Riven Quotes

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing...

All my laurels you have riven away, and my roses; yet in spite of you, there is one crown I bear away with me... One thing without stain, unspotted from the world, in spite of doom mine own! And that is... my white plume.

And the Shadow fell upon the land, and the world was riven stone from stone. The oceans fled, and the mountains were swallowed up, and the nations were scattered to the eight corners of the World. The moon was as blood, and the sun was as ashes. The seas boiled, and the living envied the dead. All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon. And it came to pass in those days, as it had come before and would come again, that the Dark lay heavy on the land and weighed down the hearts of men, and the green things failed, and hope died. And men cried out to the Creator, saying, O Light of the Heavens, Light of the World, let the Promised One be born of the mountain, according to the prophecies, as he was in ages past and will be in ages to come. Let the Prince of the Morning sing to the land that green things will grow and the valleys give forth lambs. Let the arm of the Lord of the Dawn shelter us from the Dark, and the great sword of justice defend us. Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE TWO NATIONS. ONE WAS A vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swathe of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of the path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees. After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her. Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees. Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard...

Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: ‘In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

I pity who I was then: a girl riven by her mistake, beholden to the needs of others, and trained to disminish her own. I was a snake that had not yet learned to strike.

He loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey.

On dit que le temps guérit toutes les blessures. Je pense plutôt qu’il nous aide à accepter la réalité qui nous meurtrit. Nous seuls pouvons guérir de nos blessures qui, pour moi, étaient mes sentiments.

But in her day, Emily had been a beast, a teenage girl so riven with hormones and rage that her two younger sisters decided it would be easier to just be good. Emily had raised sufficient hell for all of them put together.

Yap, yap little dog.

For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things and I will ride this tantrum back to God

Cyrano: I can see him there---he grins--- He is looking at my nose---that skeleton ---What's that you say? Hopeless?---Why, very well!--- But a man does not fight merely to win! No---no---better to know one fights in vain!... You there---Who are you? A hundred against one--- I know them now, my ancient enemies--- Falsehood!...There! There! Prejudice---Compromise---Cowardice--- What's that? No! Surrender? No! Never---never!... Ah, you too, Vanity! I knew you would overthrow me in the end--- No! I fight on! I fight on! I fight on! Yes, all my laurels you have riven away And all my roses; yet in spite of you, There is one crown I bear away with me, And to-night, when I enter before God, My salute shall sweep all the stars away From the blue threshold! One thing without stain, Unspotted from the world, in spite of doom Mine own!--- And that is... Roxane: ---That is... Cyrano: My white plume....

To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven- From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven- From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven.

Such a beginning presaged nothing good. However, I lost neither courage nor hope. I turned to the consolation of all those in distress, and for the first time tasted the sweetness of prayer, poured forth from a pure but riven heart. I fell asleep serenely, unworried as to what was to become of me.

I am banished from the patient men who fight. They smote my heart to pity, built my pride. Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side, They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light. Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight They went arrayed in honour. But they died,-- Not one by one: and mutinous I cried To those who sent them out into the night. The darkness tells how vainly I have striven To free them from the pit where they must dwell In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel. Love drives me back to grope with them through hell; And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.

Avant il voulait te voir morte, maintenant il peut mourir pour toi

Isaiah looked in the mirror and saw everlasting broken pieces, but maybe my broken pieces would fit with his. Together, maybe we’d make a whole.

Day by day, I was falling in love with the lie.

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of a chestnut-tree; it stood up, black and riven: the trunk, split down the centere, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken for each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; through communtiy of vitality was destroyed -- the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree -- a ruin, but and entire ruin. 'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said: as if the monster splinters were living things, and could hear me. 'I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more -- never more see birds making nests and singing idylls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.' As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disc was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. The wind fell, for a second, round Thornfield; but far away over wood and water poured a wild, melancholy wail: it was sad to listen to, and I ran off again.

Last night, he’d let down his guard. Last night, I’d fallen asleep in his arms. And last night, I’d stopped pretending I wasn’t in love with my husband.

If my heart left her breathless, then hers gave me a reason to breathe.

It was unbearable to be around her, knowing she’d eventually leave. It was exhausting to keep her at arm’s length when all I wanted to do was hold her close.

You’re willing to share a woman, but not your lube?” Riven says drily. Eli just shrugs. “I own the lube. I don’t own the woman.

you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are.

If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values.

O mighty-armed Kṛṣṇa, does not such a man, who is bewildered from the path of transcendence, fall away from both spiritual and material success and perish like a riven cloud, with no position in any sphere?

We all live in the digital poorhouse. We have always lived in the world we built for the poor. We create a society that has no use for the disabled or the elderly, and then are cast aside when we are hurt or grow old. We measure human worth based only on the ability to earn a wage, and suffer in a world that undervalues care and community. We base our economy on exploiting the labor of racial and ethnic minorities, and watch lasting inequities snuff out human potential. We see the world as inevitably riven by bloody competition and are left unable to recognize the many ways we cooperate and lift each other up. But only the poor lived in the common dorms of the county poorhouse. Only the poor were put under the diagnostic microscope of scientific clarity. Today, we all live among the digital traps we have laid for the destitute.

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with here it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event. - Innocence, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead

And the Shadow fell upon the Land, and the World was riven stone from stone. The oceans fled, and the mountains were swallowed up, and the nations were scattered to the eight corners of the World. The moon was as blood, and the sun was as ashes. The seas boiled, and the living envied the dead. All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon.

Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

But in her day, Emily had been a beast, a teenage girl so riven with hormones and rage that her two younger sisters decided it would be easier to just be good. Emily had raised sufficient hell for all of them put together. We worried that her devotion to the orchard might be some latent penance for bad behavior. She was trying to make it up to us long after we had ceased to be hurt.

And the Shdaow fell upon the Land, and the World was riven stone from stone. The oceans fled, and the mountains were swallowed up, and the nations were scattered to the eight corners of the World. The moon was as blood, and the sun was as ashes. The seas boiled, and the living envied the dead. All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon. - from Aleth nin Taerin alta Camora, The Breaking of the World. Authoer unknown, the Fourth Age.

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.

When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/​biology/​French test and say, “Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!” and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: “Yes, I’m good at history/​biology/​French, and I’m good at this, too.” It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud Madden me back to an afternoon I carry in me not like a wound but like a will against a wound Give me again enough man to be the child choosing my own annihilations To make of this severed limb a wand to conjure a weapon to shatter dark matter of the dirt daubers' nests galaxies of glass Whacking glints bash-dancing on the cellar's fire I am the sound the sun would make if the sun could make a sound and the gasp of rot stabbed from the compost's lumpen living death is me O my life my war in a jar I shake you and shake you and may the best ant win For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things and I will ride this tantrum back to God until my fixed self, my fluorescent self my grief–nibbling, unbewildered, wall–to–wall self withers in me like a salted slug

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.

There’s a natural tendency in American political life to think that things were always better in the past. The passions of previous years fade, to be inevitably replaced by the passions of the present. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and in the maelstrom of the moment many of us seek comfort in imagining that once there was a Camelot—without quite remembering that the Arthurian legend itself was about a court riven by ambition and infidelity. One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception.

You are the magical fairy that makes things happen in your life. Don't wait for someone else to make your dreams come true.

Fie! Fly! Be gone, little manling!” she spat at him. “Take your tainted She and be gone!

Nothing in this world could have prepared me for Genevieve. She’d crept up on me, consuming more and more of my thoughts, day by day. And then she’d stolen my dreams.

Youth which lives by hope is riven by unrest.

Our republic has never been more hierarchical, more riven by class, more managed by an elite than it is today.

All right. We’ll find you something,” Gage says, finally relenting. “Any preferences? War hammer? Battle axe?” “Be serious.” He laughs. “Wee little dagger it is.

Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories.

Mindfulness can serve as an antidote to living a fragmental life riven with deleterious delusions and illusions.

I'd seen enough strange things at sea to believe it. The Riven had lost her soul a long time ago. So had we.

Quand tu veux cacher un truc, montre-le. Personne n’est curieux quand tout est transparent.

He was seeking the presidency of a country riven not only by competing interests but by incompatible understandings of reality.

Mon cerveau s’était autorisé à effacer mes souvenirs pour maintenir un semblant de stabilité émotionnelle et mentale. Incroyable, mon cerveau n’est pas aussi bête que moi.

The facts were strongly behind his client. But the legal battle could be drawn out for months; no one stood to gain except the lawyers. Ghandi was not interested in making a profit out of legal briefs and empty arguments. He was determined to serve the best interests of both sides. Dada Abdulla and his opponent were blood relations, and every day the case dragged on only drove in deeper the wedge that was splitting their family in two. With much talking Ghandi persuaded both sides to submit to arbitration and settle out of court. Even more talking was necessary to get Dada Abdulla to agree on terms which would not bankrupt the loser, but in the end both sides were satisfied. Ghandi was ecstatic. "I had learnt," he exclaimed, "the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men's hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.

Her family was at least as dysfunctional and peculiar as his own, riven with scenes that to other people might've been epoch defining—'it was a month before Daddy torched Mummy's portrait in the hall, and the paneling caught fire, and the fire brigade came, and we all had to be evacuated via the upstairs windows'—but to the Campbells were so normalized they seemed routine.

O where are you going with your love-locks flowing On the west wind bellowing along this valley track?” “The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye, We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.” So they two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight. “Oh, what is that in heaven where grey cloud-flakes are seven, Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?” “Oh, that’s a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous, An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt>” “Oh, what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly, Their scent comes rich and sickly?” “A scaled and hooded worm.” ”Oh, what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?” “Oh, that’s a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.” “Turn again, O my sweetest,--turn again, false and fleetest: This beaten way thou beatest, I fear is hell’s own track.” “Nay, too steep for hill mounting; nay, too late for cost counting: This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.

Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.

How should I worship your God, no matter how powerful, when I know what he will allow to befall us? Who would follow such a cruel god? And how should I lay aside the spirits by whose aid I have roiled the sea and riven rock, who for long years gifted me the power to cure the sick and to inflame my enemies’ blood? To begloom the bright day and set dim night ablaze? All this, my spirits have allowed to me. Your God may be stronger than these; I see that. As I see that he will prevail. But not yet. Not for me. While I live, I will not abandon my familiars and the rites that are due to them.

He now lived in a country riven by the same tribalism and hatreds that haunted lesser nations. He had always seen American democracy as a giant oak tree, with roots that went more than two hundred years deep. But it turned out the roots were shallow, held in place by custom and good manners, and all it took to lay them bare was one man who refused to play by the rules of civility and democracy.

The South is a land that has known sorrows; it is a land that has broken the ashen crust and moistened it with tears; a land scarred and riven by the plowshare of war and billowed with the graves of her dead; but a land of legend, a land of song, a land of hallowed and heroic memories. To that land every drop of my blood, every fiber of my being, every pulsation of my heart, is consecrated forever. I was born of her womb; I was nurtured at her.breast; and when my last hour shall come, I pray God that I may be pillowed upon her bosom and rocked to sleep within her tender and encircling arms.

Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.

This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantès, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord? This time his solitude was peopled with thoughts, the night illuminated by his dreams and the silence riven with his promises.

Grant’s fortuitous move to Illinois on the eve of the election had monumental consequences, conveniently situating him in the president’s home state and overtly pro-Union northern Illinois. It also placed him in the district of Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, an emphatic Lincoln supporter. Had Grant remained in Missouri, riven by internal strife, he would never have enjoyed the same chance for rapid advancement in the coming war.

Someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and riven......I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of an event.

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees

Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances—including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice.

Though this new forest grew mightily, elsewhere the mighty jungles fell. Elsewhere the coastal rain forests that furred the body of the world were torn and riven. Elsewhere the last of the old growth the last of the world’s own garment were ripped away. It was in this time, now, that the mother of us all was stripped naked and left to die in shame of her children, she who had been robed in glory like this, adorned like this. I bent my head upon the roots and wept, sorrowing for the trees.

we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.

We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.” All-out treatment, we tell the incurably ill, is a train you can get off at any time—just say when. But for most patients and their families we are asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.

The hill of comfort is the hill of Calvary; the house of consolation is built with the wood of the cross; the temple of heavenly blessing is founded upon the riven rock--riven by the spear which pierced his side. No scene in sacred history ever gladdens the soul like Calvary's tragedy.

In a society riven into ‘us’ and ‘them’, an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested. If there was never going to be an end to your country, and you could never leave, why wouldn’t you opt for a peaceful life and a satisfying career?

Smith echoes the famous appeal of W.E.B. Du Bois to the human bond in books that ignores the veil of racial prejudice: I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.64 Committed to a goal (Truth) beyond what mere social life might offer, Du Bois finds in books a human community open to him in a way that his local human communities are not, riven as they are by segregation and hatred. Instead, on the basis of common humanity and common concern for truth, the dead authors welcome Du Bois into their company.

Love isn't a reward. It's not something you deserve or don't deserve.

I promise, I solemnly swear, I will return in one piece.

Can I help you?" he said, in a manner which indicated very clearly that not only did he not wish to help them, but also that he resented the implication that he ought to

I thought of Theo, the sleepy warmth of him in the dark, waking slowly like a night-blooming orchid, his sprawling limbs as tender and sinuous as purple-bruised petals.

Isaiah and his simple gestures. He took the quiet moments, the ones most overlooked, and made the most of them. “I

Even if our stars weep. Even if our sun dies. We never really stop growing.

But I hope you don’t wake up in a couple of years and realize you threw the baby out with the bathwater. You know, if staring at your walls is so hard, you might try something else. Try caring about someone else, or something else. ’Cause what the fuck’s the point of working so hard to get your life back if you’re stuck out there alone and doing nothing with it.

I turned the final page. RATHANAEL THE SCORNED, read the lettering. Above it hung a skeleton twined in a ragged shroud, with two pairs of tattered, crowlike wings. Its fleshless skull grinned out at me, the eye sockets bound behind dark wrappings. It held an iron torch clasped in front of its rib cage, the top spiked like a crown, the flames roaring up, enveloping its body and wings in fire. The silver of its form had a dark, tarnished look like an old mirror, but I couldn’t tell if that was intentional or a result of the gilt flaking with age. Some powerful spirits held objects, like riveners did swords. It represented something important about their nature, but I had no idea what a torch might signify and doubted the revenant did either—only how ironic it was that I’d ended up with the revenant associated with fire. I absorbed its deadly visage, trying and failing to match it with the voice in my head. The revenant had devoured the populations of entire cities; it was also the entity who ordered me to eat my pottage. “I’ll have you know that I’m very good-looking by undead standards,” the revenant remarked.

Had the German Army been opposed by the French and British forces stationed near by, it had orders to retire back to base and such a reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler the chancellorship. Yet the Western powers, riven with guilt about having imposed what was described as a ‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany in 1919, allowed the Germans to enter the Rhineland unopposed.

Oh Love! no habitant of earth thou art— An unseen seraph, we believe in thee, A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart, But never yet hath seen, nor e’er shall see The naked eye, thy form, as it should be; The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven, Even with its own desiring phantasy, And to a thought such shape and image given, As haunts the unquench’d soul—parch’d—wearied—wrung—and riven.

It was on 7 March 1936 that Hitler comprehensivelyviolated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops intothe industrial region of the Rhineland, which under Article 180 had been specifically designated ademilitarized zone. Had the German Army beenopposed by the French and British forces stationednear by, it had orders to retire back to base and sucha reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler thechancellorship. Yet the Western powers, riven withguilt about having imposed what was described as a‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany in 1919, allowedthe Germans to enter the Rhineland unopposed. ‘After all,’ said the influential Liberal politician andnewspaper director the Marquis of Lothian, who hadbeen Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in RamsayMacDonald’s National Government, ‘they are onlygoing into their own back garden.’ When Hitler assured the Western powers in March 1936 thatGermany wished only for peace, Arthur Greenwood,the deputy leader of the Labour Party, told the Houseof Commons: ‘Herr Hitler has made a statement…holding out the olive branch… which ought to be takenat face value… It is idle to say that those statementsare insincere.’ That August Germany adopted compulsory two-year military service

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In the end, external reality matches their bureaucratic fantasies, but only because they forced reality to do so. For example, the borders of many African countries disregard river lines, mountain ranges and trade routes, split historical and economic zones unnecessarily, and ignore local ethnic and religious identities. The same tribe may find itself riven between several countries, whereas one country may incorporate splinters of numerous rival clans. Such problems bedevil countries all over the world, but in Africa they are particularly acute because modern African borders don’t reflect the wishes and struggles of local nations. They were drawn by European bureaucrats who never set foot in Africa.

Darwin proposed that creatures like us who, by their nature, are riven by strong emotional conflicts, and who have also the intelligence to be aware of those conflicts, absolutely need to develop a morality because they need a priority system by which to resolve them. The need for morality is a corollary of conflicts plus intellect: 'Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection. . . . Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or anything like as well-developed as in man.' - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man That (he said) is why we have within us the rudiments of such a priority system and why we have also an intense need to develop those rudiments. We try to shape our moralities in accordance with our deepest wishes so that we can in some degree harmonize our muddled and conflict-ridden emotional constitution, thus finding ourselves a way of life that suits it so far as is possible. These systems are, therefore, something far deeper than mere social contracts made for convenience. They are not optional. They are a profound attempt -- though of course usually an unsuccessful one -- to shape our conflict-ridden life in a way that gives priority to the things that we care about most. If this is right, then we are creatures whose evolved nature absolutely requires that we develop a morality. We need it in order to find our way in the world. The idea that we could live without any distinction between right and wrong is as strange as the idea that we -- being creatures subject to gravitation -- could live without any idea of up and down. That at least is Darwin’s idea and it seems to me to be one that deserves attention. “Wickedness: An Open Debate,” The Philosopher’s Magazine, No. 14, Spring 2001

Written culture itself, up to its recently implemented universal literacy, has had sharply selective effects. It has riven its host societies and formed a divide between literate and illiterate human beings, whose unbridgeability almost attained the firmness of a species differentiation. If one wished, despite Heidegger’s dissuasions, to speak anthropologically again, then the human beings of historical times could be defined as the animals of whom some can read and write while the others cannot. From here it is only a single step, if a demanding one, to the thesis that human beings are the animals of whom some breed those like them, while the others are bred—a thought that belongs to the pastoral folklore of Europeans since the time of Plato’s reflections on education and the state. Something of this is still heard in Nietzsche’s statement that few of the human beings in the small houses will, but most are willed. But to be only willed means to exist merely as an object, not as a subject, of selection.

adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their own personal feelings. If in the Middle Ages two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they had never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement – indeed, their lack of guilt would only have worsened the situation. Today, in contrast, if two men are in love, they are told: ‘If it feels good – do it! Don’t let any priest mess with your mind. Just follow your heart. You know best what’s good for you.’ Interestingly enough, today even religious zealots adopt this humanistic discourse when they want to influence public opinion. For example, every year for the past decade the Israeli LGBT community has held a gay pride parade in the streets of Jerusalem. It’s a unique day of harmony in this conflict-riven city, because it is the one occasion when religious Jews, Muslims and Christians suddenly find a common cause – they all fume in accord against the gay parade. What’s really interesting, though, is the argument they use. They don’t say, ‘These sinners shouldn’t hold a gay parade because God forbids homosexuality.’ Rather, they explain to every available microphone and TV camera that ‘seeing a gay parade passing through the holy city of Jerusalem hurts our feelings. Just as gay people want us to respect their feelings, they should respect ours.’ On 7 January 2015 Muslim fanatics massacred several staff members of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, because the magazine published caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. In the following days, many Muslim organisations condemned the attack, yet some could not resist adding a ‘but’ clause. For example, the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate denounced the terrorists for their use of violence, but in the same breath denounced the magazine for ‘hurting the feelings of millions of Muslims across the world’.2 Note that the Syndicate did not blame the magazine for disobeying God’s will. That’s what we call progress.

Their mother, twice the size of a hippo and with an uglier face to boot, shoots me the ‘I’ll do anything to protect my bear cubs from the evilness of the world including brainwashing them and purposefully raising them stupid just so they don’t have to face the reality of our world’ look.

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her. 'Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees. 'Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. 'Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. These they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And nom they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver-love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.

His own true hidden reality that he had desired to know grew palpable, recognizable. It seemed to him just this: a great, glad, abounding hope that he had saved his brother; too expansive to be contained by the limited form of a sole man, it yearned for a new embodiment infinite as the stars. What did it matter to that true reality that the man's brain shrank, shrank, till it was nothing; that the man's body could not retain the huge pain of his heart, and heaved it out through the red exit riven at the neck: that hurtling blackness blotted out forever the man's sight, hearing, sense?

The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes, Is like the Scorpion girt by fire, In circle narrowing as it glows The flames around their captive close, Till inly search’d by thousand throes, And maddening in her ire, One sad and sole relief she knows, The sting she nourish’d for her foes, Whose venom never yet was vain, Gives but one pang, and cures all pain, And darts into her desperate brain.— So do the dark in soul expire, Or live like Scorpion girt by fire; So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven, Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven, Darkness above, despair beneath, Around it flame, within it death!

As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.

There’s a story in Luke, where an apparently “good,” religious, and rich young man approaches Jesus, wondering what he must do to inherit eternal life. Ultimately, Jesus places a demand on him—sell everything and give to the poor—and we’re told the young man heard that and walked away, sad. I think for many of us who live in this society that is so riven with anger, even addicted to it, Jesus is giving us a similar demand: “Give up your anger. Because of what I’ve done for you, give it up, and forgive.” Sadly, our response is, “That’s not fair.” And we walk away too. One thing that strikes me about the rich young man story: Jesus doesn’t leave him with room to wriggle. The man will either do what Jesus says, or walk away. There’s no splitting the difference, paying lip service, or trying to split theological hairs. But we love to do this with forgiveness. Jesus tells His followers to forgive as we have been forgiven, yet we find reasons why this doesn’t quite apply in our situation. (Maybe He didn’t anticipate what I was going to have to endure . . . Does He realize what He’s asking?) But we don’t walk away sad, like the rich young man. Instead, we tell ourselves that we can live a Christian lifestyle, and integrate our own decisions about whom to forgive, and when. This is especially dangerous, because when we do that, we’re walking away. But we’re not aware we’ve walked away at all. We’ve just de-radicalized the very nature of following Jesus, because we think we know a better way.

Drae sighed. “I appreciate your flair for the dramatic, and I’m glad to learn it’s survived your hypnol poisoning. But there’s no need for you to go through the hassle of regenesis this time. We can drop the bomb from half a kilometer above the meeting and have time to escape the blast.” Eren forced a confident smile, pulling the correct muscles into a barely remembered pattern and holding them there. “This is where you’re wrong—there is absolutely a need for me to go through the hassle of regenesis.” He reached up and rubbed a palm over the stubble covering his scalp. “If I am going to continue living in this world, I have got to get my hair back.” Drae stared at him incredulously, then burst out laughing. “You know, that may be the first true thing you’ve said to me since this ordeal began.

He strove for the diapason, the great song that should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people, wherein all people should be included—they and their legends, their folk lore, their fightings, their loves and their lusts, their blunt, grim humour, their stoicism under stress, their adventures, their treasures found in a day and gambled in a night, their direct, crude speech, their generosity and cruelty, their heroism and bestiality, their religion and profanity, their self-sacrifice and obscenity—a true and fearless setting forth of a passing phase of history, un-compromising, sincere; each group in its proper environment; the valley, the plain, and the mountain; the ranch, the range, and the mine—all this, all the traits and types of every community from the Dakotas to the Mexicos, from Winnipeg to Guadalupe, gathered together, swept together, welded and riven together in one single, mighty song, the Song of the West.

I have gone into the waste lonely places Behind the eye; the lost acres at the edge of smoky cities. What’s beyond never crumbles like an embankment, Explodes like a rose, or thrusts wings over the Caribbean. There are no pursuing forms, faces on walls: Only the motes of dust in the immaculate hallways, The darkness of falling hair, the warning from lint and spiders, The vines graying to a fine powder. There is no riven tree, or lamb dropped by an eagle. There are still times, morning and evening: The cerulean, high in the elm, Thin and insistent as a cicada, And the far phoebe, singing, The long plaintive notes floating down, Drifting through leaves, oak and maple, Or the whippoorwill, along the smoky ridges, A single bird calling and calling: A fume reminds me, drifting across wet gravel; A cold wind comes over stones; A flame, intense, visible, Plays over the dry pods, Runs fitfully along the stubble, Moves over the field, Without burning. In such times, lacking a god, I am still happy.

When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of the path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees. After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, "Let the children come!" and they ran from the trees toward her. "Let your mothers hear you laugh,"she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then "Let the grown men come," she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees. "Let your wives and your children see you dance," she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her. “Cry,” she told them. “For the living and the dead. Just cry.” And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart…“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it… No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them! Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it - you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed…What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give leavins instead. No they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it." "This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And oh my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it, and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver - love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet…More than your life-holding womb and your live-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize."" -Baby Suggs

I hate inconstancy—I loathe, detest, Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal made Of such quicksilver clay that in his breast No permanent foundation can be laid; Love, constant love, has been my constant guest, And yet last night, being at a masquerade, I saw the prettiest creature, fresh from Milan, Which gave me some sensations like a villain. But soon Philosophy came to my aid, And whisper’d, ‘Think of every sacred tie!’ ‘I will, my dear Philosophy!’ I said, ‘But then her teeth, and then, oh, Heaven! her eye! I’ll just inquire if she be wife or maid, Or neither—out of curiosity.’ ‘Stop!’ cried Philosophy, with air so Grecian (Though she was masqued then as a fair Venetian); ‘Stop!’ so I stopp’d.—But to return: that which Men call inconstancy is nothing more Than admiration due where nature’s rich Profusion with young beauty covers o’er Some favour’d object; and as in the niche A lovely statue we almost adore, This sort of adoration of the real Is but a heightening of the ‘beau ideal.’ ’Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filter’d through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull; In short, it is the use of our own eyes, With one or two small senses added, just To hint that flesh is form’d of fiery dust. Yet ’tis a painful feeling, and unwilling, For surely if we always could perceive In the same object graces quite as killing As when she rose upon us like an Eve, ’Twould save us many a heartache, many a shilling (For we must get them any how or grieve), Whereas if one sole lady pleased for ever, How pleasant for the heart as well as liver! The heart is like the sky, a part of heaven, But changes night and day, too, like the sky; Now o’er it clouds and thunder must be driven, And darkness and destruction as on high: But when it hath been scorch’d, and pierced, and riven, Its storms expire in water-drops; the eye Pours forth at last the heart’s blood turn’d to tears, Which make the English climate of our years.

It wanted me,” she says, her tone too even. “Me alone.” I turn her in my arms to face her. “You’re safe now.” “I am the key.” She shakes her head. “If I deny it, there will be more and more of this...until eventually, both kingdoms will die.” “Amalia…” “I love you,” she says, meeting my eyes, not caring who hears her. “Rhys, I love you desperately. Whether you love me or not. But what can I do? If I’m with you, everything will be destroyed. And it will be my fault.” “Give me time,” I whisper. “Please.” “We don’t have time.” “Then give me minutes,” I whisper, holding her close. “Rhys,” she says, her voice breaking. “I love you, Amalia. And I swear to you—I make a solemn vow—I will see us through this together.” “You love me?” she whispers, tears once more trailing down her cheeks. “I do.” And then, not caring who sees, I capture her face in my hands and press my lips to hers, sealing the vow I made back in Saulette. Amalia cries against me, grasping hold of my shoulders and pulling me close. I lean into her, swearing to myself I will make good on my promise. Her tears wet my face, but she meets me without hesitation—trusting me, as I’ve asked her to do so many times. And dawn breaks.

How shall the burial rite be read? The solemn song be sung? The requiem for the loveliest dead, That ever died so young?   Her friends are gazing on her, And on her gaudy bier, And weep! — oh! to dishonor Dead beauty with a tear!   They loved her for her wealth — And they hated her for her pride — But she grew in feeble health, And they love her — that she died.   They tell me (while they speak Of her “costly broider’d pall”) That my voice is growing weak — That I should not sing at all —   Or that my tone should be Tun’d to such solemn song So mournfully — so mournfully, That the dead may feel no wrong.   But she is gone above, With young Hope at her side, And I am drunk with love Of the dead, who is my bride. —   Of the dead — dead who lies All perfum’d there, With the death upon her eyes, And the life upon her hair.   Thus on the coffin loud and long I strike — the murmur sent Through the grey chambers to my song, Shall be the accompaniment.   Thou died’st in thy life’s June — But thou did’st not die too fair: Thou did’st not die too soon, Nor with too calm an air.   From more than fiends on earth, Thy life and love are riven, To join the untainted mirth Of more than thrones in heaven —   Therefore, to thee this night I will no requiem raise, But waft thee on thy flight, With a Pæan of old days.  

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support. Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns.[1] Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

If Marx had no time for the state, it was partly because he viewed it as a kind of alienated power. It was as though this august entity had confiscated the abilities of men and women to determine their own existence, and was now doing so on their behalf. It also had the impudence to call this process ‘‘democracy.’’ Marx himself began his career as a radical democrat and ended up as a revolutionary one, as he came to realize just how much transformation genuine democracy would entail; and it is as a democrat that he challenges the state’s sublime authority. He is too wholehearted a believer in popular sovereignty to rest content with the pale shadow of it known as parliamentary democracy. He is not in principle opposed to parliaments, any more than was Lenin. But he saw democracy as too precious to be entrusted to parliaments alone. It had to be local, popular and spread across all the institutions of civil society. It had to extend to economic as well as political life. It had to mean actual self-government, not government entrusted to a political elite. The state Marx approved of was the rule of citizens over themselves, not of a minority over a majority. The state, Marx considered, had come adrift from civil society. There was a blatant contradiction between the two. We were, for example, abstractly equal as citizens within the state, but dramatically unequal in everyday social existence. That social existence was riven with conflicts, but the state projected an image of it as seamlessly whole. The state saw itself as shaping society from above, but was in fact a product of it. Society did not stem from the state; instead, the state was a parasite on society. The whole setup was topsy-turvy. As one commentator puts it, ‘‘Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down’’—meaning that instead of political institutions regulating capitalism, capitalism regulated them. The speaker is Robert Reich, a former U.S. labour secretary, who is not generally suspected of being a Marxist. Marx’s aim was to close this gap between state and society, politics and everyday life, by dissolving the former into the latter. And this is what he called democracy. Men and women had to reclaim in their daily lives the powers that the state had appropriated from them. Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it. It is hard to see why so many defenders of democracy should find this vision objectionable.