Prepare To Be Tortured Quotes

No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination.

They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am. They will have to do more and more and more...but they don’t know how enormous my need is. They don’t know how much I will demand from them before I can even think about getting better. They do not know that this is not some practice fire drill meant to prepare them for the real inferno, because the real thing is happening right now. All the bells say: too late. Its much too late and I’m sure that they are still not listening. They still don’t know that they need to do more and more and more, they need to try to get through to me until they haven’t slept or eaten or breathed fresh air for days, they need to try until they’ve died for me. They have to suffer as I have. And even after they’ve done that, there will still be more. They will have to rearrange the order of the cosmos, they will have to end the cold war...they will have to cure hunger in Ethiopia, and end the sex trade in Thailand and stop torture in Argentina. They will have to do more then they ever thought they could if they want me to stay alive. They have no idea how much energy and exasperation I am willing to suck out of them until I feel better. I will drain them and drown them until they know how little of me there is left even after I’ve taken everything they’ve got to give me because I hate them for not knowing.

The very fact that you have bought or borrowed this book means that a narcissist has somehow managed to get under your skin. So, perhaps already you have dipped a toe in, and paid a heavy price.

The precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” . . . is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.

By the time you get to the magic number 10, it really is game over. Self -confidence, self-belief, self-esteem- just about everything in fact- is well and truly on the floor. A long, painful, drawn-out recovery process lies ahead.

Look. (Grow-ups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it is my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming up, torture you've already been prepared for, but there's worse. There's death coming up, and you better understand this: Some of the wrong people die. Be ready for it. This isn't Curious George Uses the Potty. Nobody warned me and it was my own fault (you'll see what I mean in a little) and that was my mistake, so I'm not letting it happen to you. The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this: life is not fair. Forget all the garbage your parents put out.

The main weakness he has seized on is your vulnerability, your desire for love. This leaves you open to (easy for him) emotional manipulation.

I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants. Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?

I mean, what if I were to suggest that there are some sensible middle-aged people out there who allow themselves to fall for someone, and in the process allow themselves to become so controlled and manipulated that they are powerless to prevent it? I mean, could you ever imagine yourself allowing THAT?

Codependents usually have a poor sense of self-worth and at times debilitatingly low self-esteem.

You can imagine a narcissist positively salivating at the opportunity presented to them on meeting a codependent.

In essence, you will always put the needs of other people above your own. Always.

You are overly altruistic; you help too many people, people who in a million years would never reciprocate. You prioritise other peoples´ needs over your own.

Don't torture yourself over the past. Use it as a teacher. Whatever happened to you in the past, has only prepared you for now.

Around the time they were preparing Jose Arcadio for the seminary she had already made a detailed recapitulation of life in the house since the founding of Macondo and had completely changed the opinion that she had always had of its descendants. She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had not lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone... Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end. It was during that time that Ursula began to speak Rebeca's name, bringing back the memory of her with an old love that was exalted by tardy repentance and a sudden admiration, coming to understand that only she, Rebeca , the one who had never fed of her milk but only of the earth of the land and the whiteness of the walls... Rebeca, the one with an impatient heart, the one with a fierce womb, was the only one who had the unbridled courage that Ursula had wanted for her line.

Utopians are heedless of methods. To render the human species happy, they are prepared to subject it to murder, torture, lethal injection, incineration, deportation, sterilization, quartering, lobotomy, electrocution, military invasion, bombing, etc.

grief. The first is anticipatory. This is hospice grief. Prognostic grief. This is the grief that comes when you drive your dog to the vet for the very last time. This is the death row inmate’s family’s grief. See that pain in the distance? It’s on its way. This is the grief that it is somewhat possible to prepare for. You finish all business. You come to terms. Goodbyes are said and said again. Anguish stalks the chambers of your heart and you steel yourself for the impending presence of an everlasting absence. This grief is an instrument of torture. It squeezes and pulls and presses down. Grief that follows an immediate loss comes on like a stab wound. This is the second kind of grief. It is a cutting pain and it is always a surprise. You never see it coming. It is a grief that can’t be

They say that if you wonder if you're a narcissist, you're not a narcissist.

Narcissists may be self-important, manipulative, selfish and greedy, but they can fall in love just as easily as the rest of us.

Fully compliant, accommodating, and happy to continually play second fiddle, the codependent will put himself out if the net result is some form of gratitude or meaningful approval.

Having become accustomed to receiving mediocre scraps of love in his formative years, you can imagine his enthusiasm flying off the Richter scale if a potential love interest promises much, much more.

When Maddie prepared for bed behind her screen that night, she emerged to find the most terrible sight yet. "Oh, really, Logan. That just isn't fair." He looked up from his reclines pose in her bedroom chaise longue, his face partly covered behind a book bound in dark green leather. "What?" "You're reading Pride and Prejudice?" He shrugged. "I found it on your bookshelf." Seeing him read any book was bad enough. But her favorite book? This was sheer torture. "Just promise me something, please," she said. "What's that?" "Just promise me that I'm not going to come out from around this screen one night and find you holding a baby." That seemed the only possibility more devastating to her self-control. "He chucked. "It doesna seem likely." "Good.

Narcissists will be thrilled to hear that studies continually show that, as a group, they are usually rated more attractive and likeable than everyone else on first appearances. Not only are they shits, but they are attractive shits into the bargain.

But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, ‘Yesterday there would have been enough time’—and again you think, ‘If only I had begun yesterday …’ And instead of the clear and precise work that is needed, instead of a gradual preparation of the soul for that morning when it will have to get up, when—when you, soul, will be offered the executioner’s pail to wash in—Instead, you involuntarily indulge in banal senseless dreams of escape—alas, of escape …

The relationship deteriorates as the narcissist withdraws. They won the testing period, and are now bored, but the codependent clings on. They are used to clinging on, they have done it their whole lives, and this is no different. If he just keeps trying that little bit harder, his partner will see sense. It´s the only thing the codependent knows.

People associated their emperor with a scale of horror fully comparable with Auschwitz – and perhaps worse. They.,were prepared to believe that living men and women nailed to posts,'•soaked in oil and set on fire were used to light a party, because the public enjoyment of torture was part of the fabric of their state. Death screams were part of the fun.

Step 1. Accept it was never a long-term bet. Sure, there were great times. You had fun, they were attractive, and you seemed to click in every way. Now get real. It doesn't

Human emotional attachment can make animal companions cling to a torturous existence when they would normally prepare themselves for their transitions peacefully.

To describe the ending of a narcissistic relationship as problematic would be a serious understatement.

Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.

I recollected my threat and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested, yet could not disobey. Yet when she died!—nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!

The initial flattery and attention will get the narcissist off to a flying start, and when the love-bombing follows, the codependent will be blown away. Somebody loves him, at last. No wonder he will become hooked so quickly. Even when the nonsense starts- the silent treatment etc. - this is behaviour he recognises and is conditioned to. He just has to keep trying that little bit harder, in order to win back the narcissist´s approval.

Why do we need to be pardoned? What are we to be pardoned for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should we ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, break-bone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count with no one saying, “Enough!” which would at least have granted some meaning to their deaths, a meaning no one ever sought for them, the dead of all times, who are now dying once again, but now in order to live? Should we ask pardon from those who deny us the right and capacity to govern ourselves? From those who don’t respect our customs and our culture and who ask us for identification papers and obedience to a law whose existence and moral basis we don’t accept? From those who oppress us, torture us, assassinate us, disappear us from the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not too big and not too small, but just a simple piece of land on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it?

Like a lot of gym teachers, Coach Babcock loved to torture his students. He felt he had failed as a teacher if his students didn't cry out for mercy. He often bragged that he held the school district's record for causing the most hysterical breakdowns in one afternoon. He used such classic forms of torture as weight training, wrestling, long-distance running, rope climing, wind spirits, chin-ups, and the occasional game of wet dodgeball (the wet ball was superloud when it hit a kid, and it left a huge red welt). But his favorite device of torment was so horrible, so truly evil, that it would drive most children to the brink of madness. It was the square dance. For six weeks of the school year, his students suffered through the Star Promenade, the Slip the Clutch, and the Ferris Wheel. As Babcock saw it, square dancing was the most embarrassing and uncomfortable form of dancing ever created, and a perfect way to prepare his students for the crushing heartbreak of life. Square dancing was a metaphor for like- you got swung around and just when you thought you were free, you got dragged back into the dance. He really thought he was doing the kids a favor.

Codependents suffer relationship addiction. Rather than taking things slowly and seeing what develops, codependents have a bull-in-a-china-shop approach. There is no hanging around, it´s all guns blazing to find a partner, then hang on them at any cost.

How to Sleep at Night Try to think of nothing. That's the secret. Try to think of nothing. Do not think of work not done, or of promises unkept, calls to return, or agendas you have failed to prepare for meetings yet unheld. Think of nothing. Do not think of words said and unsaid, or minor scandals and major investigations, of humiliations endured, insults suffered, or retorts that did not spring to mind in time. Think of nothing. Do not think of your wife, of lonely children and their reproachful demands, or the smile of the pretty woman whose handshake lingered just a shade too long in your palm. Think of nothing. Do not think of newspaper headlines, of the insistent transience of the shortwave radio, or the seductive stridency of the TV microphones thrust so thrillingly into your face. Think of nothing. Do not think of the waif on the foreign sidewalk, her large eyes open in supplication, her ragged shift stained by dirt and dust, stretching her despairing hand towards you in hope No, do not think of the solitary tear, the broken limb, the rubble-strewn home, the choking scream; never think of piled up bodies, blazing flames, shattered lives, or sundered souls. Do not think of the triumph of the torturer, the wails of the hungry, the screams of the mutilated, or the indifferent smirk of the sleek. Think of nothing. then you will be able to sleep.

But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. The political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. This subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology; it can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet without involving violence; it may be calculated, organized, technically thought out; it may be subtle, make use neither of weapons nor of terror and yet remain of a physical order.

An Underground that knew all about this, knew all about Les, was preparing to wake up the world and invite it to a Canada’s Wonderland made of bodies. Giant bloodslides. Houses of torture where children’s kidneys are twisted like sponges in the fat hands of musclemen. There would be buns crammed with the cooked knuckles of teenagers, and a king, sitting on a mountain of kings, eating his own shoulder.

Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That's something you don't understand, and can't understand until you've gone through it yourself. You're still at the state of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs makes the hardest road look short, and you've such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You're prepared for a feast, you're going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it's within reach and you don't care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you're surprised it hasn't brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make love, with painful, humiliating results. ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!

Paris is a sensuous woman every man has loved, even if only in his dreams. Once he has been deep inside her, walked her streets and tasted her delights, he can never forget her. Yet no matter how strong the memory of her remains, it cannot prepare him for the sheer beauty of her nakedness as he gazes upon her for the second time; the intoxicating fragrance of her hair as it brushes against him as it did when she let him love her; the softness of her skin beneath his fingertips as he strokes her breathtakingly graceful form; or the searing fire which courses through every fiber of his soul now that she is within reach. For every man blessed with a woman's love, she is a shrine to his happiness now that he need search no more. But for those who reside in obscurity within the lonely domicile of an empty heart, she is the hope of finding love. In his tortured heart, love waits for him at a corner cafe in the woman's smile two tables away; it lingers in the melodic laughter of a girl riding past him on a bicycle; and sometimes, when the woman is smiling at someone else, and the girl rides past him without notice, he finds love beneath the skirt of the darkly sensual woman waiting for him under a streetlamp.

Eu espero alguém que não desista de mim mesmo quando já não tem interesse. Espero alguém que não me torture com promessas de envelhecer comigo, mas sim que realmente envelheça comigo. Espero alguém que se orgulhe do que escrevo, que me faça ser mais amigo dos meus amigos e mais irmão do meu irmão. Espero alguém que não tenha medo do escândalo, mas tenha medo da indiferença. Espero alguém que ponha bilhetinhos dentro daqueles livros que vou ler até o fim. Espero alguém que se arrependa rápido de suas grosserias e me perdoe sem querer. Espero alguém que me avise que estou repetindo a roupa na semana. Espero alguém que nunca abandone a conversa quando não sei mais o que falar. Espero alguém que, nos jantares entre os amigos, dispute comigo para contar primeiro como nos conhecemos. Espero alguém que goste de dirigir para nos revezarmos em longas viagens. Espero alguém disposto a conferir se a porta está fechada e o fogão desligado, se meu rosto está aborrecido ou esperançoso. Espero alguém que prove que amar não é contrato, que o amor não termina com nossos erros. Espero alguém que não se irrite com a minha ansiedade. Espero alguém que possa criar toda uma linguagem cifrada para que ninguém nos recrimine. Espero alguém que arrume ingressos de teatro de repente, que me sequestre ao cinema, que cheire meu corpo suado depois de uma corrida como se ainda fosse perfume. Espero alguém que não largue as mãos dadas nem para coçar o rosto. Espero alguém que me olhe demoradamente quando estou distraído, que me telefone para narrar como foi seu dia. Espero alguém que procure um espaço acolchoado em meu peito. Espero alguém que minta que cozinha e só diga a verdade depois que comi. Espero alguém que leia uma notícia, veja que haverá um show de minha banda predileta, e corra para me adiantar por e-mail. Espero alguém que ame meus filhos como se estivesse reencontrando minha infância e adolescência fora de mim. Espero alguém que fique me chamando para dormir, que fique me chamando para despertar, que não precise me chamar para amar. Espero alguém com uma vocação pela metade, uma frustração antiga, um desejo de ser algo que não se cumpriu, uma melancolia discreta, para nunca ser prepotente. Espero alguém que tenha uma risada tão bonita que terei sempre vontade de ser engraçado. Espero alguém que comente sua dor com respeito e ouça minha dor com interesse. Espero alguém que prepare minha festa de aniversário em segredo e crie conspiração dos amigos para me ajudar. Espero alguém que pinte o muro onde passo, que não se perturbe com o que as pessoas pensam a nosso respeito. Espero alguém que vire cínico no desespero e doce na tristeza. Espero alguém que curta o domingo em casa, acordar tarde e andar de chinelos, e que me pergunte o tempo antes de olhar para as janelas. Espero alguém que me ensine a me amar porque a separação apenas vem me ensinando a me destruir. Espero alguém que tenha pressa de mim, eternidade de mim, que chegue logo, que apareça hoje, que largue o casaco no sofá e não seja educada a ponto de estendê-lo no cabide. Espero encontrar uma mulher que me torne novamente necessário.

What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were 'led up the garden path'. Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.

Well, Harry, while we’ve still got you here, you won’t mind helping with the preparations for Bill and Fleur’s wedding, will you? There’s still so much to do.” “No--I--of course not,” said Harry, disconcerted by this sudden change of subject. “Sweet of you,” she replied, and she smiled as she left the scullery. From that moment on, Mrs. Weasley kept Harry, Ron, and Hermione so busy with preparations for the wedding that they hardly had any time to think. The kindest explanation of this behavior would have been that Mrs. Weasley wanted to distract them all from thoughts of Mad-Eye and the terrors of their recent journey. After two days of nonstop cutlery cleaning, of color-matching favors, ribbons, and flowers, of de-gnoming the garden and helping Mrs. Weasley cook vast batches of canapés, however, Harry started to suspect her of a different motive. All the jobs she handed out seemed to keep him, Ron, and Hermione away from one another; he had not had a chance to speak to the two of them alone since the first night, when he had told them about Voldemort torturing Ollivander. “I think Mum thinks that if she can stop the three of you getting together and planning, she’ll be able to delay you leaving,” Ginny told Harry in an undertone, as they laid the table for dinner on the third night of his stay. “And then what does she think’s going to happen?” Harry muttered. “Someone else might kill off Voldemort while she’s holding us here making vol-au-vents?

In a cage of wire-ribs The size of a man’s head, the macaw bristles in a staring Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes. In the old lady’s parlour, where an aspidistra succumbs To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs in clear flames, Like a torturer’s iron instrument preparing With dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues, Crimsoning into the barbs: Or like the smouldering head that hung In Killdevil’s brass kitchen, in irons, who had been Volcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash, And would, one day; or a fugitive aristocrat From some thunderous mythological hierarchy, caught By a little boy with a crust and a bent pin, Or snare of horsehair set for a song-thrush, And put in a cage to sing. The old lady who feeds him seeds Has a grand-daughter. The girl calls him ‘Poor Polly’, pokes fun. ’Jolly Mop.’ But lies under every full moon, The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-still Her brimming eyes do not tremble or spill The dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron, Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin: Deep into her pillow her silence pleads. All day he stares at his furnace With eyes red-raw, but when she comes they close. ’Polly. Pretty Poll’, she cajoles, and rocks him gently. She caresses, whispers kisses. The blue lids stay shut. She strikes the cage in a tantrum and swirls out: Instantly beak, wings, talons crash The bars in conflagration and frenzy, And his shriek shakes the house.

In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His “will” is completely identical with that of the government. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation. Educators have always known this and have exploited it for their own purposes. Grünewald writes that he has never yet found willfulness in an intellectually advanced or exceptionally gifted child. Such a child can, in later life, exhibit extraordinary acuity in criticizing the ideologies of his opponents—and in puberty even the views by his own parents—because in these cases his intellectual powers can function without impairment. Furthermore, the teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.

Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about. They all knew that feeling and at the same time were afraid of knowing it; they turned their heads away from fear of seeing the border and stumbling (lured by vertigo as by an abyss) across it to the other side, where the language of their tortured people make a noise as trivial as the twittering of birds.

Legitimacy will come at the end of time, when the kingdom of men is assured. "The affair has only just begun, it is far from being terminated, and the world has many other things to suffer, but we shall achieve our aim, we shall be Caesar, and then we shall begin to think about universal happiness." By then the prisoner has been executed; the Grand Inquisitors reign alone, listening to "the profound spirit, the spirit of destruction and death." The Grand Inquisitors proudly refuse freedom and the bread of heaven and offer the bread of this earth without freedom. "Come down from the cross and we will believe in you," their police agents are already crying on Golgotha. But He did not come down and, even, at the most tortured moment of His agony, He protested to God at having been forsaken. There are, thus, no longer any proofs, but faith and the mystery that the rebels reject and at which the Grand Inquisitors scoff. Everything is permitted and centuries of crime are prepared in that cataclysmic moment. From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes. The unity of the world, which was not achieved with God, will henceforth be attempted in defiance of God.

In this wicked world, and in these evil times, the Church through her present humiliation is preparing for future exaltation. She is being trained by the stings of fear, the tortures of sorrow, the distresses of hardship, and the dangers of temptation; and she rejoices only in expectation, when her joy is wholesome. In this situation, many reprobates are mingled in the Church with the good, and both sorts are collected as it were in the dragnet of the gospel;228 and in this world, as in a sea, both kinds swim without separation, enclosed in nets until the shore is reached. There the evil are to be divided from the good; and among the good, as it were in his temple, ‘God will be all in all.

The deeper the worry, the greater the tragedy becomes, the more he loses himself in the enthusiasm of the divine mania. And that is prepared here. To a man like Nietzsche, gripped by an extraordinary suffering, it is a real consolation when somebody says: "All that terrible trouble which burns you now with the tortures of hell, will come to an end; you will go to sleep and not know what is happening to your body." If you have ever experienced such a state of oblivion in your life, where only your body lives, then you know all the bliss of the Dionysian revelation. And Nietzsche had that revelation. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 144)

We had been out for one of our evening rambles, Holmes and I, and had returned about six o’clock on a cold, frosty winter’s evening. As Holmes turned up the lamp the light fell upon a card on the table. He glanced at it, and then, with an ejaculation of disgust, threw it on the floor. I picked it up and read: CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON, Appledore Towers, Hampstead. Agent. “Who is he?” I asked. “The worst man in London,” Holmes answered, as he sat down and stretched his legs before the fire. “Is anything on the back of the card?” I turned it over. “Will call at 6:30--C.A.M.,” I read. “Hum! He’s about due. Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me. I’ve had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow. And yet I can’t get out of doing business with him--indeed, he is here at my invitation.” “But who is he?” “I’ll tell you, Watson. He is the king of all the blackmailers. Heaven help the man, and still more the woman, whose secret and reputation come into the power of Milverton! With a smiling face and a heart of marble, he will squeeze and squeeze until he has drained them dry. The fellow is a genius in his way, and would have made his mark in some more savoury trade. His method is as follows: He allows it to be known that he is prepared to pay very high sums for letters which compromise people of wealth and position. He receives these wares not only from treacherous valets or maids, but frequently from genteel ruffians, who have gained the confidence and affection of trusting women. He deals with no niggard hand. I happen to know that he paid seven hundred pounds to a footman for a note two lines in length, and that the ruin of a noble family was the result. Everything which is in the market goes to Milverton, and there are hundreds in this great city who turn white at his name. No one knows where his grip may fall, for he is far too rich and far too cunning to work from hand to mouth. He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning. I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian, who in hot blood bludgeons his mate, with this man, who methodically and at his leisure tortures the soul and wrings the nerves in order to add to his already swollen money-bags?” I had seldom heard my friend speak with such intensity of feeling.

The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapers, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy, or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow , for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession, dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants. The Communist purges, as the word 'purge' indicates, were understood as operations of social hygiene, to prepare mankind for the golden age of the classless society. The gas chambers and crematoria worked for the advent of a different version of the millennium. Heinrich Eichmann (as Hannah Ahrendt, reporting on his trial, has pointed out) was not a monster or a sadist, but a conscientious bureaucrat, who considered it his duty to carry out his orders and believed in obedience as the supreme virtue; far from being a sadist, he felt physically sick on the only occasion when he watched the Zircon gas at work.

Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge—in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

The male narcissist is a misogynist, holding women in complete contempt. Here you are being tormented, and your compliance with this request [ because by now you know the silent treatment will follow if you don’t ] is just another example of his control over you. At the end of the day you are merely an object, a source of his narcissistic supply discussed earlier, giving him another ‘fix’ to his fragile ego. Attention procured from fellow male diners at the next outing will only serve to inflate his delusional feeling of superiority over others, and bear in mind the attention is for his benefit, not yours. Women present will no doubt take a different perspective from their temporarily distracted partners looking on with tongues hanging out. Along the lines ‘poor woman, if that’s how she’s made to dress. I’ll bet her life must be hell. What a prick’. His demands, always phrased as though in your favour continue unabated. ‘Why don’t you just pack in your job? It’s not as if we need the money. We can live comfortably off my salary. Think of all the extra time we can have together, and less pressure on you’. Awwww, this man is all heart. Well, he does need a cleaner, that’s for sure, as describing the place as untidy would be an understatement. As for employing a gardener! Forget it. Guess who will be spending the summer months breaking her back weeding and edging? Narcissists deem such jobs trivial and beneath them. These tasks were designed for inferior people.

I call an ambulance and do a mini-intake over the phone but they will not come to help when they hear his background. He is a felon, they say. You have to call the police. I beg. Please help us. This isn’t a criminal matter. They refuse. They disconnect the line. My mother and I go back and forth and decide we have no other choice. I call the local law enforcement office and explain everything. I beg them to go slow. I tell them Monte’s history with police because by now I know how he was beaten and tortured by LA County sheriffs. Two rookies arrive and they are young as fuck. I meet them downstairs. I ask them, What will you do if my brother gets violent? Monte’s never been violent but I am trying to prepare for anything. I’m—we’re—in a place we’ve never been. We’ll just taser him, one responds. No! My God! Absolutely not! I refuse to let them past me until they promise me they won’t hurt him, and when they finally do, I lead them into the apartment, explaining to Monte as I walk through the door, It’s okay. It’s okay. They’re just here to help. And my brother. My big, loving, unwell, good-hearted brother, my brother who has rescued small animals and my brother who has never, never hurt another human being, drops to his knees and begins to cry. His hands are in the air. He is sobbing. Please don’t take me back. Please don’t take me back. I stop cold. I tell the police they have to leave and they do and I get down on the floor. I curl up next to Monte. I hold him as much as he’ll allow.

True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely little. If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1579 Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we possess paradise, we desire heaven. Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness. ‘Does she still come to the Luxembourg?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘This is the church where she attends mass, is it not?’ ‘She no longer comes here.’ ‘Does she still live in this house?’ ‘She has moved away.’ ‘Where has she gone to dwell?’ ‘She did not say.’ What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one’s soul! Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child of him! There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away. Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger,—that would suffice for my eternity! Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it. Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture. There is ecstasy in agony. Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing. 1580 Les Miserables Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise. Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again. I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul. What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake. If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.

Sonya burst into hysterical tears and replied through her sobs that she would do anything and was prepared for anything, but gave no actual promise and could not bring herself to decide to do what was demanded of her. She must sacrifice herself for the family that had reared and brought her up. To sacrifice herself for others was Sonya's habit. Her position in the house was such that only by sacrifice could she show her worth, and she was accustomed to this and loved doing it. But in all her former acts of self-sacrifice she had been happily conscious that they raised her in her own esteem and in that of others, and so made her more worthy of Nicholas whom she loved more than anything in the world. But now they wanted her to sacrifice the very thing that constituted the whole reward for her self-sacrifice and the whole meaning of her life. And for the first time she felt bitterness against those who had been her benefactors only to torture her the more painfully; she felt jealous of Natasha who had never experienced anything of this sort, had never needed to sacrifice herself, but made others sacrifice themselves for her and yet was beloved by everybody. And for the first time Sonya felt that out of her pure, quiet love for Nicholas a passionate feeling was beginning to grow up which was stronger than principle, virtue, or religion. Under the influence of this feeling Sonya, whose life of dependence had taught her involuntarily to be secretive, having answered the countess in vague general terms, avoided talking with her and resolved to wait till she should see Nicholas, not in order to set him free but on the contrary at that meeting to bind him to her forever.

Towards the end of the last century the pursuit of Utopia entered the political mainstream. In future only one kind of regime would be legitimate: American-style democratic capitalism – the final form of human government, as it was termed in the fleeting and now forgotten mood of hubris that followed the Soviet collapse. Led by the United States, western governments committed themselves to installing democracy throughout the world – an impossible dream that in many countries could only produce chaos. At the same time they launched a ‘war against terror’ that failed to distinguish between new threats and the normal conflicts of history. The Right was possessed by fantasies, and like the utopian visions of the last century – but far more quickly – its grandiose projects have crumbled into dust. In the twentieth century it seemed utopian movements could come to power only in dictatorial regimes. Yet after 9/ 11 utopian thinking came to shape foreign policy in the world’s pre-eminent democracy. In many ways the Bush administration behaved like a revolutionary regime. It was prepared to engage in pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states in order to achieve its goals, while at the same time it has been ready to erode long-established American freedoms. It established a concentration camp in Guantánamo whose inmates are beyond the reach of normal legal protection, denied the protection of habeas corpus to terrorist suspects, set up an apparatus of surveillance to monitor the population and authorized American officials to practise what in any other country would be defined as torture. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, Britain suffered, in a more limited way, a similar transformation.

The moment before the gun goes off is always the most silent. Your world is quiet, but it is not calm. The runners around you bounce and flex and relax, flex and relax. They slap their faces for motivation, they look to the sky and mumble prayers to God. The coaches shout instructions and the teammates cheer as do the fans in the stands, but you cannot hear because you are somewhere else, somewhere deep inside, preparing your body to deal with the coming pain, the breath sucked from you, your limbs on fire and the voices that won't let you stop. They say keep moving, it gets better, it will be better if you can only break through this pain. They say there's another life after this torture, a new level, just keep breathing. Then the gunshot and your body no longer belongs to you. Yes, you are there, you are present but you are no longer in control. Whatever happens from this point happens and all you can do, all you must do now is breathe, keep breathing, don't lose your nerve, don't choke, no matter how much it hurts, don't stop breathing otherwise it will all be over before it's time. They cheer for me. I can't breathe. Harvard isn't going to know what hit them, I hear. I can't breathe. We are the champions, I hear, we are the champions, they sing around me. I can't breathe. Your personal best by a long shot. That's Coach Erickson's voice. That's my boy. It's my father. It's like I'm dying, trying to hold on. My body says oh no, and my knees buckle but so many arms are around me, they hold me up. The voices they say breathe, keep breathing. They bring me water, they bring me something sweet and then they lay me down in the soft grass where I feel the blades against my tingling skin.

O, Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you. Amen. . When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. I saw this happen today as the sun went down. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! No herons, no distant music, not even the taste of his lips. How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? . Life moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds. . I smile and say nothing, . If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. . Everything is an illusion - and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. . She had spent a lot of her life saying 'no' to things to which she would have liked to say 'yes', . My dear, it's better to be unhappy with a rich man than happy with a poor man, and over there you'll have far more chance of becoming an unhappy rich woman. . Love isn't that important. I didn't love your father at first, but money buys everything, even true love. . Hail Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you. Amen. . She would never find what she was looking for if she couldn't express herself. . At the moment, I'm far too lonely to think about love, but I have to believe that it will happen, that I will find a job and that I am here because I chose this fate. . Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant. . A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love. What nonsense! The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin. Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life, from one moment to the next. . Again, she seemed like a stranger to herself. . I let fate choose which route I should take. . Some people were born to face life alone, and this is neither good nor bad, it is simply life. . I'm not a body with a soul, I'm a soul that has a visible part called the body. . She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day-to-day frustration. . Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings. . We are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. . No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. . However tempted she was to continue, however prepared she was for the challenges she had met on her path, all these months living alone with herself had taught her that there is always a right moment to stop something. . He knew everything about her, although she knew nothing about him. . She had opened a door which she didn't know how to close. . Our experiences have been entirely different, but we are both desperate people. . Free yourself from something that cost your heart even more. . One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with. . Does a soldier go to war in order to kill the enemy? No, he goes in order to die for his country. . What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over. . Because we don't want to forget who we are - nor can we. . This was simply a place where people gathered to worship something they could not understand.

I have talked to many people about this and it seems to be a kind of mystical experience. The preparation is unconscious, the realization happens in a flaming second. It was on Third Avenue. The trains were grinding over my head. The snow was nearly waist-high in the gutters and uncollected garbage was scattered in a dirty mess. The wind was cold, and frozen pieces of paper went scraping along the pavement. I stopped to look in a drug-store window where a latex cooch dancer was undulating by a concealed motor–and something burst in my head, a kind of light and a kind of feeling blended into an emotion which if it had spoken would have said, “My God! I belong here. Isn’t this wonderful?” Everything fell into place. I saw every face I passed. I noticed every doorway and the stairways to apartments. I looked across the street at the windows, lace curtains and potted geraniums through sooty glass. It was beautiful–but most important, I was part of it. I was no longer a stranger. I had become a New Yorker. Now there may be people who move easily into New York without travail, but most I have talked to about it have had some kind of trial by torture before acceptance. And the acceptance is a double thing. It seems to me that the city finally accepts you just as you finally accept the city. A young man in a small town, a frog in a small puddle, if he kicks his feet is able to make waves, get mud in his neighbor’s eyes–make some impression. He is known. His family is known. People watch him with some interest, whether kindly or maliciously. He comes to New York and no matter what he does, no one is impressed. He challenges the city to fight and it licks him without being aware of him. This is a dreadful blow to a small-town ego. He hates the organism that ignores him. He hates the people who look through him. And then one day he falls into place, accepts the city and does not fight it any more. It is too huge to notice him and suddenly the fact that it doesn’t notice him becomes the most delightful thing in the world. His self-consciousness evaporates. If he is dressed superbly well–there are half a million people dressed equally well. If he is in rags–there are a million ragged people. If he is tall, it is a city of tall people. If he is short the streets are full of dwarfs; if ugly, ten perfect horrors pass him in one block; if beautiful, the competition is overwhelming. If he is talented, talent is a dime a dozen. If he tries to make an impression by wearing a toga–there’s a man down the street in a leopard skin. Whatever he does or says or wears or thinks he is not unique. Once accepted this gives him perfect freedom to be himself, but unaccepted it horrifies him. I don’t think New York City is like other cities. It does not have character like Los Angeles or New Orleans. It is all characters–in fact, it is everything. It can destroy a man, but if his eyes are open it cannot bore him. New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it–once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theatre, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else….

Rider made this sound in the back of his throat. It was deep and masculine, part groan and growl, and it made me shiver. He folded one hand along my cheek and lowered his head to mine, but he didn’t kiss me. No. His warm breath glided over my forehead as his hand slid across my cheek, his fingers spreading into my hair at the base. His other hand landed low on my back, and the weight did insane things to my insides. He drew it up my back, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. My eyes fluttered shut as his lips brushed over the curve of my cheek. It was the craziest torture. My entire body tensed, prepared for the moment when his lips met mine. And it was the sweetest pressure, a feather-light brush of his lips over mine. Once. Then twice. I felt the touch everywhere, a jolt to the system that zipped through my veins, and then the pressure increased. Rider kissed me then. It was a real one, soft and beautiful, and when the kiss deepened, it wasn’t a shy one. He knew what he was doing, and even though I didn’t, an innate knowledge told me it didn’t matter. His lips mapped out mine, and my insides were in tight coils. Kissing was awesome. Amazing. Astonishing. I could probably think of a couple of more words to describe it. Kissing blew me away, and when he lifted his mouth, both of us were breathing hard. He rested his forehead against mine. Neither of us spoke for several moments. I still wasn’t thinking. I had no idea how my hands had gotten to Rider’s chest, but his heart pounded under my palm as fast as mine did. My mind was blissfully blank as I breathed in his scent, a mix of his citrusy cologne and the faint trace of paint. “Did you like that?” he asked, dragging his fingers out of my hair and over the line of my jaw. Screaming yes, oh, God, yes, would’ve probably been a little too excessive, so I managed a somewhat subdued, “Yes.” As Rider grinned, his lips brushed mine. “Good. Because I really liked it.

An Orthodox priest, a friend of mine, telephoned me and told me that a Russian officer had come to him to confess. My friend did not know Russian. However, knowing that I speak Russian, he had given him my address. The next day this man came to see me. He longed for God, but he had never seen a Bible. He had no religious education and never attended religious services (churches in Russia then were very scarce). He loved God without the slightest knowledge of Him. I read to him the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of Jesus. After hearing them, he danced around the room in rapturous joy proclaiming, “What a wonderful beauty! How could I live without knowing this Christ!” It was the first time that I saw someone so joyful in Christ. Then I made a mistake. I read to him the passion and crucifixion of Christ, without having prepared him for this. He had not expected it and, when he heard how Christ was beaten, how He was crucified and that in the end He died, he fell into an armchair and began to weep bitterly. He had believed in a Savior and now his Savior was dead! I looked at him and was ashamed. I had called myself a Christian, a pastor, and a teacher of others, but I had never shared the sufferings of Christ as this Russian officer now shared them. Looking at him, it was like seeing Mary Magdalene weeping at the foot of the cross, faithfully weeping when Jesus was a corpse in the tomb. Then I read to him the story of the resurrection and watched his expression change. He had not known that his Savior arose from the tomb. When he heard this wonderful news, he beat his knees and swore—using very dirty, but very “holy” profanity. This was his crude manner of speech. Again he rejoiced, shouting for joy, “He is alive! He is alive!” He danced around the room once more, overwhelmed with happiness! I said to him, “Let us pray!” He did not know how to pray. He did not know our “holy” phrases. He fell on his knees together with me and his words of prayer were: “Oh God, what a fine chap you are! If I were You and You were me, I would never have forgiven You of Your sins. But You are really a very nice chap! I love You with all of my heart.” I think that all the angels in heaven stopped what they were doing to listen to this sublime prayer from a Russian officer. The man had been won for Christ!

And by the end of March one of them had already begun his journey. Twenty-two years old, an A.B. and LL.B. of Harvard, Francis Parkman was back from a winter trip to scenes in Pennsylvania and Ohio that would figure in his book and now he started with his cousin, Quincy Adams Shaw, for St. Louis. He was prepared to find it quite as alien to Beacon Hill as the Dakota lands beyond it, whither he was going. He was already an author (a poet and romancer), had already designed the great edifice his books were to build, and already suffered from the mysterious, composite illness that was to make his life a long torture. He hoped, in fact, that a summer on the prairies might relieve or even cure the malady that had impaired his eyes and, he feared, his heart and brain as well. He had done his best to cure it by systematic exercise, hard living in the White Mountains, and a regimen self-imposed in the code of his Puritan ancestors which would excuse no weakness. But more specifically Parkman was going west to study the Indians. He intended to write the history of the conflict between imperial Britain and imperial France, which was in great part a story of Indians. The Conspiracy of Pontiac had already taken shape in his mind; beyond it stretched out the aisles and transepts of what remains the most considerable achievement by an American historian. So he needed to see some uncorrupted Indians in their native state. It was Parkman’s fortune to witness and take part in one of the greatest national experiences, at the moment and site of its occurrence. It is our misfortune that he did not understand the smallest part of it. No other historian, not even Xenophon, has ever had so magnificent an opportunity: Parkman did not even know that it was there, and if his trip to the prairies produced one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature, it ought instead to have produced a key work of American history. But the other half of his inheritance forbade. It was the Puritan virtues that held him to the ideal of labor and achievement and kept him faithful to his goal in spite of suffering all but unparalleled in literary history. And likewise it was the narrowness, prejudice, and mere snobbery of the Brahmins that insulated him from the coarse, crude folk who were the movement he traveled with, turned him shuddering away from them to rejoice in the ineffabilities of Beacon Hill, and denied our culture a study of the American empire at the moment of its birth. Much may rightly be regretted, therefore. But set it down also that, though the Brahmin was indifferent to Manifest Destiny, the Puritan took with him a quiet valor which has not been outmatched among literary folk or in the history of the West.

Before taking the discipline for the first time, Brother Martin spent considerable time in prayer. Then he lashed himself with an iron chain armed with hooks of steel until the blood flowed copiously; to increase the pain and at the same time to staunch the flow of blood, he rubbed the wounds with salt and vinegar, in this way hoping to make reparation for his faults and failings. Then Martin would spend a long period of time in the chapter room, meditating on the sufferings of Our Divine Lord, with his eyes often fixed upon the crucifix. Filled with a longing to participate in the sorrows and pains endured by Christ, Martin made preparations for the second nightly flagellation by ripping off his garments, which were matted with blood and glued fast to his shoulders. The instrument of torture now was a leather whip, and Martin inflicted an even more severe punishment upon his back and shoulders, begging Almighty God to take pity upon sinners and especially to open wide the gates of heaven by the conversion of infidels. It was zeal for souls, for those for whom Christ had shed His own Precious Blood, that urged Blessed Martin to lash himself mercilessly with this leather whip. He was only too happy to share in the bitter Passion of Christ, on the details of which he had just lovingly meditated; and he would only too gladly endure any physical pain, any agony however terrifying, if only thereby he could win souls to Christ. Martin now permitted his weary body to snatch brief rest which we have mentioned previously. With the approach of dawn, before four o'clock, he arose and ran to the bell tower, where he greeted the dawn in honor of the Mother of God, as was his regular custom. It was at this time that the holy Negro took the third and most severe of his scourgings. Again, it was preceded by prayer and the cruel removal of the rough tunic which was stuck fast to his flesh. This third scourging was administered with the branch of a wild quince tree, and sometimes Martin would enlist the assistance of an Indian or a Negro in whom he could confide and who was indebted to Blessed Martin for some outstanding kindness. Mercilessly the lash was applied by strong and powerful hands. In the midst of his sufferings Martin would urge on his friend to greater vigor and to be utterly brutal in applying this instrument for penance. This third and last scourging was for the relief of the Poor Souls abandoned in the fires of Purgatory.

In a market where multiple offers are raising prices, Teri Toombs, Principal Broker at Living Room Realty, says she discourages people from overpaying for homes. But some can’t resist. Some people don’t want to continue renting. And they don’t care what that costs. An in-house poll led by Toombs’ colleague Alyssa Isenstein Krueger, Living Room found more than a few first-time buyers with cash to throw around. The Living Room agents that responded said that of 148 first-time buyers served in 2014, 42 percent came to the table with funds from friends and relatives to help grab whatever edge they could leverage. The sums ranged from up to $470,000. It’s not scientific, but it suggests a hard new reality in the market. For those without cash? Those that can’t overpay? “It’s torture. And I try my best to prepare them for what they’re in for and I see them starting to glaze over like, ‘Why is this lady saying all this? Why can’t we just start looking at houses? Why is she bringing us down like this?’” said Toombs. “With determination and being really diligent about it, they can get into a house. But they have to realize that they’re going to be moving into emerging neighborhoods.

There was one way he could help her though—she was still shivering from the cold. Without saying a word he unsnapped his shirt and shrugged it off, baring his upper body. “Hey, whoa—what are you doing?” Olivia was looking at him with wide eyes as though he was about to pounce on her. Did she really think so little of him to believe that he would try to take advantage of her when she was injured and helpless? Baird felt his heart fist in his chest. “Only this,” he said gruffly, draping the crimson shirt around her shivering bare shoulders. “Oh…uh, thanks.” She was staring at him now, as though she’d never seen a male before. Baird looked down at himself to see if there was something wrong. He had spent a full hour in the bathing pool that morning preparing but was it possible he had spilled something on himself before getting dressed to claim her? The broad planes of his muscular chest looked all right to him—his dusky tan skin was marked by the whitish scars left by the AllFather’s torture but a Kindred warrior always wore such marks with pride. There was a small patch of black hair between the two flat copper disks of his nipples and a trail of it led down his corded abdomen into the black uniform pants he was wearing. Truly there was nothing to stare at—so why was she still staring? “Is there a problem?” he asked at last. “You don’t like the way I look?” “Uh, no, I…You look fine. Just fine.” Olivia looked down at her hands, her fair skin blushing a deep embarrassed red. “What’s wrong then?” “Nothing.” But her beautiful silvery eyes were still flickering up to his bare chest and back down to her hands as though she couldn’t quite look away. Baird resisted the urge to tilt her chin up so she would have to meet his eyes directly. Why did she keep looking at him? He looked down at his chest again. Maybe she preferred smooth skin only? If so she was out of luck, only Tranq Kindred grew no body hair. “What’s wrong, Lilenta?” he asked her earnestly. “Is there somethin’ you want me to change?” “No, it’s nothing you can change. You’re just so…” She made a helpless little motion with one hand. “You’re just so big. And…and muscular.” Baird frowned. “Sorry about that—a warrior has to keep his body in top physical shape.” “No, don’t apologize.

She sighed and sniffed the air. The smell of dirty water hung thickly in it. They were supposed to be running a clean-up initiative. Whether they had and failed, or they’d succeeded and it had grown filthy again she wasn’t sure. Either way, she wasn’t fancying a swim.  ‘Johansson,’ Roper called from the tent, beckoning her over, the report from the uniformed officer already in his hand. ‘Come on.’ She approached and he held the edge of the door-flap open for her so she could pass inside. It was eight feet by eight feet, and the translucent material made everything bright with daylight.  The kid in front of them could have been no more than eighteen or nineteen. He was skinny and had thick curly brown hair. His skin was blued from the cold and had the distinctly greyish look of someone who did more drugs than ate food. He was lying on his back on the bank, eyes closed, hands bound together on his stomach. His clothes were enough to tell them that he was homeless. It was charity shop mix and match. A pair of jeans that were two sizes too big, tied tight around pronounced hip bones with a shoelace. He was wearing a t-shirt with the cookie monster on it that looked as old as he was. But that was it. He had no jacket despite the time of year and no socks or shoes.  Jamie crouched down, pulling a pair of latex gloves from her jacket pocket. She had a box of them in the car. ‘We got an ID?’ she asked, not looking up. She knew Roper wouldn’t get down next to her. He didn’t have the stamina for it for one, and with his hangover the smell would make him puke.  He’d leave the close inspection to her.  ‘Uh, yeah. He matches the description of a missing person’s — Oliver Hammond. Eighteen years old. No positive ID yet though. No picture on file.’ ‘Eighteen,’ Jamie mumbled, looking over him more closely. ‘Jesus.’ ‘Yup.’ Roper sighed. ‘Probably scored, got high, took a little stroll, fell in the river… And here we are.’ ‘Did he zip-tie his hands together before or after shooting up?’ She side-eyed him as he scrolled through something on his phone. She hoped it was the missing person’s report, but thought it was more likely to be one of the daily news items his phone prepared for him. ‘I’m just testing you,’ he said absently. ‘What else d’you see?’ Jamie pursed her lips. No one seemed to care when homeless people turned up dead. There’d been eight this month alone in the city — two of which had been floaters like this. She’d checked it out waiting at some traffic lights. There were more than a hundred and forty homeless missing persons reported in the last six months in London. Most cases were never closed. She grimaced at the thought and went back to her inspection. Oliver’s wrists were rubbed raw from the zip-tie, but that looked self-inflicted. She craned her neck to see his arms. His elbows were grazed and rubbed raw, and the insides were tracked out, like Roper had said. He wasn’t new to the needle. She didn’t need to check his ankles and toes to know that they’d be the same.  She lingered on his fingers, honing in on the ones with missing nails.  ‘Ripped out,’ Roper said, watching as she lifted and straightened his fingers, careful not to disturb anything before the SOCOs showed up to take their photographs. In a perfect world the body would have stayed in situ in the water, but these things couldn’t be helped.  She inspected the middle and the index fingers on the right hand — the nails were completely gone. ‘Torture,’ Roper added to the silence. ‘Probably over the heroin. You know, where’s my money?

I noticed Jim and Kalveer standing among some trees approximately 50 metres away, their cameras pointing towards us. My heart was pounding. I went down on one knee. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Danielle asked. I smiled and started to recite a carefully prepared speech telling her what she meant to me and concluding with the words: ‘You’re the one I want to live with forever. Danielle, will you marry me?’ At that moment, I took the engagement ring out of my pocket and presented it to her. She looked at it, promptly burst into tears and fell into my arms. A few seconds passed. I held her tightly. A few more seconds passed. I was starting to feel just slightly concerned. Danielle is a strong-minded person, not afraid to say what she thinks. As these torturous seconds passed, I considered it was not entirely impossible that she could turn to me and say, ‘Sorry, bud, that was a nice presentation but this is not going to happen. Would you mind if we go back to Bangalore?’ I was getting anxious. ‘Listen, are you going to give me an answer?’ She finally looked up at me and said: ‘Yes.’ We

The men were thorough sportsmen, loving horse-racing, foot-racing, and gambling. They were graceful winners, and good losers in games of chance. And they were firm believers in luck, and in the medicine conferred in dreams. Men often starved, and even tortured themselves, in preparation for desired medicine-dreams. Then, weakened both physically and mentally by enervating sweat-baths and fatigue, they slipped away alone to some dangerous spot, usually a high mountain-peak, a sheer cliff or a well-worn buffalo-trail that might be traveled at any hour by a vast herd of buffalo; and here, without food, or water, they spent four days and nights (if necessary) trying to dream, appealing to invisible “helpers,” crying aloud to the winds until utter exhaustion brought them sleep, or unconsciousness—and perhaps a medicine-dream. If lucky, some animal or bird appeared to the dreamer, offering counsel and help, nearly always prescribing rules which if followed would lead the dreamer to success in war. Thereafter the bird or animal appearing in the medicine-dream was the dreamer’s medicine. He believed that all the power, the cunning, and the instinctive wisdom, possessed by the appearing bird or animal would forever afterward be his own in time of need. And always thereafter the dreamer carried with him some part of such bird or animal. It was his lucky-piece, a talisman, and he would undertake nothing without it upon his person.

Chicago deep dish takes forever to cook and costs as much as four New York–style pizzas. Chicago deep dish is a commitment. You arrive at Uno’s, Giordano’s, Gino’s East, or Lou Malnati’s and place your order, and then you wait and wait for what seems like a lifetime. At times it feels like they are purposely tormenting you to make the deep-dish pizza seem all the more appealing. I actually make a point of not showing up hungry when I go out for a Chicago deep-dish pizza. It would be torture. To kill time, you eat a salad with provolone, salami, and pepperoncini in it and drink a pitcher of beer like you are preparing yourself for some kind of long, difficult journey of waiting. Finally your pizza arrives in a pan carried by your server with some kind of clamp contraption that I’m pretty sure is the same one they use to shape molten glass. After the first slice you are full, and you should be. You’ve eaten roughly three pounds of food that is baked on top of a crispy, cake-like crust. There is never a reason to eat more than one slice of deep dish, but you forge on. The wait has built an enthusiasm and excitement in you that can’t be quelled by just one slice. Most humans stop after two slices, but I like to think of myself as a superhuman.

We cannot escape the Lord’s words to us, and they will serve as the criteria upon which we will be judged: whether we have fed the hungry and given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger and clothed the naked, or spent time with the sick and those in prison (cf. Mt 25:31–45). Moreover, we will be asked if we have helped others to escape the doubt that causes them to fall into despair and which is often a source of loneliness; if we have helped to overcome the ignorance in which millions of people live, especially children deprived of the necessary means to free them from the bonds of poverty; if we have been close to the lonely and afflicted; if we have forgiven those who have offended us and have rejected all forms of anger and hate that lead to violence; if we have had the kind of patience God shows, who is so patient with us; and if we have commended our brothers and sisters to the Lord in prayer. In each of these “little ones,” Christ himself is present. His flesh becomes visible in the flesh of the tortured, the crushed, the scourged, the malnourished, and the exiled…to be acknowledged, touched, and cared for by us. Let us not forget the words of Saint John of the Cross: “as we prepare to leave this life, we will be judged on the basis of love”.12

Our Advent journey, preparing our hearts to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, takes us to the cross, where we remember that the Child whose birth we celebrate would be tortured and killed, and that on that cross he gave his life that we might receive life. He bore our sins that

And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands — all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible — and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.

They were aware that the first missionary to have entered Auca territory—Pedro Suarez, a Jesuit priest—had been murdered by spears in an isolated station near the confluence of the Napo and Curaray. That was in 1667. His murderers were Indians who might have been the ancestors of some present-day Aucas. For about two hundred years after this the Indians had been left in peace by the white man. Then the coming of rubber hunters wrote a dark page in the history of this jungle area. For some fifty years—from about 1875 to 1925—these men roamed the jungles, plundering and burning the Indian homes, raping, torturing, and enslaving the people. It was a time when the concept of “lesser breeds without the law” was almost universally accepted. For the Aucas to have no love for the white man was understandable. Could Christian love wipe out the memories of past treachery and brutality? This was a challenge to Jim and Pete as they hoped to bring the message of God’s love and salvation to these primitive people. It was a challenge and leading for which they had both been prepared since childhood.

There’s one thing about being a worrier, you’re prepared to go to mind-torturing lengths to worry today today on the off-chance it will avoid an even worse worry tomorrow. The alternative would be not to fret today as the catastrophe is unlikely to happen tomorrow.

The next morning the newspapers carried the news that while our meeting was being held there had been staged in Paris, Texas, one of the most awful lynchings and burnings this country has ever witnessed. A Negro had been charged with ravishing and murdering a five-year-old girl. He had been arrested and imprisoned while preparations were made to burn him alive. The local papers issued bulletins detailing the preparations, the schoolchildren had been given a holiday to see a man burned alive, and the railroads ran excursions and brought people of the surrounding country to witness the event, which was in broad daylight with the authorities aiding and abetting this horror. The dispatches told in detail how he had been tortured with red-hot irons searing his flesh for hours before finally the flames were lit which put an end to his agony. They also told how the mob fought over the hot ashes for bones, buttons, and teeth for souvenirs.

Rhys kept starting at the table as he said, 'I didn't know. That you were with Tamlin. That you were staying at the Spring Court. Amarantha sent me that day after the Summer Solstice because I'd been so successful on Calanmai. I was prepared to mock him, maybe pick a fight. But then I got into that room, and the scent was familiar, but hidden... And then I saw the plate, and felt the glamour, and... There you were. Living in my second-most enemy's house. Dining with him. Reeking of his scent. Looking at him like... Like you loved him.' The whites of his knuckles showed. 'And I decided that I had to scare Tamlin. I had to scare you, and Lucien, but mostly Tamlin. Because I saw how he looked at you, too. So what I did that day...' His lips were pale, tight. 'I broke into your mind and held it enough that you felt it, that it terrified you, hurt you. I made Tamlin beg- as Amarantha had made me beg, to show him how powerless he was to save you. And I prayed my performance was enough to get him to send you away. Back to the human realm, away from Amarantha. Because she was going to find you. If you broke that curse, she was going to find you and kill you. 'But I was so selfish- I was so stupidly selfish that I couldn't walk away without knowing your name. And you were looking at me like I was a monster, so I told myself it didn't matter, anyway. But you lied when I asked. I knew you did. I had your mind in my hands, and you had the defiance and foresight to lie to my face. So I walked away from you again. I vomited my guts up as soon as I left.' My lips wobbled, and I pressed them together. 'I checked back once. To ensure you were gone. I went with them the day they sacked the manor- to make my performance complete. I told Amarantha the name of that girl, thinking you'd invented it. I had no idea... I had no idea she'd sent her cronies to retrieve Clare. But if I admitted my lie...' He swallowed hard. 'I broke into Clare's head when they brought her Under the Mountain. I took away her pain, and told her to scream when expected to. So they... they did those things to her, and I tried to make it right, but... After a week, I couldn't let them do it. Hurt her like that anymore. So while they tortured her, I slipped into her mind again and ended it. She didn't feel any pain. She felt none of what they did to her, even at the end. But... But I still see her. And my men. And the others that I killed for Amarantha.' Two tears slid down his cheeks, swift and cold. He didn't wipe them away as he said, 'I thought it was done after that. With Clare's death. Amarantha believed you were dead. So you were safe, and far away, and my people were safe, and Tamlin had lost, so... It was done. We were done. But then... I was in the back of the throne room that day the Attor brought you in. And I have never known such horror, Feyre, as I did when I watched you make that bargain. Irrational, stupid terror- I didn't know you. I didn't even know your name. But I thought of those painter's hands, the flowers I'd seen you create. And how she'd delight in breaking your fingers apart. I had to stand and watch as the Attor and its cronies beat you. I had to watch the disgust and hatred on your face as you looked at me, watched me threaten to shatter Lucien's mind. And then- then I learned your name. Hearing you say it... it was like an answer to a question I'd been asking for five hundred years.

Even among the uninitiated - men and women who were unaware of how a day's labor had been defined through years of tense negotiation - extracting such large drafts of labor required extraordinarily coercive measures. Violent confrontations between masters and slaves seemed to grow as the lower Mississippi Valley became a slave society. Wielding the lash with greater frequency if not greater force, planters struggled to bend slaves to the new order. Slaves resisted with equal ferocity. Unrest increased and rumors of rebellion boiled to the surface. During the 1790s and into the new century, the lower Mississippi Valley was alive with news of revolt, as one intrigue after another came to light. In 1791, 1795, and again in 1804 and 1805, planters uncovered major conspiracies. They responded with the lash, mutilating many rebels and suspected rebels, deporting others, and executing still others, often after grotesque torture. Yet behind this bloody facade, master and slave began to renegotiate the terms under which slaves lived and worked. Many of these involved the pace of labor; others originated in the organization of labor and the authority of the masters' subalterns, as overseers became a fixture on the largest estates. From the planters' perspective, the large units on which sugar and cotton were grown made movement from plantation to plantation - a prominent feature of slave life in eighteenth-century Louisiana - unnecessary and undesirable. But perhaps the most intense conflicts arose over the slaves' economy: their free Sundays and half-Saturdays, their gardens and provision grounds, and their right to sell their labor and market its product. Slaves in the lower Mississippi Valley had a long tradition of independent productive activities. Planters, who once saw advantages in allowing slaves to subsist themselves, pressed for an allowance society in which rations replaced gardens and the right to market. ... Under the new regime, plantation slaves frequently worked from dawn to noon and then, after a two hour break, until 'the approach of night.' As the planters' demands intensified, the time left for slaves to work their gardens grew shorter. Sustaining them took an extraordinary commitment. The frantic pace at which slaves worked in their own plots was captured by an emigre from Saint Domingue in 1799, who observed that a slave returning form the field 'does not lose his time. He goes to work at a bit of the land which he has planted with provisions for his own use, while his companion, if he has one, busies herself in preparing some for him, herself, and their children.' 'Many of the owners take off a part of that ration,' noted another visitor. Slaves 'must obtain the rest of their food, as well as their clothing, from the results of their Sunday labors.' Planters who supplied their slaves with clothes forced them to work on Sunday 'until they have been reimbursed for their advances,' so that the cash that previously went into the slaves' pockets went to the masters'.

I get caught in a hell-world of some sort. In the initial phase, I’m aware of and merging with a kind of network of light, with a sense that this network or fabric contains all possibilities of experience. Each point of light represents a human experience, like what the Buddhists call a “seed-thought”. One of these points could be “fear of dying.” Things change so quickly, that this fear-seed usually doesn’t develop into a full-blown panic state. But if I get fixated on it, or resist letting it pass, I get stuck and the movement stops. The shimmering network freezes and congeals: it becomes brittle, harsh and glaring, like steel wires and bands. It closes in on me, like an immense spider’s web, tighter and tighter, as in Stan Grof ’s description of BPM-II. There is dread and terror associated with it and it can develop into a fullblown hallucination of a hell-realm. (These can occur with psilocybe mushrooms and LSD, too). It’s a fully developed hell, with demons torturing me, reminiscent of concentration camp accounts or the torture chambers of the Inquisition. It has a historical feel to it, as if I’m a participant-observer of collective human history, since I know these are not personal memories from my life. Being aware of the possibility of such hellish experiences and centering preparation would definitely reduce the chances of getting stuck in them (RM).

I cared only about myself, always myself. But I desperately yearned to someday, at long last, live a little too: put something of myself out into the world; to struggle against, and connect with, that world. Sometimes, wandering the streets at night, too restless to go back home before midnight, I thought that now, now, I would have to see my beloved, crossing the street at the next corner or calling to me from the next window. At other times my whole existence felt like unbearable torture, and I was prepared to take my own life.

on a seagull poo–like texture when mixed into cold water. Amelia saved my palate and joints by introducing me to the Great Lakes hydrolyzed version (green label), which blends easily and smoothly. Add a tablespoon of beet root powder like BeetElite to stave off any cow-hoof flavor, and it’s a whole new game. Amelia uses BeetElite pre-race and pre-training for its endurance benefits, but I’m much harder-core: I use it to make tart, low-carb gummy bears when fat Tim has carb cravings. RumbleRoller: Think foam roller meets monster-truck tire. Foam rollers have historically done very little for me, but this torture device had an immediate positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked

The lost man, who has no belongings, no outside interests, no personal ties of any sort - not even a name. Possessed of but one thought, interest and passion - the revolution. A man who has broken with Society, broken with its laws and conventions. He must despise the opinions of others, and be prepared for death and torture at any time. Hard towards himself, he must be hard to others, and in his heart there must be no place for love, friendship, gratitude or even honor.

For Lewis, there was simply no good reason to believe in God. No intelligent person would want to believe in “a bogey who is prepared to torture me for ever and ever.”[83] The rational case for religion was, in Lewis’s view, totally bankrupt.

For it is easier to see oneself as a criminal than to know and feel that one was, and is, an innocent victim who must be prepared at all times for torture and persecution. Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.

For its part, the Washington Post, in an article written shortly after the Islamic Revolution, acknowledges that “the CIA ‘definitely’ trained SAVAK agents in ‘both physical and psychological’ torture techniques….”4 The article explained that there were “joint activities ” between the SAVAK and the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, and that “the Israelis even wrote SAVAK’s manuals … and prepared an ill-fated effort … to undermine the growing religious impact of the revolution.” Well-trained by the CIA, the “Savak—Sazman-i Etelaat va Amniyat-I Keshvar, the “National Information and Security Organization”—was to become the most notorious and murderous [of the Shah’s security services], its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions.”5

Not of God should we speak to our child, but of the importance of being prepared to do all in its power to help others to escape the torture, misery and hardships it must so painfully overcome.

Split is doing well at the box office around the world, but it misrepresents people with dissociative identity disorder (DID; previously called multiple personality disorder). The trailer is particularly gripping, luring in audiences by depicting a man with DID kidnapping and preparing to torture three teenage girls. Kevin (played by James McAvoy) juggles 24 personalities that are based on stereotypes: a cutesy 9-year-old infatuated with Kanye West, a flamboyant designer, and the “Beast,” a superhuman monster who sees the girls as “sacred food.” Kevin falsely represents people with DID through exaggerated symptoms, extreme violence, and unrealistic physical characteristics. The senior author, an expert in DID, has not seen any DID patient who is this violent in 25 years of clinical practice. Kevin’s ghastly personalities are so over-the-top that terrifying scenes are making audiences laugh.

Forgive and release is a powerful preparation for inner healing or deliverance as it brings you out of the torture chamber and allows God to heal and restore your life.

The United Arab Emirates reportedly had its contract with NSO cancelled in 2021 when it became clear that Dubai’s ruler had used it to hack his ex-wife’s phone and those of her associates. The New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard, Beirut chief for the paper, had his phone compromised while reporting on Saudi Arabia and its leader Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a man who has invested huge amounts of money in commercial spyware.45 Palestinian human rights activists and diplomats in Palestine have also been targeted by Pegasus, including officials who were preparing complaints against Israel to the International Criminal Court. NSO technology was used by the Israeli police to covertly gather information from Israelis’ smartphones. Pegasus had become a key asset for Israel’s domestic and international activities.46 Saudi Arabia is perhaps the crown jewel of NSO’s exploits, one of the Arab world’s most powerful nations and a close ally of the US with no formal relations with the Jewish state. It is a repressive, Sunni Muslim ethnostate that imprisons and tortures dissidents and actively discriminates against its Shia minority.47 Unlike previous generations of Saudi leaders, bin Salman thought that the Israel/Palestine conflict was “an annoying irritant—a problem to be overcome rather than a conflict to be fairly resolved,” according to Rob Malley, a senior White House official in the Obama and Biden administrations.48

MARCH 16 Ordeal of Shame In a memoir of the years before World War II, Pierre Van Paassen tells of an act of humiliation by Nazi storm troopers who had seized an elderly Jewish rabbi and dragged him to headquarters. In the far end of the same room, two colleagues were beating another Jew to death. They stripped the rabbi naked and commanded that he preach the sermon he had prepared for the coming Sabbath in the synagogue. The rabbi asked if he could wear his yarmulke, and the Nazis, grinning, agreed. It added to the joke. The trembling rabbi proceeded to deliver in a raspy voice his sermon on what it means to walk humbly before God, all the while being poked and prodded by the hooting Nazis, and all the while hearing the last cries of his neighbor at the end of the room. When I read the Gospel accounts of the imprisonment, torture, and execution of Jesus, I think of that naked rabbi standing humiliated in a police station. I still cannot fathom the indignity, the shame endured by God’s Son on earth, stripped naked, flogged, spat on, struck in the face, garlanded with thorns. Jewish leaders as well as Romans intended the mockery to parody the crime for which the victim had been condemned. Messiah, huh? Great, let’s hear a prophecy.Wham. Who hit you, huh? Thunk. C’mon, tell us, spit it out, Mr. Prophet. For a Messiah, you don’t know much, do you? It went like that all day long, from the bullying game of Blind Man’s Bluff in the high priest’s courtyard, to the professional thuggery of Pilate’s and Herod’s guards, to the catcalls of spectators up the long road to Calvary, and finally to the cross itself where Jesus heard a stream of taunts. I have marveled at, and sometimes openly questioned, the self-restraint God has shown throughout history, allowing the Genghis Khans and the Hitlers and the Stalins to have their way. But nothing—nothing—compares to the self-restraint shown that dark Friday in Jerusalem. With every lash of the whip, every fibrous crunch of fist against flesh, Jesus must have mentally replayed the temptation in the wilderness and in Gethsemane. Legions of angels awaited his command. One word, and the ordeal would end. The Jesus I Never Knew(199 - 200)