Prime Way Of Life Quotes

Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I'm just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it really hard to set my ways and say, "Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?" Anaïs Nin: One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also you're in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything.... We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one's sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do. You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.

Shepherd Book: What are we up to, sweetheart? River: Fixing your Bible. Book: I, um... What? River: Bible's broken. Contradictions, false logistics - doesn't make sense. Shepherd Book: No, no. You-you-you can't... River: So we'll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God's creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah's ark is a problem. Shepherd Book: Really? River: We'll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat. Shepherd Book: River, you don't fix the Bible. River: It's broken. It doesn't make sense. Book: It's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you.

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing. What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.

Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and it's quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp.

In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend.

But we must be completely clear...if nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out---that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed? Why, if this is a high watermark of our national life, has our speech been vulgarized in this unprecedented way?

Mom had normalized this abuse. Indulged it. She’d made me a participant, reinforced this behavior by giving my father what he wanted when he acted this way. The most influential woman in my life had modeled this for me from the day I was born and told me to take it. She’d taught me this, primed me for my relationship with Neil. Made me believe that this was what love looked like.

My Father, the Age I Am Now Time, which diminishes all things, increases understanding for the aging. —PLUTARCH My mother was the star: Smart and funny and warm, A patient listener and an easy laugher. My father was . . . an accountant: Not one to look up to, Ask advice from, Confide in. A man of few words. We faulted him—my mother, my sister, and I, For being this dutiful, uninspiring guy Who never missed a day of work, Or wondered what our dreams were. Just . . . an accountant. Decades later, My mother dead, my sister dead, My father, the age I am now, Planning ahead in his so-accountant way, Sent me, for my records, Copies of his will, his insurance policies, And assorted other documents, including The paid receipt for his cemetery plot, The paid receipt for his tombstone, And the words that he had chosen for his stone. And for the first time, shame on me, I saw my father: Our family’s prime provider, only provider. A barely-out-of-boyhood married man Working without a safety net through the Depression years That marked him forever, Terrified that maybe he wouldn’t make it, Terrified he would fall and drag us down with him, His only goal, his life-consuming goal, To put bread on our table, a roof over our head. With no time for anyone’s secrets, With no time for anyone’s dreams, He quietly earned the words that made me weep, The words that were carved, the following year, On his tombstone: HE TOOK CARE OF HIS FAMILY.

If you neglect your personal space and allow chaos and clutter to creep in, it will affect you, and perhaps encourage further neglect. Positive feedback loops should improve your life, not detract from it. You can’t prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve.

Practice "zero-based thinking" in every part of your life. Ask yourself continually, "If I were not doing this already, knowing what I now know, would I start doing it again today?" If it is something you would not start again today, knowing what you now know, it is a prime candidate for abandonment or creative procrastination.

[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.

If our bodies were different, though, our metaphors would be different, as Olaf Stapledon showed in Star Maker. Crabs walk sideways, for instance. If crabs could talk, they would undoubtedly describe progress in difficult negotiations as sidling toward agreement and express the hope for a better future by saying their best days are still beside them. Our bodies prime our metaphors, and our metaphors prime how we think and act.

and when i look at prime minister mr narendra modi . i realize nothing in this world is unachievable. if you have the will you will yourself make the way.

Who is a bad man and who is a good man? What is the definition? The bad man is one who is inconsiderate of others. The bad man is one who uses others and has no respect for others. The bad man is one who thinks he is the center of the world and everybody is just to be used. Everything exists for him. The bad man is one who thinks that other persons are just means for his gratification. Keep this definition in mind because you ordinarily think the bad man is the criminal. The bad man may not be the criminal: all bad men are not criminals. All criminals are bad, but all bad men are not criminals. A few of them are judges, a few of them are very respectable people, a few of them are politicians, presidents and prime ministers, a few of them are even parading as saints. So when we will be talking about this sutra, remember the definition of a bad man - Buddha says a bad man is one who has no consideration for others. He simply thinks about himself only - he thinks he is the center of existence and he feels the whole existence is made for him. He feels authorized to sacrifice everybody for his own self. He may not be bad ordinarily, but if this is the attitude, then he is a bad man. Who is a good man? Just the opposite of the bad man: one who is considerate of others, who gives as much respect to others as he gives to himself, and who does not pretend in any way that he is the center of the world, and who has come to feel that everybody is the center of the world. The world is one, but millions of centers exist. He is very respectful. He never uses the other as a means. The other is an end in itself. His reverence is tremendous. Watch, watch your own life.

Modern states with democratic forms of government dispense with hereditary leviathans, but they have not found a way to dispense with inequalities of wealth and power backed up by an enormously complex system of criminal justice. Yet for 30,000 years after takeoff, life went on without kings, queens, prime ministers, presidents, parliaments, congresses, cabinets, governors, mayors, police officers, sheriffs, marshals, generals, lawyers, bailiffs, judges, district attorneys, court clerks, patrol cars, paddy wagons, jails, and penitentiaries. How did our ancestors manage to leave home without them?

In search of relationship safety, our attachment system is primed to seek the answers to certain questions regarding our partners. Both consciously and unconsciously we are looking to know: If I turn towards you, will you be there for me? Will you receive and accept me instead of attack, criticize, dismiss or judge me? Will you comfort me? Will you respond in a way that calms my nervous system? Do I matter to you? Do I make a difference in your life? Can we lean into and rely on each other?

The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the absolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The school boy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle.

YOU SHOULD NOW be well on your way to using disputation, the prime technique for learned optimism, in your daily life. You first saw the ABC link—that specific beliefs lead to dejection and passivity. Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.

I'd never seen the footage on the news, and now in a way I'd never experience, seeing it on CNN somehow seemed to validate, at least in my mind, the significance of the event. On national television, in prime time. I broke down and sobbed, burying my head on the bar. At that moment, I cried harder and longer than I have in my entire life.

He had not stopped looking into her eyes, and she showed no signs of faltering. He gave a deep sigh and recited: "O sweet treasures, discovered to my sorrow." She did not understand. "It is a verse by the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother," he explained. "He wrote three eclogues, two elegies, five songs, and forty sonnets. Most of them for a Portuguese lady of very ordinary charms who was never his, first because he was married, and then because she married another man and died before he did." "Was he a priest too?" "A soldier," he said. Something stirred in the heart of Sierva María, for she wanted to hear the verse again. He repeated it, and this time he continued, in an intense, well-articulated voice, until he had recited the last of the forty sonnets by the cavalier of amours and arms Don Garcilaso de la Vega, killed in his prime by a stone hurled in battle.When he had finished, Cayetano took Sierva María's hand and placed it over his heart. She felt the internal clamor of his suffering. "I am always in this state," he said. And without giving his panic an opportunity, he unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. He continued to speak without looking at her, with the same fluidity and passion as when he recited poetry, until it seemed to him that Sierva María was sleeping. But she was awake, her eyes, like those of a startled deer, fixed on him. She almost did not dare to ask: "And now?" "And now nothing," he said. "It is enough for me that you know." He could not go on. Weeping in silence, he slipped his arm beneath her head to serve as a pillow, and she curled up at his side. And so they remained, not sleeping, not talking, until the roosters began to crow and he had to hurry to arrive in time for five-o'clock Mass. Before he left, Sierva María gave him the beautiful necklace of Oddúa: eighteen inches of mother-of-pearl and coral beads. Panic had been replaced by the yearning in his heart. Delaura knew no peace, he carried out his tasks in a haphazard way, he floated until the joyous hour when he escaped the hospital to see Sierva María. He would reach the cell gasping for breath, soaked by the perpetual rains, and she would wait for him with so much longing that only his smile allowed her to breathe again. One night she took the initiative with the verses she had learned after hearing them so often. 'When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me," she recited. And asked with a certain slyness: "What's the rest of it?" "I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end," he said. She repeated the lines with the same tenderness, and so they continued until the end of the book, omitting verses, corrupting and twisting the sonnets to suit themselves, toying with them with the skill of masters. They fell asleep exhausted. At five the warder brought in breakfast, to the uproarious crowing of the roosters, and they awoke in alarm. Life stopped for them.

Asking for and receiving help is a way to prime the pump of generosity.

A prime way of giving children a good start in life is to help their parents. There

The Active Life If an expert does not have some problem to vex him, he is unhappy! If a philosopher's teaching is never attacked, she pines away! If critics have no one on whom to exercise their spite, they are unhappy. All such people are prisoners in the world of objects. He who wants followers, seeks political power. She who wants reputation, holds an office. The strong man looks for weights to lift. The brave woman looks for an emergency in which she can show bravery. The swordsman wants a battle in which he can swing his sword. People past their prime prefer a dignified retirement, in which they may seem profound. People experienced in law seek difficult cases to extend the application of the laws. Liturgists and musicians like festivals in which they parade their ceremonious talents. The benevolent, the dutiful, are always looking for chances to display virtue. Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds? What would become of business without a market of fools? Where would the masses be if there were no pretext for getting jammed together and making noise? What would become of labor if there were no superfluous objects to be made? Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes! Or you will die of despair! Those who are caught in the machinery of power take no joy except in activity and change--the whirring of the machine! Whenever an occasion for action presents itself, they are compelled to act; they cannot help themselves. They are inexorably moved, like the ma- chine of which they are a part. Prisoners in the world of objects, they have no choice but to submit to the demands of matter! They are pressed down and crushed by external forces, fashion, the mar- ket, events, public opinion. Never in a whole lifetime do they re- cover their right mind! The active life! What a pity!

Fiction can do that: can make a space for reflecting, for generating novel ways of responding and reacting to lies and guns and walls alike. The mere act of cracking open a book, Smith thinks, is creative in itself, capable of inculcating kindness and agility in the reader. ‘Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s like being given the world, its darks and lights. At which point we can go about the darks and lights with our imagination energised” - Olivia Laing, Funny Weather

Sometimes bad shit happens, and you have to protect the people you love,” Leon said. “It would be nice if you can do that and keep your hands clean but life doesn’t work that way. Life is messy, and sometimes you must do what needs to be done to keep your family safe. It doesn’t make you a bad person.” I’d have to thank Kurt. “One day some other Prime will threaten our House, and when that day comes, I’ll hill him.” What? “I’ll do it quiet and clean, and nobody will ever know.” Leon smiled. “I’m going to be a dark horse, House Baylor’s secret. I’ll be the best assassin. A legend. They’ll never see me coming.” I would kill Kurt. I would strangle him with my bare hands.

We are used to the idea of giving witness to one’s life as an important and noble counterpoint to being unheard, especially when applied to people in certain disadvantaged, oppressed or unacceptable situations. But in a slightly more pathological way, I’m not sure that we aren’t seeing the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. As though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being’s natural state—and so, as a corollary, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any and all questions in order to redress this awful imbalance.

This is the end of Prime Minister, Cardinal Archbishop Lomenie de Brienne. Flimsier mortal was seldom fated to do as weighty a mischief; to have a life as despicable-envied, an exit as frightful. Fired, as the phrase is, with ambition: blown, like a kindled rag, the sport of winds, not this way, not that way, but of all ways, straight towards such a powder-mine,—which he kindled! Let us pity the hapless Lomenie; and forgive him; and, as soon as possible, forget him.

I envied the sons their life in the country. I wasn’t even jealous of how at home they were in the fields and woods and barns; of how they could do so many things I couldn’t, drive tractors, take apart and fix motors, pluck eggs from under a hen, shove their way into a stall with a stubborn horse pushing back: I just marveled at it all, and wanted it. They and the boys who lived on farms near them were also so enviably at ease in their bodies: what back in the city would be taken as a slouch of disinterest, here was an expression of physical grace. No need to be tense when everything so readily submitted to your efficiently minimal gestures: hoisting bales of hay into a loft, priming a recalcitrant pump … Something else there was as well, something more elusive: perhaps that they lived so much of the time in a world of wild, poignant odors—mown grass, the redolent pines, even the tang of manure and horse-piss-soaked hay. Just the thought of those sensory elations inflicted me with a feeling I still have to exert myself to repress that I was squandering my time, wasting what I knew already were irretrievable clutches of years, now hecatombs of years, trapped in my trivial, stifling life.

The rule for working out prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. If a number is really, really big, it can take a computer years to work out whether it is a prime number. Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living. Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

In 1915, Japanese prime minister Okuma Shigenobu used his country’s newfound leverage to levy “Twenty-One Demands” against the Republic of China for greater Japanese economic and territorial authority over the Asia-Pacific. These demands posed a deep challenge not only to China but also to the regional order established by America’s Open Door policy of 1899. Secretary of State Henry Stimson worried that Japan’s claims threatened this order and the American way of life that depended on it.140 In pursuit of a “New Order in East Asia,” Japan launched an unprovoked campaign to seize Manchuria in 1931. This campaign extended into the heart of China, reaching its ruthless climax in the 1937 Rape of Nanking. Though the US viewed Japan’s aggression against an American ally with consternation, President Franklin Roosevelt initially refrained from acting, even as Japan bombed a US ship seeking to rescue Americans near Nanking.

We see the world the way we do — as solid, lasting, and independent — because we’ve been primed to do so by our parents, teachers, and virtually everyone alive. It’s this continued reinforcement that continues into the dream state and primes us to see the dream as solid, lasting, and independent, and therefore non-lucid.

There are three ways you can live life—three again—remember that the great writers almost always do things in threes. You can live life as though it’s all a cosmic accident; we’re nothing but an irritating skin disease on the face of the earth. Maybe you can live your life as though everything’s a bad joke. I can’t.” They couldn’t, either, though for some of the kids who sat around the table that day not much had happened to make them think that life is anything else. “Or you can go out at night and look at the stars and think, yes, they were created by a prime mover, and so were you, but he’s aloof perfection, impassible, indifferent to his creation. He doesn’t care, or, if he cares, he only cares about the ultimate end of his creation, and so what happens to any part of it on the way is really a matter of indifference. You don’t matter to him, I don’t matter to him, except possibly as a means to an end. I can’t live that way, either.” Again there was general agreement. “Then there’s a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That’s the only way I can live.

The major impairments of ADD — the distractibility, the hyperactivity and the poor impulse control — reflect, each in its particular way, a lack of self-regulation. Self-regulation implies that someone can direct attention where she chooses, can control impulses and can be consciously mindful and in charge of what her body is doing. Like time literacy, self-regulation is also a distinct task of development in human life, achieved gradually from young childhood through adolescence and adulthood. We are born with no capacity whatsoever to self-regulate emotion or action. For self-regulation to be possible, specific brain centers have to develop and grow connections with other important nerve centers, and chemical pathways need to be established. Attention deficit disorder is a prime illustration of how the adult continues to struggle with the unsolved problems of childhood. She is held back precisely where the child did not develop, hampered in those areas where the infant or toddler got stuck during the course of development.

All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic...a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority.” The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister... all the way up to “God.

You’re unhappy and you feel like a failure. PERFECT! Use that sad/angry/disappointed energy. Channel it into what you know, deep down in your heart, you love. Spend the next six months in a state of total obsession. Get up two hours earlier than usual and write before you go to work. Come home and exercise (not optional, sorry), then write for another hour. Read or watch the kind of comedy you love before bed. Don’t waste all your time socializing. Do a little socializing on weekends, but focus. Focus! Save your money. Research part-time work you could do for your company; use your slackness as a way to sell a new position where your boss would get your best from you every hour that you’re there. Pitch it as a win-win. Or pitch working from home half the time to cure your blahs and jack up your productivity. Then overproduce at work, but fit all of your work into a part-time schedule, and fill your prime working hours with writing/comedy. Almost any capable human with a not-that-taxing job can pull this off if they put their mind to it. If you’re a manager, investigate other roles or sell your boss on the fact that you’re managing via e-mail most of the time anyway.

Kate?” Anthony yelled again. He couldn’t see anyone; a dislodged bench was blocking the opening. “Can you hear me?” Still no response. “Try the other side,” came Edwina’s frantic voice. “The opening isn’t as crushed.” Anthony jumped to his feet and ran around the back of the carriage to the other side. The door had already come off its hinges, leaving a hole just large enough for him to stuff his upper body into. “Kate?” he called out, trying not to notice the sharp sound of panic in his voice. Every breath from his lips seemed overloud, reverberating in the tight space, reminding him that he wasn’t hearing the same sounds from Kate. And then, as he carefully moved a seat cushion that had turned sideways, he saw her. She was terrifyingly still, but her head didn’t appear to be stuck in an unnatural position, and he didn’t see any blood. That had to be a good sign. He didn’t know much of medicine, but he held on to that thought like a miracle. “You can’t die, Kate,” he said as his terrified fingers yanked away at the wreckage, desperate to open the hole until it was wide enough to pull her through. “Do you hear me? You can’t die!” A jagged piece of wood sliced open the back of his hand, but Anthony didn’t notice the blood running over his skin as he pulled on another broken beam. “You had better be breathing,” he warned, his voice shaking and precariously close to a sob. “This wasn’t supposed to be you. It was never supposed to be you. It isn’t your time. Do you understand me?” He tore away another broken piece of wood and reached through the newly widened hole to grasp her hand. His fingers found her pulse, which seemed steady enough to him, but it was still impossible to tell if she was bleeding, or had broken her back, or had hit her head, or had . . . His heart shuddered. There were so many ways to die. If a bee could bring down a man in his prime, surely a carriage accident could steal the life of one small woman. Anthony grabbed the last piece of wood that stood in his way and heaved, but it didn’t budge. “Don’t do this to me,” he muttered. “Not now. It isn’t her time. Do you hear me? It isn’t her time!” He felt something wet on his cheeks and dimly realized that it was tears. “It was supposed to be me,” he said, choking on the words. “It was always supposed to be me.” And then, just as he was preparing to give that last piece of wood another desperate yank, Kate’s fingers tightened like a claw around his wrist. His eyes flew to her face, just in time to see her eyes open wide and clear, with nary a blink. “What the devil,” she asked, sounding quite lucid and utterly awake, “are you talking about?” Relief flooded his chest so quickly it was almost painful. “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice wobbling on every syllable. She grimaced, then said, “I’ll be fine.” Anthony paused for the barest of seconds as he considered her choice of words. “But are you fine right now?” She let out a little cough, and he fancied he could hear her wince with pain. “I did something to my leg,” she admitted. “But I don’t think I’m bleeding.” “Are you faint? Dizzy? Weak?” She shook her head. “Just in pain. What are you doing here?” He smiled through his tears. “I came to find you.” “You did?” she whispered. He nodded. “I came to— That is to say, I realized . . .” He swallowed convulsively. He’d never dreamed that the day would come when he’d say these words to a woman, and they’d grown so big in his heart he could barely squeeze them out. “I love you, Kate,” he said chokingly. “It took me a while to figure it out, but I do, and I had to tell you. Today.” Her lips wobbled into a shaky smile as she motioned to the rest of her body with her chin. “You’ve bloody good timing.

It seemed as if nothing were to break that tie — as if the years were merely to compact and cement it; and as if those years were to be all the years of their natural lives. Eighteen-forty-two turned into eighteen-forty-three; eighteen-forty-three into eighteen- forty-four; eighteen-forty-four into eighteen-forty-five. Flush was no longer a puppy; he was a dog of four or five; he was a dog in the full prime of life — and still Miss Barrett lay on her sofa in Wimpole Street and still Flush lay on the sofa at her feet. Miss Barrett’s life was the life of “a bird in its cage.” She sometimes kept the house for weeks at a time, and when she left it, it was only for an hour or two, to drive to a shop in a carriage, or to be wheeled to Regent’s Park in a bath-chair. The Barretts never left London. Mr. Barrett, the seven brothers, the two sisters, the butler, Wilson and the maids, Catiline, Folly, Miss Barrett and Flush all went on living at 50 Wimpole Street, eating in the dining-room, sleeping in the bedrooms, smoking in the study, cooking in the kitchen, carrying hot-water cans and emptying the slops from January to December. The chair-covers became slightly soiled; the carpets slightly worn; coal dust, mud, soot, fog, vapours of cigar smoke and wine and meat accumulated in crevices, in cracks, in fabrics, on the tops of picture-frames, in the scrolls of carvings. And the ivy that hung over Miss Barrett’s bedroom window flourished; its green curtain became thicker and thicker, and in summer the nasturtiums and the scarlet runners rioted together in the window-box. But one night early in January 1845 the postman knocked. Letters fell into the box as usual. Wilson went downstairs to fetch the letters as usual. Everything was as usual — every night the postman knocked, every night Wilson fetched the letters, every night there was a letter for Miss Barrett. But tonight the letter was not the same letter; it was a different letter. Flush saw that, even before the envelope was broken. He knew it from the way that Miss Barrett took it; turned it; looked at the vigorous, jagged writing of her name.

The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness — we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge — there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied. The third prime requirement, a secure, safe and not overly stressed emotional atmosphere, is the one most likely to be disrupted in Western societies. The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb. For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. Now outside the matrix of the womb, the infant is nevertheless held close to the warmth of the maternal body from which nourishment continues to flow. Breast-feeding also deepens the mother’s feeling of connectedness to the baby, enhancing the emotionally symbiotic bonding relationship. No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. This security is more than the love and best possible intentions of the parents. It depends also on a less controllable variable: their freedom from stresses that can undermine their psychological equilibrium. A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. When interfered with, as it often is in our society, brain development is adversely affected.

Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living. Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. So with death this near he thought numbly but purely upon a billion vanities, arrivals, departures, idiot excursions of boy, boy-man, man and old-man goat.

It’s kind of sad how cynical I’ve become, but the more I think about it, I wonder how anybody makes it through life without becoming this way. The way I see it, after you make it past the innocence of youth you have one of two choices: you can either become cynical or delusional. I tried delusional for a while. It was sort of nice while it lasted-mainly because I didn’t realize I was delusional. But then I woke up. So now I’m cynical. And the universe is once again having its way with me.

Indeed. But what is sane? Especially here in ‘our own country’––in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consciousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him…but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create…a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody––or at least some force––is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic…a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority.’ The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister…all the way up to “God”.

In lots of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily life. The modes of presentation that work best for TV—stuff like “action,” with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire “collage” of commercials, news, and music videos, or the “hysteria” of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too much laughter—are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more… well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it.

The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle. Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to grind.

In his essay on Clemenceau in Great Contemporaries, Churchill had commended the way the Frenchman was ‘fighting, fighting all the way’ through life.254 Over the next five months Churchill had to fight the Government whips, the Prime Minister, the press (especially The Times), Conservative Central Office, his backbench colleagues, the Security Services and his own constituency association. In some parliamentary divisions he led a party of three, and sometimes two. Yet in that same desolate period he showed the greatest moral courage of his life, and laid the foundations of his future wartime leadership.

For most people passing through the urban park across from my house, the cottonwood is past its prime- scarred by fire…soon to be marked with a large red X by the crew… For me, he’s a presence in my life that’s hard to describe. Martin Buber, in I and Thou, spoke of two different ways of relating to a tree. On the one hand, he said, “I can assign it to a species and observe it as an…object. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I’m drawn into a relationship, and the tree ceases to be an It.” Buber and his tree were able to enter into a mystery of reciprocity.

The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. The fulfilment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor’s way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic … a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority.” The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister … all the way up to “God.

One author, in writing of the Bible’s uniqueness, put it this way: Here is a book: 1. written over a 1500 year span; 2. written over 40 generations; 3. written by more than 40 authors, from every walk of life— including kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, scholars, etc.: Moses, a political leader, trained in the universities of Egypt Peter, a fisherman Amos, a herdsman Joshua, a military general Nehemiah, a cupbearer Daniel, a prime minister Luke, a doctor Solomon, a king Matthew, a tax collector Paul, a rabbi 4. written in different places: Moses in the wilderness Jeremiah in a dungeon Daniel on a hillside and in a palace Paul inside a prison Luke while traveling John on the isle of Patmos others in the rigors of a military campaign 5. written at different times: David in times of war Solomon in times of peace 6. written during different moods: some writing from the heights of joy and others from the depths of sorrow and despair 7. written on three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe 8. written in three languages: Hebrew… , Aramaic… , and Greek… 9. Finally, its subject matter includes hundreds of controversial topics. Yet, the biblical authors spoke with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. There is one unfolding story…

We lessen the sin of the world by joining the Lamb of God in bearing sin and pardoning sinners. But as the church as become a powerful institution, a consort with kings and queens, a confidante of presidents and prime ministers, our dispensing of grace has become distorted. We show grace to the institutions of systematic sin while condemning the individual sinner. It should be the other way around. It was never the “rank and file” sinners who gnashed their teeth at Jesus, but those for whom the present arrangement of systematic sin was advantageous. Jesus condemned the systematic sin that preserved the status quo for the Herodians and the Sadducees, but showed compassion to publicans and prostitutes. This is grace. But the church, courting the favor of the powerful, has forgotten this kind of grace. We coddle the mighty whose ire we fear and condemn the sin of the weak who pose no threat. We enthusiastically endorse the systems of greed that run Wall Street while condemning personal greed in the life of the individual working for the minimum wage. We will gladly preach a sermon against the sin of personal greed, but we dare not offer a prophetic critique of the golden calf of unfettered capitalism. Jesus and Saint Francis and Dorothy Day did the opposite. They shamed the principalities and powers, but offered pardon to the people. This is the grace of God the church is to embody.

and state. But for the time being, in summer 1940, she saw a continent that was genuinely impressed by this unprecedented German vitality: ‘Hitler, Europe felt, was a smart guy – disagreeable, but smart. He had gone far in making his country strong. Why not try his way?’ That was how many Europeans felt, and they all expressed it in their own way. In France they spoke of the ‘Pax Hitlérica’. In the upper circles of society, it quickly became fashionable to invite young SS and Wehrmacht officers to dinner. They represented a dynamism that had never been seen before, that could perhaps breathe new life into stuffy old France. The leader of the Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP), the former prime minister Hendrik Colijn, wrote in June 1940: ‘Unless a true

If the privilege of 'never being bored' is the measure of a successful life, of happiness and even of human decency, and if intense consumer activity is the prime, royal road to victory over boredom, then the lid has been taken off human desires; no amount of gratifying acquisitions and enticing sensations is likely ever to bring satisfaction in the way once promised by 'keeping up to standards'. There are now no standards to keep up to — or rather no standards which, once reached, can authoritatively endorse the right to acceptance and respect, and guarantee their long duration. The finishing line moves together with the runner, the goals stay forever a step or two ahead. Records keep being broken, and there seems to be no end to what a human being may desire.

her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn’t quite the ‘interesting job’ she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. (‘One day a woman will be Prime Minister,’ Pamela said. ‘Maybe even in our lifetime.’) Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress. Since ’36 she’d been working in the Air Raid Precautions Department. ‘You’ve not heard rumours then?’ Pamela said. ‘I’m a lowly squaw, I hear nothing but rumours.’ ‘Maurice can’t say what he does,’ Pamela grumbled. ‘Couldn’t

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it— he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth. I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream- familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust.

Her new fever, her anxiety which changed itself to anger was even more of a toy to him. A part of his attention, secret until now, leaned forward to scan every pore of her Halloween face. Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. So with death this near he thought numbly but purely upon a billion vanities, arrivals, departures, idiot excursions of boy, boy-man, man and old-man goat. He had gathered and stacked all manner of foibles, devices, playthings of his egotism and now, between all the silly corridors of books, the toys of his life swayed. And none more grotesque than this thing named Witch Gypsy Reader-of-Dust, tickling, that’s what! just tickling the air! Fool! Didn’t she know what she was doing!

Her new fever, her anxiety which changed itself to anger was even more of a toy to him. A part of his attention, secret until now, leaned forward to scan every pore of her Halloween face. Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. So with death this near he thought numbly but purely upon a billion vanities, arrivals, departures, idiot excursions of boy, boy-man, man and old-man goat. He had gathered and stacked all manner of foibles, devices, playthings of his egotism and now, between all the silly corridors of books, the toys of his life swayed. And none more grotesque than this thing named Witch Gypsy Reader-of-Dust, tickling, that’s what! just tickling the air! Fool! Didn’t she know what she was doing!

EAGLE The East direction is represented by eagle and condor, who bring vision, clarity, and foresight. Eagle perceives the entire panorama of life without becoming bogged down in its details. The energies of eagle assist us in finding the guiding vision of our lives. The eyes of condor see into the past and the future, helping to know where we come from, and who we are becoming. When I work with a client who is stuck in the traumas of the past, I help her to connect with the spirit of eagle or condor. As this energy infuses the healing space, my client is often able to attain new clarity and insight into her life. This is not an intellectual insight, but rather a call, faint at first, hardly consciously heard. Her possibilities beckon to her and propel her out of her grief and into her destiny. I believe that while everyone has a future, only certain people have a destiny. Having a destiny means living to your fullest human potential. You don’t need to become a famous politician or poet, but your destiny has to be endowed with meaning and purpose. You could be a street sweeper and be living a destiny. You could be the president of a large corporation and be living a life bereft of meaning. One can make oneself available to destiny, but it requires a great deal of courage to do so. Otherwise our destiny bypasses us, leaving us deprived of a fulfillment known by those who choose to take the road less traveled. Eagle allows us to rise above the mundane battles that occupy our lives and consume our energy and attention. Eagle gives us wings to soar above trivial day-to-day struggles into the high peaks close to Heaven. Eagle and condor represent the self-transcending principle in nature. Biologists have identified the self-transcending principle as one of the prime agendas of evolution. Living molecules seek to transcend their selfhood to become cells, then simple organisms, which then form tissues, then organs, and then evolve into complex beings such as humans and whales. Every transcending jump is inclusive of all of the levels beneath it. Cells are inclusive of molecules, yet transcend them; organs are inclusive of cells, yet go far beyond them; whales are inclusive of organs yet cannot be described by them, as the whole transcends the sum of its parts. The transcending principle represented by eagle states that problems at a certain level are best solved by going up one step. The problems of cells are best resolved by organs, while the needs of organs are best addressed by an organism such as a butterfly or a human. The same principle operates in our lives. Think of nested Russian dolls. Material needs are the tiny doll in the center. The larger emotional doll encompasses them, and both are contained within the outermost spiritual doll. In this way, we cannot satisfy emotional needs with material things, but we can satisfy them spiritually. When we go one step up, our emotional needs are addressed in the solution. We rise above our life dilemmas on the wings of eagle and see our lives in perspective.

For the mob is a congregation of compulsions. It does not matter who or what squats upon the altar: Robespierre, Beelzebub, Mussolini, Belial, any political or social savior with the sibilant speech and the slick tongue, hissing out every other word with its suffix -ism. The people will be saved not by the grace of God, not by any act of faith, hope, or charity. They will be saved because they belong to the right mob. They think they have pulled the lever of righteousness, but they are themselves the levers that are pulled. A mob is not a great cloud of witnesses. It is not a gathering of friends for a wedding feast. It is a herd of enemies who have fused their enmity with the cause, whereof they are the willing effects. Witness the goings-on when a politician dies. No one, in Life Under Compulsion, says to himself, “The fearful reckoning he meets may be mine, soon.” They turn the funeral into a political event. They must: they are marionettes and they will dance. They look over the shoulder to see who gets the prime time for the moist eye and the hitch in the voice.

Maybe I've put too much high hopes and expectations on you, or started holding you to an unreachable standard." "That isn't fair," he says, his own breath coming quicker. He's starting to look less confused and more straight-up angry. Join the club, bud. "I probably should have told you before Geoffrey and Aiden, but I was excited, and you've been ignoring all my attempts to talk since UltiCon. And I really didn't think you would take the news this way. I thought it was a good thing and truthfully? I think you're overreacting." The little porcupine quills that I imagine live just beneath my skin, primed to shoot up and protect me at a moment's notice, are at the ready now. Except they feel more like Wolverine claws in this case, and Norberto Beneventi's about to feel their wrath. "Overreacting, huh? Love to hear that. Sorry I'm not over the moon, shooting rainbows out my eyeballs because I'm so delighted for you. Sorry I'm not a selfless little woman whose only goal in life is to see her man shine, that I have real feelings and ambitions for myself." "Reese, for the love of---" he shouts, throwing his hands up in the air and walking in a tight circle before returning to stand in front of me. He adjusts his cap with a long-suffering sigh. "You know what? I think you've been waiting for this. I think you figured out that there was more to say after our last conversation, and you know this is not that big of a deal, but you've been scared for so long, and angry, and the world's been unfair to you. And I bet whether you realize it or not, you've been waiting for the first excuse to get rid of me for good. You're used to being alone and it's easier than letting another person in, so all you needed was the smallest hint that something may not be perfect and boom---no more Benny. Am I right?" I scoff, moving to pass him for real this time and not stopping when his hand brushes my shoulder. "You just know me so well, don't you? Please, tell me more about how I'm feeling, why I do the things I do. But you'll have to send it in another message, because I don't have to stay here and listen to it." I hoist my bag farther onto my shoulder and stomp away from him, my own fury nearly blocking out his parting words. "Go on, then. Maybe you can move back across the country. See if running from your problems works the second time around.

What did we see at Entebbe? We saw an extremist left-wing German Nazi point a finger at the hostages: who shall go to the left and who shall go to the right – non-Jews one way, Jews the other. And we asked ourselves, Ribono shel olam – God Almighty – hardly thirty years after the Auschwitz crematoria, that cemetery without end, with the image of Dr. Mengele still fresh in our minds, standing there among the rows of Jews – of the men and of the women, of the children and of the babies – pointing his finger, ‘To the right: to death; to the left: to life.’ And there was no one to save them. “Well, now there is. Now we declare for all to hear: Never again! Our generation has taken a solemn oath consecrated in the blood of our slain mothers, our butchered fathers, our asphyxiated babes, and our fallen brave – never again will the blood of the Jew be shed with impunity. Never again will Jewish honor be easy prey. “We are no empire. We are but a small nation…but after all that has befallen our nation throughout all the generations – and not least the generation of the Holocaust – we declare that if there be anyone anywhere who is persecuted, or humiliated, or threatened, or abducted, or is in any way endangered simply because he or she is a Jew, then let the whole world know that we, Israel, the Jewish State, shall marshal all our strength to come to their aid and bring them to the safe haven of our homeland. This is the message of Entebbe.

A team of Mass-Observation researchers, experienced in chronicling the effects of air raids, had arrived on Friday afternoon. In their subsequent report they wrote of having found “more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis” than they had seen over the prior two months of chronicling air-raid effects. “The overwhelmingly dominant feeling on Friday was the feeling of utter helplessness.” (The italics were theirs.) The observers noted a widespread sense of dislocation and depression. “The dislocation is so total in the town that people feel that the town itself is killed.” In order to help stem the surge of rumors arising from the raid, the BBC invited Tom Harrisson, the twenty-nine-year-old director of Mass-Observation, to do a broadcast on Saturday night, at nine o’clock, during its prime Home Service news slot, to talk about what he had seen in the city. “The strangest sight of all,” Harrisson told his vast audience, “was the Cathedral. At each end the bare frames of the great windows still have a kind of beauty without their glass; but in between them is an incredible chaos of bricks, pillars, girders, memorial tablets.” He spoke of the absolute silence in the city on Friday night as he drove around it in his car, threading his way past bomb craters and mounds of broken glass. He slept in the car that night. “I think this is one of the weirdest experiences of my whole life,” he said, “driving in a lonely, silent desolation and drizzling rain in that great industrial town.

Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize. However, this is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. The fulfilment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor’s way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse. To

So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them. Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.13 For all these reasons, the growth of education—and its first dividend, literacy—is a flagship of human progress.

I'm unaccustomed to being cooped up all day-I really must insist that you permit me to enjoy a short walk." "Not on your life," Fletcher growled. From the sound, Breckenridge realized the group had moved closer to the tap. "You don't need to think you're going to give us the slip so easily," Fletcher said again. "My dear good man"-Heather with her nose in the air; Breckenridge could tell by her tone-"just where in this landscape of empty fields do you imagine I'm going to slip to?" Cobbins opined that she might try to steal a horse and ride off. "Oh,yes-in a round gown and evening slippers," Heather jeered. "But I wasn't suggesting you let me ramble on my own-Martha can come with me." That was Martha's cue to enter the fray, but Heather stuck to her guns, refusing to back down through the ensuing, increasingly heated verbal stoush. Until Fletcher intervened, aggravated frustration resonating in his voice. "Look you-we're under strict orders to keep you safe, not to let you wander off to fall prey to the first shiftless rake who rides past and takes a fancy to you." Silence reigned for half a minute, then Heather audibly sniffed. "I'll have you know that shiftless rakes know better than to take a fancy to me." Not true, Breckenridge thought, but that wasn't the startling information contained in Fletcher's outburst. "Come on, Heather-follow up." As if she'd heard his muttered exhortation, she blithely swept on. "But if rather than standing there arguing, you instead treated me like a sensible adult and told me what your so strict orders with respect to me were, I might see my way to complying-or at least to helping you comply with them." Breckenridge blinked as he sorted through that pronouncement; he could almost feel for Fletcher when he hissed out a sigh. "All right," Fletcher's frustration had reached breaking point. "If you must know, we're to keep you safe from all harm. We're not to let a bloody pigeon pluck so much as a hair from your head. We're to deliver you up in prime condition, exactly as you were when he grabbed you." From the change in Fletcher's tone, Breckenridge could visualize him moving closer to tower over Heather to intimidate her into backing down; he could have told him it wouldn't work. "So now you see," Fletcher went on, voice low and forceful, "that it's entirely out of the question for you to go out for any ramble." "Hmm." Heather's tone was tellingly mild. Fletcher was about to get floored by an uppercut. For once not being on the receiving end, Breckenridge grinned and waited for it to land. "If, as you say, your orders are to-do correct me if I'm wrong-keep me in my customary excellent health until you hand me over to your employer, then, my dear Fletcher, that will absolutely necessitate me going for a walk. Being cooped up all day in a carriage has never agreed with me-if you don't wish me to weaken or develop some unhealthy affliction, I will require fresh air and gentle exercise to recoup." She paused, then went on, her tone one of utmost reasonableness, "A short excursion along the river at the rear of the inn, and back, should restore my constitution." Breckenridge was certain he could hear Fletcher breathing in and out through clenched teeth. A fraught moment passed on, then, "Oh, very well! Martha-go with her. Twenty minutes, do you hear? Not a minute more." "Thank you, Fletcher. Come, Martha-we don't want to waste the light." Breckenridge heard Heather, with the rather slower Martha, leave the inn by the main door. He sipped his ale, waited. Eventually, Fletcher and Cobbins climbed the stairs, Cobbins grumbling, Fletcher ominously silent. The instant they passed out of hearing, Breckenridge stood, stretched, then walked out of the tap and into the foyer. Seconds later, he slipped out of the front door.

The liberal ideals of the Enlightenment could be realized only in very partial and limited ways in the emerging capitalist order: "Democracy with its mono of equality of all citizens before the law and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy," Rocker correctly observed. Those who are compelled to rent themselves to owners of capital in order to survive are deprived of one of the most fundamental rights: the right to productive, creative and fulfilling work under one's own control, in solidarity with others. And under the ideological constraints of capitalist democracy, the prime necessity is to satisfy the needs of those in a position to make investment decisions; if their demands are not satisfied, there will be no production, no work, no social services, no means for survival. All necessarily subordinate themselves and their interests to the overriding need to serve the interests of the owners and managers of the society, who, furthermore, with their control over resources, are easily able to shape the ideological system (the media, schools, universities and so on) in their interests, to determine the basic conditions within which the political process will function, its parameters and basic agenda, and to call upon the resources of state violence, when need be, to suppress any challenge to entrenched power. The point was formulated succinctly in the early days of the liberal democratic revolutions by John Jay, the President of the Continental Congress and the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court: "The people who own the country ought to govern it." And, of course, they do, whatever political faction may be in power. Matters could hardly be otherwise when economic power is narrowly concentrated and the basic decisions over the nature and character of life, the investment decisions, are in principle removed from democratic control.

When the day of the meeting arrived, Anna opened by acknowledging ABC’s biggest gripes. “We understand that we brought you on board with the shared goal of having you lead this work,” she said. “You may feel like we have treated you unfairly, and that we changed the deal significantly since then. We acknowledge that you believe you were promised this work.” This received an emphatic nod from the ABC representatives, so Anna continued by outlining the situation in a way that encouraged the ABC reps to see the firms as teammates, peppering her statements with open-ended questions that showed she was listening: “What else is there you feel is important to add to this?” By labeling the fears and asking for input, Anna was able to elicit an important fact about ABC’s fears, namely that ABC was expecting this to be a high-profit contract because it thought Anna’s firm was doing quite well from the deal. This provided an entry point for Mark, who explained that the client’s new demands had turned his firm’s profits into losses, meaning that he and Anna needed to cut ABC’s pay further, to three people. Angela, one of ABC’s representatives, gasped. “It sounds like you think we are the big, bad prime contractor trying to push out the small business,” Anna said, heading off the accusation before it could be made. “No, no, we don’t think that,” Angela said, conditioned by the acknowledgment to look for common ground. With the negatives labeled and the worst accusations laid bare, Anna and Mark were able to turn the conversation to the contract. Watch what they do closely, as it’s brilliant: they acknowledge ABC’s situation while simultaneously shifting the onus of offering a solution to the smaller company. “It sounds like you have a great handle on how the government contract should work,” Anna said, labeling Angela’s expertise. “Yes—but I know that’s not how it always goes,” Angela answered, proud to have her experience acknowledged. Anna then asked Angela how she would amend the contract so that everyone made some money, which pushed Angela to admit that she saw no way to do so without cutting ABC’s worker count. Several weeks later, the contract was tweaked to cut ABC’s payout, which brought Anna’s company $1 million that put the contract into the black. But it was Angela’s reaction at the end of the meeting that most surprised Anna. After Anna had acknowledged that she had given Angela some bad news and that she understood how angry she must feel, Angela said:

the ten thousand things To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things. – Eihei Dogen If one is very fortunate indeed, one comes upon – or is found by – the teachings that match one’s disposition and the teachers or mentors whose expression strikes to the heart while teasing the knots from the mind. The Miriam Louisa character came with a tendency towards contrariness and scepticism, which is probably why she gravitated to teachers who displayed like qualities. It was always evident to me that the ‘blink’ required in order to meet life in its naked suchness was not something to be gained in time. Rather, it was clear that it was something to do with understanding what sabotages this direct engagement. So my teachers were those who deconstructed the spiritual search – and with it the seeker – inviting one to “see for oneself.” I realised early on that I wouldn’t find any help within traditional spiritual institutions since their version of awakening is usually a project in time. Anyway, I’m not a joiner by nature. I set out on my via negativa at an early age, trying on all kinds of philosophies and practices with enthusiasm and casting them aside –neti neti – equally enthusiastically. Chögyam Trungpa wised me up to “spiritual materialism” in the 70s; Alan Watts followed on, pointing out that whatever is being experienced is none other than ‘IT’ – the unarguable aliveness that one IS. By then I was perfectly primed for the questions put by Jiddu Krishnamurti – “Is there a thinker separate from thought?” “Is there an observer separate from the observed?” “Can consciousness be separated from its content?” It was while teaching at Brockwood Park that I also had the good fortune to engage with David Bohm in formal dialogues as well as private conversations. (About which I have written elsewhere.) Krishnamurti and Bohm were seminal teachers for me; I also loved the unique style of deconstruction offered by Nisargadatta Maharaj. As it happened though, it took just one tiny paragraph from Wei Wu Wei to land in my brain at exactly the right time for the irreversible ‘blink’ to occur. I mention this rather august lineage because it explains why the writing of Robert Saltzman strikes not just a chord but an entire symphonic movement for me. We are peers; we were probably reading the same books by Watts and Krishnamurti at the same time during the 70s and 80s. Reading his book, The Ten Thousand Things, is, for me, like feeling my way across a tapestry exquisitely woven from the threads of my own life. I’m not sure that I can adequately express my wonderment and appreciation… The candor, lucidity and lack of jargon in Robert’s writing are deeply refreshing. I also relish his way with words. He knows how to write. He also knows how to take astonishingly fine photographs, and these are featured throughout the book. It’s been said that this book will become a classic, which is a pretty good achievement for someone who isn’t claiming to be a teacher and has nothing to gain by its sale. (The book sells for the production price.) He is not peddling enlightenment. He is simply sharing how it feels to be free from all the spiritual fantasies that obscure our seamless engagement with this miraculous thing called life, right now.

To paint after nature is to transfer three-dimensional corporeality to a two-dimensional surface. This you can do if you are in good health and not colorblind. Oil paint, canvas, and brush are material and tools. It is possible by expedient distribution of oil paint on canvas to copy natural impressions; under favorable conditions you can do it so accurately that the picture cannot be distinguished from the model. You start, let us say, with a white canvas primed for oil painting and sketch in with charcoal the most discernible lines of the natural form you have chosen. Only the first line may be drawn more or less arbitrarily, all the others must form with the first the angle prescribed by the natural model. By constant comparison of the sketch with the model, the lines can be so adjusted that the lines of the sketch will correspond to those of the model. Lines are now drawn by feeling, the accuracy of the feeling is checked and measured by comparison of the estimated angle of the line with the perpendicular in nature and in the sketch. Then, according to the apparent proportions between the parts of the model, you sketch in the proportions between parts on the canvas, preferably by means of broken lines delimiting these parts. The size of the first part is arbitrary, unless your plan is to represent a part, such as the head, in 'life size.' In that case you measure with a compass an imaginary line running parallel to a plane on the natural object conceived as a plane on the picture, and use this measurement in representing the first part. You adjust all the remaining parts to the first through feeling, according to the corresponding parts of the model, and check your feeling by measurement; to do this, you place the picture so far away form you that the first part appears as large in the painting as the model, and then you compare. In order to check a given proportion, you hold out the handle of your paintbrush at arm's length towards this proportion in such a way that the end of the thumbnail on the handle coincides with the other end of the proportion. If then you hold the paintbrush out towards the picture, again at arm's length, you can, by the measurement thus obtained, determine with photographic accuracy whether your feeling has deceived you. If the sketch is correct, you fill in the parts of the picture with color, according to nature. The most expedient method is to begin with a clearly recognizable color of large area, perhaps with a somewhat broken blue. You estimate the degree of matness and break the luminosity with a complimentary color, ultramarine, for example, with light ochre. By addition of white you can make the color light, by addition of black dark. All this can be learned. The best way of checking for accuracy is to place the picture directly beside the projected picture surface in nature, return to your old place and compare the color in your picture with the natural color. By breaking those tones that are too bright and adding those that are still lacking, you will achieve a color tonality as close as possible to that in nature. If one tone is correct, you can put the picture back in its place and adjust the other colors to the first by feeling. You can check your feeling by comparing every tone directly with nature, after setting the picture back beside the model. If you have patience and adjust all large and small lines, all forms and color tones according to nature, you will have an exact reproduction of nature. This can be learned. This can be taught. And in addition, you can avoid making too many mistakes in 'feeling' by studying nature itself through anatomy and perspective and your medium through color theory. That is academy.

Jesus Christ, who is . . . the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Revelation 1:5). The word for “ruler” means he is the ultimate authority over all the kings of the earth. They are great, but he is greater. They are mighty, but he is mightier. Millions answer to them, but they answer to him. He is not merely one of the kings. He rules over them all. In the first century the mighty emperor Nero thought he was the ruler of the kings of the earth. He held in his hands the power of life and death. Thumbs up: one man lived. Thumbs down: one man died. It is said that he ordered the burning of Rome and then blamed it on the early Christians. He had Paul the apostle beheaded, thinking that the pernicious Christian movement would die with him. But now 2000 years have passed, and the tables have turned. We name our dogs Nero and our sons Paul. Who are the kings of the earth John is talking about? They are political leaders in their various spheres–mayors and council members, governors, congressmen and senators, presidents and prime ministers, and potentates of every variety. There are small-time kings who rule tiny realms and mighty kings who rule vast empires. Their names are Obama, Putin, Netanyahu, Ahmadinejad, Komorowski, Mukherjee, Harper, Kim, Abdullah, Sarkozy, Karzai, Xi, Mugabe, Remengesau, Calderon, Merkel, Cartes and Cameron. And a thousand others just like them. Jesus rules over them all. We all know that the world is in a mess. That’s why it’s hard to believe this is true. All the evidence seems to move in the opposite direction. The pornographers go free, the baby-killers are untouched, the politicians break the laws they write, the drug dealers make their millions, and the nations arm themselves for total destruction. Without trying very hard, you could make a good case that Satan is the ruler of the kings of the earth. But it only seems that way. Satan has no power except that granted to him by God. In due time and at the proper moment, Jesus will step back on the stage of world history. Think of it. The hands that were nailed to the cross will someday rule the world. Though we do not see it today, it is certain and sure of fulfillment. That’s what the book of Revelation is all about. Read it for yourself and see how the story ends.

I wear my soul in my eyes. Everything in my life primed me for the next event good or bad. Every event left me in the mental state I needed to be in to enter and maintain the next stage. If something had altered at any point along the way, then maybe I stood a chance. But it didn’t. One train wreck prepared me for the next train wreck, which only prepared me for the next train wreck until I had inevitably become what I am before you.

Before going to bed, they take a few minutes to read over the mathematical or literary work they did during the day—especially if they’ve reached a plateau or feel stuck. The mind then works all night to close the loop, and they wake up in the morning with “inspiration.” It seems magical, but it isn’t so much magical as it is the result of effective priming of the mental pump. The OTT principle and prioritization with a list

new research in psychology and neuroscience shows that it works the other way around: We become more successful when we are happier and more positive. For example, doctors put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56 percent. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement tests far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.

In 1980, at independence, a man might expect to live to sixty and to see his children grow up strong and have children of their own, and if he was fortunate, a man might even live to see his great-grandchildren bring him gourds of beer before he died. But life expectancy dropped to fifty, and now it has collapsed, all the way down to thirty-three. It is hard to comprehend. At thirty-three, just as people should be in their prime, they suddenly sicken and die.

This is Ugly,” said Geung. “He’s a different animal. He’s an animal called a dog. People call him a dumb animal because he can’t speak and because he licks his arse.” More laughter. “But he can rec . . . recognize hundreds of different scents and he can run fast. So in many ways, he’s better than us. People call me and Tukta dumb animals too. We speak and we don’t lick our arses, but most people think they’re better than us. They can be unkind. Our bodies are clumsy and we won’t live very long and our brains work more slowly than yours. We can’t be doctors and we can’t be prime ministers, but we work hard and we’re kind and funny and we say what we believe. So, my wish on this day, this happiest day of my life, is that we stop thinking we’re better than other animals and start to believe that we all con . . . contribute something different and wonderful to our planet. The tiger teaches us d-d-dignity and how to control our power. The pig gives us compost that grows our vegetables. The lizard eats mosquitoes that give us dengue fever. The fish cleans our rivers and gives up its life to feed our children. If I can have one one one . . . wish this day, it is that we all stop comparing the size of our brains and learn to see the size of each other’s hearts.” Even the evening cicadas had fallen silent.

The presidents and the prime ministers and the kings and the queens—do you think they are in a different boat? Just look around and you will find them all in the same boat. They are all trying to be special in the hope that perhaps if they are special, life will treat them differently than it treats ordinary people. Obviously it cannot treat a president of a country the same way it treats a shoemaker

Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Qaeda-like group” and the State Department transcript release of a telephone call between Clinton and then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil where she stated, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest

The purpose of God with human history is nothing less than to bring out of it—small and insignificant as it seems from the biological and naturalistic point of view—an eternal community of those who were once thought to be just “ordinary human beings.”8 Because of God’s purposes for it, this community will, in its way, pervade the entire created realm and share in the government of it. God’s precreation intention to have that community as a special dwelling place or home will be realized. He will be its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. But why? What is the point of it? The purpose is to meet what can only be described as a need of God’s nature as totally competent love. It is the same purpose that manifests itself in his creation of the world. Only in the light of such a creation and such a redeemed community is it possible for God to be known in his deepest nature. They make it possible for God to be known. And love unknown is love unfulfilled. Moreover, the welfare of every conscious being in existence depends upon their possession of this knowledge of God.

Tripolar spirituality is not a desirable consequence or an optional third way; it is not an extra or additive dimension. Rather, it is a radical alternative to both monopolar and bipolar spirituality. When love for God and neighbor are interdependent and inseparable, a pivotal redirection results, and an acute deviation from social norms ensues. Committing oneself to tripolar spirituality is making a painful decision to depart from cultural mandates and to risk countercultural actions motivated by a new agenda that becomes the prime factor revolutionizing one’s life.

In fact, confusion over units was not confined to electricity and magnetism. When two people spoke of a quantity like 'force' or 'power' you could not be sure that they meant the same thing. James saw a prime opportunity to straighten out the muddle. He went beyond his brief for the paper and proposed a systematic way of defining all physical quantities in terms of mass, length and time, symbolised by the letters M, L and T. For example, velocity was defined L/T, acceleration L/T^2, and force ML/T^2, since, by Newton's second law, force=mass x acceleration. His method is used in exactly this form today. Called dimensional analysis, it seems to us so simple and so natural a part of all physical science that almost nobody wonders who first thought of it.

Your daily routine has a worldview It orients your body to the world and primes you to experience in specific ways.

Page 1-2 One of the most serious concerns of the Thai government for the past forty years or so has been the presence within the national society of an economically powerful minority group whose way of life is alien, and in some respects incompatible, to the Thai way of life. How to assimilate this minority, or at least to reduce its influence nationally, is a question which has troubled a succession of Thai monarchs and prime ministers. To speak of the Chinese minority as constituting a problem is only to recognize this concern felt in varying degrees by all Thai political leaders. Yet, the Chinese living in Thailand are peaceful and self-disciplined, a thrifty and very industrious people who have made significant contributions to their adopted land—to what extent, then, can they be regarded as a ‘problem’? While the Chinese problem has many dimensions, at is first of all an economic problem, and it is precisely this aspect which looms largest for the Thai. As they see it, the Chinese, welcomed into the Kingdom years ago by a generous government, have since that time subtly undermined the livelihood of the Thai people themselves. They have driven the latter from various skilled crafts, monopolized new occupations, and through combination of commercial know-how and chicanery have gained a stranglehold over the trade and commerce of the entire Kingdom. The Thai see the Chinese as exploiting unmercifully their advantageous economic position: the Thai are obliged to pay high prices to the Chinese for the very necessities of life, and on the other hand are forced to accept the lowest price for the rice they grow. Through deliberate profiteering, according to standard Thai thinking, this minority has driven up living costs, hitting especially hard government employees on fixed salaries. It is also charged that profits made by the Chinese go out of the country in the form of remittances to China, which means a continuous and gigantic draining away of the Kingdom’s wealth. To protect their favored economic position, one hears, the Chinese have not hesitated to bribe officials, which in turn has undermined the efficiency and morale of the public service. Efforts to protect the economic interests of the Thai people through legislation have been only partially effective, again because of Chinese adeptness at evasion and dissimulation.

Here we find yet more evidence of Mother Teresa’s exceptional political sensibility, inherited from her father, and a prime example of the way she used this gift to do the will of God and serve her people—that is, the people of the world.

see his greatgrandchildren bring him gourds of beer before he died. But life expectancy dropped to fifty, and now it has collapsed, all the way down to thirty-three. It is hard to comprehend. At thirty-three, just as people should be in their prime, they suddenly sicken and die. And the managers of the mines and the factories and the farms have begun training three people to fill every job, because they know two will not live to do the work. I can

I wonder sometimes if the price of my heightened resistance to loneliness might be higher than I realize. I'm in the phase of life when there are a lot of weddings, a lot of first babies, when, to many, the absence of those things appears troublesome, even pitiable. People like to say you have to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone else, but that doesn't seem true. I know plenty of people who hated being along and whose happiness in finding a partner was magnified by relief. Their dislike, sometimes even horror, of being alone primed them for love, motivated them to commit. But if you're actually happy alone, if you accomplished that mythical prerequisite for love, you will probably also have rendered love less necessary, made yourself less amenable to accommodating someone else's needs and schedule and foibles. You run the risk of becoming set in your ways, of being unable not to feel smothered.

She was seventy-four years old, way past what anyone would consider the prime of life. Not old. Not finished. But definitely tired.

In physics, recall the time and energy once wasted by brilliant theoreticians debating “Is the electron a wave or a particle?” In E-Prime this becomes “Does the wave model of the electron model tell us more than, as much as, or less than the particle model?” Once stated that way, it would not have required the genius of Bohr to find the answer, which appears nowadays as “Usually, as much as; sometimes, in special cases, more or less than.” (Insofar as Bohr admitted the influence of the pragmatist James and the existentialist Kierkegaard, both of them also obvious influences on E-Prime, Bohr had the spirit, if not the letter, or E-Prime, when he realized physics could usefully model the electron both as wave and as particle in different contexts: a triumph of perspectivism that, curiously, does not arouse the fury of Gross and Levitt . . .)

I wonder sometimes if the price of my heightened resistance to loneliness might be higher than I realize. I’m in the phase of life when there are a lot of weddings, a lot of first babies, when, to many, the absence of those things appears troublesome, even pitiable. People like to say you have to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone else, but that doesn’t seem true. I know plenty of people who hated being alone and whose happiness in finding a partner was magnified by relief. Their dislike, sometimes even horror, of being alone primed them for love, motivated them to commit. But if you’re actually happy alone, if you’ve accomplished that mythical prerequisite for love, you will probably also have rendered love less necessary, made yourself less amenable to accommodating someone’s needs and schedule and foibles. You run the risk of becoming set in your ways, of being unable not to feel smothered. An acupuncturist, feeling my pulse, said he could tell I was an armored person. I asked my mom later if she thought I was armored, and she laughed like, duh. Would I be able to tell the difference between contentment and armor? It seems like one should be light and the other heavy, but you can get used to weight, not even notice it after a while.

Cuando se quedaron solos los Delfines, Jacinta se despachó a su gusto con su marido, y tan cargada de razón estaba y tan firme y valerosa, que apenas pudo él contestarle, y sus triquiñuelas fueron armas impotentes y risibles contra la verdad que afluía de los labios de la ofendida consorte. Esta le hacía temblar con sus acerados juicios, y ya no era fácil que el habilidoso caballero triunfara de aquella alma tierna, cuya dialéctica solía debilitarse con la fuerza del cariño. Entonces se vio que la continuidad de los sufrimientos había destruido en Jacinta la estimación a su marido, y la ruina de la estimación arrastró consigo parte del amor, hallándose por fin este reducido a tan míseras proporciones, que casi no se le echaba de ver. La situación desairada en que esto le ponía, inflamaba más y más el orgullo de Santa Cruz, y ante el desdén no simulado, sino real y efectivo, que su mujer le mostraba, el pobre hombre padecía horriblemente, porque era para él muy triste, que a la víctima no le doliesen ya los golpes que recibía. No ser nadie en presencia de su mujer, no encontrar allí aquel refugio a que periódicamente estaba acostumbrado, le ponía de malísimo talante. Y era tal su confianza en la seguridad de aquel refugio, que al perderlo, experimentó por vez primera esa sensación tristísima de las irreparables pérdidas y del vacío de la vida, sensación que en plena juventud equivale al envejecer , en plena familia equivale al quedarse solo, y marca la hora en que lo mejor de la existencia se corre hacia atrás, quedando a la espalda los horizontes que antes estaban por delante. Claramente se lo dijo ella, con expresiva sinceridad en sus ojos, que nunca engañaban. When the Dauphins were left alone, Jacinta dealt with her husband in her own way; she was so right, so firm, and valiant that he could hardly retaliate, his petty tricks becoming mere laughable, impotent weapons against the truth that flowed from the lips of the wronged wife. She made him tremble with her steely judgements, and it was no longer easy for the clever gentleman to triumph over that tender soul whose dialectics had usually weakened under the force of his affection. Then it became evident that the continuity of Jacinta's suffering had destroyed her respect for her husband, and the ruins of that respect had destroyed some of her love, and then the greater part of it, until it was finally reduced to such miserable proportions that it was scarcely visible. The ungraceful position in which Santa Cruz found himself inflamed his pride all the more; and with this disdain – no longer disguised, but now real and effective – that his wife was showing him the poor man suffered horribly, because it was very sad for him that his blows could no longer hurt his victim. To be a nobody to his wife, not to find in her that periodic refuge to which he was accustomed, put him in a very bad frame of mind. And his confidence in the security of that refuge was such that, upon losing it, he experienced for the first time in his life that terrible sadness produced by irreparable losses and the emptiness of life; a sensation which in the prime of youth equals aging; when surrounded by one's family, equals loneliness; which convinces one that the best of life is behind, leaving one's back turned on the horizons that were once ahead. She told him so clearly, with expressive sincerity in her eyes, which never deceived.

Self-confidence will give you that success which no other way can help, it is the prime key. Look into the mirror, say- Yes! you can Think once!

Our malleable brains as children make us amazing learners, receptive to every experience and primed to take any shape our culture decrees. Think, for example, about how a child born in a multicultural home can grow up to speak two or three languages fluently. But it also causes us to take on all forms of childhood conditioning. Ever notice how often a child asks why? The typical parent’s response to the steady barrage of why, why, why is usually something along the lines of: “Because I said so.” “Because that’s the way it is.” “Because God wanted it this way.” “Because Dad says you need to do it.” Statements like these cause children to get trapped in a thicket of Brules they may not even realize are open to question. Those children grow up to become adults trapped by restrictions and rules that they have taken to be “truth.” Thus we absorb the rules transmitted by culture and act in the world based on these beliefs. Much of this conditioning is in place before the age of nine, and we may carry many of these beliefs until we die—until or unless we learn to challenge them.

So when, in what is probably his earliest letter, Paul talks about “advancing in Judaism beyond any of his age,”1 the word “Judaism” refers, not to a “religion,” but to an activity: the zealous propagation and defense of the ancestral way of life. From the point of view of Saul of Tarsus, the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth were a prime example of the deviant behavior that had to be eradicated if Israel’s God was to be honored.

I thought about my father. In his prime, he’d been a fierce enforcer for the Gallo family. A legend of loyalty and brutality. He’d been a good father—though tough on us boys—who prized honor and courage above almost everything. I’d strived my whole life to live up to his legacy, but I also witnessed the way my mother’s death had destroyed him. Destroyed our entire family. I had pledged I wouldn’t allow myself to fall victim to that weakness. The lives we led were dangerous, and bringing a woman into the mix was asking for misery. Between that promise and my need to maintain control of my life, having a wife never made sense. How could I be adamantly against something yet cling to it with such ferocity? I never wanted to end up losing the love of my life like my father.

He sees his future as a widower, then as a father in his forties rather than his thirties. He probably hopes that this doesn’t go on for another five years, five years at the prime of his life spent in hospitals, caretaking his young wife whose body is being cut apart. At the same time, I’ll bet that he is touched to his core by this experience, that in some ways it makes him feel, as one man told me in the months before his wife of thirty years died, “forever changed and paradoxically alive.” I’d wager that, like that man, Matt wouldn’t choose to go back in time and marry a different person. But Matt’s at a life stage when everyone else is moving forward; the thirties are a decade of building the foundation of the future. He’s out of sync with his peers, and in his own way, in his own grief, he probably feels completely alone.

Documentary photography is one of the prominent and influential branches in the art of photography that records social, cultural, and even historical realities. This type of photography allows the photographer to depict real and sometimes untold stories of everyday life and people. In this type of photography, the main goal is to convey the sense of realness and authenticity of the scenes. In this article, we will review important tips and principles for documentary photography with a camera and explain how to record facts in an attractive and effective way. Choosing the right equipment Choosing the right equipment Choosing the right equipment for documentary photography is very important, because you often need to act quickly and accurately. Using DSLR cameras and mirrorless cameras are the best options for this type of photography. Camera feature advantages High flexibility DSLR, excellent image quality, various lenses Mirrorless light and compact, more speed, silence Recommended lenses: 50mm prime lens: for portraits and close-ups. 24mm wide lens: for shooting wide landscapes and scenes. The importance of light in documentary photography Natural light is one of the main factors in documentary photography. You can't always control the lighting conditions, but learning to use ambient light, especially in public or outdoor settings, can help you create better images. Important points in using light: Natural light: during the golden hours (early morning and evening) is the best time to take documentary photos. This light is soft and pleasant. Shadow Light: If the direct sunlight is strong, try shooting in the shadows to avoid harsh shadows on your subjects. Composition techniques in documentary photography Composition is one of the key principles in documentary photography, with the help of which you can tell a telling and interesting story. The rule of thirds is one of the best and most common compositional rules used by documentary photographers. Rule of thirds: Divide the image frame into three horizontal parts and three vertical parts. Place the important subjects of the photo at the intersection points of these lines. Also, pay attention to the depth of the scene and try to use the foreground and background properly to make your image more dynamic. Taking meaningful photos One of the important principles in documentary photography is the meaningfulness of the images. Each photo should tell a story or capture a special moment. In order for your images to be real and emotional, it is better to interact with your subjects and capture them in their natural state. Don't be afraid to record unexpected and normal moments; Because these moments can better reflect the reality of everyday life. Recording feelings and emotions: Documentary photography should be able to show feelings and emotions well. Pay attention to small details in faces, gestures and looks. These details can add depth to your images. Choose the right angle The right angle of view can make a big difference in the impact of your documentary photo. Try different angles to find the best way to tell your story. Low Angle: To show the power or glory of a subject. High Angle: To show the smallness or loneliness of the subject. Normal angle (Eye Level): to create a closer and more realistic connection with the viewer. Camera settings for documentary photography Camera settings for documentary photography Camera settings are very important for documentary photography, as you may be shooting in different light conditions and at high speed. In the following, we mention some key camera settings for documentary photography. shutter speed For documentary photography, where there is a lot of movement in the scene, the shutter speed is very important. If you are shooting moving scenes, the shutter speed should be faster than 1/250 second to avoid blurring. resource : nivamag.ir

I’d hate for us to get into an argument,” he said, “but if that’s the only way we could communicate....” Carlotta said that grown-ups recover from arguments if they keep their knives in the drawer. “What if our talents don’t mesh?” he worried. “We’ll create a weave that works,” she said in a silvery tone. He brought her to a bench by the lake; they chatted while kids played soccer behind them. “I’m not sure the west coast would appeal with me.” “So you don’t want me to disrupt your life,” Carlotta needled him. “I know two men who’ll provide for me from their millions.” “And let their money ruin your talent?” he nearly exploded. “Over my dead body. I thought you could support yourself. You and I together....” We’ve encircled each other; I can about guess what will happen next. Either her “no” or her “yes” would cause him to quake. They inspected the flowers in a rock garden – purple and red, daisies past their prime, white dots and white dust on deep green leaves, brown tufts that created an impression of mauve from a distance but looked red and green as they moved closer – all on purplish brown stalks. Other nearby blooms could have been the tails of the proudest birds – the kind that have red maple feathers and violet eyes. Carlotta interrupted his reverie. “You’ll have to speak up. I can’t say ‘yes’ for both of us.

When one examines the Gospels one can find examples of him advocating for a resurrection understanding and on other occasions arguing for the idea of the eternal soul dwelling with God in paradise. Either way, however, he is never far from the idea that this life, the one we are in now, is of prime importance and that whatever meaning there is to be made comes not through ritual gesture, but by how we treat our fellow human beings.

It was in her garden that whatever physical grace Abigail St. Croix possessed asserted itself. She moved among her flowers with consummate natural fluidity, enjoying the incommunicable pleasures of growing things with the patience and concentration of a watchmaker. In this, her small, green country, surrounded by an embrasure of old Charleston brick, there were camellias of distinction, eight discrete varieties of azaleas, and a host of other flowers, but she directed her prime attention to the growing of roses. She had taught me to love flowers since I had known her; I had learned that each variety had its own special personality, its own distinctive and individual way of presenting itself to the world. She told me of the shyness of columbine, the aggression of ivy, and the diseases that affected gardenias. Some flowers were arrogant invaders and would overrun the entire garden if allowed too much freedom. Some were so diffident and fearful that in their fragile reticence often lived the truest, most infinitely prized beauty. She spoke to her flowers unconsciously as we made our way to the roses in the rear of the garden. “You can learn a lot from raising roses, Will. I’ve always told you that.” “I’ve never raised a good weed, Abigail. I could kill kudzu.” “Then one part of your life is empty,” she declared. “There’s a part of the spirit that’s not being fed.

I hate this whole damn place. I hate the fact that you have live toilet paper and that you eat dog crap and bug guts for dinner and drink woo that looks like blue Kool-aid and tastes like somebody lit a blowtorch in your mouth. I hate the fact that it’s so damned cold outside I can’t get away. So I’m trapped here with your aunt and uncle, who can’t stand me, because the live clothing they gave me to wear made a fool of me in front of their entire community. And now I’m stuck with a pet I don’t want for…how long do they live?” Sylvan cleared his throat. “The average tharp can live as long as its owner.” “For life.” Sophia threw up her hands. “I’m stuck with a horrible, badly behaved pet I don’t want for the rest of my life! I hate it, Sylvan. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And I just…just want to go home.” The last word ended on a sob and she buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with the force of her tears. “Talana…” Sylvan put a hand on her shoulder but she shrugged it off. “Just go away and leave me alone,” she whispered brokenly. “Go back to Feenah—that’s where you want to be.” “That isn’t true,” Sylvan said in a low voice. “Of course it is.” She looked up, her eyes red from crying. “I saw the way you two were looking at each other. Not that I can say anything, I know. But still…still…” “Still what?” Sylvan’s heart gave a strange little thump. Could it be that she was jealous? That she cared for him after all? Enough that he didn’t want him to see Feenah? But Sophia only shook her head. “Never mind. Just…go. Leave the tharp and go.” Sylvan wanted badly to stay and comfort her. To cuddle her in his arms and whisper that everything would be all right. But from the look on her tearstained face his comfort wasn’t wanted right now. In fact, he was fairly sure that Sophia wouldn’t want anything to do with him or any of the rest of Tranq Prime for some time to come. “Very well, Talana. Maybe we can speak later.” Sighing, he dropped the tharp at the foot of her sleeping platform and left the room. What

Rightly known as the father of our Constitution, he was the prime mover behind that magnificent document and known as well as the primary author of the Bill of Rights. The knowledge that enabled these achievements came in large part from reading, an occupation to which Madison dedicated himself from his youngest years. Even as a boy, he knew the power of the printed word to enlarge experience. He saw how books could teach about times and places that one could otherwise never know. During his college years ... Madison encountered more books than he had ever seen before and well-trained minds to test himself against ... As early as 1783, Madison began an intensive course of reading to assess the alternatives [to the Articles of Confederation]. He implored his friend Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris, to send him books. In spite of the fact that he never traveled far from where he was born, Cheney points out, Madison profoundly influenced the shaping of American thought. "And from within it," she writes, "using books as his lever, he managed to move the world.

Gough was a serious student but found time to gain a blue in rowing; he was later to say that the sport was an apt one for men in public life because you could face one way while going in the other.