Route Home Quotes

And after I dropped him off, I took the longest possible route home... I explored alleys and hidden roads I never knew existed. I discovered neighborhoods entirely new to me. And finally... I discovered I was sick of this town and everything in it.

The last act was to infect me with nightmares and paranoid delusions that would take years of therapy and metabolism-wrecking medications to rout out.

I draw a line down the middle of a chalkboard, sketching a male symbol on one side and a female symbol on the other. Then I ask just the men: What steps do you guys take, on a daily basis, to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? At first there is a kind of awkward silence as the men try to figure out if they've been asked a trick question. The silence gives way to a smattering of nervous laughter. Occasionally, a young a guy will raise his hand and say, 'I stay out of prison.' This is typically followed by another moment of laughter, before someone finally raises his hand and soberly states, 'Nothing. I don't think about it.' Then I ask women the same question. What steps do you take on a daily basis to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? Women throughout the audience immediately start raising their hands. As the men sit in stunned silence, the women recount safety precautions they take as part of their daily routine. Here are some of their answers: Hold my keys as a potential weapon. Look in the back seat of the car before getting in. Carry a cell phone. Don't go jogging at night. Lock all the windows when I sleep, even on hot summer nights. Be careful not to drink too much. Don't put my drink down and come back to it; make sure I see it being poured. Own a big dog. Carry Mace or pepper spray. Have an unlisted phone number. Have a man's voice on my answering machine. Park in well-lit areas. Don't use parking garages. Don't get on elevators with only one man, or with a group of men. Vary my route home from work. Watch what I wear. Don't use highway rest areas. Use a home alarm system. Don't wear headphones when jogging. Avoid forests or wooded areas, even in the daytime. Don't take a first-floor apartment. Go out in groups. Own a firearm. Meet men on first dates in public places. Make sure to have a car or cab fare. Don't make eye contact with men on the street. Make assertive eye contact with men on the street.

Nothing fires the warrior’s heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one’s own bowels or guts but from one’s discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions.

Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are Escape Routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.

She knows where she's going, and what she has to do. She could, after all, find her way to Route 95 South blindfolded. She could do it in the dark, in fair weather or foul; she can do it even when it seems she will run out of gas. It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

There is no more deadly peril than disobedience; States are devoured by it, homes laid in ruins, Armies defeated, victory turned to rout. White simple obedience saves the lives of hundreds Of honest folk." - Creon

To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. It could be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture in a room, a new route home to avoid a traffic jam.

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.

they’ve come here to dance, drawn sideways from their route home by the music and by bravado, and now they are hesitating, unsure of how to begin, unfamiliar with the steps, embarrassed.............they dance, and he smiles and nods and thinks of his wife sleeping at home, and thinks of when they were young and might still have done something like this………… but here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter, and a slow walk home……

Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.

When I was in second grade, my teacher, Miss Maxwell, read from The Harmony Herald that one in every four children lived in China. I remember looking over the room, guessing which children they might be. I wasn't sure where China was, but suspected it was on bus route three. I recall being grateful I didn't live in China because I didn't care for Chinese food and couldn't speak the language.

The future homemaker trains for her role within the home, but the boy prepares for his by being given more independence outside the home, by his taking a “paper route” or a summer job. A provider will profit by independence, dominance, aggressiveness, competitiveness.8

The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. Today, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay, And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose. Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears. Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man. So set, before its echoes fade, The fleet foot on the sill of shade, And hold to the low lintel up The still-defended challenge-cup. And round that early-laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find unwithered on its curls The garland briefer than a girl’s.

A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect.

They leave the insistent monotony of the interstate for more reasonable roads. While the former slices its path through entire states, peppering them with exit signs and mile markers, these lesser cousins of the grand highways keep their manners intact, clinging gently to the hemlines of all but the most obstinate geological points of interest. Charming and sometimes a bit frightening, their paths are as unpredictable and winding as a little boy's route home from school.

There were three people in my home and I was the only one showing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and reactivity to the radio frequency transmitting utility meters. For these reasons I did not shield my home and took the route of adapting my body to the toxic electromagnetic environment.

I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about place, about the way we often talk about love of place, but seldom how places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain collected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite. The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel in both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story..... I told the student that they were at an age when they might begin to choose the places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were much more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked each of them where they felt at home. They answered, each of them, down the rows, for an hour, the immigrants who had never stayed anywhere long or left a familiar world behind, the teenagers who'd left the home they'd spent their whole lives in for the first time, the ones who loved or missed familiar landscapes and the ones who had not yet noticed them. I found books and places before I found friends and mentors, and they gave me a lot, if not quite what a human being would. As a child, I spun outward in trouble, for in that inside-out world [of my family], everywhere but home was safe. Happily, the oaks were there, the hills, the creeks, the groves, the birds, the old dairy and horse ranches, the rock outcroppings, the open space inviting me to leap out of the personal into the embrace of the nonhuman world.

I had a Muslim neighbour once who did the Hajj. He went to Mecca, did the whole route—Mina, Arafah, seven times around the Kaabah, of course, and prayers at the masjid. You know what he told me was the best part? Coming home. And that’s what pilgrimages are for, really. To think about the places and people you leave behind.

You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.

I’ve been wrapped up in trying to find something that feels like home instead of questioning why I even think that’s so important.

Just read. Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.

Laura has seriously hurt the polygamists. In return, they’ve threatened her life, and that of her family. When her sister escaped her own polygamous husband, she was kidnapped while working a paper route. The men took her back to her husband and threatened to kill her in blood atonement. The police looked the other way, saying, “You can’t be abducted in your own home.

Sо they had begun to walk about in a fabulous Paris, letting themselves be guided by the nighttime signs, following routes born of a clochard phrase, of an attic lit up in the darkness of a street's end, stopping in little confidential squares to kiss on the benches or look at the hopscotch game, those childish rites of a pebble and a hop on one leg to get into Heaven, Home.

If we fail in our negotiation,” Greene told Lafayette en route to d’Estaing’s ship, “we shall at least get a good dinner.” Washington should have chosen Greene, not Sullivan, to steer this mission. Besides his cool head and personal interest in helping his home state, Greene understood that whatever their shortcomings, the French could always be counted on to roast the hell out of a chicken. Greene

Our route had now obviously been completely blotted out and here I reckoned less of our chances of survival. We’re like a voyage ship veered off course by a ruthless storm now left with no radar or compass. Ours is a sorry tale of an unpredictable adventure. One moment it seem like we’re going home to mama’s warm embrace and tears of joy, the next moment we feel helplessly immersed in the blackness of hopelessness.” - Dami K.

Nothing is stronger in disarming the kingdom of darkness than love. Love is the thing Satan can’t stand. Love is the weapon of mass destruction. Satan is the one who heaps shame on us—he’s the accuser, and in our approach to people, we should never agree with what the accuser says about them. Satan is the one whispering in people’s ears, “God is repulsed by you.” God is saying, “I love you—I’m crazy about you! Come home to Me.

Jesus makes it clear that the way to God is the same as the way to a new childhood. The innocence that is reached through conscious choices. The Beatitudes offer me the simplest route for the journey home, back into the house of my Father. And along this route I will discover the joys of the second childhood: comfort, mercy, and an ever clearer vision of God. It's a place where I can live in freedom without obsessions and compulsions.

Some ultimately felt grateful for the boxes, for the chance to say goodbye, to never regret the last words uttered. Others found comfort in the strings’ uncanny power, enabling them to believe that the lives of their short-string loved ones were not, in fact, cut short. They were just as long as they were meant to be, since the moment they were born and the length of their string was seemingly determined. It made losing them somehow easier to accept, trusting that nothing could have changed the ending, that their deaths did not hinge upon any particular decisions they made, what they did or didn’t do. Because of the strings, there was no need to wonder what might have happened if they had lived in a different city, or eaten different foods, or driven a different route home. The loss still hurt, of course, still didn’t make sense, but it was almost a relief not to be hounded by what-ifs.

Joshua 23:10 provides my favorite image of God’s favor. It says, “One of you routs a thousand, because the LORD your God fights for you.” How can a single warrior with one sword take down a thousand armed enemies? Because God fights for him!

To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. It could be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture in a room, a new route home to avoid a traffic jam. What you make doesn’t have to be witnessed, recorded, sold, or encased in glass for it to be a work of art. Through the ordinary state of being, we’re already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive.

The journey home is never a direct route; it is, in fact, always circuitous, and somewhere along the way, we discover that the journey is more significant than the destination and that the people we meet along the way will be the traveling companions of our memories forever.

All he wanted to do was shove home and stay there until neither one of them could move, but he found himself saying, “Last chance. You sure about this?” If she had any doubts, now was the time to call the whole thing off. “Oh no. You don’t get to take the goddamn noble route now.

People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey's end, the full stop at the end of the trek. For people who live on islands, the sea is always the beginning. It's the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home.

LATRINES ARE MERELY one of the many places where we accidentally sow the seeds of wild plants that we eat. When we gather edible wild plants and bring them home, some spill en route or at our houses. Some fruit rots while still containing perfectly good seeds, and gets thrown out uneaten into the garbage. As parts of the fruit that we actually take into our mouths, strawberry seeds are tiny and inevitably swallowed and defecated, but other seeds are large enough to be spat out. Thus, our spittoons and garbage dumps joined our latrines to form the first agricultural research laboratories.

I like that I have ten things on the go, all at once. I like that I'm always planning for the next thing. I like that I bring a high energy to my life, that I see it as a challenge. I like that my favourite thing to do on the flight home is to look at the airline route map to pick my next destination.

There's one big difference between the poor and the rich,' Kite says, taking a drag from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time. 'The rich aren't evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I've known rich people -- I have played on their yachts -- and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And they are not stupid -- or at least, not any more than the poor are. Much as I find amusing the idea of a ruling class of honking toffs, unable to put their socks on without Nanny helping them, it is not true. They build banks, and broker deals, and formulate policy, all with perfect competency. 'No -- the big difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are blithe. They believe nothing can ever really be so bad, They are born with the lovely, velvety coating of blitheness -- like lanugo, on a baby -- and it is never rubbed off by a bill that can't be paid; a child that can't be educated; a home that must be left for a hostel, when the rent becomes too much. 'Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you're comfortably middle-class, what's the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 per cent and leave your bins, unemptied, on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine -- but maybe cheaper -- go on holiday -- but somewhere nearer -- and pay off your mortgage -- although maybe later. 'Consider, now, then, the poor. What's the worst a government policy can do to them? It can cancel their operation, with no recourse to private care. It can run down their school -- with no escape route to a prep. It can have you out of your house and into a B&B by the end of the year. When the middle-classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats -- their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. 'Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us -- no walking around National Trust properties, or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful; dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate, then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor -- that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better, later. We live now -- for our instant, hot, fast treats, to prep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. 'You must never, never forget, when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode, It's a miracle when someone from a bad postcode gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.

I was adrift on the high seas, but my course was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family. Veering toward scylla seemed much the safer route, and after navigating the passage, I soon washed up, a bit stunned, on a new shore. Like Odysseus on the island of the cyclops, I found myself facing a "being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and god meant nothing." In true heroic fashion, I moved toward the thing I feared. Yet while Odysseus schemed desperately to escape Polyphemus's cave, I found that I was quite content to stay here forever.

Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit—just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await the next transit in 1769. With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments, and had everything in a state of perfect readiness. On the morning of the second transit, June 4, 1769, he awoke to a fine day, but, just as Venus began its pass, a cloud slid in front of the Sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit: three hours, fourteen minutes, and seven seconds. Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year. Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship. It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast. When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.

I keep seeing my life darting off in the different directions it could have taken, as chance and circumstance, temperament and desire, open and close, open and close gates, routes, roadways. And yet there feels like an inevitability to who I am--just as of all the planets in all the universes, planet blue, this planet Earth, is the one that is home.

You feel safer in your bedroom, but you’re actually much safer in the shelter.” It didn’t matter how I felt. She made me go into the shelter every time the sirens wailed. Men came and removed all the signposts from the roads around the village, so that when Hitler invaded he wouldn’t know where he was. When he invaded, we were to bury our radio. Jamie had already dug a hole for it in the garden. When Hitler invaded we were to say nothing, do nothing to help the enemy. If he invaded while I was out riding, I was to return home at once, as fast as possible by the shortest route. I’d know it was an invasion, not an air raid, because all the church bells would ring. “What if the Germans take Butter?” I asked Susan. “They won’t,” she said, but I was sure she was lying. “Bloody huns,” Fred muttered, when I went to help with chores. “They come here, I’ll stab ’em with a pitchfork, I will.” Fred was not happy. The riding horses, the Thortons’ fine hunters, were all out to grass, and the grass was good, but the hayfields had been turned over to wheat and Fred didn’t know how he’d feed the horses through the winter. Plus the Land Girls staying in the loft annoyed him. “Work twelve hours a day, then go out dancing,” he said. “Bunch of lightfoots. In my day girls didn’t act like that.” I thought the Land Girls seemed friendly, but I knew better than to say so to Fred. You could get used to anything. After a few weeks, I didn’t panic when I went into the shelter. I quit worrying about the invasion. I put Jamie up behind me on Butter

tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying various wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tubs in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger seagoing junks to carry heavy loads of cargo and ports to handle them. They improved the use of the compass in navigation and learned to produce more accurate nautical charts. The route from the port of Zaytun in southern China to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf became the main sea link between the Far East and the Middle East, and was used by both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, among others.

What first comes across our minds About the stocky Mexican Pushing a mower across the lawn At 7 a.m. on a Saturday As the roar of the cutter wakes us? Let me take a guess. Why do they have to come so damn early? What do we make of his flannel Shirt missing buttons at the cuffs, Threadbare at the shoulders, The grass stains around his knees, The dirt like roadmaps to nowhere, Between the wrinkles of his neck? Let me take a shot. Dirty Mexican. Would his appearance lead us to believe He is a border jumper or wetback Who hits the bar top with an empty shot glass For the twelfth time then goes home To kick his wife around like fallen grapefruit Lying on the ground? First, the stocky Mexican isn’t mowing the lawn At 7 a.m. on a Saturday. He doesn’t work weekends anymore ever since He lost one-third of his route To laborers willing to work for next to nothing. Second, he knows better than to kneel On the wet grass because, well, the knees Of his pants will become grass-stained And pants don’t grow on trees, even here, Close to Palm Springs. Instead, after 25 years of the same blue collar work, Two sons out and one going to college, Rather than jail, and a small but modest savings In case he loses the remaining two-thirds Of his work—no matter how small and reluctantly The checks come in the mail— My father the stocky gardener believes He firmly holds his life In both his hands like pruning shears, Chopping branches and blossoms, Never looking downward as they fall to his feet In pieces like the American dream.

Jean-Nicolas contacted Cateau-Cambrésis in a belligerent mood to ask why his son had developed a stutter. The priests said he came with it, and Jean-Nicolas said he assuredly did not leave home with it; and it was concluded that Camille’s fluency of speech lay discarded along the coach-route, like a valise or a pair of gloves that has gone astray. No one was to blame; it was one of those things that happen.

Even more surprising—because we had been taught it was impossible—was that the axons from the resurrected retinal ganglion cell grew all the way from the back of the eye to a place near the center of the brain called the optic chiasm. “The amazing thing is that the regenerated axons were able to find their way home along these long, tortuous routes back to their targets in the brain . . . that’s incredible,” Huberman says.

Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney. With the introduction by Qantas of larger Lockheed Super Constellation airliners in 1954, prices began to fall, but even by the end of the decade travelling to Europe by air still cost as much as a new car. Nor was it a terribly speedy or comfortable service. The Super Constellations took three days to reach London and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but to put on the seat-belt signs and bounce through them. Even in normal conditions they flew at a height guaranteed to produce more or less constant turbulence. (Qantas called it, without evident irony, the Kangaroo Route.) It was, by any modern measure, an ordeal.

Men don’t look at pretty women on the street and think, “She’s pretty, so I won’t sexually harass her or follow her home.” It’s the opposite. I walk through life with constant vigilance—anxious about the next man who’ll stick his head out his car window and shout something at me, who’ll spike the drink that my “prettiness” encouraged him to buy for me, or who’ll force me to stop in a shop before I go home to make sure I’m not being followed. Keys between my fingers, heart racing, checking over my shoulder, strategizing my safest route home even if it means spending money on a taxi—this is what navigating public spaces looks like for a lot of women. I can’t tell you the amount of times I have contemplated shaving my head to reduce sexual harassment. But to do so would be giving in to the idea that it’s my responsibility to prevent this harassment, not theirs.

Hannah's dad had a habit of never walking home the same way twice, with the intention of giving her a sense of how it all fitted together. What he'd actually achieved was to fail to provide a dependable route. As she stood confused on the corner, turning in a circle, it struck Hannah this happened all the time - grown-ups trying to teach you things in the wrong way, their way, that only made sense if you already knew what you were trying to learn.

Writing a novel is like taking a long cross-country journey. The hardest part is getting going, making sure you have all the items you need to take with you, double- and triple-checking that the route you’re taking is the best way. So often you leave your driveway and start north when you realize you actually needed to head southwest. I’ve never written a novel without a certain number of false starts. And it never seems to get easier. Part of me thinks it only gets harder.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and the novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage. To make our meaning plain — Orlando could come home from one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr M. amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it.

Then you've got the kids who live within a mile of the school and can walk home. Although this may not sound glamorous, it still beats my place on the totem pole: the bottom. Yes, we of the bus routes find ourselves in a general throng outside the auditorium, where all who pass may mock us.We look forward to an hour-long ride of picking up and dropping off loud middle schoolers and louder elementary kids and peeling our hamstrings off the pleather seats over and over again in the heat.

Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one.* That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.

He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way. PSALM 25:9 JUNE 22 After a speaking engagement in Florida, my hosts assigned a Navy captain to fly me home. En route, the captain told me that there was a very heavy overcast in New York. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “we’ll have to go in on instruments.” We went down, down, down. And finally, I saw the lights of the runway and we came right up to the ramp. It was a beautiful landing. The captain said, “The primary ingredient for a good landing is faith. I have to have faith in these instruments. If I didn’t, I might think, ‘Well, maybe this instrument isn’t exactly right, so I’ll make this adjustment.’ And that could have tragic consequences.” Your religious education is your instrument panel for safe navigation through the long flight of the years. When clouds gather, storms develop, and trouble looms, if you lose faith in your instruments, you can be lost. But if you have faith in the teachings of the Bible, in prayer, in the church, in goodness, love, and hope, your instruments will bring you through.

Hail, oh woman, who was so afflicted, It was our ruin that you were in chains, Our fine land in the possession of thieves... While you were sold to the foreigners! Oh-ro, welcome home Oh-ro, welcome home Oh-ro, welcome home Now that summer's coming!' Gráinne Mhaol is coming over the sea, Armed warriors as her guard, Only Irish are they, not French nor Spanish... and they will rout the foreigners! May it please God that we might see, Although we may live but one week after, Gráinne Mhaol and a thousand warriors... Dispersing the foreigners!

Homelessness is a recognised entry route into prostitution, which, in the case of young people and children, is often a result of running away (Home Office, 2004a). Running away can be an attempt to make a positive move, a means of breaking away from an intolerable home life in order to make a fresh start. It can also be seen as an attempt to exercise control over the situation. However, while a young woman may be making an attempt to be assertive, she would simultaneously be increasing her vulnerability to manipulation.’ (Cusick et al, 2003) The

One morning Profane woke up early, couldn't get back to sleep and decided on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa. He made his way to the washroom of Our Home, tripping over two empty mattresses on route. Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The handles wouldn't turn. When he finally found a shower that worked, the water came out hot and cold in random patterns. He danced around, yowling and shivering, slipped on a bar of soap and nearly broke his neck. Drying off, he ripped a frayed towel in half, rendering it useless. He put on his skivvy shirt backwards, took ten minutes getting his fly zipped and another fifteen repairing a shoelace which had broken as he was tying it. All the rests of his morning songs were silent cuss words. It wasn't that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schlemihl, he'd known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace.

The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognized an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone´s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades

Nor could I fail to recall my friendship with Howard K. Beale, professor of American History at the University of North Carolina. There he was, one day in 1940, standing just outside my room in the men’s dormitory at St. Augustine’s, in his chesterfield topcoat, white silk scarf, and bowler hat, with his calling card in hand, perhaps looking for a silver tray in which to drop it. Paul Buck, whom he knew at Harvard, had told him to look me up. He wanted to invite me to his home in Chapel Hill to have lunch or dinner and to meet his family. From that point on we saw each other regularly. After I moved to Durham, he invited me each year to give a lecture on “The Negro in American Social Thought” in one of his classes. One day when I was en route to Beale’s class, I encountered one of his colleagues, who greeted me and inquired where I was going. I returned the greeting and told him that I was going to Howard Beale’s class to give a lecture. After I began the lecture I noticed that Howard was called out of the class. He returned shortly, and I did not give it another thought. Some years later, after we both had left North Carolina, Howard told me that he had been called out to answer a long-distance phone call from a trustee of the university who had heard that a Negro was lecturing in his class. The trustee ordered Beale to remove me immediately. In recounting this story, Beale told me that he had said that he was not in the habit of letting trustees plan his courses, and he promptly hung up. Within a few years Howard accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin. A favorite comment from Chapel Hill was that upon his departure from North Carolina, blood pressures went down all over the state.

In the end It will not matter That I was a woman. I am sure of it. The body is a source. Nothing more. There is a time for it. There is a certainty About the way it seeks its own dissolution. Consider rivers. They are always en route to Their own nothingness. From the first moment They are going home. And so When language cannot do it for us, Cannot make us know love will not diminish us, There are these phrases Of the ocean To console us. Particular and unafraid of their completion. In the end Everything that burdened and distinguished me Will be lost in this: I was a voice.

It wasn’t too tough a trip. There were many others like me riding the rods for one reason or another, some heading nowhere in particular—people without anchors, just drifting along. Others were going someplace definite—home or to a new place where a job might be found. They too were like other people, some nice and helpful, some nasty and mean, but on the whole I got along. I minded my own business, never stayed on one train too long, jumped off at an occasional town along the route to hole up for a day and night in a cheap room and eat a few decent meals, and then I’d be on my way again.

There was something about those birds in the glass aviary that was foreboding and sad. They could fly, but they had no sky. The one who had escaped- the homing pigeon- was mourned, but shouldn't he have been celebrated? He had freedom; he had escaped his predictable route between Malibu and Bel-Air and was now flying in bigger and brighter skies, with a flight plan that was spontaneous and new. And then there was the girl: I had forced myself to forget her but was only successful for an hour or two, and then she would creep back in, the way a spider returns to a musty corner of a room to spin her web.

There were, inevitably, children’s clothing stores, furniture shops still offering bedroom sets by layaway, and dollar stores whose awnings teemed with suspended inflatable dolls, beach chairs, laundry carts, and other impulse purchases a mom might make on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted by errand running with her kids. There was the sneaker store where Olga used to buy her cute kicks, the fruit store Prieto had worked at in high school, the little storefront that sold the kind of old-lady bras Abuelita used to wear. On the sidewalks, the Mexican women began to set up their snack stands. Mango with lime and chili on this corner, tamales on that. Until the Mexicans had come to Sunset Park, Olga had never tried any of this food, and now she always tried to leave a little room to grab a snack on her way home. Despite the relatively early hour, most of the shops were open, music blasting into the streets, granting the avenue the aura of a party. In a few more hours, cars with their stereos pumping, teens with boom boxes en route to the neighborhood’s public pool, and laughing children darting in front of their mothers would add to the cacophony that Olga had grown to think of as the sound of a Saturday.

They knew Elwood’s route. Sometimes jeered at him for being a goody-two-shoes when he biked past Larry’s window on his way home. That night they jumped him. It was just getting dark and the smell of magnolias mingled with the tang of fried pork. They slammed him and his bike into the new asphalt the county had laid down that winter. The boys tore his sweater, threw his glasses into the street. As they beat him, Larry asked Elwood if he had any damned sense; Willie declared that he needed to be taught a lesson, and proceeded to do so. Elwood got a few licks in here and there, not much to talk about. He didn’t cry.

Lost In The World" (feat. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver) [Sample From "Woods": Justin Vernon] I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind I'm building a still to slow down the time I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind I'm building a still to slow down the time I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind I'm building a still to slow down the time [Chorus 2x:] I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night Down for the night Said she's down for the night [Kanye West:] You're my devil, you're my angel You're my heaven, you're my hell You're my now, you're my forever You're my freedom, you're my jail You're my lies, you're my truth You're my war, you're my truce You're my questions, you're my proof You're my stress and you're my masseuse Mama-say mama-say ma-ma-coo-sah Lost in this plastic life, Let's break out of this fake ass party Turn this into a classic night If we die in each other's arms we still get laid in the afterlife If we die in each other's arms we still get laid [Chorus:] (I'm lost in the world) Run from the lights, run from the night, (I'm down on my mind) Run for your life, I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night Down for the night Down for the night I'm lost in the world, been down for my whole life, I'm new in the city but I'm down for the night Down for the night Down for the night Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America? [Chorus:] I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night Down for the night Said she's down for the night I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind I'm new in the city and I'm goin' for a ride Goin' for a ride I'm lost in the world, been down for my whole life I'm new in the city but I'm down the for the night Down for a night, down for a good time [Gil-Scott Heron:] Us living as we do upside down. And the new word to have is revolution. People don't even want to hear the preacher spill or spiel because God's whole card has been thoroughly piqued. And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey. The youngsters who were programmed to continue fucking up woke up one night digging Paul Revere and Nat Turner as the good guys. America stripped for bed and we had not all yet closed our eyes. The signs of truth were tattooed across our open ended vagina. We learned to our amazement the untold tale of scandal. Two long centuries buried in the musty vault, hosed down daily with a gagging perfume. America was a bastard, the illegitimate daughter of the mother country whose legs were then spread around the world and a rapist known as freedom, free doom. Democracy, liberty, and justice were revolutionary code names that preceded the bubbling bubbling bubbling bubbling bubbling in the mother country's crotch What does Webster say about soul? All I want is a good home and a wife And our children and some food to feed them every night. After all is said and done build a new route to China if they'll have you. Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America?

Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit—just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await the next transit in 1769. With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments, and had everything in a state of perfect readiness. On the morning of the second transit, June 4, 1769, he awoke to a fine day, but, just as Venus began its pass, a cloud slid in front of the Sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit: three hours, fourteen minutes, and seven seconds. Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year. Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship. It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast. When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate. In

Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way . Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit (of Venus) from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit—just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await the next transit in 1769. With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments, and had everything in a state of perfect readiness. On the morning of the second transit, June 4, 1769, he awoke to a fine day, but, just as Venus began its pass, a cloud slid in front of the Sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit: three hours, fourteen minutes, and seven seconds. Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year. Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship. It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast. When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate

It’s like hopping in the car to begin a big cross-country road trip. You know you will not reach the other side of the country on the first day, and the trip will require hours of driving. But you will see signs that you are moving in the right direction along the way. You pass through different states, observe new landscapes out the window, and see landmarks in person that previously you had only ever read about. In the worst-case scenario, you realize you want to take a different route and adjust your GPS to navigate a new course. Even in that situation, you are still closer to your destination than you would have been by staying at home, wondering what the rest of the country looks like.

THE GHOST OF THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER HAS A CONVERSATION WITH HIS FIANCÉE ABOUT HIGHWAYS ...and down south, honey. When the side of the road began to swell with dead and dying things, that's when us black children knew it was summer. Daddy didn't keep clocks in the house. Ain't no use when the sky round those parts always had some flames runnin' to horizon, lookin' like the sun was always out. back when I was a little girl, I swear, them white folk down south would do anything to stop another dark thing from touching the land, even the nighttime. We ain't have streetlights, or some grandmotherly voice riding through the fields on horseback tellin' us when to come inside. What we had was the stomach of a deer, split open on route 59. What we had was flies resting on the exposed insides of animals with their tongues touching the pavement. What we had was the smell of gunpowder and the promise of more to come, and, child, that'll get you home before the old folks would break out the moonshine and celebrate another day they didn't have to pull the body of someone they loved from the river. I say 'river' because I want you to always be able to look at the trees without crying. When we moved east, I learned how a night sky can cup a black girl in its hands and ask for forgiveness. My daddy sold the pistol he kept in the sock drawer and took me to the park. Those days, I used to ask him what he feared, and he always said "the bottom of a good glass." And then he stopped answering. And then he stopped coming home altogether. Something about the first day of a season, honey. Something always gotta sacrifice its blood. Everything that has its time must be lifted from the earth. My boys don't bother with seasons anymore. My sons went to sleep in the spring once and woke up to a motherless summer. All they know now is that it always be colder than it should be. I wish I could fix this for you. I'm sorry none of my children wear suits anymore. I wish ties didn't remind my boys of shovels, and dirt, and an empty living room. They all used to look so nice in ties. I'm sorry that you may come home one day to the smell of rotting meat, every calendar you own, torn off the walls, burning in a trashcan. And it will be the end of spring. And you will know.

Patriarchy creates coercive background conditions for women, and thus patriarchy, not capitalism, is to blame for women’s exploitation under capitalism. Women are exploited under capitalism because they are forced by gendered expectations of women’s place into segregated spaces. In the home, gendered expectations about what women ought to do causes them to devote more time and energy to caring activities. Not only are women expected to be the main source of childcare and domestic labor in the home, they are also the psychic caregivers, coordinating social, spiritual, and emotional efforts for families. Their doing this explains the exploitation of women qua women in capitalism. The best evidence for this claim is that women in other economic systems are also exploited. For example, in the Soviet Union women were exploited for their domestic and sexual labor despite living under a noncapitalist economic system.121 I do not mean to say that there is no economic or material component to women’s condition. Women are stuck in these roles in part for material and economic reasons; they do not have enough bargaining power within heterosexual relationships generally to escape these roles. If women are able to gain an economic foothold, as is possible in an enlightened capitalism that eschews discrimination and gender segregation, then they can begin to work their way into better bargaining positions in their homes. And with better bargaining outcomes in their domestic lives, women can do better in the capitalist economy. Thus, capitalism does not provide an easy escape route, but it does point in the direction of escape from patriarchy.

Suppose a man had an appointment a hundred miles north of his home, and that if he kept it he would be sure of having health, much happiness, fair prosperity, for the rest of his life. He has just time enough to get there, just enough gas in his car. He drives out, but decides that it would be more fun to go twenty-five miles south before starting out in earnest. That is nonsense! Yes, isn't it? The gas had nothing to do with it; time had no preference as to how it would be spent; the road ran north as well as south, yet he missed his appointment. Now, if that man told us that, after all, he had quite enjoyed the drive in the wrong direction, that in some ways he found it pleasanter to drive with no objective than to try to keep a date, that he had had a touching glimpse of his old home by driving south, should we praise him for being properly philosophical about having lost his opportunity? No, we should think he had acted like an imbecile. Even if he had missed his appointment by getting into a daydream in which he drove automatically past a road sign or two, we should still not absolve him. Or if he had arrived too late from having lost his way when he might have looked up his route on a good map and failed to do so before starting, we might commiserate with him, but we should indict him for bad judgment. Yet when it comes to going straight to the appointments we make with ourselves and our own fulfillment we all act very much like the hero of this silly fable: we drive the wrong way. We fail where we might have succeeded by spending the same power and time. Failure indicates that energy has been poured into the wrong channel. It takes energy to fail.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

Doggerel by a Senior Citizen (for Robert Lederer) Our earth in 1969 Is not the planet I call mine, The world, I mean, that gives me strength To hold off chaos at arm’s length. My Eden landscapes and their climes Are constructs from Edwardian times, When bath-rooms took up lots of space, And, before eating, one said Grace. The automobile, the aeroplane, Are useful gadgets, but profane: The enginry of which I dream Is moved by water or by steam. Reason requires that I approve The light-bulb which I cannot love: To me more reverence-commanding A fish-tail burner on the landing. My family ghosts I fought and routed, Their values, though, I never doubted: I thought the Protestant Work-Ethic Both practical and sympathetic. When couples played or sang duets, It was immoral to have debts: I shall continue till I die To pay in cash for what I buy. The Book of Common Prayer we knew Was that of 1662: Though with-it sermons may be well, Liturgical reforms are hell. Sex was of course —it always is— The most enticing of mysteries, But news-stands did not then supply Manichean pornography. Then Speech was mannerly, an Art, Like learning not to belch or fart: I cannot settle which is worse, The Anti-Novel or Free Verse. Nor are those Ph.D’s my kith, Who dig the symbol and the myth: I count myself a man of letters Who writes, or hopes to, for his betters. Dare any call Permissiveness An educational success? Saner those class-rooms which I sat in, Compelled to study Greek and Latin. Though I suspect the term is crap, There is a Generation Gap, Who is to blame? Those, old or young, Who will not learn their Mother-Tongue. But Love, at least, is not a state Either en vogue or out-of-date, And I’ve true friends, I will allow, To talk and eat with here and now. Me alienated? Bosh! It’s just As a sworn citizen who must Skirmish with it that I feel Most at home with what is Real.

Every building was just gone, and every soul as well. Across the Potomac River, the Pentagon shuddered violently from the blast wave and then began to partially collapse. What remained standing was utterly ablaze, as was every structure not flattened for as far as the eye could see. Howling, scorching winds soon began sweeping lethal radioactivity through the city’s northeast quadrant and into Maryland, surging through Prince George’s County and Anne Arundel County, as if they were following 295 to the north and Routes 50 and 214 to the east, through Capitol Heights and Lanham and Bowie toward Crofton and Annapolis. Soon more than five thousand square miles of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia were contaminated with deadly levels of radioactivity. And the nightmare had only just begun. Moments after the first missile hit D.C., a second missile struck the CIA building at Langley directly, its superheated fireball and cataclysmic blast wave obliterating the nation’s premier intelligence headquarters in the tree-lined suburbs of northern Virginia and vaporizing every home and office building, every church and mall for mile after mile

The Calf Path One day, through the primeval wood, A calf walked home, as good calves should; But made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail as all calves do. Since then three hundred years have fled, And, I infer, the calf is dead. But still he left behind his trail, And thereby hangs my moral tale. The trail was taken up next day By a lone dog that passed that way; And then a wise bell-wether sheep Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep, And drew the flock behind him, too, As good bell-wethers always do. And from that day, o’er hill and glade, Through those old woods a path was made. And many men wound in and out, And dodged, and turned, and bent about And uttered words of righteous wrath Because ’twas such a crooked path.15 But still they followed—do not laugh— The first migrations of that calf, And through this winding wood-way stalked, Because he wobbled when he walked. This forest path became a lane, That bent, and turned, and turned again; This crooked lane became a road, Where many a poor horse with his load Toiled on beneath the burning sun, And traveled some three miles in one. And thus a century and a half They trod the footsteps of that calf. The years passed on in swiftness fleet, The road became a village street; And this, before men were aware, A city’s crowded thoroughfare; And soon the central street was this Of a renowned metropolis; And men two centuries and a half Trod in the footsteps of that calf. Each day a hundred thousand rout Followed the zigzag calf about; And o’er his crooked journey went The traffic of a continent. A hundred thousand men were led By one calf near three centuries dead. They followed still his crooked way, And lost one hundred years a day; For thus such reverence is lent To well-established precedent. A moral lesson this might teach, Were I ordained and called to preach; For men are prone to go it blind Along the calf-paths of the mind, And work away from sun to sun To do what other men have done. They follow in the beaten track, And out and in, and forth and back, And still their devious course pursue, To keep the path that others do. They keep the path a sacred groove, Along which all their lives they move. But how the wise old wood-gods laugh, Who saw the first primeval calf! Ah! Many things this tale might teach— But I am not ordained to preach. —Sam Walter Foss

She stands at the hairpin turn on Night Road. On either side of her, giant evergreens grow clustered together, rising high into the blue summer sky. Even now, in midday, this stubbled, winding ribbon of asphalt holds the morning mist close. This road is like her life; knee deep in shadow. Once, it had been the quickest way home and she’d taken it easily, turning onto its potholed surface without a second thought, rarely noticing how the earth dropped away on either edge. Her mind had been on other things back then, on the miniutae of everyday life. Chores. Errands. Schedules. She hadn’t taken this route in years. Just the thought of it had been enough to make her turn the steering wheel too sharply; better to go off the road than to find herself here. Or so she’d thought until today. People on the island still talk about what happened in the summer of ’04. They sit on barstools and in porch swings and spout opinions, half truths, making judgments that aren’t theirs to make. They think a few columns in a newspaper give them the facts they need. But the facts are hardly what matter. If anyone sees her here, just standing on this lonely roadside in a gathering mist, it will all come up again. Like her, they’ll remember that night, so long ago, when the rain turned to ash….

His hand felt odd against her swollen belly. She started to speak at the same moment that the baby suddenly moved. Tate’s hand jerked back as if it had been stung. He stared at her stomach with pure horror as it fluttered again. She couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. “Is that…normal?” he wanted to know. “It’s a baby,” she said softly. “They move around. He kicks a little. Not much, just yet, but as he grows, he’ll get stronger.” “I never realized…” He drew in a long breath and put his hand back against her body. “Cecily, does it hurt you when he…” He hesitated. His black, stunned eyes met hers. “He?” She nodded. “They can tell, so soon?” “Yes,” she said simply. “They did an ultrasound.” His fingers became caressing. A son. He was going to have a son. He swallowed. It was a shock. He hadn’t thought past her pregnancy, but now he realized that there was going to be a miniature version of himself and Cecily, a child who would embody the traits of all his ancestors. All his ancestors. It made him feel humble. “How did you find me?” she asked. He glared into her eyes. “Not with any help from you, let me tell you! It took me forever to track down the driver who brought you to Nashville. He was off on extended sick leave, and it wasn’t until this week that anybody remembered he’d worked that route before Christmas.” She averted her eyes. “I didn’t want to be found.” “So I noticed. But you have been, and you’re damned well coming home,” he said furiously. “I’m damned if I’m going to leave you here at the mercy of people who go nuts over an inch of snow!” She sat up, displacing his hand, noticed that she was too close to him for comfort, swung her legs off the sofa and got up. “I’m not going as far as the mailbox with you!” she told him flatly. “I’ve made a new life for myself here, and I’m staying!” “That’s what you think.” He got up, too, and went toward the bedroom. He found her suitcase minutes later, threw it open on the bed and started filling it. “I’m not going with you,” she told him flatly. “You can pack. You can even take the suitcase and all my clothes. But I’m not leaving. This is my life now. You have no place in it!” He whirled. He was furious. “You’re carrying my child!” The sight of him was killing her. She loved him, wanted him, needed him, but he was here only out of a sense of duty, maybe even out of guilt. She knew he didn’t want ties or commitments; he’d said so often enough. He didn’t love her, either, and that was the coldest knowledge of all. “Colby asked me to marry him for the baby’s sake,” she said bitterly. “Maybe I should have.” “Over my dead body,” he assured her.

Nothing fires the warrior’s heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one’s own bowels or guts but from one’s own discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions. Not only to achieve this for oneself alone, as Achilles or the solo champions of yore, but to do it as part of a unit, to feel about oneself one’s brothers-in-arms, in an instance like this of chaos and disorder, comrades whom one doesn’t even know, with whom one has never trained; to feel them filling the spaces alongside him, from spear side and shield side, fore and rear, to behold one’s comrades likewise rallying, not in a frenzy of mad possession-driven abandon, but with order and self-composure, each man knowing his role and rising to it, drawing strength from him as he draws it from them; the warrior in these moments finds himself lifted as if by the hand of a god. He cannot tell where his being leaves off and that of the comrade beside him begins. In that moment the phalanx forms a unity so dense and all-divining that it performs not merely at the level of a machine or engine of war but, surpassing that, to the state of a single organism, a beast of one blood and heart.

There were stars here and there, dotting the sky among thin clouds, but no moon. Annemarie shivered, standing at the foot of the steps. “Come,” Mama murmured, and she moved away from the house. One by one the Rosens turned and hugged Annemarie silently. Ellen came to her last; the two girls held each other. “I’ll come back someday,” Ellen whispered fiercely. “I promise.” “I know you will,” Annemarie whispered back, holding her friend tightly. Then they were gone, Mama and the Rosens. Annemarie was alone. She went into the house, crying suddenly, and closed the door against the night. The lid of the casket was closed again. Now the room was empty; there was no sign of the people who had sat there for those hours. Annemarie wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She opened the dark curtains and the windows; she curled once more in the rocker, trying to relax; she traced their route in her mind. She knew the old path, too—not as well as her mother, who had followed it almost every day of her childhood with her dog scampering behind. But Annemarie had often walked to town and back that way, and she remembered the turns, the twisted trees whose gnarled roots pushed the earth now and then into knotted clumps, and the thick bushes that often flowered in early summer. She walked with them in her mind, feeling the way through the darkness. It would take them, she thought, half an hour to reach the place where Uncle Henrik was waiting with his boat. Mama would leave them there—pausing a minute, no more, for a final hug—and then she would turn and come home. It would be faster for Mama alone, with no need to wait as the Rosens, unfamiliar with the path, slowly felt their way along. Mama would hurry, sure-footed now, back to her children.

Open All Night" (originally by Bruce Springsteen) I had the carburetor cleaned and checked With her line blown out, she's hummin' like a turbojet Propped her up in the backyard on concrete blocks For a new clutch plate and a new set of shocks Took her down to the carwash, check the plugs and points I'm goin' out tonight, I'm gonna rock that joint Early north Jersey industrial skyline I'm a all-set cobra jet creepin' through the nighttime Gotta find a gas station, gotta find a payphone This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you're all alone Gotta hit the gas, baby, I'm runnin' late This New Jersey in the mornin' like a lunar landscape The boss don't dig me, so he put me on the nightshift It takes me two hours to get back to where my baby lives In the wee wee hours, your mind gets hazy Radio relay towers, won't you lead me to my baby? Underneath the overpass, trooper hits his party light switch Goodnight, good luck, one two powershift I met Wanda when she was employed Behind the counter at the Route 60 Bob's Big Boy Fried chicken on the front seat, she's sittin' in my lap We're wipin' our fingers on a Texaco roadmap I remember Wanda up on scrap metal hill With them big brown eyes that make your heart stand still 5 A.M., oil pressure's sinkin' fast I make a pit stop, wipe the windshield, check the gas Gotta call my baby on the telephone Let her know that her daddy's comin' on home Sit tight, little mama, I'm comin' round I got three more hours, but I'm coverin' ground Your eyes get itchy in the wee wee hours Sun's just a red ball risin' over them refinery towers Radio's jammed up with gospel stations Lost souls callin' long distance salvation Hey Mr. DJ, won't you hear my last prayer? Hey ho rock 'n' roll, deliver me from nowhere Ryan Adams, Nebraska (2022)

O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London's streets? Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to 'move on.' You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is a law of the powers that be that you shall be routed out. But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer. Not so with these homeless ones who walked Poplar Workhouse with me. And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in “London Town this night. Please don't remember it as you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be, you may not rest so well as usual. But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this nights and days- O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?

My route, Sior Francis—and don't be surprised when you hear it—my route when I set out to find God... was... laziness. Yes, laziness. If I wasn't lazy I would have gone the way of respectable, upstanding people. Like everyone else I would have studied a trade—cabinet-maker, weaver, mason—and opened a shop; I would have worked all day long, and where then would I have found time to search for God? I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack: that's what I would have said to myself. All my mind and thoughts would have been occupied with how to earn my living, feed my children, how to keep the upper hand over my wife. With such worries, curse them, how could I have the time, or inclination, or the pure heart needed to think about the Almighty? But by the grace of God I was born lazy. To work, get married, have children, and make problems for myself were all too much trouble. I simply sat in the sun during winter and in the shade during summer, while at night, stretched out on my back on the roof of my house, I watched the moon and the stars. And when you watch the moon and the stars how can you expect your mind not to dwell on God? I couldn't sleep any more. Who made all that? I asked myself. And why? Who made me, and why? Where can I find God so that I may ask Him? Piety requires laziness, you know. It requires leisure—and don't listen to what others say. The laborer who lives from hand to mouth returns home each night exhausted and famished. He assaults his dinner, bolts his food, then quarrels with his wife, beats his children without rhyme or reason simply because he's tired and irritated, and afterwards he clenches his fists and sleeps. Waking up for a moment he finds his wife at his side, couples with her, clenches his fists once more, and plunges back into sleep.... Where can he find time for God? But the man who is without work, children, and wife thinks about God, at first just out of curiosity, but later with anguish.

DREAMLAND             BY a route obscure and lonely,             Haunted by ill angels only,             Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,             On a black throne reigns upright,             I have reached these lands but newly             From an ultimate dim Thule— From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime                 Out of SPACE—out of TIME.             Bottomless vales and boundless floods,             And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods             With forms that no man can discover             For the dews that drip all over; WHERE AN EIDOLON NAMED NIGHT ON A BLACK THRONE REIGNS UPRIGHT         Mountains toppling evermore         Into seas without a shore;         Seas that restlessly aspire,         Surging, unto skies of fire;         Lakes that endlessly outspread         Their lone waters—lone and dead,         Their still waters—still and chilly         With the snows of the lolling lily.         By the lakes that thus outspread         Their lone waters, lone and dead,—         Their sad waters, sad and chilly         With the snows of the lolling lily,—         By the mountains—near the river         Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,—         By the grey woods,—by the swamp         Where the toad and the newt encamp,—         By the dismal tarns and pools                 Where dwell the Ghouls,—         By each spot the most unholy—         In each nook most melancholy,—         There the traveller meets aghast         Sheeted Memories of the Past—         Shrouded forms that start and sigh         As they pass the wanderer by—         White-robed forms of friends long given,         In agony, to the Earth—and Heaven.         For the heart whose woes are legion         ’Tis a peaceful, soothing region—         For the spirit that walks in shadow         ’Tis—oh, ’tis an Eldorado!         But the traveller, travelling through it,         May not—dare not openly view it;         Never its mysteries are exposed         To the weak human eye unclosed;         So wills its King, who hath forbid         The uplifting of the fringèd lid;         And thus the sad Soul that here passes         Beholds it but through darkened glasses.         By a route obscure and lonely,         Haunted by ill angels only,         Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,         On a black throne reigns upright,         I have wandered home but newly         From this ultimate dim Thule.

her family than himself. No wonder her brother trusted Luke. He pulled into traffic and headed back up Route 676. On the Schuylkill Expressway, bumper-to-bumper traffic slowed their trip home, but once they hit the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the traffic thinned. Brooke’s stomach rumbled as the car exited the

To the Christian, the route to a meaningful life was found in sacrificial service to others in imitation of Jesus.

All we believe is the roads, the bridges, the railways, the electricity they build only on televisions. I always ask my self these questions: 1. Where are the roads? ✏The Abuja - Lokoja road was awarded by Obasanjo's administration. He spent 8 years in the office. Then Yaradua and Goodluck spent another 4 years. Now if Goodluck is elected, he will be spending another 8 years. This will amount to 20 years and 180 km road is yet to be completed. ✏Enugu - Onitsha road was also awarded by the Obasanjo administration and till date, a journey that is supposed to take 45 minutes can take you 8 hours if it rains. ✏Enugu- PH road is on the same series. ✏What about Uyo - Calabar route? Just to mention a few. 2. Where is the power? They sold all the NEPA to their friends. We pay for the light that was not supplied. 3. Our education and health system go bad everyday. Lecturers and Health workers spent more time at home than in the schools and hospitals as a result of incessant strikes. 4. The government failed to provide us with security. People are being killed everyday and yet government comes out to tell us they are in control. 5. Why are we pretending that all is well? It is only in Nigeria where monies develop wings and fly. $20 billion oil money disappeared and they said it was $10 billion. Forensic investigators were hired and that was the end of the story. N20 billion pension fund stolen and nothing came out of it. $9.3 million seized in South Africa and government claimed it was meant for ammunition purchase. The immigration scandal has also been swept under the carpet because the senate could not proceed with their investigation. The man behind the contract is sitting among the high seats in the senate. Innocent people were defrauded and they at the same time lost their lives yet, we have a transparent governance. 6. Why are we praising government as if they are doing whatever with their personal money. How many people in their various communities have they provided scholarship with their personal money before they got elected? The reason they got elected is to manage our resources and not to loot us dry. One thing I know is that we will not have any meaningful development except if we make a CHANGE.

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

green. His route may be circuitous and difficult, but he can always get home. The one indispensable thing is that he must locate his ball. I started to surrender into each moment in meditation. I told myself ‘Be present, everything is Shiva’. My war-cry became, ‘Be with what is’. I felt that I had to transcend time by entering more fully into the present moment. To do this, I minutely observed my experience in the moment. I saw that while thought might lead me away from being present, feeling was a reliable indicator of presentness, since it could never be of the past or future. When I sat to meditate, I examined feeling within my body. I noticed that it tended to cluster in various chakras, like the navel, the heart and the third eye. From this inquiry the A-Statement developed as a technique for becoming present (I feel sad, I feel glad). Getting

L'occupation principale d'un malade mental consiste à fuir. Il veut, doit, constamment partir. À cet effet, il y a, dans le jardin du home Lumière d'Hiver, un arrêt de bus. Tout à fait fictif naturellement. Je veux dire: jamais un bus ne s'arrêtera ou ne démarrera dans ce jardin. Mais il s'agit d'un arrêt de bus parfaitement imité, avec un abri et un banc, des horaires clairement affichés, et diverses "informations aux voyageurs" auxquelles pas un seul patient ne s'intéresse, mais qui rendent tout particulièrement crédible: "Travaux rue Haute, veuillez tenir compte de probable retards. Nous vous remercions pour votre compréhension." On a même construit un petit morceau de route, six ou sept mètres au total, coulé dans ce bel asphalte lisse que le cycliste aime sentir sous ses roues, avec une plaque indiquant une ville qui n'existe pas et où doit se rendre le bus. Ligne 77. ("Comment ma femme m'a rendu fou", p.62)

I didn’t know much about it either. Connie said that it was once traditional for young men of a certain class and age to embark on a cultural pilgrimage to the continent, following well-established routes and, with the help of local guides, taking in certain ancient sites and works of art before returning to Britain as sophisticated, civilised men of experience. In practice the culture was largely an excuse for drinking and whoring and getting ripped off, arriving home with pillaged artefacts, some bottles of the local booze and venereal disease.

And you, Ivanhoe,' Skaggs said, 'intend to find her and fetch her home?' 'I do intend to find her. If she is at the ends of the earth, I shall find her. And to stay with her forever if she'll allow me.' Duff stared in admiration: the ends of the earth. He had never heard anyone but a priest use that phrase. He felt a wave of love for Ben, and suddenly saw his chance. 'I'll come along with you,' he said, practically shouting, he was so excited. 'West.' Ben smiled, and clasped Duff's hand, thumb hooked to thumb. 'Wait, wait, wait...' It had fallen to Skaggs, of all people, to challenge their quest on practical grounds. 'How shall you possibly find her? She has been two weeks on the road already. They might be anywheres between Ohio and the desert.' 'We shall obtain from Mr. Brisbane a copy of his little guide,' Ben said, 'and follow it like a map from east to west. The only question is our fastest route. Speed is paramount.' Skaggs saw that his friend would not be deterred. 'Well, a steamboat to Albany, railways to Buffalo, then a steamer across Lake Erie. It sickens me even to describe the route. But you could be in Cleveland before the end of the week.' He paused. 'I cannot believe that I am describing a speedy arrival in Cleveland as a desirable thing.

The world of the Vikings was extensive. It stretched round the whole of Europe: from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, along both easterly and westerly routes, and to the north-west to Iceland, Greenland and America. Throughout the Viking Age many sought their fortune in distant lands. Some remained there, others returned home and the tough life took its toll.

to many of the skills in this book, there is much the average civilian can learn from an operative’s mindset. First and foremost, that mindset is defined by preparedness and awareness. Whether in home territory or under deepest cover, operatives are continually scanning the general landscape for threats even when they’re not on the clock. Civilians, too, can train their minds toward habits such as scouting exit routes in crowded restaurants or building spur-of-the-moment escape plans. This kind of vigilance allows an operative confronted with sudden danger to take

The line went dead as I checked the mirror. The blue Dodge was back, but didn’t stay long. It appeared twice more, never closer than three or four cars, and I never picked out the cars that replaced it. I wouldn’t have known the Dodge was following me if they hadn’t jumped the red. Jumping the red had cost them. I passed UCLA and the National Cemetery in Westwood, and reached Brentwood when Pike texted. HERE Pike, saying he was ready. 12OUT Me, saying I was twelve minutes away. Kenter Canyon was a narrow box canyon in the foothills of Brentwood above Sunset. The canyon was dense with upscale homes, but higher, beyond the houses, the hills were undeveloped, and thick with scrub oak and brush. Unpaved roads and trails had been cut for fire crews, and were open to hikers and runners. Pike and I ran the trails often, and knew the canyon well. A single, innocuous residential street led into the canyon, and appeared to be the only way to enter or leave. Smaller streets branched and re-branched from this larger street as it wound its way higher, but the smaller streets appeared trapped in the canyon. This wasn’t true, but the convoluted route using these smaller back streets wasn’t easily found. Pike and I knew this way, and another, but I was betting the tail cops behind me didn’t, and wouldn’t, until I was already gone. I

It was funny how the mind takes weird, circuitous routes sometimes. Do you ever start thinking of something odd and try to trace back to what started your thought process and really, your mind is going all over the place? That was what was happening, so here was the trail my brain took: When Ema mentioned basketball, I tried to push the thought away, but the one thing that would help me escape the pain of getting thrown off the basketball team would be . . . well, playing basketball. That made me think of the last time I played basketball, which made me think about playing yesterday in Newark, which made me think about Tyrell Waters and what he might be doing, which made me think about his father, Detective Waters, which made me think about the ride home, which made me think about two things about Detective Waters: One, he was working on busting a drug ring in Kasselton. Two, he had known that Mr. Caldwell’s first name was Henry. How would he know that—and were those two things related?

No matter how far they traveled, they always had this house to welcome them home.” “True. Did you ever wonder why they altered it so often?” “Miss Everleigh says they were innovators. Visionaries.” He glanced at her, the firelight shadowing his face. “They kept knocking down the walls. Expanding them, making new routes for egress. Not much innovation in that. As visions go, it’s the dream of claustrophobics.” The notion unsettled her. “What do you mean to say?” “I mean, they traveled to escape this place.” He reached for the bottle, splashed more liquor into his glass. Set down the bottle and stared at it. “Came back very reluctantly, already itching to leave again.” She did not like that idea. “It was their home. They were a famously loving family—” “It’s a house,” he said. “That doesn’t make it a home. And family—yes, family is important. But it can trap you more neatly than four walls and a locked door.” Her

If I were to go back in time with the knowledge that I have today about Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), I would invest the money into changing the electrical characteristics of my body and exhaust that route first, particularly if no one else in the home is showing the condition. If everyone is sick in the home, it is probably an environmental issue that warrants expense on changing the environmental factors.

An overnight train ride delivered him to Persia, his 153rd country, where he drank beer for breakfast and began mapping a route home.

When I asked May how long she had been feeling disengaged, her first answer was “I’m going through this now.” Before I could get out my next question, she choked off a wry laugh and said, “Looking back, I think it’s been going on all seven years here, stemming from soulless work.” She actually felt a sense of unease dating back to her first day on the job when she went home that night and told herself, “This work just isn’t my passion.” Tamping down those feelings, and giving in to her fears, May stayed—hopefully for only a limited time—but just for the money she desperately needed. It wasn’t the work that caused these feelings of disengagement per se, but more the feeling that she was not where she was supposed to be. While she went about doing her job with a smile on her face, her inner voice kept saying, “This isn’t right.” May felt like she had developed Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) in her current role because her body needed, in fact craved, movement. She couldn’t seem to focus. For May, the underlying cause of disengagement was a strong feeling that her job didn’t align with her core values—the essence of who she is. As she searched to name her feelings and how to deal with the overwhelming sadness across the years, she talked to friends, hired coaches, learned new skills, and most importantly built an escape route. But she still felt angst and isolation. Finally, she approached her boss and indicated she was about to blow like a volcano. That was the catalyst for change. May knew it was time to listen to her inner voice and leave this job when the right opportunity presented itself. Although she hasn’t left yet, the fact that she has an escape plan has made the waiting so much easier, just knowing there is an out. May’s message to others struggling with this disease is to know you are not alone, don’t give up on your dream, keep the faith, and it will eventually lead you to a sunnier side of the street.

back burner, with intervals of détente, reversals of alliance, and many changes in fortune. After the failure of the Armada in 1588, Spain could not attack England at home. English forces were never strong enough to wage sustained warfare on the Spanish mainland. Instead, the intermittent conflict moved indecisively through what we would now call the third world—the scattered colonial dependencies of the two powers and over the trade routes and oceans of the world. English hawks, often Puritans and merchants, wanted an aggressive anti-Spanish policy that would take on the pope while opening markets; moderates (often country squires uninterested in costly foreign ventures) promoted détente.

Confident persons hit roadblocks while pursuing their dreams and objectives, but they look for an alternate route rather than giving up and going home.