Rowing Together Quotes

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.

I'm not a girl that will lay in diamonds but I will run through the flowers of the seeds we plant together.

Congratulations," I tell her with a slight bow. "I hope you and your power trip will be very happy together. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go.

The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me. I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil. From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.

How do you know when you're There, I had once wondered. Maybe you're lucky enough to notice the moment it's happening to you. Maybe you're able to block out all the other stuff that is, in the end, just background noise. But, most often, you don't know that you were There until you lose it, or until it gets taken away from you. When you look back, you clearly see that time, that place, when all the pieces of you had finally fit together to make you blissfully happy, make you your whole self. Like one of those jumbo puzzles that take up your entire kitchen table for weeks, the tiny pieces are just cardboard shapes with colors splashed on them, and they don't make any sense until you find their rightful place among the other pieces. When you put the last piece into place and the pieces now form a complete picture, that's when you're There. But while you were busy thinking about gluing the puzzle together, so that the pieces would never be apart again, someone comes from behind you, destroys the last piece and throws the rest of the pieces away. Even if you could muster up enough courage to put the pieces back together, the picture would never be complete again, because of the last missing piece...which, as it turned out, was smack in the middle, or in the heart, of the picture.

Please! Please! Tell me someone has recorded your practices together. Ooh! Tell me you’re doing a live video of them. I would watch every minute. Give me all your competition dates in advance. It’ll be the Hunger Games on ice. I’ll buy everyone in the family front row seats,” she cried out, her voice full of laughter.

I met a girl in a U-Haul. A beautiful girl And I fell for her. I fell hard. Unfortunately, sometimes life gets in the way. Life definitely got in my way. It got all up in my damn way, Life blocked the door with a stack of wooden 2x4's nailed together and attached to a fifteen inch concrete wall behind a row of solid steel bars, bolted to a titanium frame that no matter how hard I shoved against it- It wouldn't budge. Sometimes life doesn't budge. It just gets all up in your damn way. It blocked my plans, my dreams, my desires, my wishes, my wants, my needs. It blocked out that beautiful girl That I fell so hard for. Life tries to tell you what's best for you What should be most important to you What should come in first Or second Or third. I tried so hard to keep it all organized, alphabetized, stacked in chronological order, everything in its perfect space, its perfect place. I thought that's what life wanted me to do. This is what life needed for me to do. Right? Keep it all in sequence? Sometimes, life gets in your way. It gets all up in your damn way. But it doesn't get all up in your damn way because it wants you to just give up and let it take control. Life doesn't get all up in your damn way because it just wants you to hand it all over and be carried along. Life wants you to fight it. It wants you to grab an axe and hack through the wood. It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through the concrete. It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal and steel until you can reach through and grab it. Life wants you to grab all the organized, the alphabetized, the chronological, the sequenced. It wants you to mix it all together, stir it up, blend it. Life doesn't want you to let it tell you that your little brother should be the only thing that comes first. Life doesn't want you to let it tell you that your career and your education should be the only thing that comes in second. And life definitely doesn't want me To just let it tell me that the girl I met, The beautiful, strong, amazing, resilient girl That I fell so hard for Should only come in third. Life knows. Life is trying to tell me That the girl I love, The girl I fell So hard for? There's room for her in first. I'm putting her first.

I don't think anyone could really know her, just as the peak of her struggle blooms, she again appearered to have held it all together when the whole world; would have thought, she'd fall Apart.

While I was backstage before presenting the Best New Artist award, I talked to George Strait for a while. He's so incredibly cool. So down-to-earth and funny. I think it should be known that George Strait has an awesome, dry, subtle sense of humor. Then I went back out into the crowd and watched the rest of the show. Keith Urban's new song KILLS ME, it's so good. And when Brad Paisley ran down into the front row and kissed Kimberley's stomach (she's pregnant) before accepting his award, Kellie, my mom, and I all started crying. That's probably the sweetest thing I've ever seen. I thought Kellie NAILED her performance of the song we wrote together "The Best Days of Your Life". I was so proud of her. I thought Darius Rucker's performance RULED, and his vocals were incredible. I'm a huge fan. I love it when I find out that the people who make the music I love are wonderful people. I love Faith Hill and how she always makes everyone in the room feel special. I love Keith Urban, and how he told me he knows every word to "Love Story" (That made my night). I love Nicole Kidman, and her sweet, warm personality. I love how Kenny Chesney always has something hilarious or thoughtful to say. But the real moment that brought on this wave of gratitude was when Shania Twain HERSELF walked up and introduced herself to me. Shania Twain, as in.. The reason I wanted to do this in the first place. Shania Twain, as in.. the most impressive and independent and confident and successful female artist to ever hit country music. She walked up to me and said she wanted to meet me and tell me I was doing a great job. She was so beautiful, guys. She really IS that beautiful. All the while, I was completely star struck. After she walked away, I realized I didn't have my camera. Then I cried. You know, last night made me feel really great about being a country music fan in general. Country music is the place to find reality in music, and reality in the stars who make that music. There's kindness and goodness and....honesty in the people I look up to, and knowing that makes me smile. I'm proud to sing country music, and that has never wavered. The reason for the being.. nights like last night.

In the candle's flickering light, the library's thousands of books emerged from the shadows, and for a moment Nicholas could not help admiring them again. During free time he had almost never looked up from the pages he was reading, but now he saw the books anew, from without rather than from within, and was reminded of how beautiful they were simply as objects. The geometrical wonder of them all, each book on its own and all the books together, row upon row, the infinite patterns and possibilities they presented. They were truly lovely.

The Frays had never been a religiously observant family, but Clary loved Fifth Avenue at Christmas time. The air smelled like sweet roasted chestnuts, and the window displays sparkled with silver and blue, green and red. This year there were fat round crystal snowflakes attached to each lamppost, sending back the winter sunlight in shafts of gold. Not to mention the huge tree at Rockefeller Center. It threw its shadow across them as she and Simon draped themselves over the gate at the side of the skating rink, watching tourists fall down as they tried to navigate the ice. Clary had a hot chocolate wrapped in her hands, the warmth spreading through her body. She felt almost normal—this, coming to Fifth to see the window displays and the tree, had been a winter tradition for her and Simon for as long as she could remember. “Feels like old times, doesn’t it?” he said, echoing her thoughts as he propped his chin on his folded arms. She chanced a sideways look at him. He was wearing a black topcoat and scarf that emphasized the winter pallor of his skin. His eyes were shadowed, indicating that he hadn’t fed on blood recently. He looked like what he was—a hungry, tired vampire. Well, she thought. Almost like old times. “More people to buy presents for,” she said. “Plus, the always traumatic what-to-buy-someone-for-the-first-Christmas-after-you’ve-started-dating question.” “What to get the Shadowhunter who has everything,” Simon said with a grin. “Jace mostly likes weapons,” Clary sighed. “He likes books, but they have a huge library at the Institute. He likes classical music …” She brightened. Simon was a musician; even though his band was terrible, and was always changing their name—currently they were Lethal Soufflé—he did have training. “What would you give someone who likes to play the piano?” “A piano.” “Simon.” “A really huge metronome that could also double as a weapon?” Clary sighed, exasperated. “Sheet music. Rachmaninoff is tough stuff, but he likes a challenge.” “Now you’re talking. I’m going to see if there’s a music store around here.” Clary, done with her hot chocolate, tossed the cup into a nearby trash can and pulled her phone out. “What about you? What are you giving Isabelle?” “I have absolutely no idea,” Simon said. They had started heading toward the avenue, where a steady stream of pedestrians gawking at the windows clogged the streets. “Oh, come on. Isabelle’s easy.” “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.” Simon’s brows drew together. “I think. I’m not sure. We haven’t discussed it. The relationship, I mean.” “You really have to DTR, Simon.” “What?” “Define the relationship. What it is, where it’s going. Are you boyfriend and girlfriend, just having fun, ‘it’s complicated,’ or what? When’s she going to tell her parents? Are you allowed to see other people?” Simon blanched. “What? Seriously?” “Seriously. In the meantime—perfume!” Clary grabbed Simon by the back of his coat and hauled him into a cosmetics store that had once been a bank. It was massive on the inside, with rows of gleaming bottles everywhere. “And something unusual,” she said, heading for the fragrance area. “Isabelle isn’t going to want to smell like everyone else. She’s going to want to smell like figs, or vetiver, or—” “Figs? Figs have a smell?” Simon looked horrified; Clary was about to laugh at him when her phone buzzed. It was her mother. where are you? It’s an emergency.

The way I see it, is the quicker we work together, the quicker you can row, row, row your boats back across the Atlantic.

If your temper is aroused and you tell 'em a thing or two, you will have a fine time unloading your feelings. But what about the other fellow? Will he share your pleasure? Will your belligerent tones, your hostile attitude, make it easy for him to agree with you? "If you come at me with your fists doubled," said Wood row Wilson, "I think I can promise you that mine will double as fast as yours; but if you come to me and say, 'Let us sit down and take counsel together, and, if we differ from one another, understand why it is that we differ from one another, just what the points at issue are,' we will presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the points on which we differ are few and the points on which we agree are many, and that if we only have the patience and the candor and the desire to get together, we will get together.

On the left side of my cheek a row of crusted scabbed stitches hold a deep 1 inch-long gash together. My nose is bent and swollen beneath its bandage and red lines streak from my nostrils. There are black and yellow bruises beneath both eyes, there is blood both wet and dry everywhere." (James Frey)

A man shrewd enough and clever enough to amass such a fortune in ten years does not throw together

My town is a factory for the production of human babies. People live in nests packed closely together. It's just like the silkworm room in Granny's house. The nests are lined up neatly in rows, and each contains a breeding pair of male and female humans and their babies. The breeding pairs raise their young inside their nests. The Baby Factory produces humans connected by flesh and blood. Eventually we children will also leave the factory and be shipped out. Once shipped out, male and female humans are trained how to take food back to their own nests. They become society's tools, receive money from other humans, and purchase food. Eventually these young humans also form breeding pairs, coop themselves up in new nests, and manufacture more babies.

Inside plum trees stood in a row, flowers lifted their pale throats to the moon and stars, a magnolia held its tight-closed buds like white candles in its green hands.

There are moments on stage when everything comes together. Then the kid in the front row coughs.

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.

Becka said that writing was almost the same as that—each letter was like a picture or a row of stitching, and it was also like a musical note; you just had to learn how to form the letters, and then how to attach them together,

Backstage, Willem is thinking about accidents again. And things that seemingly don't make sense, except they do. Like right out there in the fifth row. All of them, together. That makes sense.

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone.

I just want a life of happiness, laughter and possibility, I want a passion that I call my job, to pay my bills. I want to spend my time, eating good food & making unremarkable memories with the family I have left. I want friends that can be honest enough to tell me, if I fuck up, so I can fix it & also beautiful enough to know when I'm lieing in my smile. I want a lover who isn't afraid to love me with every inch of his heart but also fearless in keeping his individual voice as we grow together. And I will have all of it, because I believe I am worthy of it.

[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller's works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes's “Seaside Studies,” will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedge-rows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the universe, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!—are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic... upon the strata of the Earth!

To me this out-of-the way corner was always a wonderful and a mysterious place, where my castles in the air stood close together in radiant rows, and where the strangest and most splendid adventures befell me; for the hours I passed in it and the people I met in it were all enchanted.

One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock.

Have you ever wondered why the keys on a typewriter are arranged in that particular order?” “No, I haven’t.” “We call it the QWERTY keyboard, because that’s the order of the letters on the first row of keys. I once wondered why it was like that, and I found the answer. The first machine was invented by Christopher Sholes, in 1873, to improve on calligraphy, but there was a problem: If a person typed very fast, the keys got stuck together and stopped the machine from working. Then Sholes designed the QWERTY keyboard, a keyboard that would oblige typists to type more slowly. ” “I don’t believe it.” “But it’s true. It so happened that Remington—which made sewing machines as well as guns at the time—used the QWERTY keyboard for its first typewriters. That meant that more people were forced to learn that particular system, and more companies started to make those keyboards, until it became the only available model. To repeat: The keyboard on typewriters and computers was designed so that people would type more slowly, not more quickly, do you understand? If you changed the letters around, you wouldn’t find anyone to buy your product.” When she saw a keyboard for the first time, Mari had wondered why the letters weren’t in alphabetical order, but she had then promptly forgotten about it. She assumed it was simply the best layout for people to type quickly.

Not all who demand your attention desire your happiness, many merely seeking a conveyance to their own. It is entirely easy when wrapped up with the petty to miss what is possible and what rows your ship to worthwhile dreams. But when two or more fall together to share the oars of what might be, dreams may find them in equal measure and as fast as the wake made.

Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people's homes. But among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here.

The screams echoing through Janet's class were hard to bear. She was attempting a lecture on the Treaty of Paris while Mrs. Pachenko walked between the rows of desks insisting upon calm, raising a finger to her lips and whispering to individual students to please sit all the way down in their desks. In the back of the of the room, several kids were cheering as one of them, a young man whose shirt bore a flaming skull, stood hunched atop his desk like a motocross biker, sliding it forward in small hops. Students appear enthusiastic and are communicating well together, I wrote on the evaluation form.

I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.

Neither is necessarily a better or more valuable oarsman than the other; both the long arms and the strong back are assets to the boat. But if they are to row well together, each of these oarsmen must adjust to the needs and capabilities of the other. Each must be prepared to compromise something in the way of optimizing his stroke for the overall benefit of the boat...Only in this way can the capabilities that come with diversity...be turned to advantage rather than disadvantage. p179

Amanda bit her lip. "You're not... trying to be funny or something, are you?" "I'm not trying to be anything!" I said. "All right, kids," the photographer called. "On the count of three. One, two-" She broke off, straightening up from the camera with a frown. "Excuse me. You in the turquoise? I need you to face forward." I rotated my body as best I could. "All the way, please." I turned so that my shoulders werre even with everybody else's, only now my head faced Gail instead of the lens. Gail pressed her lips together. "Stop it!" she said. "Winnie?" Mr. Hutchinson said. He walked to the end of our row. "What's going on?" "I can't," I whispered. "Can't what?" "Can't move my neck, it's stuck." Tears burned in my eyes, and I blinked hard to keep them back. "Mr. Hutchinson, she's faking," Gail said. "She's trying to be funny and she's ruining everything.

Our souls danced in magic, but reality wore thin. Two lovers who kept getting it wrong - Our timing always out of sync. A telepathy between our hearts, but our human keeps getting it wrong. A new melody but the same old song. Apart, but together - on the road we travel on. We'll never be out of touch our souls are too interwined - but we'll be out of reach , walking paths of a different kind, promised to find eachother first next life.

Everywhere I read, I see a rush for love, if it comes knocking and your not ready you'll miss it; bla bla fucking bla... If love is, LOVE it wouldn't miss me and if it did, it wasn't worth my time to begin with. Never should the most important emotion of our journey be rushed.

So I leave flowers; spring flowers, then summer flowers. I gather the red and orange and yellow trumpet flowers, for a trumpet is a thing that makes a loud noise like a shout, and I tie their vines together and leave them to shout I love you in a row from Miranda's window-ledge.

I wouldn't pick you as the kind of man who'd care to die nicely." He leant forward, lacing his hands together. "How do you think I'd like to die?" "In a blaze of ice and fury." He was from Pirenti, after all. The corner of his mouth hitched up at that, but it was a humourless expression, one filled with chipped edges and painted regrets. "And you?" he asked. " How would you like to die, Avery of Kaya?" I picked up the oars and started to row. "I'm already dead, Ambrose.

When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter. In a long marriage you don’t need words to have a row, but you don’t need words to say “I love you,” either.

A hush fell over them. For a long moment, while she was leaning her chin on her hand atop the piano lid, and his hands rested lightly on the keys, they stared at each other. The stage, the wings, the maw of the theater and its rows of seats and ornamental moldings, all receded. The air about them shimmered, drew in, coalesced into a bubble. They looked at each other, breathing together, long past a socially acceptable interval. It was far beyond the border where Erik normally would have dropped his gaze, cracked a joke or at least a smile. She’s peaceful, he thought, and her eyes widened slightly, as if she had heard him.

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

She knew it was time, What for was the mystery but focused; she remained. She turned her back on anything that no longer served her strengths nor taught her vital lessons with her weaknesses. She said no without explanation & assigned validation back just to parking spots. She was fierce but gentle and authentic in her approach to live even if it meant standing alone. She knew the hard days weren't over but stood proud that she had already survived some of the worst. She laughed in the midst of a mindfuck & gathered her worth with all the pieces of herself that have held her together throughout the years. She knew it was time What for was the mystery, but focused; she remained. She learnt that motherhood provided unconditional love doesn't have boundaries, it's pure in all its forms. Family are rare connections. Friendships are like shoes, not all will fit but when some do it's like you have won the lotto. She learnt that every love was different and how important it was to keep her heart open for the possibility of being able to experience it just one more time.

She tells stories of working beside her father, cleaning out fence rows with his sling blade and hoe. Her stories help me to see, as we work together, that history is being made as it gets told. Passed on as it passes by.

Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That’s the steepest challenge. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. It is an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way. The intense bonding and the sense of exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than for trophies or accolades. But it takes young men or women of extraordinary character as well as extraordinary physical ability to pull it off.

Then Hermione’s voice came out of the blackness for the third time, sharp and clear from a few yards away. “Harry, they’re here…right here.” And he knew by her tone that it was his mother and father this time: He moved toward her, feeling as if something heavy were pressing on his chest, the same sensation he had had right after Dumbledore had died, a grief that had actually weighed on his heart and lungs. The headstone was only two rows behind Kendra and Ariana’s. It was made of white marble, just like Dumbledore’s tomb, and this made it easy to read, as it seemed to shine in the dark. Harry did not need to kneel or even approach very close to it to make out the words engraved upon it. JAMES POTTER BORN 27 MARCH 1960 DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981 LILY POTTER BORN 30 JANUARY 1960 DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. Harry read the words slowly, as though he would have only one chance to take in their meaning, and he read the last of them aloud. “‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’…” A horrible thought came to him, and with it a kind of panic. “Isn’t that a Death Eater idea? Why is that there?” “It doesn’t mean defeating death in the way the Death Eaters mean it, Harry,” said Hermione, her voice gentle. “It means…you know…living beyond death. Living after death.” But they were not living, though Harry: They were gone. The empty words could not disguise the fact that his parents’ moldering remains lay beneath snow and stone, indifferent, unknowing. And tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off or pretending? He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them.

Where my love is going There will I go. Where his boat is rowing I will row. We will laugh together, Together we will cry. If he lives I will live, If he dies I die. Where my love is going There will I go. Where his boat is rowing I will row.

It didn't make much sense to me then, what Gnut was going through, but after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.

A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.

I wondered straightaway how he could sit at peace there, of an evening, with the row of heads staring down at him. There were no pictures, no flowers: only the heads of chamois. The concession to melody was the radiogram and the stack of records of classical music. Foolishly, I had asked, "Why only chamois?" He answered at once, "They fear Man." This might have led to an argument about animals in general, domestic, wild, and those which adapt themselves to the whims and vagaries of the human race; but instead he changed the subject abruptly, put on a Sibelius record, and presently made love to me, intently but without emotion. I was surprised but pleased. I thought, "We are suited to one another. There will be no demands. Each of us will be self-contained and not beholden to the other." All this came true, but something was amiss. There was a flaw - not only the nonappearance of children, but a division of the spirit. The communion of flesh which brought us together was in reality a chasm, and I despised the bridge we made. Perhaps he did as well. I had been endeavouring for ten years to build for my self a ledge of safety. ("The Chamois")

Oh," he said again and picked up two petals of cherry blossom which he folded together like a sandwich and ate slowly. "Supposing," he said, staring past her at the wall of the house, "you saw a little man, about as tall as a pencil, with a blue patch in his trousers, halfway up a window curtain, carrying a doll's tea cup-would you say it was a fairy?" "No," said Arrietty, "I'd say it was my father." "Oh," said the boy, thinking this out, "does your father have a blue patch on his trousers?" "Not on his best trousers. He does on his borrowing ones." 'Oh," said the boy again. He seemed to find it a safe sound, as lawyers do. "Are there many people like you?" "No," said Arrietty. "None. We're all different." "I mean as small as you?" Arrietty laughed. "Oh, don't be silly!" she said. "Surely you don't think there are many people in the world your size?" "There are more my size than yours," he retorted. "Honestly-" began Arrietty helplessly and laughed again. "Do you really think-I mean, whatever sort of a world would it be? Those great chairs . . . I've seen them. Fancy if you had to make chairs that size for everyone? And the stuff for their clothes . . . miles and miles of it . . . tents of it ... and the sewing! And their great houses, reaching up so you can hardly see the ceilings . . . their great beds ... the food they eat ... great, smoking mountains of it, huge bogs of stew and soup and stuff." "Don't you eat soup?" asked the boy. "Of course we do," laughed Arrietty. "My father had an uncle who had a little boat which he rowed round in the stock-pot picking up flotsam and jetsam. He did bottom-fishing too for bits of marrow until the cook got suspicious through finding bent pins in the soup. Once he was nearly shipwrecked on a chunk of submerged shinbone. He lost his oars and the boat sprang a leak but he flung a line over the pot handle and pulled himself alongside the rim. But all that stock-fathoms of it! And the size of the stockpot! I mean, there wouldn't be enough stuff in the world to go round after a bit! That's why my father says it's a good thing they're dying out . . . just a few, my father says, that's all we need-to keep us. Otherwise, he says, the whole thing gets"-Arrietty hesitated, trying to remember the word-"exaggerated, he says-" "What do you mean," asked the boy, " 'to keep us'?

Plus, the dots are typically very faint, so the book actually looks blank from far away—which means that people who glance at your journal in passing will think you are secretly a witch, because how else would you be able to write such perfectly even rows of text on blank pages?

Women don't always want the right things in a man. And men don't have even an idea of what they want," she said. "Why, one minute their bodies tell them they want a wild woman that makes their blood rush. The next minute their good sense reminds them that they need a hard worker who is sturdy enough to help plow the field and birth the babies. They want a woman who'll mind their word and not be giving no jawing. But they also want a gal they can complain to when they are scared and unsure and who's smart enough to talk clear about the things goin' on." "So the wife has to be all those things?" "No, the wife is none of them," the old woman answered. "The wife is a wife and no further definition is necessary." Granny leaned forward in her chair to look more closely at Meggie. "Roe Farley married you and you were his wife. Nothing further even need to be said." Her face flushing with embarrassment, she glanced away. "But he doesn't... he didn't love me." "And did you think he would?" Momentarily Meggie was taken aback. "Well, yes." "Lord Almighty, child," Granny said. "Love ain't something that heaven hands out like good teeth or keen eyesight. Love is something two people make together." Shaking her head, the old woman leaned back in her chair once more and tapped on her pipe. "Love, oh, my, it starts out simple and scary with all that heavy breathing and in the bed sharing," she said. "You a-trembling when he runs his hands acrost your skin, him screaming out your name when he gets in the short rows. That's the easy part, Meggie. Every day thereafter it gets harder. The more you know him, the more he knows you, the longer you are a part of each other, the stronger the love is and the tougher it is to have it.

I enjoy a torture session on the rowing machine and I also enjoy my mom’s homemade peach cobbler. I enjoy flopping like that dead fish with hips that can’t lie in dance class, and I also enjoy ordering pizza with my kid, renting a movie, and downing popcorn while we share some special time together. I enjoy seeing how much I can lift at the gym and I also enjoy stuffing a fresh chewy chocolate chip cookie into my face when I’m having a hard day.

The first sixth-grade assembly.” I look up at him. “Huh?” “That’s the first time I saw you. You were sitting in the row in the front of me. I thought you were cute.” I laugh. “Nice try.” It’s so endearingly Peter to make up stuff to try and sound romantic. He keeps going. “Your hair was really long and you had a headband with a bow. I always liked your hair, even back then.” “Okay, Peter,” I say, reaching up and patting him on his cheek. He ignores me. “Your backpack had your name written on it in glitter letters. I’d never heard of the name Lara Jean before.” My mouth falls open. I hot-glued those glitter letters to my backpack myself! It took me forever trying to get them straight enough. I’d forgotten all about that backpack. It was my prized possession. “The principal started picking random people to come on stage and play a game for prizes. Everybody was raising their hands, but your hair got caught in your chair and you were trying to untangle it, so you didn’t get picked. I remember thinking maybe I should help you, but then I thought that would be weird.” “How do you remember all that?” I ask in amazement. Smiling, he shrugs. “I don’t know. I just do.” Kitty’s always saying how origin stories are important. At college, when people ask us how we met, how will we answer them? The shorty story is, we grew up together. But that’s more Josh’s and my story. High school sweethearts? That’s Peter and Gen’s story. So what’s ours, then? I suppose I’ll say it all started with a love letter.

Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.

In the second row was a boy named Doon Harrow. He sat with his shoulders hunched, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration, and his hands clasped tightly together. His hair looked rumpled, as if he hadn’t combed it for a while. He had dark, thick eyebrows, which made him look serious at the best of times and, when he was anxious or angry, came together to form a straight line across his forehead. His brown corduroy jacket was so old that its ridges had flattened out.

It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punctuated by the ringing of bells. There was a predetermined syllabus, rather than open-ended learning. There was the habit of doing several subjects in one day, rather than sticking to one subject for more than a day. These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.

How well we pull together, don't we?" said Amy, who objected to silence just then. "So well that I wish we might always pull in the same boat. Will you, Amy?" very tenderly. "Yes, Laurie," very low. Then they both stopped rowing, and unconsciously added a pretty little tableau of human love and happiness to the dissolving views reflected in the lake.

It is interesting to observe in traditional cultures, especially in the Muslim world, that the marketplaces are comprised of rows of businesses dealing with the same product. In America, many would consider it foolish to open a business in proximity to another business already selling the same product. In Damascus, everyone knows where the marketplace for clothing is. There are dozens of stores strung together selling virtually the same material and fashions. Not only are the stores together, but when the time for prayer comes, the merchants pray together. They often attend the same study circles, have the same teachers, and are the best of friends. It used to be that when one person sold enough for the day, he would shut down, go home, and allow other merchants to get what they need. This is not make-believe or part of a utopian world. It actually happened. It is hard to believe that there were people like that on the planet. They exist to this day, but to a lesser extent. They are now old, and many of their sons have not embraced the beauty of that way of doing business.

we are going to experience joy in this lifetime, there’s only one possible way: We will have to choose it. We will have to choose it in spite of unbelievable circumstances. We will have to choose it in the middle of a situation that seems too hard to bear. We will have to choose it even if our worst nightmare comes true. This isn’t what we want to hear. We keep trying to line up all the little ducks in a row, to smooth out the rough spots, and to shore up all the wobbly places, still convinced that if we get our act together, we finish the huge project, our health clears up, we get a raise, or we can just get things right, we can finally be joyful.

The New Groupthink is also practiced in our schools, via an increasingly popular method of instruction called “cooperative” or “small group” learning. In many elementary schools, the traditional rows of seats facing the teacher have been replaced with “pods” of four or more desks pushed together to facilitate countless group learning activities. Even subjects like math and creative writing, which would seem to depend on solo flights of thought, are often taught as group projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited, a big sign announced the “Rules for Group Work,” including, YOU CAN’T ASK A TEACHER FOR HELP UNLESS EVERYONE IN YOUR GROUP HAS THE SAME QUESTION.

Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping. how could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure?

So many requests, always, from a lover! None when they fall out of love. I'm glad the water does not move under the colourless ice of the river. And I'll stand - God help me! - on this ice, however light and brittle it is, and you...take care of our letters, that our descendants not misjudge us, That they may read and understand more clearly what you are, wise, brave. In your glorious biography No row of dots should stand. Earth's drink is much too sweet, love's nets too close together. May my name be in the textbooks of children playing in the street. When they've read my grievous story, may they smile behind their desklids... If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, give me a bitter glory. 1913

У меня в Москве — купола горят! У меня в Москве — колокола звонят! И гробницы в ряд у меня стоят, — В них царицы спят, и цари. И не знаешь ты, что зарёй в Кремле Легче дышится — чем на всей земле! И не знаешь ты, что зарёй в Кремле Я молюсь тебе — до зари! И проходишь ты над своей Невой О ту пору, как над рекой-Москвой Я стою с опущенной головой, И слипаются фонари. Всей бессонницей я тебя люблю, Всей бессонницей я тебе внемлю — О ту пору, как по всему Кремлю Просыпаются звонари… Но моя река — да с твоей рекой, Но моя рука — да с твоей рукой Не сойдутся, Радость моя, доколь Не догонит заря — зари. 7 мая 1916 At home in Moscow - where the domes are burning, at home in Moscow - in the sound of bells, where I live the tombs - in their rows are standing and in them Tsaritsas - are asleep and tsars. And you don't know how - at dawn the Kremlin is the easiest place to - breathe in the whole wide earth and you don't know when - dawn reaches the Kremlin I pray to you until - the next day comes and I go with you - by your river Neva even while beside - the Moscow river I am standing here - with my head lowered and the line of street lights - sticks fast together. With my insomnia - I love you wholly. With my insomnia - I listen for you, just at the hour throughout - the Kremlin, men who ring the bells - begin to waken, Still my river - and your river still my hand - and your hand will never join, or not until one dawn catches up another dawning.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give you the creeps just to look at them. All hope gone from them, and from those who passed in and out through them. Just one more row of stopped-up orifices in this giant honeycomb that was the city. Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave, for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City hotel.

Decolonization is the process whereby we intend the conditions we want to live and social relations we wish to have. We have to supplant the colonial logic of the state itself. German philosopher Gustav Landauer wrote almost a hundred years ago that "the State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships." Decolonization requires us to exercise our sovereignties differently, and reconfigure our communities based on shared experiences, ideals, and visions. Almost all indigenous formulations of sovereignty--such as the Two Row Wampum agreement of peace, friendship, and respect between the Haudenosaunee nations and settlers--are premised on revolutionary notions of respectful coexistence and stewardship of the land, which goes far beyond any Western liberal democratic ideal. Original blog post: Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory and Practice. Quoted In: Decolonize Together: Moving beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization. Taking Sides.

Oh, Haifa. City of glistering grime, smog hovering over foamy sea. Of blocky apartment buildings facing the coast, topped with white water tanks crowded together like flocks of squat storks. Of palm trees and pine trees and electric wires, twisting green and black toward the chalky beachfront and rows of factory smokestacks. The way you put it once, Laith, your voice warped to mimic a radio announcer: 'Welcome to Haifa: you may die an early and also agonizing carcinogenic death, but at least you'll have a killer view from your hospital room.

I was Juliet and Quinn was Romeo, and the lines weren't dead black-and-white words on a page but somehow alive, as natural and real as the argument we'd had about the spider and the fly. The rows of empty seats were gone, and we were in a candlelit ballrooom, wrapped in our own cocoon of words. But the playful banter of our words couldn't mask what we both knew--that after this, nothing would be the same . And then we got to the kissing part, which we'd only read through together and had never really rehearsed. But it didn't matter, because I was still Juliet and Quinn was still Romeo, his gray-green eyes fixed on mine. And when he bent to kiss me, it was Romeo's lips on Juliet's. Even so, Juliet was just as stunned as I would've been. When I said the last line, I was speaking for both of us. You kiss by the book.

I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet--we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke's--we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it--much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me.

The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, to hit the bottom yard of the pillars on the north side of the nave. Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension. He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how the individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind. He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral. Where the south transept lighted the crossways from a hundred and fifty foot of grisaille, the honey thickened in a pillar that lifted straight as Abel’s from the men working with crows at the pavement.

Nanna: Inside, there was a long rigmarole that went on and on; it began with my hair, which had been cut off in the church, and said that he had gathered it together and made a neckband of it for himself; and my forehead was clearer than a cloudless sky. He compared my eyebrows to the black wood which is used to make combs, and he said that my cheeks were so white that they filled milk and cream with envy. He declared my teeth were like a row of pearls, and my lips like pomegranate blossoms; he composed a great preamble on my hands - he even praised my fingernails; and he said that my voice was like the canticle 'Gloria in eccelsis'; and when he came to my breasts, he waxed positively ecstatic - they displayed two apples as white and shining as the snow in sunlight. Finally he allowed himself to slip down to the fountain, saying that he had drunk from it all unworthily, and that it distilled nectar and manna, and that the curls of hair round it were made of silk.

There is an entire orchard. Hidden, tucked away. Rows and rows of magical, uncharted trees. Doorways into old, long forgotten towns. Father Time. Old Man Winter. The Tooth Fairy. Multitudes of worlds, places we never knew existed. I smile, and Jack pulls me to him. A queen, and her king. And I know, with a certainty that is knitted in my linen bones, we will spend a lifetime---Jack and I, side by side---slipping through doorways that lead to other doorways, carved into ancient, gnarled trees. Lands to explore, adventures to be had. But always together. Because there is nothing quite so wasted as a life unlived. And I intend to live mine. Fully. Unbound by the rules of others. Queen or not, we all deserve these things. Freedom. Hope. A chance to find out who we really are.

He'd been down at the Cass County Library, reading...Win danced a jig he thought that was so funny...about this cat Henry David Thoreau, which he pronounced Toe-Row. He read about his life and read some of his writings and this cat really had his shit together...Toe-Row knew better than anybody that Life is a Big Fat Asshole with everybody trying to Stick It To You when they get half the chance.

THE BOTTOMS" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

That is when it happened. A soft white glow gathered on his chest, over the place where his heart must be. The glow became a cord, reaching out through the air. The cord approached me. I rowed and struggled. But I was held fast. I felt the light encircle my neck, link me to his heart. It didn’t hurt. It bound us together. I don’t know if he felt it too – I like to think he did. Then he brought me home to this nice warm house where I can sleep all the time and get stroked. I don’t even have to look at the outside world if I don’t want to! The windows are all boarded up. Ted made me an indoor cat and I’ve never had to worry about anything since. This is our house which is just for us, and no one else is allowed in. Apart from Night-time, of course, and the green boys and Lauren. I could do without some of them, to be honest. I

While Cinder walked down the endless black-carpeted aisle, she tried not to think of all the people in the universe who were watching her. She tried not to wonder whether they were judging her or admiring her, afraid of her or impressed by her. She tried not to guess how many saw her as the lost princess or a pathetic cyborg, a vigilante or a criminal, a revolutionary or a mechanic that had gotten lucky. She tried not to think about the smear of yellow frosting on her priceless gown. Kai and Winter stood at the altar encased in the light of glowing orbs, Winter holding the queen's crown and Kai a ceremonial scepter. Together, they represented how both Earth and Luna would accept her right to rule. The rest of her friends were in their reserved seats in the front row. Thorne, on the aisle, held out his hand as Cinder passed. She snorted and accepted the high five before floating up the stairs. Winter winked at her. "Well done, Cinder-friend. You didn't trip. The hard part is over." Kai gave a smile meant for only Cinder, even though the entire universe was watching. "She's right, that really is the hard part." "Thank the stars," Cinder whispered back. "Now let's get this over with." Taking a long shaky breath, she turned to face her kingdom.

How are things going with your brothers?” “The judge set a date to hear me out after graduation. Mrs.Collins has been prepping me.” “That is awesome!” “Yeah.” “What’s wrong?” “Carrie and Joe hired a lawyer and I lost visitation.” Echo placed her delicate hand over mine.“Oh, Noah. I am so sorry." I’d spent countless hours on the couch in the basement, staring at the ceiling wondering what she was doing. Her laughter, her smile, the feel of her body next to mine, and the regret that I let her walk away too easily haunted me. Taking the risk, I entwined my fingers with hers. Odds were I’d never get the chance to be this close again. "No, Mrs. Collins convinced me the best thing to do is to keep my distance and follow the letter of the law." "Wow, Mrs. Collins is a freaking miracle worker. Dangerous Noah Hutchins on the straight and narrow. If you don’t watch out she’ll ruin your rep with the girls." I lowered my voice. "Not that it matters. I only care what one girl thinks about me." She relaxed her fingers into mine and stroked her thumb over my skin. Minutes into being alone together, we fell into each other again, like no time had passed. I could blame her for ending us, but in the end, I agreed with her decision. “How about you, Echo? Did you find your answers?” “No.” If I continued to disregard breakup rules, I might as well go all the way. I pushed her curls behind her shoulder and let my fingers linger longer than needed so I could enjoy the silky feel. “Don’t hide from me, baby. We’ve been through too much for that.” Echo leaned into me, placing her head on my shoulder and letting me wrap an arm around her. “I’ve missed you, too, Noah. I’m tired of ignoring you.” “Then don’t.” Ignoring her hurt like hell. Acknowledging her had to be better. I swallowed, trying to shut out the bittersweet memories of our last night together. “Where’ve you been? It kills me when you’re not at school.” “I went to an art gallery and the curator showed some interest in my work and sold my first piece two days later. Since then, I’ve been traveling around to different galleries, hawking my wares.” “That’s awesome, Echo. Sounds like you’re fitting into your future perfectly. Where did you decide to go to school?” “I don’t know if I’m going to school.” Shock jolted my system and I inched away to make sure I understood. “What the fuck do you mean you don’t know? You’ve got colleges falling all over you and you don’t fucking know if you want to go to school?” My damned little siren laughed at me. “I see your language has improved.” Poof—like magic, the anger disappeared. “If you’re not going to school, then what are your plans?” "I’m considering putting college off for a year or two and traveling cross-country, hopping from gallery to gallery.” “I feel like a dick. We made a deal and I left you hanging. I’m not that guy who goes back on his word. What can I do to help you get to the truth?” Echo’s chest rose with her breath then deflated when she exhaled. Sensing our moment ending, I nuzzled her hair, savoring her scent. She patted my knee and broke away. “Nothing. There’s nothing you can do.” "I think it’s time that I move on. As soon as I graduate, this part of my life will be over. I’m okay with not knowing what happened.” Her words sounded pretty, but I knew her better. She’d blinked three times in a row.

Failure. Failure shapes the world. History is the story of failure; progress is the succession of failures. Development! says the futurist. Loss, states the rebel. Hangover! cries the moralist from the back row. Faliure: the rebel gets angry. Time is pale, he says. The failure of the Creator - an introduction to an era. Kras Mazov shoots himself in the head, and Abadanaiz, together with Dobreva, takes poison on the Ozonne Islands. Beneath the palms the wind blew the flesh from their bones into sand. Who could've known? All the good people in the world came together. Teachers, writers, migrant workers squatting in the trenches... young soldiers abandoned their battalions. What beautiful songs they sing! It seems to them that brave children are the favourites of history, as they wave white flags with a crown of silver horns. And then, they lose.

He says, That’s great. My grace covers your guilt. My grace changes your shame. I want you to become a leader in My church. I want you to feed My sheep. I want you to be a part of My mission. I want you to love God and love other people in My name. You do not have to sit in the back row for the rest of your life. You do not have to live in the shadows. You don’t have to build protective walls around yourself. You don’t have to hide from the people who love you and care for you. They’ll help love you and restore your integrity, and your call is to help take My name to the world, and I want you in the front row on that mission. You are My chosen instrument to carry forth the plans and purposes of God. You are not going to live defined by shame or guilt. You are going to live defined by Me. Since you love Me, let’s not go backward. Let’s go forward, together.

You’d think someone as resourceful as Rachel would know whether or not Toraf was the identical twin of a known terrorist. But nooooo. So we wait by our guard in the corridor of the security office of LAX airport while about a dozen people work to verify our identity. My identity comes back fine and clean and boring. Toraf’s identity doesn’t come back for a few hours. Which is not cool, because he’s been puking in the trash can next to our bench seats and it’s got to be almost full by now. Because of the regional storms in Jersey, we’d had a rough takeoff. Coupled with the reaction Toraf had to the Dramamine-excitability, no less-it was all I could do to coax him out of the tiny bathroom to get him to sit still and not puke while doing so. His fingerprints could not be matched and his violet eyes were throwing them for a loop, since they physically verified that they aren’t contacts. A lady security officer asked us several times in several different ways why our tickets would be one-way to Hawaii if we lived in Jersey and only had a carry-on bag full of miscellaneous crap that you don’t really need. Where were we going? What were we doing? I’d told them we were going to Honolulu to pick a place to get married and weren’t in a hurry to come back, so we only purchased one-way tickets and blah blah blah. It’s a BS story and they know it, but sometimes BS stories can’t be proven false. Finally, I asked for an attorney, and since they hadn’t charged us with anything, and couldn’t charge us with anything, they decided to let us go. For crying out loud. I can’t decide if I’m relieved or nervous that Toraf’s seat is a couple of rows back on our flight to Honolulu. On the plus side, I don’t have to be bothered every time he goes to the bathroom to upchuck. Then again, I can’t keep my eye on him, either, in case he doesn’t know how to act or respond to nosy strangers who can’t mind their own business. I peek around my seat and roll my eyes. He’s seated next to two girls, about my age and obviously traveling together, and they’re trying nonstop to start a conversation with him. Poor, poor Toraf. It must be a hard-knock life to have inherited the exquisite Syrena features. It’s all he can do not to puke in their laps. A small part of me wishes that he would, so they’d shut up and leave him alone and I could maybe close my eyes for two seconds. From here I can hear him squirm in his seat, which is about four times too small for a built Syrena male. His shoulder and biceps protrude into the aisle, so he’s constantly getting bumped. Oy.

Daniel's wings were concealed, but he must have sensed her eyeing the place where they unfurled from his shoulders. "When everything is in order, we'll fly wherever we have to go to stop Lucifer. Until then it's better to stay low to the ground." "Okay," Luce said. "Race you to the other side?" Her breath frosted the air. "You know I'd beat you." "True." He slipped an arm around her waist, warming her. "Maybe we'd better take the boat, then. Protect my famous pride." She watched him unmoor a small metal rowboat from a boat slip. The soft light on the water made her think back to the day they'd raced across the secret lake at Sword & Cross. His skin had glistened as they had pulled themselves up to the flat rock in the center to catch their breath, then had lain on the sun-warmed stone, letting the day's heat dry their bodies. She'd barely known Daniel then-she hadn't known he was an angel-and already she'd been dangerously in love with him. "We used to swim together in my lifetime in Tahiti, didn't we?" she asked, surprised to remember another time she'd seen Daniel's hair glisten with water. Daniel stared at her and she knew how much it meant to him finally to be able to share some of his memories of their past. He looked so moved that Luce thought he might cry. Instead he kissed her forehead tenderly and said, "You beat me all those times, too, Lulu." They didn't talk much as Daniel rowed. It was enough for Luce to watch the way his muscles strained and flexed each time he dragged back, hearing the oars dip into and out of the cold water, breathing in the brine of the ocean.

As of old Phoenician men, to the Tin Isles sailing Straight against the sunset and the edges of the earth, Chaunted loud above the storm and the strange sea's wailing, Legends of their people and the land that gave them birth- Sang aloud to Baal-Peor, sang unto the horned maiden, Sang how they should come again with the Brethon treasure laden, Sang of all the pride and glory of their hardy enterprise, How they found the outer islands, where the unknown stars arise; And the rowers down below, rowing hard as they could row, Toiling at the stroke and feather through the wet and weary weather, Even they forgot their burden in the measure of a song, And the merchants and the masters and the bondsmen all together, Dreaming of the wondrous islands, brought the gallant ship along; So in mighty deeps alone on the chainless breezes blown In my coracle of verses I will sing of lands unknown, Flying from the scarlet city where a Lord that knows no pity, Mocks the broken people praying round his iron throne, -Sing about the Hidden Country fresh and full of quiet green. Sailing over seas uncharted to a port that none has seen.

Harriet turned round, and we both saw a girl walking towards us. She was dark-skinned and thin, not veiled but dressed in a sitara, a brightly coloured robe of greens and pinks, and she wore a headscarf of a deep rose colour. In that barren place the vividness of her dress was all the more striking. On her head she balanced a pitcher and in her hand she carried something. As we watched her approach, I saw that she had come from a small house, not much more than a cave, which had been built into the side of the mountain wall that formed the far boundary of the gravel plateau we were standing on. I now saw that the side of the mountain had been terraced in places and that there were a few rows of crops growing on the terraces. Small black and brown goats stepped up and down amongst the rocks with acrobatic grace, chewing the tops of the thorn bushes. As the girl approached she gave a shy smile and said, ‘Salaam alaikum, ’ and we replied, ‘Wa alaikum as salaam, ’ as the sheikh had taught us. She took the pitcher from where it was balanced on her head, kneeled on the ground, and gestured to us to sit. She poured water from the pitcher into two small tin cups, and handed them to us. Then she reached into her robe and drew out a flat package of greaseproof paper from which she withdrew a thin, round piece of bread, almost like a large flat biscuit. She broke off two pieces, and handed one to each of us, and gestured to us to eat and drink. The water and the bread were both delicious. We smiled and mimed our thanks until I remembered the Arabic word, ‘Shukran.’ So we sat together for a while, strangers who could speak no word of each other’s languages, and I marvelled at her simple act. She had seen two people walking in the heat, and so she laid down whatever she had been doing and came to render us a service. Because it was the custom, because her faith told her it was right to do so, because her action was as natural to her as the water that she poured for us. When we declined any further refreshment after a second cup of water she rose to her feet, murmured some word of farewell, and turned and went back to the house she had come from. Harriet and I looked at each other as the girl walked back to her house. ‘That was so…biblical,’ said Harriet. ‘Can you imagine that ever happening at home?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘That was charity. Giving water to strangers in the desert, where water is so scarce. That was true charity, the charity of poor people giving to the rich.’ In Britain a stranger offering a drink to a thirsty man in a lonely place would be regarded with suspicion. If someone had approached us like that at home, we would probably have assumed they were a little touched or we were going to be asked for money. We might have protected ourselves by being stiff and unfriendly, evasive or even rude.

In the beginning, when Twaslitri (the Divine Artificer) came to the creation of woman he found that he had exhausted his materials in the making of man and that no solid elements were left. In this dilemma, after pro-found meditation, he did as follows: he took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of the creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sun-beams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldnesss of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakravaka; and compounding all these together, he made woman and gave her to man. (Written by scholars of the Vedic Age)

Feeling that she had not mended matters much, Amy took the offered third of a seat, shook her hair over her face, and accepted an oar. She rowed as well as she did many other things; and, though she used both hands, and Laurie but one, the oars kept time, and the boat went smoothly through the water. “How well we pull together, don’t we?” said Amy, who objected to silence just then. “So well that I wish we might always pull in the same boat. Will you, Amy?” very tenderly. “Yes, Laurie,” very low. Then they both stopped rowing, and unconsciously added a pretty little tableau of human love and happiness to the dissolving views reflected in the lake.

When Sally stopped crying, she found herself alone, the cold draft of the window at her neck, and on both sides, the rows of doors went on and on, diminishing to nothing, the end. 'What fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight, oh.' What glories. Mathilde came. And though she appeared to be the... same sweet girl Sally had been afraid of, she was not. Sally saw the flint in her. Mathilde can save Lotto from his own laziness, Sally thought. But here they were, a year later, and he was still ordinary. The chorus caught in her throat. A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean, white light from a tree, and his heart did a soumersault. And the image stayed with him, it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already asleep in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver he'd run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys and puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystalized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.

Old Dudley would get out his gun and take it apart and, as Rabie cleaned the pieces, would explain the mechanism to him. Then he’d put it together again. Rabie always marveled at the way he could put it together again. Old Dudley would have liked to have explained New York to Rabie. If he could have showed it to Rabie, it wouldn’t have been so big—he wouldn’t have felt pressed down every time he went out in it. “It ain’t so big,” he would have said. “Don’t let it get you down, Rabie. It’s just like any other city and cities ain’t all that complicated.” But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn’t even live in a house. She lived in a building—the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened-red and gray with rasp-mouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he’d been dazed by the building the first week. He’d wake up expecting the halls to have changed in the night and he’d look out the door and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same way. He wondered where he’d be if he walked to the end of one of them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the building—nowhere.

The Brinkmans take to reading, when they're alone together. And, together, they're alone most of the time. ... In place of children, then, books...Ray's shelves are organized by topic; Dorothy's, alphabetical by author. He prefers state-of-the-art books with fresh copyrights. She needs to communicate with the distant dead, alien souls as different from her as possible... Once any given volume enters the house, it can never leave. For Ray, the goal is readiness: a book for every unforeseeable need. Dorothy strives to keep loyal independent booksellers afloat and save neglected gems from the cutout bin. Ray thinks: You never know when you might finally get around to reading that tome you picked up five years ago. And Dorothy: Someday you'll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain. The conversion of their house into a library happens too slowly to see. The books that won't fit she lays on their sides, on top of the existing rows. This warps the covers and makes him crazy. For a while they solve the problem with more furniture. A pair of cherry cases to set between the windows in his downstairs office. A large walnut unit in the front room, in the space traditionally reserved for the television altar. Maple in the guest room. He says, "That should hold us for a while." She laughs, knowing from every novel she has ever read, how brief a while a while can be.

Lambspun’s Whodunnit Shell   Very Easy Knit with Bulky Yarn GAUGE: 2 sts/in   MATERIALS: US size 15 needles (or size to obtain gauge), 14-inch straight Very bulky yarn with gauge of 2 sts per inch   INSTRUCTIONS:     BACK: With yarn required for gauge, CO 40, 44, 46, 50, 52 sts. Work in garter stitch, (knit every row) or if you like an edge that rolls, work in stockinette (knit one row, purl one row) throughout garment. Continue in garter or stockinette until piece measures 8, 8.5, 9, 9, 9 inches or desired length to armhole. At armhole edges BO 3 sts once, 2 sts once, 1 st once. Work on remaining 28, 32, 34, 38, 40 sts until piece measures 14.5, 15, 15.5, 16, 16.5 inches.   NECK SHAPING: Work 11, 12, 12, 14, 15 sts. Join second ball of yarn and bind off center 6, 8, 10, 10, 10 sts. Work remaining sts, turn. Working both sides at once, bind off 1 st from the neck edge 3 times. Continue working on reaming sts until piece measures 17, 18, 18.5, 19, 19.5 inches. Place remaining 8, 9, 9, 11, 12 sts on holders.   FRONT: CO 39, 43, 45, 49, 51 sts. Work in garter stitch, (knit every row) or if you like an edge that rolls, work in stockinette (knit one row, purl one row) throughout garment. Continue in garter or stockinette until piece measures 8, 8.5, 9, 9, 9 inches or desired length to armhole. At armhole edges BO 3 sts once, 2 sts once, 1 st once. Work on remaining 28, 32, 34, 38, 40 sts until piece measures 14.5, 15, 15.5, 16, 16.5 inches.   NECK SHAPING: Same as for back.   FINISHING: Join shoulders with three-needle bind off. Single crochet around every edge. Hand seam sides together. Pattern courtesy of Lambspun of Colorado, Fort Collins, Colorado.

The only distinguishing characteristic of a literature professor at the millennium was that he or she wrote about other people's writing. Apart from that, the writing he wrote about didn't even need to be literature, or writing about literature, or even writing about writing about literature. He needed theory...In the unflickering glare, at the center of a severe perspective, Nelson suddenly felt the visceral truth of the world as text; he apperceived the fundamentally linguistic nature of reality. Everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory. Words arranged in lines; lines arrayed on pages; pages pressed together, bound, and trimmed in books; books arranged cover to cover along a shelf like the words in a line of text; shelves stacked one atop the other like lines of text on a page; rows of shelves pressed together, with just the barest passage for the reader, like the pages of a book.

You weren’t supposed to choose me,” he said. Behind them, Ira approached, stunned and speechless for what must have been the first time in his life. He helped lift Samuel, whose cheeks had blanched as well. Camille prodded Oscar’s arms and stomach and face. It was truly him. The unbearable grief over losing him flipped inside out. Her joy ran so deep and strong she thought she might burst from it. “The night the Christina went down, you rowed to me,” she answered, her throat knotted as she thought of her father. She forced it down. “This time, I must have needed to row to you.” Oscar kissed her, his lips still cold but filled with life. She leaned into him and hung on as though he might disappear. Ira let out a playful high-pitched whistle. Samuel coughed. Oscar and Camille reluctantly pulled apart and blushed. “Holy gallnipper,” Ira said. Camille grinned, not minding in the least that he was using that annoying turn of phrase again. “I can’t believe that little rock…I mean you were dead, mate. Dead as this bloke right here.” Ira kicked McGreenery in the leg. Oscar nodded, rubbing his hand over the fading red mark, as if to feel for himself that the deadly wound was gone. “I was in the dory,” he whispered. Ira cocked his head. “Say again?” Camille lifted her ear from his chest, where she’d wanted to listen to the smooth rhythm of his heart. She looked up at him before hearing its strong beat. “The dory?” Oscar nodded again, eyebrows creased. “I heard your voice. At the cave,” he said to Camille. “This force kept pulling me backward, away from you, like I was being sucked into the ground.” So this was how it had felt for him to die. She remembered the way he’d looked right through her and how it had chilled her to the marrow. Her own brush with death had been different, and somehow better, if death could even be measured in levels of bad or good. The image of her father had drawn her to safety, making her forget her yearning for air. He had been there for her, but she hadn’t been able to do the same for him. All this time, all this trouble, and all she’d wanted was to bring him back, make him proud of the lengths to which she’d gone for him. In the end, she’d failed him miserably. “And then you were gone. Your voice faded, and I was in the dory, adrift in the Tasman, the dawn after the Christina went down,” Oscar continued. Samuel and Ira glanced at each other with marked expressions of doubt and confusion. “But I wasn’t alone.” He gently pulled Camille away from him and gripped her arms. “Your father was with me. He was sitting there, smiling. It all seemed so real. I could taste the salt air, and…and I remember touching the water, and it was cold. It wasn’t like in a dream, when you can’t do those things.” Camille sucked in a deep breath, trying to inflate her crushing lungs. Oscar had seen him, too. She’d give anything to see her father again, to hear his voice, to feel at home by just being in his presence. At least, that’s what she’d once believed. But Camille hadn’t been willing to give up Oscar. Did that mean she loved her father less? Never. She could never love her fatherless. So then why hadn’t her heart chosen him? "Did he say anything?" she asked, anxious to know yet afraid to hear. "It's all jumbled," Oscar said, again shaking his head and rubbing his chest. "I remember him saying a few things. Bits and pieces." Camille looked to Ira and Samuel. Their parted mouths and bugged eyes hung on Oscar's every word. Oscar squinted at the ground and seemed to be working hard to piece together what her father had said on the other side. "I'm still here to guide her?" he said, questioning his own memory. "It doesn't make any sense, I'm sorry." She shook her head, eyes tearing up again. It had been real. He really had come to her in the black water of the underground pool. "No, don't be sorry," she said, tears spilling. "It does make sense. It makes sense to me.

Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: “There’s no danger.” “No danger?” screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling. “Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!” “The whole thing’s falling apart, Pointsman!” “Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of our scheme, and there’ve been embarrassing inquires down from Duncan Sandys—“ “That’s the P.M.’s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!” “We’ve already begun to run into a deficit—“ “Funding,” IF you can keep your head, “is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being ‘knocked out,’ is quite happily at work at Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active in the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal ’46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head.” “Your Interested Parties again?” sez Rollo Groast. “Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday,” Edwin Treacle mentions now. “Clive Mossmoon and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?” “No,” smoothly, “Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I’m afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over the Schwarzkommando business.” “The hell you were. I happen to know Clive’s at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research.” They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great of bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. “I do wish ICI would finance part of this,” Pointsman smiles. “Lame, lame,” mutters the younger Dr. Groast. “What’s it matter?” cries Aaron Throwster. “If the old man gets moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang.” “Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments,” Pointsman very steady, calm, “we have made arrangements with him. The details aren’t important.” They never are, in these meetings of his.

My husband and I have been a part of the same small group for the past five years.... Like many small groups, we regularly share a meal together, love one another practically, and serve together to meet needs outside our small group. We worship, study God’s Word, and pray. It has been a rich time to grow in our understanding of God, what Jesus has accomplished for us, God’s purposes for us as a part of his kingdom, his power and desire to change us, and many other precious truths. We have grown in our love for God and others, and have been challenged to repent of our sin and trust God in every area of our lives. It was a new and refreshing experience for us to be in a group where people were willing to share their struggles with temptation and sin and ask for prayer....We have been welcomed by others, challenged to become more vulnerable, held up in prayer, encouraged in specific ongoing struggles, and have developed sweet friendships. I have seen one woman who had one foot in the world and one foot in the church openly share her struggles with us. We prayed that God would show her the way of escape from temptation many times and have seen God’s work in delivering her. Her openness has given us a front row seat to see the power of God intersect with her weakness. Her continued vulnerability and growth in godliness encourage us to be humble with one another, and to believe that God is able to change us too. Because years have now passed in close community, God’s work can be seen more clearly than on a week-by-week basis. One man who had some deep struggles and a lot of anger has grown through repenting of sin and being vulnerable one on one and in the group. He has been willing to hear the encouragement and challenges of others, and to stay in community throughout his struggle.... He has become an example in serving others, a better listener, and more gentle with his wife. As a group, we have confronted anxiety, interpersonal strife, the need to forgive, lust, family troubles, unbelief, the fear of man, hypocrisy, unemployment, sickness, lack of love, idolatry, and marital strife. We have been helped, held accountable, and lifted up by one another. We have also grieved together, celebrated together, laughed together, offended one another, reconciled with one another, put up with one another,...and sought to love God and one another. As a group we were saddened in the spring when a man who had recently joined us felt that we let him down by not being sensitive to his loneliness. He chose to leave. I say this because, with all the benefits of being in a small group, it is still just a group of sinners. It is Jesus who makes it worth getting together. Apart from our relationship with him...,we have nothing to offer. But because our focus is on Jesus, the group has the potential to make a significant and life-changing difference in all our lives. ...When 7 o’clock on Monday night comes around, I eagerly look forward to the sound of my brothers and sisters coming in our front door. I never know how the evening will go, what burdens people will be carrying, how I will be challenged, or what laughter or tears we will share. But I always know that the great Shepherd will meet us and that our lives will be richer and fuller because we have been together. ...I hope that by hearing my story you will be encouraged to make a commitment to become a part of a small group and experience the blessing of Christian community within the smaller, more intimate setting that it makes possible. 6

I want you to want something for once. Something that nobody told you to want. I want. I do. Want things. Like what princess? I want something that will make this all worth it; I want the good stuff. I’m ready for the goddamn silver lining. I want to have sisters who live down the street, I want a family; I want a mother to call when I need to know the right temperature to cook a goddamn chicken. I want Sunday suppers and summer barbecues at lake houses. I want to stop second-guessing every tiny detail of every single day, every word that comes out of my mouth. I want to be brave. I want to jump without looking down all the time. I want to be able to watch a TV show without seeing things that remind me about my sisters, about the could-have-been family. I want us to push tables together in restaurants so we all fit, I want to fill benches and rows of bleachers with us, I want the world to make room. I want to laugh too loud and make people wish they were us. I want them to feel it. Those perfect families, those perfect packages, those smug titles for everyone- mother father sister brother, step-this and half-that. They all have words for what they are. And we don’t. I want that.

If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be able to reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other. So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really is cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you're going. Hiro appears solid to himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as if it's a fogbank, clearly seeing The Black Sun in front of him. He steps over the property line, and he's in the doorway. And in that instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As one, they all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he is -- Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over the line into The Black Sun. He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that he's all by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of avatars, he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars, hoping that Da5id -- The Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief -- will invite them inside. They flick and merge together into a hysterical wall. Stunningly beautiful women, computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two frames a second, like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional -- these are would-be actresses hoping to be discovered. Wild-looking abstracts, tornadoes of gyrating light-hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice their talent, invite them inside, give them a job. A liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people -- persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans, devoted to the fantasy of stabbing some particular actress to death; they can't even get close in Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. There are would-be rock stars done up in laser light, as though they just stepped off the concert stage, and the avatars of Nipponese businessmen, exquisitely rendered by their fancy equipment, but utterly reserved and boring in their suits.

The secret—to being you, to being Happy?” “Just keep on smiling. Even when you’re sad. Keep on smiling.” Not the most profound advice, admittedly. But Happy is wise, for only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. To venture any further, though, is to enter treacherous waters. A slippery seal, happiness is. On the road, I encountered bushels of inconsistencies. The Swiss are uptight and happy. The Thais are laid-back and happy. Icelanders find joy in their binge drinking, Moldovans only misery. Maybe an Indian mind can digest these contradictions, but mine can’t. Exasperated, I call one of the leading happiness researchers, John Helliwell. Perhaps he has some answers. “It’s simple,” he says. “There’s more than one path to happiness.” Of course. How could I have missed it? Tolstoy turned on his head. All miserable countries are alike; happy ones are happy in their own ways. It’s worth considering carbon. We wouldn’t be here without it. Carbon is the basis of all life, happy and otherwise. Carbon is also a chameleon atom. Assemble it one way—in tight, interlocking rows—and you have a diamond. Assemble it another way—a disorganized jumble—and you have a handful of soot. The arranging makes all the difference. Places are the same. It’s not the elements that matter so much as how they’re arranged and in which proportions. Arrange them one way, and you have Switzerland. Arrange them another way, and you have Moldova. Getting the balance right is important. Qatar has too much money and not enough culture. It has no way of absorbing all that cash. And then there is Iceland: a country that has no right to be happy yet is. Iceland gets the balance right. A small country but a cosmopolitan one. Dark and light. Efficient and laid-back. American gumption married to European social responsibility. A perfect, happy arrangement. The glue that holds the entire enterprise together is culture. It makes all the difference. I have some nagging doubts about my journey. I didn’t make it everywhere. Yet my doubts extend beyond matters of itinerary. I wonder if happiness is really the highest good, as Aristotle believed. Maybe Guru-ji, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is right. Maybe love is more important than happiness. Certainly, there are times when happiness seems beside the point. Ask a single, working mother if she is happy, and she’s likely to reply, “You’re not asking the right question.” Yes, we want to be happy but for the right reasons, and,

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

The pink?" she suggested, holding the shimmering rose-colored satin in front of Sara's half-clad figure. Sara held her breath in awe. She had never worn such a sumptuous creation. Silk roses adorned the sleeves and hem of the gown. The short-waisted bodice was finished with a stomacher of silver filigree and a row of satin bows. Lily shook her head thoughtfully. "Charming, but too innocent." Sara suppressed a disappointed sigh. She couldn't imagine anything more beautiful than the pink satin. Busily Monique discarded the gown and sorted through the others. "The peach. No man will be able to keep his eyes from her in that. Here, let us try it, chérie." Raising her arms, Sara let the dressmaker and her assistant Cora pull the gauzy peach-hued gown over her head. "I think it will have to be altered a great deal," Sara commented, her voice muffled beneath the delicate layers of fabric. The gowns had been fitted for Lily's lithe, compact lines. Sara was more amply endowed, with a generous bosom and curving hips, and a tiny, scoped-in waist... a figure style that had been fashionable thirty years ago. The current high-waisted Grecian mode was not particularly flattering to her. Monique settled the gown around Sara's feet and then began to yank the back of it together. "Oui, Lady Raiford has the form that fashion loves." Energetically, she hooked the tight bodice together. "But you, chérie, have the kind that men love. Draw in your breath, s'il vous plaît." Sara winced as her breasts were pushed upward until they nearly overflowed from the low-cut bodice. The hem of the unusually full skirt was bordered with three rows of graduated tulip-leaves. Sara could hardly believe the woman in the mirror was herself. The peach gown, with its transparent layers of silk and shockingly low neckline, had been designed to attract a man's attention. It was too loose at the waist, but her breasts rose from the shallow bodice in creamy splendor pushed together to form an enticing cleavage.

An unexpected sight opens in front of my eyes, a sight I cannot ignore. Instead of the calm waters in front of the fortress, the rear side offers a view of a different sea—the sea of small, dark streets and alleys—like an intricate puzzle. The breathtaking scenery visible from the other side had been replaced by the panorama of poverty–stricken streets, crumbling house walls, and dilapidated facades that struggle to hide the building materials beneath them. It reminds me of the ghettos in Barcelona, the ghettos I came to know far too well. I take a deep breath and look for a sign of life—a life not affected by its surroundings. Nothing. Down, between the rows of dirty dwellings stretches a clothesline. Heavy with the freshly washed laundry it droops down, droplets of water trickling onto the soiled pavement from its burden. Around the corner, a group of filthy children plays with a semi–deflated soccer ball—it makes a funny sound as it bounces off the wall—plunk, plunk. A man sitting on a staircase puts out a cigarette; he coughs, spits phlegm on the sidewalk, and lights a new one. A mucky dog wanders to a house, lifts his leg, and pisses on it. His urine flows down the wall and onto the street, forming a puddle on the pavement. The children run about, stepping in the piss, unconcerned. An old woman watches from the window, her large breasts hanging over the windowsill for the world to see. Une vie ordinaire, a mundane life...life in its purest. These streets bring me back to all the places I had escaped when I sneaked onto the ferry. The same feeling of conformity within despair, conformity with their destiny, prearranged long before these people were born. Nothing ever changes, nothing ever disturbs the gloomy corners of the underworld. Tucked away from the bright lights, tucked away from the shiny pavers on the promenade, hidden from the eyes of the tourists, the misery thrives. I cannot help but think of myself—only a few weeks ago my life was not much different from the view in front of my eyes. Yet, there is a certain peace soaring from these streets, a peace embedded in each cobblestone, in each rotten wall. The peace of men, unconcerned with the rest of the world, disturbed neither by global issues, nor by the stock market prices. A peace so ancient that it can only be found in the few corners of the world that remain unchanged for centuries. This is one of the places. I miss the intricacy of the street, I miss the feeling of excitement and danger melted together into one exceptional, nonconforming emotion. There is the real—the street; and then there is all the other—the removed. I am now on the other side of reality, unable to reach out with my hand and touch the pure life. I miss the street.