say she's a warm hole. It's a word in grief-language, nothing to do with primitive, not an ur-language; language stricken, sickened, cast down in decrepitude. She wants to throw the tribute away, dis- gusted, and can't, it goes on buzzing in her ear, it changes the pace of her walk, the torn posters in echoing corridors spell it out, it quakes and gnashes as the train comes in. Her pulse sullenly had picked up speed, but the cars slow down and jar to a stop while her understanding keeps on translating: 'Life after life after life goes by without poetry, without seemliness, without love.

Angel From Montgomery" I am an old woman named after my mother My old man is another child that's grown old If dreams were lightning, thunder were desire This old house would have burnt down a long time ago Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery Make me a poster of an old rodeo Just give me one thing that I can hold on to To believe in this living is just a hard way to go When I was a young girl well, I had me a cowboy He weren't much to look at, just a free rambling man But that was a long time and no matter how I try The years just flow by like a broken down dam Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery Make me a poster of an old rodeo Just give me one thing that I can hold on to To believe in this living is just a hard way to go There's flies in the kitchen, I can hear 'em there buzzing And I ain't done nothing since I woke up today How the hell can a person go to work in the morning And come home in the evening and have nothing to say Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery Make me a poster of an old rodeo Just give me one thing that I can hold on to To believe in this living is just a hard way to go John Prine, John Prine (1971)

It is fatally easy, under the conditions of the modern world, for a writer of genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah. Other writers, indeed, may have had profound insights before him; but we readily believe that everything is relative to its period of society, and that these insights have now lost their validity; a new generation is a new world, so there is always a chance, if not of delivering a wholly new gospel, of delivering one as good as new. Or the messiahship may take the form of revealing for the first time the gospel of some dead sage, which no one has understood before; which owing to the backward and confused state of men's minds has lain unknown to this very moment; or it may even go back to the lost Atlantis and the ineffable wisdom of primitive peoples. A writer who is fired with such a conviction is likely to have some devoted disciples; but for posterity he is liable to become, what he will be for the majority of his contemporaries, merely one among many entertainers. And the pity is that the man may have had something to say of the greatest importance: but to announce, as your own discovery, some truth long known to mankind, is to secure immediate attention at the price of ultimate neglect.

God requires integrity and holiness of life; he indicated by the symbol how this could be attained, that is, by cutting off in man whatever is born of the flesh, for his whole nature had become vicious. He therefore reminded Abraham by the external sign, that he was spiritually to cut off the corruption of the flesh; and to this Moses has also alluded in De 10:16. And to show that it was not the work of man, but of God, he commanded tender infants to be circumcised, who, on account of their age, could not have performed such a command. Moses has indeed expressly mentioned spiritual circumcision as the work of divine power, as you will find in De 30:6, where he says, “The Lord will circumcise thine heart:” and the Prophets afterwards declared the same thing much more clearly. As there are two points in baptism now, so there were formerly in circumcision; for it was a symbol of a new life, and also of the remission of sins. But the fact as to Abraham himself, that righteousness preceded circumcision, is not always the case in sacraments, as it is evident from the case of Isaac and his posterity: but God intended to give such an instance once at the beginning, that no one might ascribe salvation to external signs.

Speech at the annual rally of young officer cadets at the Berlin Sportpalast December 18, 1940 If somebody characterizes the morale of a company as bad, then the company leader is responsible for this. If somebody characterizes the morale of a regiment as bad, then the regiment’s commander is responsible for this. A leader is always responsible for his followers. He passes his own spirit on to his followers. If he shows signs of weakness, then his followers will also become weak. If he shows signs of resistance and valor, then his followers will resist and will be valiant. If he shows signs of heroism, then his followers will die heroically. If he shows signs of cowardly capitulation, then his followers will capitulate. The leader of any organization is not only the bearer of its shield. He also fashions its character, its valor. And, in turn, in this sense, he is also responsible for its defeatism. You must hence pass on the faith and insights which you possess to your followers. They must believe in you. And you must always and at all times be the banner, the living banner, behind which they march, an example in all things to the soldier. If this idea continues to suffuse the entire Wehrmacht to the extent which we are already witnessing today to our great joy and pride-then this Wehrmacht will be invincible. And then this age in which we live will not only be a great age for all of us now, but it will also be regarded as an age of enlightenment by future generations. Just as we think with shame of the years 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, and so on, so posterity will think with pride and joy of the age we are fashioning at present. Then, we will have done our duty. A man cannot expect more from life. Everyone will die sooner or later. Thus, there is only one question: how did he live his life? Did he live decently? Did he live courageously? Did he live faithfully and did he fulfill his duties? Or did he live like a drone among his Volk? Did he live as one of those who go with the flow of lethargy or apathy? That is the question. And if there is one reason for living, then it is to be able to say in one’s old age: “For my part, I did my duty. I always was indifferent to what the others did.” When one day you look back to this age, I wish that you will be able to do one thing: to look back with a feeling of pride: “Back then, when the Greater German Reich was fighting for its destiny, I was a soldier. I was an officer back then and I did my duty for this eternal Germany!

I’m tired of thinking about Agatha. Well, not about her, but about my loss of her. Today I went through some old boxes of mine and found some journal entries I wrote in the second grade. One was about the loss of a girl, the S name on my list, so I’ll copy and paste it for posterity: Today was a bad day. Stephany broke up with me for Tommy. I don’t like that slimy Tommy. Tommy is a turtle. I used to like turtles but now I like warm blooded creetures. Maybe Stephany is a reptile disguised as a human jerkface. I won’t cry because I am a soldier. Soldiers do not dispense tears. Soldiers kill their enemies. Tommy is my enemy. But the code of the moose says a warrior must eat what he kills. Does this mean I should have eaten my neighbors cat? I will not cry today or ever. I am fearless like my dad. My dad is a superhero. He is courageous and invisible. I haven’t seen him in four years. When I see him next he’ll probably tell me I am taller. Maybe I will tell him he is shorter. And fatter and balder. Maybe he will appear again and I can be normal. I would very much like to not wear wooden shoes anymore. Cats tongues are rough like sandpaper. Cats must never lick my shoes. Nobody licked my shoes the way Stephany did. I will miss her and her early-onset male pattern baldness.

I stood next to Breeze in a small quartz room. A sea lantern served as the only light source, bathing the room in its pale blue light. Against the center of one wall stood a mysterious object. It was three meters tall, three meters wide, and flat, like a banner. However, instead of dyed wool was a surface like the calmest pool of water. Breeze reached out with her right hand. Her fingers touched those of her reflection. After she lowered her arm, we continued staring at ourselves in silence. In awe. It was the first time we'd seen ourselves this way. But more than that were our outfits. Our clothes were made of spider silk, a type of cloth crafted using spider string. Puddles, the owner of the Clothing Castle, had worked with the humans for days to craft perfect recreations of Earth fashion. Then, to make us look even more majestic, our cloaks had been modified to fall over our shoulders. Poster children. Symbols of hope. Villagetown's biggest stars. That's what we've become. Some say it's sweet: a budding romance between two young heroes fighting valiantly against all odds. I'd say that's an exaggeration. Although Breeze and I are close, we haven't had much time for anything beyond battle or preparing for the next. I guess the mayor wants to change that, though. The people need something to believe in, he says. I suppose that's why he whisked us away in

Rejoice, O father Adam, and exult yet more, O mother Eve—you who, though the parents of all, were their destroyers even before you became their parents. Be consoled now in your daughter, and in such a daughter! you especially, O Eve, from whom the evil first originated, and whose reproach passed as a disgraceful legacy to womanhood. The time is at hand when that reproach shall be taken away. Wherefore, O Eve, hasten to Mary; hasten, O Mother, to your daughter. Let the daughter answer for the mother; let her take away her mother’s reproach; let her satisfy also for her father Adam, for if he fell by a woman, behold, he is now raised up by a woman. God gave a woman in exchange for a woman; a prudent woman for one that was foolish; a humble woman for one who was proud; one who, instead of the fruit of death, shall give you to eat of the tree of life, and who, in place of the poisoned food of bitterness, will bring forth the fruit of everlasting sweetness. Change now, O Adam, your wicked words of excuse to the song of endless thanksgiving, and say: “O Lord, the woman whom thou hast given me, gave me of the tree of life; and I have eaten, and its fruit has been sweeter than honey to my mouth, and by it thou hast given me life.” This is why the angel was sent to the Virgin. O wondrous and most honourable Virgin! O woman singularly venerable! admirable among all women! thou who hast satisfied for thy parents, and restored life to their posterity.

The other strikingly modern feature of the type of poet which Euripides now introduced into the history of literature is his apparently voluntary refusal to take any part whatever in public life. Euripides was not a soldier as Aeschylus was, nor a priestly dignitary as Sophocles was, but, on the other hand, he is the very first poet who is reported to have possessed a library, and he appears to be also the first poet to lead the life of a scholar in complete retirement from the world. If the bust of him, with its tousled hair, its tired eyes and the embittered lines round the mouth, is a true portrait, and if we are right in seeing in it a discrepancy between body and spirit, and the expression of a restless and dissatisfied life, then we may say that Euripides was the first unhappy poet, the first whose poetry brought him suffering. The notion of genius in the modern sense is not merely completely strange to the ancient world; its poets and artists have nothing of the genius about them. The rational and craftsmanlike elements in art are far more important for them than the irrational and intuitive. Plato’s doctrine of enthusiasm emphasized, indeed, that poets owed their work to divine inspiration and not to mere technical ability, but this idea by no means leads to the exaltation of the poet; it only increases the gulf between him and his work, and makes of him a mere instrument of the divine purpose. It is, however, of the essence of the modern notion of genius that there is no gulf between the artist and his work, or, if such a gulf is admitted, that the genius is far greater than any of his works and can never be adequately expressed in them. So genius connotes for us a tragic loneliness and inability to make itself fully understood. But the ancient world knows nothing of this or of the other tragic feature of the modern artist—his lack of recognition by his own contemporaries and his despairing appeals to a remote posterity. There is not a trace of all this—at least before Euripides. Euripides’ lack of success was mainly due to the fact that there was nothing in classical times that could be called an educated middle class. The old aristocracy took no pleasure in his plays, owing to their different outlook on life, and the new bourgeois public could not enjoy them either, owing to its lack of education. With his philosophical radicalism, Euripides is a unique pheno menon, even among the poets of his age, for these are in general as conservative in their outlook as were those of the classical age —in spite of a naturalism of style which was derived from the urban and commercial society they lived in, and which had reached a point at which it was really incompatible with political conservatism. As politicians and partisans these poets hold to their conservative doctrines, but as artists they are swept along in the progressive stream of their times. This inner contradiction in their work is a completely new phenomenon in the social history of art.

In short, every adventure of the mind is an adventure vehicled by words. Every adventure of the mind is an adventure with words; every such adventure is an adventure among words; and occasionally an adventure is an adventure of words. It is no exaggeration to say that, in every word of every language — every single word or phrase of every language, however primitive or rudimentary or frag­mentarily recorded, and whether living or dead- we discover an enlightening, sometimes a rather frightening, vignette of history; with such a term as water we find that we require a volume rather than a vignette. Sometimes the history concerned may seem to affect only an individual. But, as John Donne remarked in 1624, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ History is not merely individual, it is collective or social; not only national, but international; not simply terrestrial, but universal. History being recorded in words and achieved partly, sometimes predominantly, by words, it follows that he who despises or belittles or does no worse than underestimate, the value and power, the ineluctable necessity of words, despises all history and therefore despises mankind (himself perhaps excluded). He who ignores the enduring power and the history of words ignores that sole part of himself which can, after his death, influence the world outside himself, the sole part that merits a posterity.

The reason for which a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It was Beethoven’s Quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and enlarging a public for Beethoven’s Quartets, marking in this way, like every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least in intellectual society, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of enjoying it. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for brevity’s sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at the same time be working along parallel lines to create a more instructed public in the future, a public from which other men of genius shall reap the benefit) shall create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half-a-century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist (and this is what Vinteuil had done), if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, shall launch it, wherever he may find sufficient depth, confidently outward bound towards the future. And yet this interval of time, the true perspective in which to behold a work of art, if leaving it out of account is the mistake made by bad judges, taking it into account is at times a dangerous precaution of the good. No doubt one can easily imagine, by an illusion similar to that which makes everything on the horizon appear equidistant, that all the revolutions which have hitherto occurred in painting or in music did at least shew respect for certain rules, whereas that which immediately confronts us, be it impressionism, a striving after discord, an exclusive use of the Chinese scale, cubism, futurism or what you will, differs outrageously from all that have occurred before. Simply because those that have occurred before we are apt to regard as a whole, forgetting that a long process of assimilation has melted them into a continuous substance, varied of course but, taking it as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo blends with Molière. Let us try to imagine the shocking incoherence that we should find, if we did not take into account the future, and the changes that it must bring about, in a horoscope of our own riper years, drawn and presented to us in our youth. Only horoscopes are not always accurate, and the necessity, when judging a work of art, of including the temporal factor in the sum total of its beauty introduces, to our way of thinking, something as hazardous, and consequently as barren of interest, as every prophecy the non-fulfillment of which will not at all imply any inadequacy on the prophet’s part, for the power to summon possibilities into existence or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the competence of genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed in the future of railways or of flight, or, although a brilliant psychologist, in the infidelity of a mistress or of a friend whose treachery persons far less gifted would have foreseen.

A MAP IN THE hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man’s faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader — even whose author, perhaps — must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’ And indeed you are. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing. Yet, looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it is a cold thing, a map, humourless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtsman’s board. That coastline there, that ragged scrawl of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock; it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to posterity. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the casual eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet. Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest.

The one person who didn’t seem enthusiastic about giving a speech in Berlin was Obama. When Favreau and I talked to him about it, he didn’t offer much beyond suggesting we use Berlin’s story to talk about what we were proposing in our own foreign policy. Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected a request from the campaign for the speech to take place at the Brandenburg Gate, where Reagan had called on Gorbachev to tear down the wall, saying that the venue should be reserved for an actual president. When he learned about this, Obama was embarrassed and annoyed. “I never said I wanted to give a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate,” he snapped. It spoke to a larger dynamic in the campaign: While Obama was often blamed for the cult of personality growing up around him—arty posters, celebrity anthems, and lavish settings for his events—he was rarely responsible for it, and worried that we were raising expectations too high in a world that has a way of resisting change. “Before he left for Afghanistan, he read a draft of the speech and told us he was satisfied with it—“You could put this speech on the teleprompter and I’d be fine,” he said—but I was hoping for more than that. I was hoping for edits that would elevate the speech and make it more than a summation of our worldview. The shift to a foreign audience hadn’t been hard, as Obama’s message about working across races “and religions, his preference for diplomacy over war, his embrace of the science of climate change, and his recognition that the world needed to confront issues beyond terrorism were going to be well received in Germany. I kept looking for the phrase or two that might elevate that message, summarizing it in a way that could convey the same sense of common mission that Kennedy and Reagan had evoked.

That’s Cervella.” Vero’s hand picks at something in her hair, as she glares down at a disassembled bike. “This one’s his favourite. Do you bike?” Ligaya nods as she remembers the fat-tire red bike. Pedro’s. He let her borrow it to visit family in the next village. She touches her thighs as she remembers the feeling of freedom, covering such distance by the strength of her own legs, not minding at all when she had to ride home in the pouring rain, her sweat and the rainwater indistinguishable on her cheeks. Again, she feels the uncomfortable vertigo of her body being in one place and her mind in another, the two so far apart. But Vero does not wait for an answer. She pulls Ligaya—not roughly—her fingertips soft on the exposed skin of Ligaya’s wrist. But Ligaya is unaccustomed to touch. Nobody touched her at the Poons. She breathes deeply and counts the bikes. She must not flinch, wills herself not to pull away; she cannot afford to give offense. Vero twirls her around and points at a poster above the workbench. “That! Read it!” But Ligaya does not have to read it. Vero reads it for her. Since the bike makes little demand on material or energy resources, contributes little to pollution, makes a positive contribution to health and causes little death, or injury, it can be regarded as the most benevolent of machines. —Stuart S. Wilson She pauses as if she might expect a response this time. She gestures at the room stuffed with bikes until it seems the very walls and ceiling are made of bikes, the scent of rubber tires replacing oxygen. “Ridiculous, right? The bike will save the world, he says. Yes, but you just need one, I say. One bike. That I can see. That I can even admire. I’m sure Stuart buddy here couldn’t even imagine this … this … biketrocity. And that he should be to blame?!

Of course, he thought, if he ever thought about it at all, that he would be remembered for some of the many small works he wrote and published, mostly travel chronicles, though not necessarily travel chronicles in the modern sense, but little books that are still charming today and, how shall I say, highly perceptive, anyway as perceptive as they could be, little books that made it seem as if the ultimate purpose of each of his trips was to examine a particular garden, gardens sometimes forgotten, forsaken, abandoned to their fate, and whose beauty my distinguished forebear knew how to find amid the weeds and neglect. His little books, despite their, how shall I say, botanical trappings, are full of clever observations and from them one gets a rather decent idea of the Europe of his day, a Europe often in turmoil, whose storms on occasion reached the shores of the family castle, located near Gorlitz, as you’re likely aware. Of course, my forebear wasn’t oblivious to the storms, no more than he was oblivious to the vicissitudes of, how shall I say, the human condition. And so he wrote and published, and in his own way, humbly but in fine German prose, he raised his voice against injustice. I think he had little interest in knowing where the soul goes when the body dies, although he wrote about that too. He was interested in dignity and he was interested in plants. About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive. He had a great sense of humor, although some passages of his books contradict me there. And since he wasn’t a saint or even a brave man, he probably did think about posterity. The bust, the equestrian statue, the folios preserved forever in a library. What he never imagined was that he would be remembered for lending his name to a combination of three flavors of ice cream.

When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. In Vinteuil’s sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it. The time, moreover, that a person requires—as I required in the matter of this sonata—to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new. So that the man of genius, to shelter himself from the ignorant contempt of the world, may say to himself that, since one’s contemporaries are incapable of the necessary detachment, works written for posterity should be read by posterity alone, like certain pictures which one cannot appreciate when one stands too close to them.

We have therefore to inquire what there is about Machiavelli to impress the mind of Europe so prodigiously and so curiously, and why the European mind felt it necessary to deform his doctrine so absurdly. There are certainly contributing causes. The reputation of Italy as the home of fantastic, wanton and diabolical crime filled the French, and still more the English, imagination as they are now filled by the glories of Chicago or Los Angeles, and predisposed imagination toward the creation of a mythical representative for this criminality. But still more the growth of Protestantism — and France, as well as England, was then largely a Protestant country — created a disposition against a man who accepted in his own fashion the orthodox view of original sin. Calvin, whose view of humanity was far more extreme, and certainly more false, than that of Machiavelli, was never treated to such opprobrium; but when the inevitable reaction against Calvinism came out of Calvinism, and from Geneva, in the doctrine of Rousseau, that too was hostile to Machiavelli. For Machiavelli is a doctor of the mean, and the mean is always insupportable to partisans of the extreme. A fanatic can be tolerated. The failure of a fanaticism such as Savonarola's ensures its toleration by posterity, and even approving patronage. But Machiavelli was no fanatic; he merely told the truth about humanity. The world of human motives which he depicts is true — that is to say, it is humanity without the addition of superhuman Grace. It is therefore tolerable only to persons who have also a definite religious belief; to the effort of the last three centuries to supply religious belief by belief in Humanity the creed of Machiavelli is insupportable. Lord Morley voices the usual modern hostile admiration of Machiavelli when he intimates that Machiavelli saw very clearly what he did see, but that he saw only half of the truth about human nature. What Machiavelli did not see about human nature is the myth of human goodness which for liberal thought replaces the belief in Divine Grace.

The purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason consists in the attempt to change the old procedure of metaphysics, and to bring about a complete revolution after the example set by geometers and investigators of nature. This critique is a treatise on the method, not a system of the science itself; but nevertheless it marks out the whole plan of this science, both with regard to its limits and with regard to its inner organization. For it is peculiar to pure speculative reason that it is able, indeed bound, to measure its own powers according to the different ways in which it chooses its objects for thought, and to enumerate exhaustively the different ways of choosing its problems, thus tracing a complete outline of a system of metaphysics. This is due to the fact that, with regard to the first point, nothing can be attributed to objects in *a priori* knowledge, except what the thinking subject takes from within itself; while, with regard to the second point, pure reason, as far as its principles of knowledge are concerned, forms a separate and independent unity, in which, as in an organized body, every member exists for the sake of all the others, and all the others exist for the sake of the one, so that no principle can be safely applied in *one* relation unless it has been carefully examined in *all* its relations to the whole use of pure reason. Hence, too, metaphysics has this singular advantage, an advantage which cannot be shared by any other rational science which has to deal with objects (for *logic* deals only with the form of thought in general), that if by means of this critique it has been set upon the secure course of a science, it can exhaustively grasp the entire field of knowledge pertaining to it, and can thus finish its work and leave it to posterity as a capital that can never be added to, because it has to deal only with principles and with the limitations of their use, as determined by these principles themselves. And this completeness becomes indeed an obligation if metaphysics is to be a fundamental science, of which we must be able to say, *nil actum reputants, si quid superesset agendum* [to think that nothing was done for as long as something remained to be done]." ―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 21-22

Intentions precede our deeds, and then are left lying in the wake of those deeds. I am not the voice of posterity, Anomander Rake. Nor are you.’ ‘Rake?’ ‘Purake is an Azathanai word,’ Brood said. ‘You did not know? It was an honorific granted to your family, to your father in his youth.’ ‘Why? How did he earn it?’ The Azathanai shrugged. ‘K’rul gave it. He did not share his reasons. Or, rather, “she”, as K’rul is wont to change his mind’s way of thinking, and so assumes a woman’s guise every few centuries. He is now a man, but back then he was a woman.’ ‘Do you know its meaning, Caladan?’ ‘Pur Rakess Calas ne A’nom. Roughly, Strength in Standing Still.’ ‘A’nom,’ said the Son of Darkness, frowning. ‘Perhaps,’ the Azathanai said, ‘as a babe, you were quick to stand.’ ‘And Rakess? Or Rake, as you would call me?’ ‘Only what I see in you, and what all others see in you. Strength.’ ‘I feel no such thing.’ ‘No one who is strong does.’ They had conversed as if Endest was not there, as if he was deaf to their words. The two men, Tiste and Azathanai, had begun forging something between them, and whatever it was, it was unafraid of truths. ‘My father died because he would not retreat from battle.’ ‘Your father was bound in the chains of his family name.’ ‘As I will be, Caladan? You give me hope.’ ‘Forgive me, Rake, but strength is not always a virtue. I will raise no monument to you.’ The Son of Darkness had smiled, then. ‘At last, you say something that wholly pleases me.’ ‘Yet still you are worshipped. Many by nature would hide in strength’s shadow.’ ‘I will defy them.’ ‘Such principles are rarely appreciated,’ Caladan said. ‘Expect excoriation. Condemnation. Those who are not your equals will claim for their own that equality, and yet will meet your eyes with expectation, with profound presumption. Every kindness you yield they will take as deserved, but such appetites are unending, and your denial is the crime they but await. Commit it and witness their subsequent vilification.’ Anomander shrugged at that, as if the expectations of others meant nothing to him, and whatever would come from his standing upon the principles he espoused, he would bear it. ‘You promised peace, Caladan. I vowed to hold you to that, and nothing we have said now has changed my mind.’ ‘Yes, I said I would guide you, and I will. And in so doing, I will rely upon your strength, and hope it robust enough to bear each and every burden I place upon it. So I remind myself, and you, with the new name I give you. Will you accept it, Anomander Rake? Will you stand in strength?’ ‘My father’s name proved a curse. Indeed, it proved the death of him.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Very well, Caladan Brood, I will take this first burden.’ Of course. The Son of Darkness could do no less.

And, furthermore, I tell you frankly that I don’t resign myself to unhappiness, nor do I bow my head to destiny, nor do I come to terms with it, as other men do; and I dare desire death, and desire it above everything else, with such ardor and such sincerity as I believe it is desired in this world only by a very few. I would not speak to you in this manner if I were not completely certain that, when the hour comes, the facts will not belie my words; for, although I don’t see yet an end to my life, I have a profound feeling which almost assures me that this hour is not far off. I am too ripe for death; and I think it to be too absurd and incredible for me—so dead I am spiritually, so altogether concluded as the fable of life is for me in all its parts—to have to last for another forty or fifty years, that is as many as Nature threatens me with. At the mere thought of this I shudder. But as happens with all those, evils, which go beyond, so the speak, the power of imagination, so this seems to be like a dream and an illusion, impossible to realize. Indeed, if someone talks to me about the distant future as of something belonging to me, I can’t help but smile to myself—so confident am I that the space of life remaining to me is not long. And this, I can say, it is the only thought that sustains me. Books and studies, which I am often surprised I have loved so much, projects of great deeds, and hopes of glory and immortality are all things at which I can no longer even laugh. At the hopes and the projects of this century I don’t laugh; with all my soul I wish them the greatest possible success, and highly and most sincerely do I praise, admire and honor their good intentions; however, I don’t envy posterity, nor those who still have long to live. In the past I used to envy the fools and the stupid, and those who have a high opinion of themselves; and I would have gladly changed places with one of them. Now I envy neither the stupid nor the wise, neither the great nor the small, neither the weak nor the powerful. I envy the dead, and only with them I would change places. Every pleasant fantasy, every thought of the future in which I indulge, as happens, in my solitude, and with which I spend my time, consists of death, and nothing else. And in this desire I am no longer troubled, as I used to be, by the memory of dreams of my early age and by the thought of having lived in vain. If I obtain death, I will die so peaceful and so content as if I had never hoped for, or desired, anything else in the world. This is the only good that can reconcile me with destiny. If I were offered, on one hand, the fortune and the fame of Caesar or Alexander, pure of all stains, and, on the other, to die today, and if I were to make a choice, I would say, to die today, and I would not want to think it over.

Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.

One thing more makes these men and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers. Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.

The Federal Government government's policy of racial exclusion had roots earlier in the twentieth century. The Wilson administration took the initial steps. Terrified by the 917 Russian revolution, government officials came to believe that communism could be defeated in the United states by getting as many white Americans as possible to become homeowners-the idea being that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system. So in 1917 the federal Department of Labor promoted an 'Own-Your-Own-Home' campaign, handing out 'We Own Our Own Home' buttons to schoolchildren and distributing pamphlets saying that it was a 'patriotic duty' to cease renting and to build a single-family unit. the department printed more than two million posters to be hung in factories and other businesses and published newspaper advertisements throughout the country promoting single-family ownership-each one had an image of a white couple or family.

I am a steadfastly 20th-century guy. I've always been pathologically au courant. Even today I can tell you the length of Justin Bieber's hair. But it has now reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form, that it is beyond my notice. I look at things like Twitter and Facebook, and "reality TV" – which is one of the great frauds of our time, an oxymoron like "giant shrimp" – and I look at it all, and I say, these people do not really know what the good life is. I look at the parched lives that so many people live, the desperation that underlies their every action, and I say, this has all been brought about by the electronic media. And I do not envy them. I do not wish to partake of it, and I am steadfastly in the 20th century. I do not own a handheld device. Mine is an old dial-up laptop computer, which I barely can use – barely. I still write on a manual typewriter. Not even an electronic typewriter, but a manual. My books keep coming out. I have over 100 books published now, and I've reached as close to posterity as a poor broken vessel such as I am entitled to reach.

Public meetings, business meetings, encounters on the street, conversations, even posters on the wall all get wrapped up in an official language that doesn't contain a single word of truth. People in the West can't possibly understand what it is really like to lose the right to say what you think for years on end, and the way you have to repress the tiniest "illegal" thought you might have and stay silent as the tomb. That sort of pressure breaks something inside people.

Before the war, a Parisian woman could not vote, work, or even open a checking account without her husband’s say so. To humiliate her now, propaganda posters fed the lie that she and her children had been abandoned in the necessities of life by the French men who’d run off to play savior by fighting a war they couldn’t possibly win. Now it was only the German soldier who could save her. It was not by a blitzkrieg that Hitler sought to take over. It was by a prolonged methodical effort to win the ravaged minds of the women left behind and to appropriate all that was distinctly Parisian - the arts, Haute couture, the very spirit of the French people - and repurpose it to become a higher form of the German ideal. In all of this flowed the callus and crafty undercurrent of fear.

IT’S FUNNY: it isn’t the fire that kills you, it’s the smoke. There you are, pounding on the windows, climbing higher and higher through your burning home, trying to get away, to get out, hoping that if you can just avoid the flames, perhaps you’ll survive the fire, but all the time you’re suffocating slowly, your lungs filling with smoke. There you are, waiting for the horrors to come from some there, from some other, from without, and all the while you’re dying, bit by airless bit, from within. You buy a handgun—for protection, you say—and drop dead that night from a heart attack. You put locks on your doors. You put bars on your windows. You put gates around your house. The doctor phones: It’s cancer, he says. Swimming frantically up to the surface to escape from a menacing shark, you get the bends and drown. You resolve, one sunny New Year’s Day, to get back into shape. This is the year, you insist. A new beginning. A new start. A stronger you, a tougher you. At the health club the following morning, just as you’re beginning your third set of bench presses, your muscles cramp and the barbell collapses onto your neck, crushing your windpipe. You can’t cry out. Your face turns blue. Your arms go limp. There, on a poster on the wall beside you, are the last words you see before your eyes close and darkness envelopes you for eternity: Feel the Burn.

IT’S FUNNY: it isn’t the fire that kills you, it’s the smoke. There you are, pounding on the windows, climbing higher and higher through your burning home, trying to get away, to get out, hoping that if you can just avoid the flames, perhaps you’ll survive the fire, but all the time you’re suffocating slowly, your lungs filling with smoke. There you are, waiting for the horrors to come from some there, from some other, from without, and all the while you’re dying, bit by airless bit, from within. You buy a handgun—for protection, you say—and drop dead that night from a heart attack. You put locks on your doors. You put bars on your windows. You put gates around your house. The doctor phones: It’s cancer, he says. Swimming frantically up to the surface to escape from a menacing shark, you get the bends and drown. You resolve, one sunny New Year’s Day, to get back into shape. This is the year, you insist. A new beginning. A new start. A stronger you, a tougher you. At the health club the following morning, just as you’re beginning your third set of bench presses, your muscles cramp and the barbell collapses onto your neck, crushing your windpipe. You can’t cry out. Your face turns blue. Your arms go limp. There, on a poster on the wall beside you, are the last words you see before your eyes close and darkness envelopes you for eternity: Feel the Burn. It’s funny.

네노마정정품판매 ☎홈피:via3.co.to 네노마정정품구매 #네노마정구입방법 #네노마정가격 ☎카톡:ppt33 ☎ #네노마정구매방법 ☎라인:pxp32 ☎ #네노마정약효 #네노마정추천 Almost every child will complain about their parents sometimes. It is natural, because when people stay together for a long time, they will start to have argument. But ignore about the unhappy time, our parents love us all the time. No matter what happen to us, they will stand by our sides. We should be grateful to them and try to understand them. #네노마정구입 #네노마정구매 #네노마정판매 #네노마정처방 #네노마정가격 #네노마정종류 #네노마정후기 #네노마정지속시간 #네노마정정품구입 #네노마정사용후기 #네노마정사용방법 #네노마정구하는곳 Just like a boxer, we, too come face to face with many opponents in the arena of life—problems and difficulties. The bad news is, we don’t really know when our bouts with these opponents occur—no posters and promotional TV commercials; no pre-fight Press Conference and weigh in to make sure that we measure up to our opponent; and there is no Pay Per View coverage. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here? The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me. I want to put a ding in the universe. Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is better than two doubles.

What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing? What is Freelancing? We already know that, Now let's see What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing - Things to do for Self Development: Get positive feedback from clients by practicing what you are good at, and finding work that matches your skills. This is the key to your improvement and the first step to success. When you start to succeed, choose the opportunities that work best for you. Use the time appropriately and fully. Some of the processes of Self-Presentation after Self-Development are discussed below - Process of Introducing Yourself: 1. Enhance your profile and build your portfolio with accurate information about yourself. 2. Create your own signature that will identify you in your work. 3. Always use your own photo and signature for original work. 4. Run your own campaign. For example: commenting on others' posts, making full use of social sites, keeping in touch with others, doing service work, teaching others, participating in various seminars, and distributing leaflets or posters. Showing Professionalism: How to express or calculate that you are a professional? There are many ways, by which you can easily express that you are a professional entrepreneur or employee. The ways are: 1. Professionals never work for free, so before starting a job, you must be sure about the remuneration. 2. Professionals don't work on balance, if you want to show professionalism you must pay in cash or promise to pay half in advance and the rest at the end of the job. 3. A professional never lacks any research or communication for his work. Win the Client's Heart: There are thousands of freelancers in front of a client for a job, but only one gets the job. The person who got the job got it because he presented himself in the client's mind. Mistakes to Avoid: Only humans are fallible. It is natural for people to make mistakes, but if people can't learn from those mistakes then it is better not to make such mistakes. The Mistakes are: 1. Failure to identify oneself. 2. Show Engagement. 3. Lack of communication with the client etc. Being Punctual: It is wise to do the work on time. Never leave work. Because if you leave work, the amount of work will increase and not decrease. Therefore, it is better to do the work of time in time and move towards the formation of life by being respectful of time. So, if the above tasks are done or followed correctly, achieving success as a freelancer is just a saying. To make yourself a successful and efficient freelancer, the importance and importance of the above topics is immense.

When we learn about threats as children, and they are accompanied by strong emotions such as fear, they can remain embedded in the neural circuits of the hippocampus for life. Neuroscientists call these “deep emotional learnings.” Like the old posters, they may have no use in the present. They may even be triggering us to react to threats that are entirely imaginary. Yet once learned, and reinforced by conditioned behavior, they are hard to change. Like the dusty posters in the pubs, they may hang around long after they’ve outlived their usefulness. When the hippocampus isn’t sure what to make of a piece of information, it refers it to the brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC). That’s the brain’s executive center, the seat of discrimination and knowledge. It takes incoming information from the hippocampus and determines whether the apparent threat is real. For instance, you hear a loud bang and are immediately alarmed. “Gunfire?” wonders the hippocampus. “No,” the PFC tells it. “That was a car backfiring.” The reassured hippocampus then does not pass the alarm to the amygdala. Or perhaps the PFC says, “That group of young men hanging out in the parking lot looks suspicious,” and the hippocampus then signals the amygdala, which puts the body on Code Red. Using that path from the emotional center of the brain to the executive center is crucial to regulating our emotions. Because it involves a feedback loop with information going first to the PFC and then back to the hippocampus from the PFC, it’s called the long path: hippocampus > PFC > hippocampus > amygdala > FFF. The long path is the default for people with effective emotional self-regulation. 3.8. The long path. 3.9. The short path. In people with poor emotional self-regulation, such as patients with PTSD, this circuit is impaired. They startle easily and overreact to innocuous stimuli. The hippocampus cuts out the PFC. Instead of referring incoming threats to the wise discrimination of the primate brain, where the bang can be categorized as “car backfiring,” the hippocampus treats even mild stimuli as though they are life-threatening disasters and activates the amygdala. This short-circuit of the long path creates a short path: hippocampus > amygdala > FFF. The short circuit improves reaction speed, but at the expense of accuracy.

You’re covered in blood,” Felix noted. Jericho snorted. “Yeah, kind of a hazard of the job.” Felix scoffed. “Yeah, but you’re also wearing that weird smug, smirky look you only get whenever you get laid, and since you were in an abandoned cabin with Trevor the perv, we’re…alarmed.” He flicked his hand dramatically. “Alarmed,” Jericho echoed. Arsen leaned in, his tone conspiratorial. “Did you fuck Trevor the perv, Coe?" Felix pulled a face. “I’m just hoping he fucked him before he killed him, not after. Once you cross that line, you don’t come back.” Jericho tried to follow their dizzying thought process, but before he could formulate a response, Nico and Levi arrived. Fuck. Levi looked like a wanted poster had fucked a tattoo model. His inky dark hair fell in his face, and he sucked on a Dum-Dum lollipop. Nico’s springy blond curls hung in his face. He looked surprisingly angelic for somebody who was such a little monster. “What’s up? Why’s everybody looking so constipated?” Levi asked. “Coe fucked Trevor the perv,” Arsen said, as if this was fact and not their wild speculation. Levi wrinkled his nose. “That dude was gay? Or was he, like”—he mimed a blowjob—“trying to bribe his way out of it?” Jericho’s face contorted at the idea of a blowjob from greasy ass Trevor, but they paid him no mind. Nico also looked disgusted. “What the fuck, man? Like, I get it. Who hasn’t wanted to fuck somebody they killed or kill somebody they fucked? But it’s a slippery slope, man.” “This is what I told him,” Arsen said, shaking his head. “Once you cross that line…” “Jesus Christ. I didn’t fuck Trevor the perv. I killed Trevor the perv,” Jericho said, walking around the four of them to head to his office, attempting to close the door behind him. His brother caught it and swung it back open. “If you didn’t fuck Trevor, then who was it? And don’t lie and say it didn’t happen. Your after orgasm glow never lies,” Arsen said, flopping down into a chair hard enough to rock it back dangerously far before it righted itself. “I—” Jericho shook his head. “I ran into a guy.” “With your dick?” Levi asked. Nico’s brows knitted together. “In the middle of the woods?” “Like, a homeless man in the woods? A… What’s the word? A hobo?” Arsen asked. Levi elbowed him. “We don’t call them that anymore. Show some respect.” Arsen shrugged. “Sorry. What do you call a man roaming the woods looking for sex?” “A lie,” Felix said, his mouth set in a hard line. “No way my brother banged some hot, sweaty lumberjack in the woods. That’s not his type.” His long, elegant fingers trailed over his collarbones, a slow smile spreading along his face as his brother seemed to get lost in his own lumberjack fantasy. “I—” “There’s nothing in the woods but animals and Sasquatch,” Nico said. “Sasquatch?” Levi parroted. Nico nodded. “Yeah, you know. Bigfoot.” “Did you fuck Bigfoot?” Levi asked, pulling the lollipop from his mouth with a pop.

Was it necessary for the word of God to be committed to writing? We affirm... Three things particularly prove the necessity of the Scripture: (1) the preservation of the word; (2) its vindication; (3) its propagation. It was necessary for a written word to be given to the church that the canon of true religious faith might be constant and unmoved; that it might easily be preserved pure and entire against the weakness of memory, the depravity of men and the shortness of life; that it might be more certainly defended from the frauds and corruptions of Satan; that it might more conveniently not only be sent to the absent and widely separated, but also be transmitted to posterity. For by 'letters,' as Vives well observes, 'all the arts are preserved as in a treasury, so that they can never perish, while on the contrary, tradition by the hand is unhappy' (De disciplinis … de Corruptis Artibus 1 [1636], p. 5). This is a divine and wonderful advantage of letters, as Quintilian says, 'that they guard words and deliver them to readers as a sacred trust' (Institutio Oratoria 1.7.31 [Loeb, 1:144–45]). Nor for any other reason are the public laws, statutes and edicts of kings and the decrees of the commonality inscribed upon brass or committed to public tablets, except that this is the most sure method of preserving them uncorrupted and of propagating through many ages the remembrance of those things which it is important for the people to know.

The oral (agraphous) traditions of the papists, for they speak diversely of them. Sometimes tradition is used by them for the 'act of tradition' by which the sacred books were preserved by the church in an uninterrupted series of time (also a perpetual succession) and delivered to posterity. This is formal tradition and in this sense Origen says 'they learned by tradition that the four gospels were unquestioned in the church universal.' Second, it is often taken for the written doctrine which, being at first oral, was afterward committed to writing. Thus Cyprian says, 'Sacred tradition will preserve whatever is taught in the gospels or is found in the epistles of the apostles or in the Acts' (Epistle 74 'To Pompey'). Third, it is taken for a doctrine which does not exist in the Scriptures in so many words, but may be deduced thence by just and necessary consequence; in opposition to those who bound themselves to the express word of the Scriptures and would not admit the word homoousion because it did not occur verbatim there. Thus Basil denies that the profession of faith which we make in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be found in the Scriptures meaning the Apostles’ Creed, whose articles nevertheless are contained in the Scriptures as to sense (On the Spirit 8:41, 43). Fourth, it is taken for the doctrine of rites and ceremonies called 'ritual tradition.' Fifth, it is taken for the harmony of the old teachers of the church in the exposition of any passage of Scripture which, received from their ancestors, they retained out of a modest regard for antiquity because it agreed with the Scriptures. This may be called 'tradition of sense' or exegetical tradition (of which Irenaeus speaks, Against Heresies 3.3, and Tertullian often as well, Prescription Against Heretics 3:243–65). Sixth, they used the word tradition ad hominem in disputing with heretics who appealed to them not because all they approved of could not be found equally as well in the Scriptures, but because the heretics with whom they disputed did not admit the Scriptures; as Irenaeus says, 'When they perceived that they were confused by the Scriptures, they turned around to accuse them' (Against Heresies, 3.2). They dispute therefore at an advantage from the consent of tradition with the Scriptures, just as we now do from the fathers against the papists, but not because they acknowledged any doctrinal tradition besides the Scriptures. As Jerome testifies, 'The sword of God smites whatever they draw and forges from a pretended apostolic tradition, without the authority and testimony of the Scriptures' (Commentarii in prophetas: Aggaeum 1:11).

When thinking about it, it creeps me out. But that is life; I know one thing, I always try to do the right thing, because after they are gone you have nothing but sad misgivings. They're nothing more than bullies! I wish all of those assholes would have taken their belts and hanged themselves with it or cut their wrists, no! That would be too good for them… either way, justice comes with a price, and that was my fifteen-year-old girl. She lost her innocence to her bullies, and that is when my fifteen-year-old girl lost her existence in life too. All of this could have been stopped; yet after all these years,’ people still bully the weaker individuals, which they can overpower. They can fry in hell, in the eternal lake of fire! That is all I can say. Him! He would put things in her mouth, and spattered her innocents over his face and walls of the halls. He even had a life-size poster in his bedroom of my little girl, which he idolized every night, if you know what I mean; the revolting twisted freak. So now, Jaylynn clings to my ankles, as I walked to and around the cemetery as well. Yet I cannot help but say I told you so, and she says ‘I-NO-O!’ In a moaning vocal-sounding whisper! It is weird to think about but, everyone I ever loved has died, even my daughter. So, my philosophy as of now. I just chose to never love again, and I have kept that promise up until this point in my life. Things were about to change in a big way once again like always it is out of my control. All these years… I have been pining over what I cannot have, so I guess it is okay to drown my sorrows with a drink once in a while. I need one right now.

When Evan came over, the first thing I wanted to do was properly introduce him to George, John, Ringo, and Paul. We went into my room, and I turned on The White Album. We had to leave the door open, because my mother said I wasn’t allowed to have Evan in my room with the door closed. He sat on the floor with his back against the foot of my bed and looked at my poster of Matt Costa, but I could tell he wasn’t really-really looking at it. He was listening to my mom speak Cebuano on the phone with Lita. I couldn’t understand everything she was saying, but it sounded like she was asking her to bring something sweet for dessert.

We weren’t victims,’ Madeleine Dissoubray would later say. ‘It wasn’t like the Jews or the gypsies. We saw the German posters, we read about the penalties, we heard about the torture. We knew what we were doing. It was our choice, and this gave us a strong emotional link.’ (Moorehead, 2011, 161)

Ned’s bedroom was a museum. It was hard to look at any one thing. There were shelves and shelves of books; of stacked white cardboard boxes he’d labeled, in as many colored markers and fancy letters as there were boxes, COMIX; posters for things Dorry had never heard of, and didn’t know if they were comics or movies or what, but one—her head went light—she did: Sandman; and one wall, the entire wall, floor to ceiling around two windows, was a painting of the tops of the houses across the street, the edge of a tree in full summer leaf, birds, a cat watching from a high balcony, as though the wall itself were one huge window. “I do a new one every year,” Ned said. “This was my first tramp loyal,” and Dorry spent a good hour that night online, figuring out that he was saying trompe l’oeil.

Bridges Life did not appear to breathe here, It was covered in endless rounds of thread of fear, So it tread quietly along the fringes, Scared that it might be the cause of collapsing bridges, Bridges that connected life with hope, And it watched these bridges from a distance placing itself on a discreet slope, But it dared not cross them, none of them, It looked at them in desperation, especially some, For it often crossed them to renew its reserves of liveliness, But now it feels pervaded by a deep feeling of sadness, Life here seems to be a part of some sort of purgatory, Waiting to cross over and leave behind this existence derogatory, It may not be a perspicuous show of feelings, But here these are life’s daily dealings, And I wonder what about life’s own posterity, Because in this land of death life somehow loses all its virility, Tamed by some obnoxious devil, Who has had a diabolic conception and then raised by some heinous evil, Maybe that is why the bridges look so frail and hopeless themselves, Bearing stacks of hopelessness displayed on hope’s own shelves, For when life does not cross the bridges of hope, It is death that forsakes life and then time withdraws its rope, That maintains the perfect cohesion, Between beginnings and ends , between fission and fusion, And when this balance is lost anywhere, Life is cast into a place where there exists life everywhere, But nothing else nowhere, Just life, no hopes, no beauty, no bliss, no summer, a life that becomes its own prisoner in this infinity somewhere, However, now the bridges have fallen, but few still stand, And life that is tired of living without hope, feels the dying hope’s hand, And like the rope of time it pulls it unto itself, and makes life cross the bridge, Thus, life once again walks on the happy ridge, Hoping to live another day, feel life in a better and different way, For living the same moment of time begets no joy, if it is lived the same way everyday, And time weaves its threads of mystery and surprises around it, Then death too gets woven somewhere in this loop of time, and life finally says, “so be it!” And it jumps into the sea of time and collects its moments of myriad experiences, While time registers all these instances, And when the loop of death unwinds, In it a new loop of life it always finds, Now, even if the bridges may fall and time may end, Life has learned to create moments of happiness that never end!

For it’s disgraceful for an old person, or one in sight of old age, to have only the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this . . . what do you say? Cleanthes said that . . . what do you say? How long will you be compelled by the claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim—something posterity will carry in its notebook.

get to the door. Anyway, they’ve stuck it on a poster on the wall now so I can’t miss it. Colm O’Flynn. Stay in yer fecking bed, ya eejit. I dictated that to Mike, the nurse on night shift, and he wrote it up for me. He says if anyone asks me, I’ve to deny it was him. That’s not such a tough ask – I forget who did it at least half a dozen times a day. That thought ends and it takes me a moment to get to the next one. The gaps are the worst bit, because sometimes I get the fear that another one won’t come. That’s why I have to get these videos finished. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not giving up. They can tell me I’m a dying man all they like, but I still think the treatment will work, it’ll buy me some time and then someone, somewhere will come up with an even better treatment or cure for this thing. It’s got to happen because I’m not ready to go yet. Nope, not at all. But

Was it necessary for the word of God to be committed to writing? We affirm... Three things particularly prove the necessity of the Scripture: (1) the preservation of the word; (2) its vindication; (3) its propagation. It was necessary for a written word to be given to the church that the canon of true religious faith might be constant and unmoved; that it might easily be preserved pure and entire against the weakness of memory, the depravity of men and the shortness of life; that it might be more certainly defended from the frauds and corruptions of Satan; that it might more conveniently not only be sent to the absent and widely separated, but also be transmitted to posterity. For by 'letters,' as Vives well observes, 'all the arts are preserved as in a treasury, so that they can never perish, while on the contrary, tradition by the hand is unhappy' (De disciplinis … de Corruptis Artibus 1 [1636], p. 5). This is a divine and wonderful advantage of letters, as Quintilian says, 'that they guard words and deliver them to readers as a sacred trust' (Institutio Oratoria 1.7.31). Nor for any other reason are the public laws, statutes and edicts of kings and the decrees of the commonality inscribed upon brass or committed to public tablets, except that this is the most sure method of preserving them uncorrupted and of propagating through many ages the remembrance of those things which it is important for the people to know.

But when you work on a joint project with people from many companies, which squad are you playing for? Who are your teammates? Teams are identities. To truly be on one, people must know it. So BAA gave everyone working on T5, including its own employees, a clear and emphatic answer: Forget how things are usually done on big projects. Your team is not your company. Here, your team is T5. We are one team. Wolstenholme is an engineer with decades of experience in construction, but he started his career in the British military, where the squad you play for is literally on your forehead—in the form of your unit’s “cap badge.” When people came to T5, Wolstenholme says, they were told, “Take off your cap badge and throw it away, because you work for T5.” That message was explicit, blunt, and repeated. “We had posters on the walls of people with lightbulbs going on, and they were saying, you know, ‘I get it. I work for T5.’ ” MAKING HISTORY Identity was the first step.

The smell of paper is comforting and the books absorb the sound of the traffic outside. I feel like I'm back in the school library, taking refuge from the popular girls who'd tease me about how pale and strange I was. Familiar friends sit on these shelves, many boasting new jackets in the latest styles. I say hello and silently apologise to the few that are now wearing movie poster covers. No book deserves that.

GODMAN QUOTES 3 ***A fight to finish*** Contentment is the key to self discipline. In striving for the better the best knocks your way. Know the difference between patience and wasting of time. The trickish says the future is female…a wise man gives them a chance. A good turn deserves another, when it goes around you have a turn around. In posterity you are paid in future currency. Your tears doesn’t matter when your values doesn’t count. If you fear the loss you end up losing the more. Without the freedom to know it your liberty is incarcerated. If you are not ready to fight don’t bother to be called a warrior.

The 1843 marriage ceremony record is the marriage of Sarah Ann Whitney to Joseph Smith, for which Sarah Ann’s father, Newel Whitney, officiated. The words that were to be spoken at the marriage were as follows: They shall take each other by the hand, and you shall say, You both mutually agree (calling them by name) to be each other’s companion so long as you both shall live, preserving yourselves for each other and from all others, and also throughout [all] eternity. . . . I then give you, S. A. Whitney, my daughter, to Joseph Smith, to be his wife, to observe all the rights between you both that belong to that condition.” [Blessings are listed.] . . . commanding, in the name of the Lord, all those powers to concentrate in you, and through you to your posterity forever. . . . Let immortality and eternal life henceforth be sealed upon your heads forever and ever.26

They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It's a laugh, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, no matter what the posters say.

Dad’s out and Chico’s in, I’m like, fuck this. And she’s like watch your mouth and show adults respect. I pay the rent here. So I start staying out with my friends and skipping school just ’cause I feel like it and my teachers say, oh yeah, well here’s to your grades plummeting, and then I’m like, so what, and then they say one more semester and it’s over, you’re so out of here, and I’m like shit, no, they’ll send me to school with remedial kids. My little brother Peanut is gloating cause he’s at Bronx Science and thinks he’s the next Steve Jobs. That’s when I hit the books and school again. I cannot, will not, be showed up by Peanut. And that’s when I see the poster about the playwriting contest and Professor Bass, who is too old to be teaching high school but the damn union can’t fire him, says, you could probably write something decent if you weren’t so arrogant. He says half the students in the school don’t deserve to be here. And I roll my eyes and say well what, if you were

And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them—I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent [pg 060] natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define humanity, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the time-binding class of life.

Let me get a good look at you." A flush started along his neck and crept up to his ear. But he complied, his gait loose hipped and rolling. "This slow enough?" "I think I need to film it for posterity. I don't think I've ever appreciated a man's legs more." That got a smile, though it seemed more of a "The woman is ridiculous, but I like it" one. "If you're good"----he set the tray on the side table----"I'll let you ride my thigh later." That should not have made my sex clench with anticipatory heat so very hard. But it did. Lucian looked me over. "Although I have to say you didn't do yourself any favors putting on that shirt." "Was that bad?" "Very," he said sternly. "You'll be taking it off soon, or no thigh ride for you." "Yes, Lucian.

I also want to point out—and this is much more distressing—that the only people I saw complaining were White. I posted the Smithsonian’s image on my Facebook page, where I expected many of my 250 Black friends would express their outrage. Only one commented. I called Ibou in Senegal. I told him the source of the poster and explained why it was a big deal. I said, “I’m just going to read it to you, from top to bottom. Without comment. Just listen.” So I read it to him: “To be White is to be logical. To be White is to believe in hard work. To be White is to be rational.” When I was done, he just said, “Then I guess I’m White.” He went on to say the people who wrote it are inhuman because these are the things that it takes to be a well-rounded human being. These are the character traits that everyone needs to succeed in life and to lead a good, honorable life.

Some say the sons of God were the descendants of Seth and the daughters of men were the posterity of Cain and that the progeny of Seth procreated with the daughters of Cain to produce these famous heroes of old. From the mainstream Christian point of view, this makes perfect sense—end of story.

Holy shit! Fifteen bucks for a milkshake!" I exclaim, looking at the poster for the special of the month: cherry pie milkshake. I, personally, consider fifteen bucks to be too much for a drink that doesn't have alcohol. But as I study the photo, the price point starts to make sense. The milkshake is literally topped with a slice of cherry pie, which is then topped with vanilla ice cream. And it's, like, a full slice of cherry pie, not some itty-bitty version. "It's two desserts in one," Paige says. "Really stretching the definition of a milkshake.

You're planning on killing me," I say. He doesn't even deny it. "Yes." "Then, why this?" I jerk my chin up and down. "Do you get off on it? Is it your particular kink? You need to tie your girlfriends up to get hard? I’m not judging. Bondage isn’t really my thing, but I think it all depends on the people you’re with. I’d totally let my boyfriend tie me up,” I say. I can just picture it now. I bet Dean would enjoy that. Tying me to the headboard of his four-poster bed and fucking me long and hard. Or maybe the opposite—me tying him down and riding his face until I come a few dozen times. “You, on the other hand,” I keep going. “Not really my type. So, what’s the safe word?

Why should I write to the newspapers instead of to the machines themselves, why not summon a monster meeting of machines, place the steam engine in the chair, and hold a council of war?” asked the anonymous “mad correspondent.” “I answer, the time is not yet ripe for this. . . . Our plan is to turn man’s besotted enthusiasm to our own advantage, to make him develop us to the utmost, and find himself enslaved unawares. “My object is to do my humble share towards pointing out what is the ultimatum, the ne plus ultra of perfection in mechanized development,” the writer continued, “even though that end be so far off that only a Darwinian posterity can arrive at it. I therefore venture to suggest that we declare machinery and the general development of the human race to be well and effectually completed when—when—when—Like the woman in white, I had almost committed myself of my secret. Nay, this is telling too much. I must content myself with disclosing something less than the whole. I will give a great step, but not the last. We will say then that a considerable advance has been made in mechanical development, when all men, in all places, without any loss of time, are cognizant through their senses, of all that they desire to be cognizant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge, so that the back country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself—may sit in his own chair in a back country hut and hear the performance of Israel in Ægypt at Exeter Hall—may taste an ice on the Rakaia, which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house Covent garden. Multiply instance ad libitum—this is the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for, and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised.”67 This letter, bearing the stamp of Samuel Butler in style if not in name, was signed “Lunaticus.” One hundred years after Erasmus Darwin gathered his circle of Lunaticks in the English Midlands, a strand of telegraph wire was uncoiled at the antipodes of the earth. Sparked by the transit of a few pulses of electromagnetic code over this embryonic fragment of a net, Samuel Butler foresaw the evolution, perhaps not so far off as he imagined, of that phenomenon, somewhere between mechanism and organism, now manifested as the World Wide Web.

She was better looking in real life. Her hair was shiner. Her lips were plumper. Her boobs were… boobier. She radiated sexy-farmgirl perfection in jean short-shorts and a gingham blouse tied just below her cleavage. She looked like a poster of herself—and, needless to say, also wildly out of place among all these lumpy, misshapen normal people. She was like a living Barbie doll. And as badly as I wanted that to be an insult… it just wasn’t.

He spent the last four years of his life there engaged in practice of Zazen (meditation), painting, and joining tea ceremonies and poetry gatherings with the domain’s elite. Many of Musashi’s famous ink paintings were created during this period of intense personal reflection. By this time, Japan had become politically stable and war was now a distant memory. Musashi, being among the last generations who had personally experienced conflict, sensed that samurai were losing their sense of identity. He resolved to make a pilgrimage to Reigandō Cave43 in 1643 and started writing Gorin-no-sho there, hoping to preserve for posterity his Way, and what he believed to be the very essence of warriorship. A year later he fell ill, and the domain elders encouraged him to return to Kumamoto to be cared for. He continued working on his treatise for five or six months. On the twelfth day of the fifth month of 1645, he passed the not quite finished manuscript to his student Magonojō. He gave away all his worldly possessions, and then wrote Dokkōdō, a brief list of twenty-one precepts that summed up his principles shaped over a lifetime of austere training. He died on the nineteenth day of the fifth month of 1645. It is said that he had taken ill with “dysphagia,” which suggests perhaps that he had terminal stomach cancer. Some say he died of lung cancer. In Bukōden, it is recorded that Musashi was laid in his coffin dressed in full armor and with all his weapons. It evokes a powerful image of a man who had dedicated his whole life to understanding the mind of combat and strategy. As testament once again to the conspiracy theories surrounding Musashi’s life, I am reminded of a bizarre book titled Was Musashi Murdered and Other Questions of Japanese History by Fudo Yamato (Zensho Communications, 1987). In it the author postulates that Musashi’s death was actually assassination through poisoning. The author argues that Musashi and many of his contemporaries such as the priest Takuan, Hosokawa Tadaoki (Tadatoshi’s father) who was suspected of “Christian sympathies,” and even Yagyū Munenori were all viewed with suspicion by the shogunate. He goes so far as to hypothesize that the phrase found at the end of Musashi’s Combat Strategy in 35 Articles “Should there be any entries you are unsure of, please allow me to explain in person…” was actually interpreted by the government as a call for those with anti-shogunate sentiments to gather in order to hatch a seditious plot (p. 20). This is why, Fudo Yamato argues, Musashi and these other notable men of his age all died mysteriously at around the same time.

Let’s say you own a whaling ship that needs a total overhaul. It’s insured for three times its value. You’ve been thinking about getting out of the business. The bank has turned you down for a loan and your five-year-old granddaughter has a whale poster on her bedroom wall. What do you do?” “Put a limpet mine on it and send it to the bottom of the harbor. Then say you’d been getting threats,

But keep in mind one ginormous caveat: Repeated "now that" bonuses can quickly become expected "if-then" entitlements-which can ultimately crater effective performance.. ... First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci's original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that "positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation." So if the folks on the design team turn out a show-stopping poster marbe just walk into their offices and say, "Wow.

Having received great favors From His Majesty, the Emperor I have nothing to say to posterity In the hour of my death

I'm the poster boy for no movement." "I think the girls disagree with that statement. I've seen your pictures on the Internet. What does your generation say? Oh,yes, they are otaku<\I> for you.

NIGHT 1: LEXI Lexi arrives at eleven o’clock wearing a black lace dress that is both sexy and modest at the same time. It comes to just above her knees and the v-neckline reveals a hint of her small, round breasts. She’s wearing black stockings and short heels, and I’m curious to see if she’s wearing a garter belt under there. Her thick brown hair falls to her shoulders and her large brown eyes make her look innocent and doe-like. “Come in,” I say opening the door wide and stepping aside. Lexi hesitates for a second then comes in, looking around at our small studio apartment. The room is dimly lit by shaded lamps, letting most of the light come in through the uncurtained windows. I can see the full moon framed against one pane. In the center of the room is our four-poster king sized bed. Eric is lying on the red silk sheets.

He rises a copy of a poster. On the left is a quote from The New York Times dated October 9, 1903. It says,'The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians in from one million to ten million years'. On the right is a quote from Orville Wright's diary, dated October 9, 1903. 'We started assembly today' it says.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. I mentioned I’d been in contact with her mother. “Oh crikey, that sounds dangerous!” “She’s a feisty woman, isn’t she?” William giggled. “Granny’s great fun after a few gin and tonics.” “Sh, William,” Diana said, giggling too. “My mother’s been a tremendous source of support to me. She never talks publicly; she’s just there for me.” “And what about William’s other granny?” “I have enormous respect for the Queen; she has been so supportive, you know. People don’t see that side of her, but I do all the time. She’s an amazing person.” “Has she been good over the divorce?” “Yes, very. I just want it over now so I can get on with my life. I’m worried about the attacks I will get afterward.” “What attacks?” “I just worry that people will try and knock me down once I am out on my own.” This seemed unduly paranoid. People adored her. I asked William how he was enjoying Eton. “Oh, it’s great, thanks.” “Do you think the press bother you much?” “Not the British press, actually. Though the European media can be quite annoying. They sit on the riverbank watching me rowing with their cameras, waiting for me to fall in! There are photographers everywhere if I go out. Normally loads of Japanese tourists taking pictures. All saying “Where’s Prince William?’ when I’m standing right next to them.” “How are the other boys with you?” “Very nice. Though a boy was expelled this week for taking ecstasy and snuff. Drugs are everywhere, and I think they’re stupid. I never get tempted.” “Does matron take any?” laughed Diana. “No, Mummy, it gives her hallucinations.” “What, like imagining you’re going to be king?” I said. They both giggled again. “Is it true you’ve got Pamela Anderson posters on your bedroom wall?” “No! And not Cindy Crawford, either. They did both come to tea at the palace, though, and were very nice.” William had been photographed the previous week at a party at the Hammersmith Palais, where he was mobbed by young girls. I asked him if he’d had fun. “Everyone in the press said I was snogging these girls, but I wasn’t,” he insisted. Diana laughed. “One said you stuck your tongue down her throat, William. Did you?” “No, I did not. Stop it, Mummy, please. It’s embarrassing.” He’d gone puce. It was a very funny exchange, with a flushed William finally insisting: “I won’t go to any more public parties; it was crazy. People wouldn’t leave me alone.” Diana laughed again. “All the girls love a nice prince.” I turned to more serious matters. “Do you think Charles will become king one day?” “I think he thinks he will,” replied Diana, “but I think he would be happier living in Tuscany or Provence, to be honest.” “And how are you these days--someone told me you’ve stopped seeing therapists?” “I have, yes. I stopped when I realized they needed more therapy than I did. I feel stronger now, but I am under so much pressure all the time. People don’t know what it’s like to be in the public eye, they really don’t.

Criticizing highly educated women who “opt out” ignores two realities: the first is that society reaps tremendous, tangible benefits from able women (and men) who have the time to cultivate their families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, and politics. If all the capable people are working eighty hours a week, who will tend to our children, communities, and culture? Second, some values are intangible. Not everything can be monetized. It is good, and even necessary, that women be represented in all walks of professional life, because it expands the world of possibility for all women. However, there are values that defy commodification, such as the well-being of our children and even ourselves. There is also the opportunity to perpetuate our values through generations to come. By raising children well, we leave an indelible mark on posterity. Surely this is a rational choice that is worth the cost. In learning to use our words, we believe what we say matters, that our opinions are as important as our encouraging words. What we think and say can summon the best in others; it can also be an important tool for achieving our dreams. For instance, were someone to question Elizabeth’s decision to leave the workforce, I’m confident that she would have at least five well-crafted talking points that articulate her reasons. We can have our talking points too. Said Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, “Once you have learned to trust your own voice . . . you have the basic tool to fulfill your dreams.

Albert Einstein wrote from Berlin to the French writer and pacifist, Romain Rolland: ‘When posterity recounts the achievements of Europe, shall we let men say that three centuries of painstaking cultural effort carried us no farther than from religious fanaticism to the insanity of nationalism? In both camps today even scholars behave as though eight months ago they suddenly lost their heads.’ ***

As I pass Logan’s room, I catch a glorious purple glow. My curiosity gets the best of me. I walk in and flick on the light switch. On the wall above a bookshelf hangs something truly magnificent. Delicately, I pick up the Mace Windulightsaber replica. It reminds me of those super expensive knives professional chefs use that are weighted perfectly for precision. I take a step back and brandish the weapon at a poster of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings on the wall. “Don’t worry, your highness. Your Jedi escort will see you to safety,” I say in my best Obi Wan accent. “The force is strong with this one.” The words come from behind me. I whip around out of pure freaked-out instinct, swinging the lightsaber in a big arc. It clashes with one just like it, except it’s blue. I look up into Dan’s smug face and wish these lightsabers weren’t replicas. Sure, it’s a cute face, but it’s a face I’m not in the mood to deal with at the moment. I swirl my saber to move his out of the way and put the point of it to his chin. “Don’t make me slice your nose off, you scruffy-looking nerf herder.” I’ve always wanted to call someone that, but the opportunity never presented itself until now. He tosses his lightsaber onto the bed and holds his hands up in surrender. “I yield, but only because that is a limited edition.

If a social and democratic city is going to be built again, it will most probably be built by those who have no investment in the past, no fond memory of it. That isn’t to say they’ll be building on nothing. There is something to conserve, Tony Judt was right about that much – the very fact a publicly owned Carpenters Estate existed at all was the reason why it sat empty, and the reason why the slogan of the young mothers who occupied it could be so clear and so practical: ‘These people need homes, these homes need people.’ Such words are unlikely to find their way into white letters on a red poster, with an emblem of the crown above them. If we’re ever going to escape from austerity, this clear statement of collective utility is the most likely way out.

9. Retribution[FN#220] in the Past, the Present, and the Future Life. Then a question suggests itself: If there be no soul that survives body (as shown in the preceding chapter), who will receive the retributions of our actions in the present life? To answer this question, we have to restate our conviction that life is one and the same; in other words, the human beings form one life or one self—that is to say, our ancestors in the past formed man's past life. We ourselves now form man's present life, and our posterity will form the future life. Beyond all doubt, all actions of man in the past have brought their fruits on the present conditions of man, and all actions of the present man are sure to influence the conditions of the future man. To put it in another way, we now reap the fruits of what we sowed in our past life (or when we lived as our fathers), and again shall reap the fruits of what we now sow in our future life (or when we shall live as our posterity). There

Sir!" he called out. "The Great Chaffalo! My name's Touch, and I brought a bundle of straw. I'd be much obliged if you'd turn it into a horse." Nearby, the tall weeds rasped a little in the breeze. But that was all. He picked up the straw and hurried past broken windows to the rear of the house. "You there, Mr. Chaffalo? It's me, Touch, and I'm in a dreadful hurry. My great-uncle aims to cart me off to the orphan house, but that don't take my fancy. I ain't asking for a fine, high-stepping horse, sir. Just any four legs'll do, as long as one ain't lame. I'd be proper grateful, Mr. Great Chaffalo." Undiscouraged, Touch moved his bundle of straw back to the front of the house to try again. And he noticed the rocking chair was pitching as if someone had just got up. Touch's hair went stiff as needles. But he was determined not to be scared off. He caught his breath. "If you were dozing, I don't mean to rile you up, sir. Maybe you heard of my great-uncle. Judge Wigglesforth? Crosscut saws don't come any meaner. I know I don't amount to much, for a boy, but I'm not shifty-eyed, the way he says. I hope you can see that, Great Chaffalo." Suddenly, Touch thought he could feel a pair of eyes watching him. The eyes in the poster! he thought. His hopes took a leap. "I aim to ride through the woods until I'm long out of reach, sir. He won't know where to look. I'll thank you everlastingly if you'll oblige me with a horse." A snarl burst out of the tall weeds. It wasn't a horse. It was a scruffy wild dog, its teeth looking like rusty nails. And it was coming straight for Touch. Touch began to shinny up a porch column, but he knew that hound was going to get its rusty teeth into his leg. Then he heard a snap of fingers and a voice in the air. "Hey! Hey!" The bundle of straw changed into a horse.

Before leaving, Jackson assembled his brigade to bid them this farewell: “Officers and Soldiers of the First Brigade: I am not here to make a speech, but simply to say farewell. I first met you at Harper’s Ferry, in the commencement of this war, and I cannot take leave of you without giving expression to my admiration for your conduct from that day to this, whether on the march, the bivouac, the tented field, or the bloody plains of Manassas, when you gained the well deserved reputation of having decided the fate of that battle. “Throughout the broad extent of country over which you have marched, by your respect for the rights and property of citizens you have shown that you were soldiers, not only to defend, but able and willing to both defend and protect. You have already gained a brilliant and deservedly high reputation throughout the army and the whole Confederacy, and I trust in the future, by your own deeds on the field, and by the assistance of the same kind Providence who has heretofore favored our cause, you will gain more victories, and add additional luster to the reputation you now enjoy. “You have already gained a proud position in the future history of this, our second war of independence. I shall look with great anxiety to your future movements, and I trust that whenever I shall hear of the 1st Brigade on the field of battle it will be of still nobler deeds achieved and a higher reputation won. “In the Army of the Shenandoah you were the First Brigade, in the Army of the Potomac you were the First Brigade, in the 2d Corps of this army you are the First Brigade; you are First Brigade in the affections of your general, and I hope by your future deeds and bearing you will be handed down to posterity as the First Brigade in this, our second war of independence. Farewell!”[21] As it turned out, this moving speech was premature in its deliverance, because just one month later, after witnessing the deplorable troops over who he was to command, Jackson called for his old brigade to reinforce him in the Valley. An

Matilde leads us into one of the apartment’s two bedrooms, obviously belonging to Bruno and Luca. Bunk beds are stacked in the corner and the walls are covered in soccer posters. “You can have the bottom bed, Pippa,” Chiara says. “You seem to have a problem with steps.” I snatch a pillow and whip it at her, but she ducks in time, the pillow knocking over a stack of sports magazines. “Girls same as boys.” Matilde laughs as she turns back to the living area. We pull fresh clothes out of our luggage and Chiara heads to the bathroom--the only one in the apartment--closing the door behind her and leaving me to change. I shed my shirt and freshen my deodorant, then fan my skin trying to cool off. I feel wet everywhere. I can still hear Chiara shuffling around in the bathroom, so I quickly change my shorts into ones that are more breathable, and then decide to sprinkle some baby powder down my bra. Just as a little cloud of powder hits my chest, a voice that is neither Chiara’s nor her aunt’s announces its presence in the now open doorway. “You are the American girl who is taking my bed.

I think you're going to like these," she said, placing the stack on the table. "The whole class spent Monday and Tuesday painting them up." Raymond and Sean lifted up the top poster and stared. ARSE PRESENTS SUPER HALLOWEEN PARTY FOOD, DRINKS, GREAT MUSIC HALLOWEEN TRAMPOLINE COSTUME CONTEST FOR THE MYSTERY PRIZE DON'T MISS IT! She smiled proudly. "What do you think?" "Nice," said Sean, wondering why Raymond had suddenly gone so silent and so pale. Finally Raymond found his voice. "But Ashly, why does it say" —he pointed to the top line— "that?" "That? That's us. Our initials—Ashly, Raymond, Sean, and Eckerman—I couldn't remember his first name." "I get it," said Sean. Raymond was positively white. "The other kids who worked on them—they didn't—say anything about the posters? The wording maybe?" "The whole class really liked them," said Ashley. "I think everyone's favorite part was the initials thing. They thought it was clever." Raymond looked up at the ceiling. "Oh, it was.

The next message was from my mom. “What in the hell do I have to do to get my children to call me?” She was missing Chucky. I yelled from my bedroom, “Chuck, did you call Mom back?” He came and stood in the doorway of my room. Through a yawn, he said, “Yeah, she’s having empty-nester pains.” “That’s pathetic. I figured it was more about you than me.” “Your boy had a shitty game.” “I heard,” I said. “Are you working tomorrow?” “No, I don’t work on Sundays. It’s a holy day.” Chucky choked on his Kombucha. “You are the poster child of goodness and virtue.” I was brushing out my hair and inspecting the balayage I had done on it the day before. “I thought you were gonna start being nicer to your landlord?” I said. “Your hair looks good, Charlotte. Seriously. You kind of look like Lily Aldridge now.” “Who’s that?” “Some famous chick.” When Chucky left the room, I immediately Googled Lily Aldridge. She was a model and married to a rock star. I walked over to Chucky’s room, where I found him dozing off in bed. I walked right up to him and smacked him in the head. “What are you doing?” he shouted. “You can’t call me Fatbutt and then say I look like freakin’ Lily Aldridge.” “Okay,” he whined. “I take it back. You look like you ate Lily Aldridge.” “Fuck you, Chucky.” As I walked back to my room he called out, “Love you, Fatbutt!

He reaches out and trails his finger along a poster that says STAR in bubble letters. Safe, Tolerant, Accountable, Respectful-all the things teachers wish students were, but we can't always be because we're human beings and not robots.

I can see perfectly and clearly. And my glasses are still on the nightstand. I bolt upright and look around my room. Everything – every poster, every tool, every spare part, every spool of wire – I can see it all crisp and clear. I saw every strand of Mom’s hair in perfect precision. Her tired eyes. The steam rising from her mug. It should’ve all been a blurred mess of colored blobs. I should’ve had to drag my glasses on before any of my surroundings made sense. I grab my glasses and slide them on. Everything shifts out of focus. I take them off and my world sharpens. I scowl down at my frames like they’ve betrayed me somehow. Then I fumble for my cell phone and dial Porter’s number. “Alex?” “You have to do something,” I say, panicked. “I woke up and now I’m Peter freaking Parker.” “Peter who?” “I can see. Like 20/20. I don’t need my glasses anymore.” “Oh. Well, that must be a residual from Shooter Delaney. She was a sharp shooter, you know.” “Is that all you have to say?” “What do you want me to say?” “I want you to tell me how to reverse it.” There’s a pause on the other end of the phone. “You want… your bad vision back?” “Yes.” “…Why?” “Because my other option is explaining to my parents how I have perfect vision all of a sudden. I’m pretty sure they won’t buy the whole ‘bitten by a radioactive spider’ thing.

Oisin had been carried away to the Land of Youth, under the western ocean. Both of them return to their mortal existence, and to Ireland, when Patrick is in the land, winning it from Crom Cruach to Christ. Patrick meets and converts each of them. They attach themselves to his company, and travel Ireland with him. When the Saint is wearied from much travelling and work, or, as often happens, from the perversity of the people he has to deal with, Oisin or Caoilte refresh and beguile him with many a sweet tale of the Fian — all of which, says the tradition, the pleased Patrick had his scribe Breogan write down and preserve for posterity. These tales make the Agallam na Seanorach. The

Are you sure it’s going to fit? You told me to get a double.” “I did?” She glanced at the platform. “I meant a full. That’s a little narrower, isn’t it?” “I don’t know. I hope they’re the same. Measure twice, move once.” Doubt flickered across Kenzie’s expression. “That’s not how the saying goes.” “It’ll do for now.” “Let’s just try it.” She curled her fingers around a handle and dragged it onward. Linc reached for the other one and helped her flip it down. It hollowed in the middle and hung over the edge. “I’m guessing I got suckered,” he said with annoyance. He looked at the label sewn into the side. “It isn’t a national brand--the measurement sure isn’t standard. The damn thing is about three inches wider than the platform.” “The length is correct,” Kenzie said helpfully. Linc lifted it back up again and leaned it against the opposite wall. “Yeah. Great.” “Sorry,” she offered. He bent over and ran a hand along the platform’s edge, pushing gently on the long wooden bar that kept the mattress in place. It gave at one corner. “Stapled. Not exactly quality construction.” He thumped at it with a closed fist to pry it loose and di the same thing at the other end, straightening with the bar in his hand. He handed it to her. “This can go in the closet. You get to explain to Norm.” “He won’t care. You’re a genius.” Linc hoisted the mattress and flipped it down again. “If you say so.” He grinned. “At least the bed’s flat.” Kenzie rested the bar in a corner and got busy stripping off the plastic while he watched. The luxurious satin top gleamed softly--he’d spent what she’d given him. When she was done, she had an armful of plastic that she stuffed into a bag on top of the crumpled rock-star posters. With a sigh of happiness she sat down on her new bed. “Thanks so much. You really came through.” “I like protecting you from lecherous mattress salesmen. You don’t need to thank me,” he joked. “How about a kiss instead?” Linc was taken aback. He opened his mouth, too surprised for a second to say yes. No never entered his mind.

She pointed to a poster on the casino that showed a mother telling her son, “I Would Rather You Came Home a Dead Patriot Than a Live Traitor.” Maria said, “No mother on earth would say that. This worship of death is sick.

Then she called Matthew. He answered, "Where the fuck are you? I've been calling you for hours." She said, "I was asleep. Just woke up. What's the problem?" "Don't tell me you're still in your hotel room in your bed." "Didn't I say I just woke up? Still in bed. Needed some sleep. Just waking up. . . ." "Is that right?" . . . "Where are you right now?" "Antigua motherfucking Yacht Club. Room twenty-fucking-nine. Sitting on a . . . four-poster bed that has a damn mosquito net pulled back so I know I can see what the fuck I see. And I see an empty four-poster bed . . . But hell, maybe I'm wrong, because I know I didn't marry a goddamn liar. So I guess if I'm in your room and you're in the goddamn bed, just waking up, then either I am as blind as a fucking bat or you must be fucking invisible.

Her, though! Once when I was in high school she caught me doing something or other, imitating my Spanish teacher, perhaps with a pair of tights on my head, and said, like someone at the end of her rope, “What are you, a queer?” I’d been called a sissy before, not by her but by plenty of other people. That was different, though, as the word was less potent, something used by children. When my mother called me a queer, my face turned scarlet and I exploded. “Me? What are you talking about? Why would you even say a thing like that?” Then I ran down to my room, which was spotless, everything just so, the Gustav Klimt posters on the walls, the cornflower-blue vase I’d bought with the money I earned babysitting. The veil had been lifted, and now I saw this for what it was: the lair of a blatant homosexual. That would have been as good a time as any to say, “Yes, you’re right. Get me some help!” But I was still hoping that it might be a phase, that I’d wake up the next day and be normal. In the best of times, it seemed like such a short leap. I did fantasize about having a girlfriend—never the sex part, but the rest of it I had down. I knew what she’d

No it won’t. He recognized Goober’s voice and it was important to share the discovery with Goober. He had to tell Goober to play ball, to play football, to run, to make the team, to sell the chocolates, to sell whatever they wanted you to sell, to do whatever they wanted you to do. He tried to voice the words but there was something wrong with his mouth, his teeth, his face. But he went ahead anyway, telling Goober what he needed to know. They tell you to do your thing but they don’t mean it. They don’t want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It’s a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don’t disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.

Blogging: Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.

any time I feel like quitting, I just look at a framed poster I have hanging in our office: • He failed in business in ’31. • He ran as a state legislator and lost in ’32. • He tried business again in ’33 and failed again. • His sweetheart died in ’35. • He had a nervous breakdown in ’36. • He ran for state elector in ’40 after he regained his health. • He was defeated for Congress in ’43, defeated again for Congress in ’48, defeated when he ran for Senate in ’55 and defeated for vice presidency of the United States in ’56. • He ran for Senate again in ’58 and lost. • This man never quit. He kept trying till the last. In 1860, this man—Abraham Lincoln—was elected president of the United States. I want to be like Abe Lincoln. As my dad always says, “Shoot for the stars, and you just might land on the moon.

His name is C. J. Skender, and he is a living legend. Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools. He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke, and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent. In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.” Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.” In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on the radar. In 2011, Love left the White House to study at Wharton. He sent a note to Skender: “I’m on the train to Philly to start the executive MBA program and one of the first classes is financial accounting—and I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me when I was in your class.

The ashes of Augustus," she said. "Monsignor Isaac was searching for the golden urn in which the emperor's ashes were placed before it was buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus. Livia, his wife, had presided over the burning of the emperor's body for three days and two nights in the presence of members of the senate. It was even rumored that Livia paid the senator Numerius Atticus to say that he had seen the spirit of Augustus ascending into heaven." "Like Jesus' Ascension?" Ryan became introspective. "Exactly. In ancient times, ascension symbolized that a deceased ruler was of divine origin. Livia wanted Augustus' divinity to be remembered for posterity.

All over Paris right now, there are posters for the French singer Véronique Sanson, advertising concerts of songs from what are called, portentously, “Les Années Americaines”—her American years. It is fair to say that no American has any idea that Véronique had American years—although she did, and was married to Stephen Stills for a little while. It doesn’t matter. The idea of her Americanness appeals to Parisians, as the abstract idea of becoming Parisian appeals to Americans.

Alexander said as soon as it got cold, they would leave. September came and it was still warm; he liked that. Better still, not only was Tatiana making them a little money, she was drinking some sparkling wine, some Bisol Brut, for which she developed a bit of a taste. After work, she would sit with Anthony, have bread and cheese, and a glass of sparkler. She closed the winery, counted the money, played with the boy, waited for Alexander to finish work, and sipped her drink. By the time they drove to the B&B, had dinner, chocolate cake, more wine, a bath, put Anthony to bed, and she fell down onto the goose down covers, arms flung above her head, Tatiana was so bubbled up, so pliant, so agreeable to all his relentless frenzies, and so ceaselessly and supernally orgasmic that Alexander would not have been a mortal man if he allowed anything to come between his wife and her Bisol Brut. Who would do a crazy thing like quit to go into dry country? This country was flowing with foaming wine, and that is just how they both liked it. He started whispering to her again, night by night, little by little. Tania . . . you want to know what drives me insane? Yes, darling, please tell me. Please whisper to me. When you sit up straight like this with your hands on your lap, and your breasts are pushed together, and your pink nipples are nice and soft. I lose my breath when your nipples are like that. The trouble is, as soon as I see you looking at me, the nipples stop being nice and soft. Yes, they are quite shameful, he whispers, his breath lost, his mouth on them. But your hard nipples also drive me completely insane, so it’s all good, Tatia. It’s all very very good. Anthony was segregated from them by an accordion room partition. A certain privacy was achieved, and after a few nights of the boy not being woken up, they got bolder; Alexander did unbelievable things to Tatiana that made her sparkler-fueled moaning so extravagant that he had to invent and devise whole new ways of sustaining his usually impeccable command over his own release. Tell me what you want. I’ll do anything you want, Tania. Tell me. What can I do—for you? Anything, darling . . . anything you want, you do . . . There was nothing Gulag about their consuming love in that enchanted bed by the window, the bed that was a quilted down island with four posters and a canopy, with pillows so big and covers so thick . . . and afterward he lay drenched and she lay breathless, and she murmured into his chest that she should like a soft big bed like this forever, so comforted was she and so very pleased with him. Once she asked in a breath, Isn’t this better than being on top of the hard stove in Lazarevo? Alexander knew she wanted him to say yes, and he did, but he didn’t mean it, and though she wanted him to say it, he knew she didn’t want him to mean it either. Could anything come close to crimson Lazarevo where, having been nearly dead, without champagne or wine or bread or a bed, without work or food or Anthony or any future other than the wall and the blindfold, they somehow managed for one brief moon to live in thrall sublime? They had been so isolated, and in their memories they still remained near the Ural Mountains, in frozen Leningrad, in the woods of Luga when they had been fused and fevered, utterly doomed, utterly alone. And yet!—look at her tremulous light— as if in a dream—in America—in fragrant wine country, flute full of champagne, in a white quilted bed, her breath, her breasts on him, her lips on his face, her arms in rhapsody around him are so comforting, so true—and so real.

When Prince Charles arrived home from a recent private visit to France she found his presence so oppressive that she literally ran out of Kensington Palace. Diana phoned a friend who was grieving over the death of a loved one. She could sense that her chum was crying and said: “Right I’m coming over now.” As her friend recalls: “She came instantly for me but when she arrived she was visibly unsettled. Diana told me: “I’m here for you but I’m also here for me. My husband appeared and I just had to fly out and escape.’ She was all of a dither.” As far as is practicable they lead separate lives, joining forces only to maintain a façade of unity. These reunions merely give the public a glimpse into their isolated existences. At last year’s soccer Cup Final at Wembley they sat next to each other but never exchanged a word or glance during the ninety-minute game. More recently Prince Charles missed his wife’s cheek and ended up kissing her neck at the end of a polo match during their tour of India. Even their notepaper which used to have a distinctive intertwined “C and D” has been discarded in favour of individual letterheadings. When she is at Kensington palace he will be at Highgrove or Birkhall on the Balmoral estate. At Highgrove she has the large four-poster in the master bedroom; he sleeps in a brass bed which he borrowed from his son, Prince William, because he found its extra width more comfortable after he broke his right arm during a polo match. Even these distant sleeping arrangements have led to marital discord. When Prince William asked for his bed back, his father refused. “Sometimes I don’t know who the baby is in this family,” commented Diana caustically. The days when she affectionately called him “Hubcap” are long gone. As James Gilbey notes: “Their lives are spent in total isolation. It’s not as though they ring each other and have sweet chats each evening and say: ‘Darling what have you been doing?’ It simply doesn’t happen.

There’s a primer,” continued Lightfoote. “I know it. I just can’t figure it out. There’s a measuring stick in this mess!” Lopez sighed. “So you’ve been saying since dawn. But it’s a quarter to five and there hasn’t been anything more. Don’t you get hangovers?” “Cyborg.” “Right. I’d forgotten.” They’d been staring at the reconstructed image for hours, assembled on the computer from several photos Houston had taken, completing the half obtained from Fawkes’s file. “What do you make of it, Francisco?” Houston had asked after they stitched the images together. “Nothing,” he’d sighed. “Just more crazy.” But from early on Lightfoote had disagreed. As the night had limped by, she continued staring at the news clippings, scrap paper, words and diagrams, equations and images John Nash had taped and pinned together across the giant poster board. “Look. This isn’t coincidence. Numbers!” she gestured to

It paid off in two immediate ways. First, Think Different started a process of bringing pride back to Apple’s employees. Billboards and posters went up across the Cupertino campus. Steve’s narrated version was featured in a video promoting the whole campaign inside the company, and later, after Apple won the Emmy Award for the best television ad campaign for 1998, the company gave a fifty-page commemorative book to all its employees. “Our audience was the employees as much as anyone else,” says Clow. Inspiring them was challenging, especially when Steve was shuttering divisions of the company and laying off thousands of workers. But Think Different gave the surviving employees a sense that they might see better days ahead, for the first time in years.