Roll Tide Quotes

Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes. That was what Atlas was telling me when he said “I love you.” He was letting me know that I was the biggest wave he’d ever come across. And I brought so much with me that my impressions would always be there, even when the tide rolled out.

I saw thousands of pumpkins last night come floating in on the tide, bumping up against the rocks and rolling up on the beaches; it must be Halloween in the sea

There was nothing like a Saturday - unless it was the Saturday leading up to the last week of school and into summer vacation. That of course was all the Saturdays of your life rolled into one big shiny ball.

What can we do?" Mom asked again. I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...

I have opened all the doors in my head. I have opened all the pores in my body. But only the tide rolls in.

Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys.

Perhaps you should put me down?” suggested Nina. Reality crashed in on Matthias—the guards’ knowing looks, Zoya and Genya in the doorway, and the fact that in the course of kissing Nina Zenik with a year’s worth of pent-up desire, he had lifted her clear off her feet. A tide of embarrassment flooded through him. What Fjerdan did such a thing? Gently, he released his hold on her magnificent thighs and let her slide to the ground. “Shameless ,” Nina whispered, and he felt his cheeks go red. Zoya rolled her eyes. “We’re making a deal with a pair of love-struck teenagers.

I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

God spreads the heavens above us like great wings And gives a little round of deeds and days, And then come the wrecked angels and set snares, And bait them with light hopes and heavy dreams, Until the heart is puffed with pride and goes Half shuddering and half joyous from God's peace; And it was some wrecked angel, blind with tears, Who flattered Edane's heart with merry words. Come, faeries, take me out of this dull house! Let me have all the freedom I have lost; Work when I will and idle when I will! Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, For I would ride with you upon the wind, Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, And dance upon the mountains like a flame. I would take the world And break it into pieces in my hands To see you smile watching it crumble away. Once a fly dancing in a beam of the sun, Or the light wind blowing out of the dawn, Could fill your heart with dreams none other knew, But now the indissoluble sacrament Has mixed your heart that was most proud and cold With my warm heart for ever; the sun and moon Must fade and heaven be rolled up like a scroll But your white spirit still walk by my spirit. When winter sleep is abroad my hair grows thin, My feet unsteady. When the leaves awaken My mother carries me in her golden arms; I'll soon put on my womanhood and marry The spirits of wood and water, but who can tell When I was born for the first time? The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away; While the faeries dance in a place apart, Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring, Tossing their milk-white arms in the air; For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing Of a land where even the old are fair, And even the wise are merry of tongue; But I heard a reed of Coolaney say-- When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung, The lonely of heart is withered away.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, 'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge. How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lash'd from the foam of ages; while the graves Of Empires heave but like some passing waves.

In all we do, and hear, and see, Is restless Toil and Vanity. While yet the rolling earth abides, Men come and go like ocean tides

The darkness rolled and sucked like a tide, at arm’s length; and then, instead of drowning me, it receded.

It faded slowly, ebbing like the tide. He rolled onto his back, staring up, his head still aching. The black clouds were beginning to roll back, showing a widening strip of blue; the Angel was gone, the lake surging under the growing light as if the water were boiling. Simon began to sit up slowly, his eyes squinted painfully against the sun. He could see someone racing down the path from the farmhouse to the lake. Someone with long black hair, and a purple jacket that flew out behind her like wings. She hit the end of the path and leaped onto the lakeside, her boots kicking up puffs of sand behind her. She reached him and threw herself sand behind her. She reached him and threw herself down, wrapping her arms around him. “Simon,” she whispered. He could feel the strong, steady beat of Isabelle’s heart. “I thought you were dead,” she went on. “I saw you fall down, and—I thought you were dead.” Simon let her hold him, propping himself up on his hands. He realized he was listing like a ship with a hole in the side, and tried not to move. He was afraid that if he did, he would fall over. “I am dead.” “ I know,” Izzy snapped. “I mean more dead than usual.

Percy and Books Percy does not like it when I read a book. He puts his face over the top of it, and moans. He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes. The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down. The tide is out, and the neighbor's dogs are playing. But Percy, I say, Ideas! The elegance of language! The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage. Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough. Let's go.

I had this dream that my life was a rolling canvas. Everyday it rolled off the sheet, bleached white, into the beach of my life. Come sunup, I'd begin to paint it with my thoughts and actions. My breathing, my living, and my dying. Some days the pictures pleased me, maybe pleased others, pleased God himself, but some days, some months, even some years, they didn't, and I didn't ever want to look at them again. But the thing is this . . . every day, no matter what I'd painted the day before, I got a new canvas, washed white. 'Cause each night the tide rolled in, scrubbed it clean, and receded, taking it's stains with it. And my dreams . . . I just stood on the beach and watched all that stuff wash out to sea.- Nothing more than ripples in the water. No canvas is ever stained clean through. Not one.

To His Coy Mistress Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

I once banged out a story in Peshawar, Pakistan, while eating a chicken salad sandwich, as demonstrators shouted their displeasure of all things American in the glow of burning flags and some steel-edged radials. I was told, by well-meaning people, that I should tell the angry crowds that I was, in fact, Canadian. I just looked at them. How in the world do you pretend to be from Calgary, when you talk like me? I thought briefly, I would say I was from Alabama, and hope they didn’t know exactly where that was, but I am pretty sure that, if I had, someone would answer back: “Roll Tide.

The rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky slowly rolls up fine black images : it is more than enough to frame the perfect moment ; to reflect these images, she would cause dark little tides to be born in our hearts. I don't know how to take advantage of the occasion : I walk at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky.

This thing was power from the Outside, and I was a grain of sand to its oncoming tide. But you know what? That grain of sand might be the last remnant of what had once been a mountain, but that which it is, it is. The tide comes and the tide goes. Let it hammer the grain of sand as it may. Let lofty mountains fear the slow, constant assault of the waters. Let the valleys shudder at the pitiless advance of ice. Let continents drown beneath the dark and rising tide. But that grain of sand? It isn’t impressed. Let the tide roll in. The sand will still be there when it rolls out again. -Harry Dresden, Cold Days by Jim Butcher

I love you, Lily. Everything you are. I love you." I know those words get thrown around a lot, especially by teenagers. A lot of times prematurely and without much merit. But when he said them to me, I knew he wasn't saying it like he was in love with me. It wasn't that kind of "I love you." Imagine the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed on the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes. That was what Atlas was telling me wen he said "I love you." He was letting me know that I was the biggest wave he'd ever come across. And I brought so much with me that my impression would always be there, even when the tide rolled out.

So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in wickedness, till we grow invulnerable by conscience; and that sentinel, once dozed, sleeps fast, not to be awakened while the tide of pleasure continues to flow or till something dark and dreadful brings us to ourselves again.

Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes. That was what Atlas was telling me when he said “I love you.” He was letting me know that I was the biggest wave he’d ever come across. And I brought so much with me that my impressions would always be there, even when the tide rolled out.

The tides rolled up to crash against the shore while we sat feet from one another with the remnants of all we’d left unsaid driving us apart.

Despite the sea being wild and the waves rolling away from the shore, the tide always returns.

The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths.

EDMUND *Then with alcoholic talkativeness You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and signing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself -- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping looking, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like a veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see -- and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! *He grins wryly. It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a a little in love with death! TYRONE *Stares at him -- impressed. Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right. *Then protesting uneasily. But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death. EDMUND *Sardonically The *makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

It was as if some great ocean of destruction had rolled its unyielding tide through the city and then, upon its terrible recession, left behind only a shoreline of concrete sand and crushed humanity.

One thing all the stories agreed on: King Robert was dead. The bells in the seven towers of the Great Sept of Baelor had tolled for a day and a night, the thunder of their grief rolling across the city in a bronze tide. They only rang the bells like that for the death of a king, a tanner's boy told Arya.

You know sometimes when I walk into your room with a flashlight or a candle?' I nodded. 'Well, love is like that. Light doesn't have to announce it's way into a room or ask the darkness to leave. It just is. It walks ahead of you, and the darkness rolls back like a tide.' She waved her hand across the room. 'It has to 'cause darkness can't be where light is.

What do I lose when I have a praying life? Control. Independence. What do I gain? Friendship with God. A quiet heart. The living work of God in the hearts of those I love. The ability to roll back the tide of evil. Essentially, I lose my kingdom and get his. I move from being an independent player to a dependent lover. I move from being an orphan to a child of God.

Maybe you're getting into the rhythm of sailing life," says James. He looks out at the waves that are rolling in to lap against the dock. "You know, the tides going in and then out, the wind blowing east and then west, the high of a perfect day out on the water, the low of a thunderstorm or a wind that won't go your way.

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb—for we have no word to speak about it.

Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices.

The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air

Go wide, go wide, roll you Tide, we don’t run and we don’t hide, we’re the ’Bama Crimson Tide!

Old bureaucrat, my companion here present, no man ever opened an escape route for you, and you are not to blame. You built peace for yourself by blocking up every chink of light, as termites do. You rolled yourself into your ball of bourgeois security, your routines, the stifling rituals of your provincial existence, you built your humble rampart against winds and tides and stars. You have no wish to ponder great questions, you had enough trouble suppressing awareness of your human condition. You do not dwell on a wandering planet, you ask yourself no unanswerable questions

There were times when I was blown away by the virgin beauty of the land. Kind of like that guy who lost his shit on the internet at the full double rainbow across the sky. Remember that guy? He kept asking what it meant, and it is not so difficult a question to answer. It means that we are loved, like all living things that Gaia sustains. There is a poetry in the canapes of forests and in the gentle roll of hills. A song in the wind and a benediction in the kiss of the sun. There are stories in the chuckle of waters in creeks and epics told in the tides of oceans. There are trees, Granuaile, that seem sometimes like they have grown all their lives just to feel the touch of my hand upon their trunks. They are so welcoming to me. You will feel that welcome in your hands some day. You'll feel it in your toes as you walk upon the earth. I cannot wait to see that love bloom in your eyes....' Tears glistened at the edges of her eyes... She knew precisely what I meant. She understood. And she became almost unbearably beautiful to me in that moment.

Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity, - the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heavens artillery, - but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggots life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear od death, of God, of the universe, comes over him, - the hope of the Resurrection and the life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence, - it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God. - The White Silence

It starts as a low croon that rolls in with the tide, a sound so faint it might just be the wind blowing through the clapboard shutters, through the portholes of docked fishing boats, and into narrow cracks along sagging doorways. But after the first night, the harmony of voices become undeniable. An enchanting hymn sailing over the water’s surface, cool and soft and alluring. The Swan sisters have awakened.

And let Apollo drive Prince Hector back to battle, breathe power back in his lungs, make him forget the pain that racks his heart. Let him whip the Achaeans in headlong panic rout and roll them back once more, tumbling back on the oar-swept ships of Peleus' son Achilles. And he, will launch his comrade Patroclus into action and glorious Hector will cut him down with a spear in front of Troy, once Patroclus has slaughtered whole battalions of strong young fighting men and among them all, my shining son Sarpedon. But then - enraged for Patroclus - brilliant Achilles will bring Prince Hector down. And then, from that day on, I'll turn the tide of war: back the fighting goes, no stopping it, ever.

I have hair that drifts like seaweed when I swim. I have eyes that shine like rock pools. My ears are like scallop shells. The ripples on my skin are like the ripples on the sand when the tide has turned back again. At night I gleam and glow like sea beneath the stars and moon. Thoughts dart and dance inside like little minnows in the shallows. They race and flash like mackerel farther out. My wonderings roll in the deep like sails. Dreams dive each night into the dark like dolphins do and break out happy and free into the morning light. These are the things I know about myself and that I see when I look in the rock pools at myself.

Edges I am a child throwing rocks into the stream. Challenging the rushing water. Raising my fist and daring fate to do it worst. I am a dancer in the waves of the ocean. Swaying in time with the tide. Pirouetting, the current my only friend. I am the sun, rising across the canyon Ascending, and shinning down. Giving the illusion of perception and motion. I am thoughts like a rolling river. Water cascading over the rocks of my soul. Shaping, forming, conforming. I am the peace of the rain forest. Basking in solitude Tranquil, serene, transfixing angles. Reflecting from within. Dripping and dropping. Shaking it off. I am the dust of the galaxy. Yearning to know itself. I am the wind. Wandering. Searching. A storm brewing from within.

Watching someone you love… die? There are no words for how broken that makes a person. It’s like waking up from a bad dream only to find out that it’s you reality, it’s like watching sunlight fade from the sky, like watching death suck the one you love dry, and being powerless to stop it. You may as well try to stop the waves from rolling in, or the sun from rising.In the end, the waves will roll, the sun will set, and death will come. The only thing you have a choice in? How you deal with it…when it does.

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.

Evie is like a tide rolling in and clipping me at my ankles. A low, forceful tug. A blissful inevitability.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

I was the darkness and the darkness was me, and together we rolled with the tide, lulled toward a shore I could neither see nor hear.

We are drawn to repetition. We can watch the tide rolling for hours into shore. The clouds skittering across the sky. We can listen to the pulsing beat of bongo drums and are drawn magnetically to the slap, slap, slap of a girl being chastised. The human is a mystery, even too himself.

The rats had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through which they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and hidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball - when the one woman who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life ran in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course

I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until finally I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom’s middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

Sea Longing" A thousand miles beyond this sun-steeped wall Somewhere the waves creep cool along the sand, The ebbing tide forsakes the listless land With the old murmur, long and musical; The windy waves mount up and curve and fall, And round the rocks the foam blows up like snow,-- Tho' I am inland far, I hear and know, For I was born the sea's eternal thrall. I would that I were there and over me The cold insistence of the tide would roll, Quenching this burning thing men call the soul,-- Then with the ebbing I should drift and be Less than the smallest shell along the shoal, Less than the sea-gulls calling to the sea.

There is a theory that when a planet, like our earth for example, has manifested every form of life, when it has fulfilled itself to the point of exhaustion, it crumbles to bits and is dispersed like star dust throughout the universe. It does not roll on like a dead moon, but explodes, and in the space of a few minutes, there is not a trace of it visible in the heavens. In marine life we have a similar effect. it is called implosion. When an amphibian accustomed to the black depths rises above a certain level, when the pressure to which it adapts itself is lifted, the body bursts inwardly. Are we not familiar with this spectacle in the human being also? The norsemen who went berserk, the malay who runs amuck—are these not examples of implosion and explosion? When the cup is full it runs over. but when the cup and that which it contains are one substance, what then? There are moments when the elixir of life rises to such overbrimming splendor that the soul spills over. In the seraphic smile of the madonnas the soul is seen to flood the psyche. The moon of the face becomes full; the equation is perfect. A minute, a half minute, a second later, the miracle has passed. something intangible, something inexplicable, was given out—and received. In the life of a human being it may happen that the moon never comes to the full. In the life of some human beings it would seem, indeed, that the only mysterious phenomenon observable is that of perpetual eclipse. In the case of those afflicted with genius, whatever the form it may take, we are almost frightened to observe that there is nothing but a continuous waxing and waning of the moon. Rarer still are the anomalous ones who, having come to the full, are so terrified by the wonder of it that they spend the rest of their lives endeavoring to stifle that which gave them birth and being. The war of the mind is the story of the soul-split. When the moon was at full there were those who could not accept the dim death of diminution; they tried to hang full-blown in the zenith of their own heaven. They tried to arrest the action of the law which was manifesting itself through them, through their own birth and death, in fulfillment and transfiguration. Caught between the tides they were sundered; the soul departed the body, leaving the simulacrum of a divided self to fight it out in the mind. Blasted by their own radiance they live forever the futile quest of beauty, truth and harmony. Depossessed of their own effulgence they seek to possess the soul and spirit of those to whom they are attracted. They catch every beam of light; they reflect with every facet of their hungry being. instantly illumined, When the light is directed towards them, they are also speedily extinguished. The more intense the light which is cast upon them the more dazzling—and blinding—they appear. Especially dangerous are they to the radiant ones; it is always towards these bright and inexhaustible luminaries that they are most passionately drawn…

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time." And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness...: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the corking care of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:- "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain. " ... "Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

over the smooth lip of the china cup, I thought of how someone’s loss had become my gain, of how the tide would roll in and out again as if nothing had changed, and how sometimes the separation between endings and beginnings is so

When the stage claimed my bones, I became an act of creation, soft steps to the tempo of breaths. We were a sea of the dead, the push and pull of the tide, the curling smoke in an opium den, and the rolling clouds over the Himalayas.

Storms bring the detritus of other people's lives into our own, a reminder that we are not alone, and of how truly insignificant we are. The indiscriminating waves had brutalized the shore, tossing pieces of splintered timber, an intact china teacup, and a gentleman's watch—still with its cover and chain—onto my beloved beach, each coming to rest as if placed gently in the sand as a shopkeeper would display his wares. As I rubbed my thumb over the smooth lip of the china cup, I thought of how someone's loss had become my gain, of how the tide would roll in and out again as if nothing had changed, and how sometimes the separation between endings and beginnings is so small that they seem to run together like the ocean's waves.

Chester stood on the shore watching the waves. Some rose, broke and were subsumed by those that followed. Some danced, their white frothy tops rising and falling rhythmically like a ballerina’s white tutu and in their joy they made progress. Others lazily rolled in and fell short of any prize. Occasionally one roared and raced in as if to capture as much of the land as possible.

Leah is prone to ring the bath with a scrim of some curiously viscous material, oddly gritty when rolled between finger and thumb and pinkish in the white bathroom light. When I look at it, I think of tide pools filled with spiny creatures, scrub at it before running the taps again to clear the debris, little rock pool remains of something that might be shell or might be skin or might be something else entirely.

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.

Watching him, his hands buried in his pockets—to keep from circling her neck she supposed—she couldn't help but marvel at the curious mix of Southern courtesy and male arrogance, the natural assumption he shouldered of being lawfully in control. "Engaging in a moral battle isn't always hazardous to one's health, you know." "Doesn't look like it's doing wonders for yours." "Saints be praised, it can actually be rewarding." Looking over his shoulder, he halted in the middle of the room. "Irish." "I beg your pardon?" "You. Irish. The green eyes, the tiny bit of red in your hair. Is Connor your real name?" "Yes, why..." she said, stammering. Bloody hell. "Of course." "Liar." She felt the slow, hot roll of color cross her cheeks. "What could that possibly have to do with anything?" "I don't know, but I have a feeling it means something. It's the first I've heard come out of that sassy mouth of yours that didn't sound like some damned speech." He tapped his head, starting to pace again. "What I wonder is, where are you in there?

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.

The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore. The laws by which the winds blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing time; the laws by which the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints; the laws which preside over the subtle combinations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electricity; the laws of germination and production in the vegetable and animal worlds, — all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that apparel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can exhale no such sweetness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light, has found the lost paradise. For him, a new heaven and a new earth have already been created. His home is the sanctuary of God, the Holy of Holies.

We drove out along the coast road. There was the green of the headlands, the white, red-roofed villas, patches of forest, and the ocean very blue with the tide out and the water curling far out along the beach. We drove through Saint Jean de Luz and passed through villages farther down the coast. Back of the rolling country we were going through we saw the mountains we had come over from Pamplona. The road went on ahead. Bill looked at his watch. It was time for us to go back. He knocked on the glass and told the driver to turn around. The driver backed the car out into the grass to turn it. In back of us were the woods, below a stretch of meadow, then the sea.

THE FORTRESS Under the pink quilted covers I hold the pulse that counts your blood. I think the woods outdoors are half asleep, left over from summer like a stack of books after a flood, left over like those promises I never keep. On the right, the scrub pine tree waits like a fruit store holding up bunches of tufted broccoli. We watch the wind from our square bed. I press down my index finger -- half in jest, half in dread -- on the brown mole under your left eye, inherited from my right cheek: a spot of danger where a bewitched worm ate its way through our soul in search of beauty. My child, since July the leaves have been fed secretly from a pool of beet-red dye. And sometimes they are battle green with trunks as wet as hunters' boots, smacked hard by the wind, clean as oilskins. No, the wind's not off the ocean. Yes, it cried in your room like a wolf and your pony tail hurt you. That was a long time ago. The wind rolled the tide like a dying woman. She wouldn't sleep, she rolled there all night, grunting and sighing. Darling, life is not in my hands; life with its terrible changes will take you, bombs or glands, your own child at your breast, your own house on your own land. Outside the bittersweet turns orange. Before she died, my mother and I picked those fat branches, finding orange nipples on the gray wire strands. We weeded the forest, curing trees like cripples. Your feet thump-thump against my back and you whisper to yourself. Child, what are you wishing? What pact are you making? What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark can I fill for you when the world goes wild? The woods are underwater, their weeds are shaking in the tide; birches like zebra fish flash by in a pack. Child, I cannot promise that you will get your wish. I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. A pheasant moves by like a seal, pulled through the mulch by his thick white collar. He's on show like a clown. He drags a beige feather that he removed, one time, from an old lady's hat. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take away that.

I am knee deep in sea water now, feeling the energy of the tidal waves as they roll inwards towards the shore. A tide that exhales life spent, across its great, red stained sea. Its waves’ beats are out of sync, as they crawl slowly towards land.

Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here. ("New York Blues")

Today I am bothered by the story of King Canute. (...) The story is, of course, that he was so arrogant and despotic a leader that he believed he could control everything - even the tide. We see him on the beach, surrounded by subjects, sceptre in hand, ordering back the heedless waves; a laughing stock, in short. But what if we've got it all wrong? What if, in fact, he was so good and great a king that his people began to elevate him to the status of a god, and began to believe that he was capable of anything? In order to prove to them that he was a mere mortal, he took them down to the beach and ordered back the waves, which of course kept on rolling up the beach. How awful it would be if we had got it so wrong, if we had misunderstood his actions for so long.

Poem in October" It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning.

Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down. Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.

Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.

The father had long ago taken up his bundle and hidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball—when the one woman who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course.

A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us. . . . Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled the flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy0scented water. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak – and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted. “Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, ’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge: How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves Of Empires heave but like some passing waves.

The gunnery sergeant didn’t crack a smile at the radio intercept of Faith’s concept of a backup plan, an intercept that had caused Commander Bradburn, skipper of the Dallas, to literally fall out of his command chair laughing. Sands managed to watch the video stone-faced as she boarded the Voyage and began her “fifteen minutes of mayhem,” set in the video to the tune of Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping. He managed to keep a straight face the third time she popped back up like a jack-in-the-box after being dogpiled by zombies. He held it in during her overheard running commentary as the rest of the Marines, even the NCOs, started rolling on the deck. It was when she got the Halligan tool stuck in a zombie’s head and overbalanced that he snorted. When she unstuck her bent machete and it caught a male zombie in the groin he started laughing out loud. When the, admittedly not petite, girl stuck a boot knife in a zombie’s eye then threw him over the side, tears started running down his face and he completely lost his composure as a senior NCO of the United States Marine Corps.

XII. If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped, the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness? Tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. XIII. As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, Stood stupified, however he came there: Thrust out past service from the devil's stud! XIV. Alive? he might be dead for aught I knew, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain. And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. XV. I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart, As a man calls for wine before he fights, I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, Ere fitly I could hope to play my part. Think first, fight afterwards, the soldier's art: One taste of the old time sets all to rights. XVI. Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face Beneath its garniture of curly gold, Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold An arm to mine to fix me to the place, The way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace! Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold. XVII. Giles then, the soul of honour - there he stands Frank as ten years ago when knighted first, What honest man should dare (he said) he durst. Good - but the scene shifts - faugh! what hangman hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst! XVIII. Better this present than a past like that: Back therefore to my darkening path again! No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain. Will the night send a howlet or a bat? I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. XIX. A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof - to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. XX. So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. XXI. Which, while I forded - good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, Each step, of feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! - It may have been a water-rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek. XXII. Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Now for a better country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage, Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage - XXIII. The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque, What penned them there, with all the plain to choose? No footprint leading to that horrid mews, None out of it. Mad brewage set to work Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

The question now is, do we have the morality and courage required to live together as brothers and not be afraid? One of the most persistent ambiguities we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal, but among the wielders of power peace is practically nobody’s business. Many men cry “Peace! Peace!” but they refuse to do the things that make for peace. The large power blocs talk passionately of pursuing peace while expanding defense budgets that already bulge, enlarging already awesome armies and devising ever more devastating weapons. Call the roll of those who sing the glad tidings of peace and one’s ears will be surprised by the responding sounds. The heads of all the nations issue clarion calls for peace, yet they come to the peace table accompanied by bands of brigands each bearing unsheathed swords.

Even yet I do not know why the ocean holds such a fascination for me. But then, perhaps none of us can solve those things—they exist in defiance of all explanation. There are men, and wise men, who do not like the sea and its lapping surf on yellow shores; and they think us strange who love the mystery of the ancient and unending deep. Yet for me there is a haunting and inscrutable glamour in all the ocean's moods. It is in the melancholy silver foam beneath the moon's waxen corpse; it hovers over the silent and eternal waves that beat on naked shores; it is there when all is lifeless save for unknown shapes that glide through sombre depths. And when I behold the awesome billows surging in endless strength, there comes upon me an ecstasy akin to fear; so that I must abase myself before this mightiness, that I may not hate the clotted waters and their overwhelming beauty. Vast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth, nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters. And these shall beat on dark shores in thunderous foam, though none shall remain in that dying world to watch the cold light of the enfeebled moon playing on the swirling tides and coarse-grained sand. On the deep's margin shall rest only a stagnant foam, gathering about the shells and bones of perished shapes that dwelt within the waters. Silent, flabby things will toss and roll along empty shores, their sluggish life extinct. Then all shall be dark, for at last even the white moon on the distant waves shall wink out. Nothing shall be left, neither above nor below the sombre waters. And until that last millennium, and beyond the perishing of all other things, the sea will thunder and toss throughout the dismal night.

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

Men and women of today! if there be among you any pure, fresh flower, let it be laid on the altar of God. If there are among you any who, being young, do not desire to return into the world, let them give up! Let them renounce! This is the one secret of spirituality, renunciation. Dare to do this. Be brave enough to do it. Such great sacrifices are necessary. Can you not see the tide of death and materialism that is rolling over these Western lands? Can you not see the power of lust and unholiness, that is eating into the very vitals of society? Believe me, you will not arrest these things by talk, or by movements of agitation for reform; but by renunciation, by standing up, in the midst of decay and death, as mountains of righteousness. Talk not, but let the power of purity, the power of chastity, the power of renunciation, emanate from every pore of your body. Let it strike those who are struggling day and night for gold, that even in the midst of such a state of things, there can be one to whom wealth counts for nothing. Put away lust and wealth. Sacrifice yourselves.

One of the hardest things is that life keeps relentlessly rolling on, like the ocean, the tides keep rising and falling, the waves breaking and retreating. Everybody returns to their regular routine and there's an expectation that the bereaved person will start the process of recovery. This is very difficult to do because for a grieving person the most ordinary activities can take on deep meaning that would never cross anybody else's mind. Hannah says “I remember being in the supermarket and someone bumping into me. It was the first time I'd been to the supermarket since Matt had died, probably only two weeks after. I was walking around with the trolley and you're confronted by all the things you don't need to buy anymore. Matt used to have gluten free bread for example. I thought 'well I don’t need to buy that anymore’. It's the most mundane detail but it kills you inside. And someone bumped into me and didn't say sorry. I didn't do anything but I just wanted to turn around and go ‘you don't know what's happened to me! I'm grieving!' It can be the tiniest thing that wounds you.

Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protrusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded.

You are the mermaid; I am the mermaid hunter. You lead me through your wake and I follow, Knowing my fate. You swish your tales and the water boils between them: I sink, I drown, going down to green depths wordless. I shall not taste your full sweetness, only your salt madness; I will not tell our wild secrets, For while it lasts, my hollow skull skulks after you, Lying at times in your cold hands, To be tossed aside indifferently, Roll and rise with the tides, fall again, Come to rest half buried in the sinking shifting sands. Anemones be my eyes As I watch you swimming from me Laughing.

Three in the morning, thought Charles Halloway, seated on the edge of his bed. Why did the train come at that hour? For, he thought, it’s a special hour. Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M. ! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead—And wasn’t it true, had he read it somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time . . .?

One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child. When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.

O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

The Boy’s head was spinning. Raul was real, and quite possibly not kindly disposed to him, as Marama’s potential heir and jail-breaker. The sailors worshiped Marama, who controlled the tides and commanded them through dreams? The Geolwe collected clouds and lived in the sky? And did the captain just say there were mountains in the sea? Did he mean under the water? Downing the drink in front of him, he began to laugh. It was all just so hopelessly un-real. Anselt and the captain stared for a moment, then found his mirth infectious. Before long they were laughing too, and the sound of their merriment sailed through the night and out to greet the rolling waves, wrapping itself around the ship like a cloud.

SELKIE Alone, the cold body of the selkie man lay upon the sand, so like the drowned one the widow had called for. For her longing, he was hauled upon the sand, exposed to the moonlight. The selkie strained in fraught movements and human form broke from the gleaming seal fur. Undeniably he bore the image of the widow’s lost husband and spoke with the sounds of the dead man’s voice. She hailed back from the rocks. Shadows accumulating beyond the moon’s ability to reform. Colours were washed from sight and silver crashed through her, colder than snow dreams of being. In the dark, the ocean became the rolling flanks of a great beast drifting back across the horizon. Out deep soon, the land’s drop sharp.

Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby, and if that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Mama, Dada, uh-oh, ball. Good night tree, good night stars, good night moon, good night nobody. Potato stamps, paper chains, invisible ink, a cake shaped like a flower, a cake shaped like a horse, a cake shaped like a cake, inside voice, outside voice. If you see a bad dog, stand still as a tree. Conch shells, sea glass, high tide, undertow, ice cream, fireworks, watermelon seeds, swallowed gum, gum trees, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, double dares, alphabet soup, A my name is Alice and my boyfriend’s name is Andy, we come from Alabama and we like apples, A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove. Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils eat their young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1 Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations, Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car.

I feel you calling, in the autumn sweet transformation. I have reached my brightest green to the gold burning sun. I have folded my colours into the wind, bright colours taken to the sky. My silk has gone to moisture in the rising atmosphere and I am your colours again, deep and warm. I hear your calling and I answer, I come back to you, to slip inside the dark. Will I be found by the decaying things? Will I be found by the roots and drunk by tree and flower? Will I slip and mingle and roll along, find my way to a river and with it dance, and give myself in a sigh to the ocean? Will I scatter, a few fragments of sand – my body to glisten beneath a caress of moonlight as I make my way towards no more as I find my way to forever

Being held by him, kissed and mastered, taken under and swept away, enthralled her in a way she—an independent woman if nothing else in this life—could not have understood until forced to understand. From the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair, finally, a man's strength dominated her. Suddenly, she understood why women wanted so deeply. Why they wanted him. If they sensed even one-tenth of his passion, his power, his vitality, they would break his door down to get to him. And this, she learned as quickly as any pupil could, was what had been missing before: Zachariah Garrett's full participation. In all fairness to the dare, she locked her arms around his neck and consented to a draw. He murmured something low and unintelligible, his wine glass dropping to the grass with a soft thump. The arm around her waist tightened, the other climbing, his fingers delving into her loose chignon and tilting her head as he deepened the kiss, drawing down on her bottom lip and sucking. Instinct had her following his lead, shifting to better accommodate, parrying each thrust of his tongue with her own, rising on the tips of her toes to better sink into him, to gorge herself in vast, voracious gulps. The frantic nature of their joining melted her stiff posture and her cocksure bearing, rolling through her in a languid, glorious wave of sensation and recognition. It was a peculiar time to realize she had built her sense of self around an erroneous ideal. She was no different than other women.

Why, thou monkey,’ said a harpooneer to one of these lads, ‘we ’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.’ Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious revery is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. 10 There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise forever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgul the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms. As if to his eyes some sudden vision had been given, Gandalf stirred; and he turned, looking back north where the skies were pale and clear. Then he lifted up his hands and cried in a loud voice ringing above the din: The Eagles are coming! And many voices answered crying: The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming! The hosts of Mordor looked up and wondered what this sign might mean. There came Gwaihir the Windlord, and Landroval his brother, greatest of all the Eagles of the North, mightiest of the descendants of old Thorondor, who built his eyries in the inaccessible peaks of the Encircling Mountains when Middle-earth was young. Behind them in long swift lines came all their vassals from the northern mountains, speeding on a gathering wind. Straight down upon the Nazgul they bore, stooping suddenly out of the high airs, and the rush of their wide wings as they passed over was like a gale. But the Nazgul turned and fled, and vanished into Mordor's shadows, hearing a sudden terrible call out of the Dark Tower; and even at that moment all the hosts of Mordor trembled, doubt clutched their hearts, their laughter failed, their hands shook and their limbs were loosed. The Power that drove them on and filled them with hate and fury was wavering, its will was removed from them; and now looking in the eyes of their enemies they saw a deadly light and were afraid. Then all the Captains of the West cried aloud, for their hearts were filled with a new hope in the midst of darkness. Out from the beleaguered hills knights of Gondor, Riders of Rohan, Dunedain of the North, close-serried companies, drove against their wavering foes, piercing the press with the thrust of bitter spears. But Gandalf lifted up his arms and called once more in a clear voice: 'Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom.' And even as he spoke the earth rocked beneath their feet. Then rising swiftly up, far above the Towers of the Black Gate, high above the mountains, a vast soaring darkness sprang into the sky, flickering with fire. The earth groaned and quaked. The Towers of the Teeth swayed, tottered, and fell down; the mighty rampart crumbled; the Black Gate was hurled in ruin; and from far away, now dim, now growing, now mounting to the clouds, there came a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise. 'The realm of Sauron is ended!' said Gandalf. 'The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest.' And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell. The Captains bowed their heads...

(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay" Sittin' in the morning sun I'll be sittin' when the evening comes Watching the ships roll in Then I watch them roll away again, yeah I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay Wastin' time I left my home in Georgia Headed for the Frisco Bay Cuz I've had nothing to live for And look like nothing's gonna come my way So, I'm just gon' sit on the dock of the bay Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay Wastin' time Looks like nothing's gonna change Everything still remains the same I can't do what ten people tell me to do So I guess I'll remain the same, listen Sittin' here resting my bones And this loneliness won't leave me alone, listen Two thousand miles I roam Just to make this dock my home, now I'm just gon' sit at the dock of a bay Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh Sittin' on the dock of the bay Wastin' time [Ends in harmonic whistling]

That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,—for we have no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah me—what could the wild man know of it; what can we yet know? That it is a Force, and thousand-fold Complexity of Forces; a Force which is not we. That is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from us. Force, Force, everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious Force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it; how else could it rot?" Nay surely, to the Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here; never-resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, old as Eternity

Dear Orphan Soul, I never thought it is was easy to wipe away your tears when you are used to crying endlessly on the inside. Today was the first time ever that I felt a sense of relief. I laughed for the first time in a long time, or maybe my first time ever. I used to think I was permanently damaged, but Nurse Hope told me that it is okay for me to be myself. However, I do not know who I am. All my life, my mind and actions have been like loaded guns. I never knew when or where the bullets were coming from—most of the time, they came from someone else, and sometimes they came from me. My eyes are wet with tears as I write because of my life struggles. Sadness still remains because Nurse Hope says this is not permanent. Well, to give myself hope, nothing lasts forever. Therefore, nothing in life is permanent. Right? I am an orphaned soul. Nurse Hope's love reminds me of the ocean’s tide. It is a cycle of crashes as it knocks against the stones and shells as it gradually rolls up on the shore. I wonder if her love is going to say farewell to Kace and me as it sucks and pulls itself back into the ocean. Well, we’ve been washed up since we’ve been born. I hope instead of the tides sucking Nurse Hope's love away, I hope it sucks up our memories as they fade away with the tides, never to be found or returned again. Nothing is permanent.

His arms wrapped around her, and he rolled easily to his back, taking her with him. Surprised and flummoxed, Merritt floundered a little as he gently pushed her up and arranged her legs to straddle him. "What are you doing?" "Putting you to work," he said, "since you're so set on wringing me dry." She looked at the brawny male beneath her and shook her head slightly. A brief laugh escaped him as he saw her confusion. "You're a horsewoman, aye?" he asked, and nudged upward with his hips. "Ride." Genuinely shocked at finding herself in the dominant position, Merritt braced her hands on his chest for balance. Her first tentative movement was rewarded by an encouraging lift of his hips. It sent him even deeper than before, the angle seeming to open something inside her, and she quivered in sensitive reaction. Hot and excited and mortified, she understood what he wanted. As she began to move, she gradually lost her self-consciousness and found a rhythm, her sex rubbing and pumping against his. Every downstroke sent pleasure through her, every sensation connected to the thick length of him. Panting heavily, Keir reached up to cup her breasts, his thumbs stroking the stiff peaks. "Merry, love... I'm going to come soon." "Yes," she gasped, a tide of heat approaching fast. "You'll... you'll have to pull away, if you dinna want me to release inside you." "I want it," she managed to say. "Stay in me. I want to feel you come... Keir..." He began to pump fast and hard, his hands grasping her hips to keep her in place. His eyes half closed, the passion-drowsed intensity of his gaze pushing her over the edge. The release went on and on, new swells and crests washing over her, having her moaning and shivering in their wake. She felt his hands grip her thighs as he bucked beneath her once, twice, and held fast. When he subsided, trembling like a racehorse held in check, she lay on top of him with their bodies still fused. Feeling euphoric, she nuzzled the dark golden fleece of his chest.

She did not answer. Or, rather, she answered by sliding long fingers across Kassad’s chest, ripping away the leather thongs which bound the rough vest. Her hands found his shirt. It was soaked with blood and ripped halfway down the front. The woman ripped it open the rest of the way. She moved against him now, her fingers and lips on his chest, hips already beginning to move. Her right hand found the cords to his trouser front, ripped them free. Kassad helped her pull off the rest of his clothes, removed hers with three fluid movements. She wore nothing under her shirt and coarse-cloth trousers. Kassad’s hand slid between her thighs, behind her, cupped her moving buttocks, pulled her closer, and slid to the moist roughness in front. She opened to him, her mouth closing on his. Somehow, with all of their motion and disrobing, their skin never lost contact. Kassad felt his own excitement rubbing against the cusp of her belly. She rolled above him then, her thighs astride his hips, her gaze still locked with his. Kassad had never been so excited. He gasped as her right hand went behind her, found him, guided him into her. When he opened his eyes again she was moving slowly, her head back, eyes closed. Kassad’s hands moved up her sides to cup her perfect breasts. Nipples hardened against his palms. They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would never experience anything that could not be so described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never adequately share the sense of the next few minutes with anyone else. He would never try. They made love in a sudden shaft of late October light with a carpet of leaves and clothes beneath them and a film of blood and sweat oiling the sweet friction between them. Her green eyes stared down at Kassad, widening slightly when he began moving quickly, closing at the same second he closed his. They moved together then in the sudden tide of sensation as old and inevitable as the movement of worlds: pulses racing, flesh quickening with its own moist purposes, a further, final rising together, the world receding to nothing at all—and then, still joined by touch and heartbeat and the fading thrill of passion, allowing consciousness to slide back to separate flesh while the world flowed in through forgotten senses. They lay next to each other.