Seismic Quotes

It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!

Reyes, what happened?” He‘d been busy nibbling his way to my collarbone, his hot mouth evoking seismic activity at each point of contact. I really hated to interrupt, but … “Reyes, are you listening to me?” He raised his head, a sensual grin playing at the corners of his mouth, and said, “I‘m listening.” “To what? The sound of blood rushing to your nether regions?” “No,” he said with a husky chuckle that made me tingle everywhere. “To your heartbeat.

A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.

A traumatic experience is a seismic event that shakes our belief in a just world, robbing us of the sense that life is controllable, predictable, and meaningful.

When deathcare became an industry in the early twentieth century, there was a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. Caring for the corpse went from visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “profession,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men.

People do this a lot. They don't seem to realise that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say they're going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materialises. But everything's not going to be made of leather, the world won't stink of sherbet. Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you'll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to animals - you'll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment.

How do people do this? When the rug is pulled out from under the life the thought they would have forever, how do they pretend it's not seismic? That the roof hasn't fallen in and they're trapped under a concrete beam?

It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?

wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?

Her changes were dramatic and yet gradual, seismic and yet astonishingly bloodless.

The gifts and the lessons my father left me will last forever: Never take yourself too seriously, never miss a chance to laugh long and hard, speak out about political and social issues you believe in, use the written word as often as you can to make yourself and the world a better place, and love your children with all you've got. My dad's death had a seismic effect on me but so did his life.

We have an undeniable connection that's more intense than 10,000 Kelvin heat, more dynamic than seismic activity. It's like there's gravity between us - she's the only thing anchoring me to the world, keeping me from floating off into the upper stratosphere and getting lost in space.

That evening, as I watched the sunset’s pinwheels of apricot and mauve slowly explode into red ribbons, I thought: The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady’s slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other its color hitting our sense like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought

Nothing is more real than those great seismic shocks that two souls give each other in exchanging that spark.

You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.

I wanted something seismic to happen at the end. I wanted him to wake up so we could somehow forgive each other, say we loved each another, move on with some sense of closure, for I knew this would be the last time I saw him, but he didn’t wake up, and nothing was said.

Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush, is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush after all there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it. It will bloom or it will whither, but love, love seems to have infiinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I've learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once.

..the brave picture we have of humans as rational beings is utterly misleading, a kind of photograph of our surface composure and thus unreflective of-- and unattuned to-- the seismic emotional and psychic reality underneath, our true reality... The arts put onto the page or the stage or the canvas or the screen a special portraiture that does justice to our depths.

To spur growth, it must be seismic; it must shake you to your core and cause you to fundamentally rethink everything you believe. The higher the level of stress caused by the event, the greater the potential for change.

It is certain that such a revolution in thought - that is, such an expansion of consciousness, such an evolution of intelligence - is not the result of a whim. It is in fact a question of a cosmic influence to which the earth, along with everything in it, is subjected. A phase in the gestation of the planetary particle of our solar system is completed. Gaston Bachelard observes, in this connection, what he calls “a mutation of Spirit.” A new period must begin, and this is heralded by seismic movement, climate changes, and finally, above all, by the spirit that animates man.

The time of the photograph is [always] after. This imprecision accommodates the numerous successions, the end upon seismic end, in a time without time, un[re]countable: still. In this, it is a perfect crime, “l’anéantissement anéanti, la fin… privée d’elle-même.

Seismic change can happen over a lifetime, or in an instant.

Only it won’t be an earthquake - not in England, England isn’t seismic - it will be a gradual crumbling.

I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world. This book is a map in words to important territory we all are on now together. It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.

I increasingly feel that a part of me is missing, the part that is able to sit with the seismic changes that come, to sense them and experience them and integrate them, rather than to merely administrate them. As I grow older this begins to feel like a desperate lack. There has been a yearning in me that I'm only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning-making.

In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

My little brother's greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gingerly monitoring father every morning and every evening as if, without such vigilance, he would lose him. We stood- the dead child and the living- on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forver. To please us both was an impossibility. ... 'Please don't let Daddy die, Susie,' he whispered. 'I need him.' When I left my brother, I walked out past the gazebo and under the lights hanging down like berries, and I saw the brick paths branching out as I advanced. I walked until the bricks turned to flat stones and then to small, sharp rocks and then to nothing but churned earth for miles adn miles around me. I stood there. I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed. And as the light began to fade and the sky to turn a dark, sweet blue as it had on the night of my death, I saw something walking into view, so far away I could not at first make out if it was man or woman, child or adult. But as moonlight reached this figure I could make out a man and, frightened now, my breathing shallow, I raced just far enough to see. Was it my father? Was it what I had wanted all this time so deperately? 'Susie,' the man said as I approached and then stopped a few feet from where he stood. He raised his arms up toward me. 'Remember?' he said. I found myself small again, age six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet. 'Granddaddy,' I said. And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet. 'Granddaddy,' I said. And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and he was fifty-six and my father had taken us to visit. We danced so slowly to a song that on Earth had always made my grandfather cry. 'Do you remember?' he asked. 'Barber!' 'Adagio for Strings,' he said. But as we danced and spun- none of the herky-jerky awkwardness of Earth- what I remembered was how I'd found him crying to this music and asked him why. 'Sometimes you cry,' Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.' He had held me against him then, just briefly, and then I had run outside to play again with Lindsey in what seemed like my grandfather's huge backyard. We didn't speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden movement that we'd read about in science class one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space. I pressed myself into my grandfather's chest and smelled the old-man smell of him, the mothball version of my own father, the blood on Earth, the sky in heaven. The kumquat, skunk, grade-A tobacco. When the music stopped, it cold have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfateher took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back. 'I'm going,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.' He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.

Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.

It’s nice to hear him so self-aware. To know that the seismic waves of coming out are still rippling through him too. I thought I was alone in that. Everyone makes it seem like coming out is crossing the finish line and now you just get to parade around while wearing your medal. For me, it feels more like I’m still winded midmarathon.

He went to the board to write lots of Greek symbols and calculus equations. The course had started with cute little things like how people choose between tea and biscuits. It had moved on to scary equations that would dominate exams. The class took mad notes. Kanyashree wrote so hard I could feel the seismic vibrations from her pen's nib.

True revival will come when God is taken seriously by those of us who call ourselves Christ followers—take God seriously and finally believe what we say we believe. True revival will be akin to spiritual seismic activity, shaking us to our core, allowing us to see the profound overtake the profane, with the promise that our lives will never be the same.

seismic disasters known as earthquake storms,

A hint of ghost-moisture through human life Seismic mass pressing and raw My eye doesn’t meet the gaze of my other eye One with crossed eyes can turn out like that.

When you nearly lose your life or the life of someone you love, your priorities do some seismic shifting.

Our kisses were seismic.

Our kisses were seismic. When seen by the wrong person, they could destroy us. When shared with the right person, they had the power of confirmation, the force of destiny.

God. Father. Lover. For each shaken source of faith, I have hoarded a seismic sense of hurt--a sensation that led to spiritual starvation.

The tricky part about EMF, though, is its interaction with the human brain. Electromagnetic fields affect our perception, as does infrasound and seismic activity

A writer's will is the winds of dead calm in the Western Lands. Point way out he can start stirring of the sail. Writer, where are you going? To write. Here we are in texts already written on the sky. Where he doesn't need to write anymore. A slight seismic with the cat book. Always remember, the work is the mainsail to reach the Western Lands. The texts sing. Everything is grass and bushes, a desert or a maze of texts. Here you are ... never use the same door twice. Sky in all directions ... on the word for word. The word for word is word. The western sail stirs candles on 1920 country club table. Each page is a door to everything is permitted. The fragile lifeboat between this and that. Your words are the sails.

The women looked from one to the other, knowing what the men didn’t know. We knew the heartbeat and interior graces, compensation for our own clumsiness; the beatitude as we renounced our bodies, our noble little parasites the higher calling. We knew, without saying, the watery rollover, tremor, seismic shudders, the steadiness of the baby’s hiccups, the reliable stab from a kick to the kidney

When the rug is pulled out from under the life they thought they would have forever, how do they pretend it’s not seismic? That the roof hasn’t fallen in and they’re trapped under a concrete beam? How do you breathe

River, the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all my rivers: every accesible experience of every river I've seen, swum in, fished, heard about, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise. These "rivers" are infinitely tessellating rills and affluents that feed fiction's ability to spur the imagination. I read the word river and, with or without context, I'll dip beneath its surface. (I'm a child wading in the moil and suck, my feet cut on a river's rock-bottom; or the gray river just out the window, now, just to my right, over the trees of the park-spackled with ice. Or-the almost seismic eroticism of a memory from my teens-of the shift of a skirt on a girl in spring, on a quai by an arabesque of a river, in a foreign city...) This is a word's dormant power, brimming with pertinence. So little is needed from the author, when you think of it. (We are already flooded by river water, and only need the author to tap this reservoir.

I am suggesting a seismic shift in black politics. Obviously, we can’t stand idly by as Democrats take our votes for granted and cave to forces that devastate our communities. Nor can extremists on the right and those who enable them expect us to sit back as they trade in racist nonsense, continue to legislate for the 1 percent, and undo the modest gains we’ve made in this country. What has become crystal clear over these past few years, at least to me, is that business as usual isn’t sufficient; that the typical black characters on the national scene have to be called out for what they have failed to do and say in the face of what has happened and is happening in black America.

Alice is horrified at the prospect of losing her grip on the most essential things in her life—her brother, her talent, her self—in the seismic shift known as life after graduation. She can’t imagine who she’ll be on the other side.

Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population. This seismic upheaval—the Nakba,

damage to tunnels in earthquakes is extremely rare. This is true for a couple of reasons. First, the amplitude of seismic shaking underground is only half of what it is at the surface. When a seismic wave hits the surface of the earth, it is reflected back downward, and that reflected wave also causes shaking. So, at the surface, movement is double what you’d find within the earth. Second, tunnels generally have a round or oval cross section, which is a very stable shape.

Rekers’s fat begins under his nipples and increases exponentially until it eases back at his thighs. It looks as if a regular fat guy had some sort of seismic shift resulting in a landslide. A manslide. Chief Rekers is a walking manslide.

With each integer on the Richter scale, there is a tenfold increase in the number of earthquakes that occur annually. On average, there is one magnitude 8 event, ten magnitude 7 events, a hundred magnitude 6 events, and so on, each year. If we consider this from an energy standpoint, the smaller earthquakes account for a significant fraction of the total seismic energy released each year. The one million magnitude 2 events (which are too small to be felt except instrumentally) collectively release as much energy as does one magnitude 6 earthquake. Although the larger events are certainly more devastating from a human perspective, they are geologically no more important than the myriad less newsworthy small ones.

It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have!

For the creation of the mechanicals was a seismic event, an earth-rending convulsion that left nothing untouched: palaces, thrones, and empires, yes, but also the way men and women thought about themselves and their relationship to the world, to God, even their own bodies.

With those words, the busy night seemed to slow again around Cormoran Strike, and the constant growl of traffic seemed suddenly muted. This time he wasn’t staring down into Robin’s face, full of alcohol and desire: the seismic change had happened inside him because he felt something break and he knew, at last, that there was no putting it back together. It wasn’t that he saw the truth of Charlotte in that instant, because he’d come to believe that there was no single, static truth about any human being, but he understood, once and for all, that something he’d taken to be true wasn’t.

The meal was awkward—mostly silence punctuated by the occasional comment by the scythe. “You have a lovely home.” “What flavorful lemonade!” “This may be the best baked ziti in all of MidMerica!” Even though everything he said was complimentary, his voice registered like a seismic shock down everyone’s spine.

Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion.

Ms. Foster has written her story.” He gestures to the folder. “Good.” Tristan smiles, and he picks it up and begins to read. “A seismic weather event won’t do,” Jameson barks. Tristan twists his lips as he reads on. “It’s very good, though,” he comments. Hmm, I’m totally crushing on the wrong brother . . . my one is an asshole.

Everyone should be very grateful radioactivity exists at all. It can kill you, yes, but without it you wouldn't have been born in the first place. On Earth, deep under your feet, our planet happens to contain many atoms that do decay, all the time. Less so now than in the past, but still, Earth's mantle is radioactive. When atoms decay there, the particles they emit bump into their neighbours and generate heat, the very heat that contributes to keeping our planet warm. Without radioactivity, there would be no seismic or volcanic activity. The surface of the Earth would have been dead cold billions of yeras ago. Life as we know it would probably not exist at all.

What the hell?" Arriane picked herself up off the ground. "Did we step through to California without my knowledge? No one told me there were fault lines in Georgia!" Cam pulled a long shard of glass from his forearm. Luce gasped as bright red blood trailed down his elbow, but his face showed no sign that he was in pain. "That wasn't an earthquake. That was a seismic shift in time." "A what?" Luce asked. "The first of many." Daniel looked out the jagged window, watching a white cumulus cloud roll across the now blue sky. "The closer Lucifer gets, the stronger they'll become." He glanced at Cam, who nodded. "Ticktock, people," Cam said. "Time is running out. We need to fly.

the October Revolution of 1917 brought seismic changes to the city. In November, the ‘agitators’ arrived and with the support of local railway workers staged a Bolshevik coup d’état. This was swiftly followed by industrial and financial crisis as the city fell into debt and bankruptcy. Then followed arrests, shootings, confiscations and fear.

The emergence of the first large settlements triggered a seismic shift in religious life. Seeking to explain the catastrophes suddenly befalling us, we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done. A whole clerical class was put in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry. Had we eaten something forbidden? Said something wrong? Had an illicit thought?37 For the first time in history, we developed a notion of sin. And we began looking to priests to prescribe how we should do penance. Sometimes it was enough to pray or complete a strict set of rituals, but often we had to sacrifice cherished possessions–food or animals or even people.

Thank you to the fans who came to the show. You made the eras tour what it became. At the start of this, I could've never imagined you would cheer so loudly it would register as an earthquake on seismic charts (this happened multiple times) or that you would lift economics of whatever city we went to. More importantly you lifted the spirits of those around you... You made people feel included by making friendship bracelets and friends. ... A place for radical girlhood, boyhood , or person hood and unapologetic joy. Your excitement was truly contagious... you made everyone feel included, and for that I could never thank you enough. My hope is that you find ways to create these spaces around in your daily life... That would be a real legacy to leave.

Nigromanta took him to her room, which was lighted with false candlesticks, to her folding cot with the bedding stained from bad loves, and to her body of a wild dog, hardened and without a soul, which prepared itsself to dismiss him as if he were a frightened child, and suddenly it found a man whose tremendous power demanded a movement of seismic readjustment from her insides.

For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky. The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls. A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.

The problem of race is deep and wide and requires seismic change. But if we look to government to solve it, we might as well feel hopeless. If we look corporate America to solve it, we’ll be waiting a long, long time. And if we agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who tentatively suggests that “the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us," then we will truly despair, for we know how well that has worked. If we follow that track, we'll quickly add in disbelief, as he did, “Or perhaps not." As I've said, the problem of race is not “out there." It's “in here,” in the human heart. And though there is no task in heaven or on earth more difficult than changing the human heart,I believe in the one who can do it. It requires a supernatural solution. Yes, I believe in God. You see, I know how God can change a person’s heart.

This is not just the story of Donald Trump in 2016; it is also the story of William Jennings Bryan, whom we’ve already met, in 1896. During the Gilded Age, populists like Bryan surged to prominence. They challenged the laissez-faire orthodoxy and appealed to America’s working class, a segment of society that was reeling from seismic shocks produced by the Industrial Revolution and a fast-globalizing American economy.

What is the essence of human sexuality and how did it get to be that way? In the following pages, we’ll explain how seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists.

Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.… Bezos’ vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone.

Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the New York Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C. In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

Why, then, did people's perception of race relations take a nosedive after 2013? The answer is that smartphones and social media changed the speed limit of information—which in turn gave a massive competitive advantage to ideas, information, narratives, and arguments that tap into division, tribalism, and grievances. Neoracism was among the ideologies able to take advantage of this seismic change. Ultimately, this change resulted in an informational diet that is less tethered to reality, not more.

(People do this a lot. They don’t seem to realize that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say they’re going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materializes. But everything’s not going to be made of leather, the world won’t stink of sherbet. Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you’ll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to the animals—you’ll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment.)

It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them? When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences while German privates tuck live grenades in their pockets and run?

The next day—Christmas Eve—Musk called in reinforcements. Ross Nordeen drove from San Francisco. He stopped at the Apple Store in Union Square and spent $2,000 to buy out the entire stock of AirTags so the servers could be tracked on their journey, and then stopped at Home Depot, where he spent $2,500 on wrenches, bolt-cutters, headlamps, and the tools needed to unscrew the seismic bolts. Steve Davis got someone from The Boring Company to procure a semi truck and line up moving vans. Other enlistees arrived from SpaceX.

Meister Eckhart said it this way: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Some call this the Buddha Eye. If we haven’t celebrated the ordinary before dying, paying attention at life’s end may require a seismic shift in consciousness that only comes from intentional practice. When we acknowledge the nearness of death and when we have the courage to embrace living fully while dying, then it will be easier to celebrate every ordinary event, discovery, conversation, or gift as a window into the Divine.

Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush, after all, there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it: it will bloom or it will wither. But love? Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.

EFFERVESCE AND OBSESSION   Under the influence of this sensational climax I am reminded of the inundated calm before the storm as I find my mind to see through those same eyes that I have before. The curving slippage of her dynamic vehemence hums over me in a refreshing fixation that imbues this inseparable bond of the eternities. Her single touch sends shock waves down my entire vessel sending our bodies into a confluence of luscious allure. Her hips begin weaving in and out gently oscillating against me in a balmy nubile urge of effervesce and obsession. Again I occlude her recumbent orifice with the soft clasp of my wet lips, satiating my guest with an all-stimulating and interplanetary escape. In a largo samba-like motion I simultaneously absorb and alleviate the tension lingering beneath her plum fuselage as an overflowing ovulation of seismic and fulminating convulsage travels through the apex of her feminous core, following the crevice between her legs like the gentle waters that flow through the shaded gorge. As she levitates into a liberating reflex of celestial zest her panting grip begins to measure the odometer of our obsession.

Identity is an embodiment of theories from various discourses. Identity is a composite of different sets of information, an embodiment of theories, markers, and bars on our human flesh. The personality is a composite of different systems of information, at times a layering one upon the other like an onion, at times converging like spokes in a wheel. Identity is a shifting, changing chameleon. You would think that so many frames and seismic shiftings would result in a fragmented, dislocated being, but this is not so. Such shiftings and fragmentations impel us to use our imaginations to figure out who we are and who and what we can become.

Gotama's awakening involved a radical shift of perspective rather than the gaining of privileged knowledge into some higher truth. He did not use the words "know" and "truth" to describe it. He spoke only of waking up to a contingent ground--"this-conditionality, conditioned arising"--that until then had been obscured by his attachment to a fixed position. While such an awakening is bound to lead to a reconsideration of what one "knows," the awakening itself is not primarily a cognitive act. It is an existential readjustment, a seismic shift in the core of oneself and one's relation to others and the world. Rather than providing Gotama with a set of ready-made answers to life's big questions, it allowed him to respond to those questions from an entirely new perspective. To live on this shifting ground, one first needs to stop obsessing about what has happened before and what might happen later. One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This is not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life. Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be. Gotama did not encourage withdrawal to a timeless, mystical now, but an unflinching encounter with the contingent world as it unravels moment to moment.

The first break in the case came on day six. A college student named Beatrice Arnold called the FBI hotline to report she’d sold Suzanne Lombard snacks at the gas station where she worked in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. “The Breezewood tape caused a seismic shift in the investigation and completely scrambled the assumptions of law enforcement. Suzanne Lombard hadn’t been snatched; she had run away. She had somehow traveled three hundred fifty miles from the Virginia shore to the Pennsylvania line without drawing attention to herself. From the surveillance tape, three unassailable facts emerged: First, Suzanne was actively trying to conceal her identity. Second, she was waiting for someone. And third, in Suzanne’s mind at least, that someone was a friend.

When learners are struggling they need support, not red lines and stern faces. They don’t need the dark suits of doom, but rather a learning coach, detached from any process, to support, mentor and guide. (A problem solver, not a process monkey, remember?) A skilled, empathetic specialist who can work with the learner to meet their immediate needs and stem the flow of poor conduct.

This is an existential crisis rooted not only in race—which the corner has slowly transcended—but in the unresolved disaster of the American rust-belt, in the slow, seismic shift that is shutting down the assembly lines, devaluing physical labor, and undercutting the union pay scale. Down on the corner, some of the walking wounded used to make steel, but Sparrows Point isn’t hiring the way it once did. And some used to load the container ships at Seagirt and Locust Point, but the port isn’t what she used to be either. Others worked at Koppers, American Standard, or Armco, but those plants are gone now. All of which means precious little to anyone thriving in the postindustrial age. For those of us riding the wave, the world spins on an axis of technological prowess in an orbit of ever-expanding information. In that world, the men and women of the corner are almost incomprehensibly useless and have been so for more than a decade now. How

Anyway, if my lips were rose petals they’d taste too bitter. If my cheeks were apples they’d crawl with apple worms. If my eyes were stars they’d be dead by the time you saw them. If I moved you like the moon I’d disappear once a month. If my teeth were Chiclets you’d want to chew on them and spit them out. If my hands were birds you couldn’t hold them; they’d peck you bloody. Is my skin alabaster? Then it’s cold and hard and one day someone will skin me, make me into a cold hard box tinged with pink or yellow, to hold unguents, then how will you love me? If my vagina is a cool, dark forest you’ll certainly be lost, you have no sense of direction. If my vagina is a cave-watch out! It’s prone to seismic shifts and avalanche. If my vagina is a river of honey: orange, lavender, fine herbs, hazelnut, all too sweet. If my ears are shells I can’t hear you, only the ocean anyway. And if my voice is music, it is unintelligible. Don’t say anything. I am not a flower, but a body with rules and predictable, cellular qualities. My eyelashes and fingernails and skin and spit are organized by proteins designed to erode at a pre-encoded date and time, no matter what you do or do not do to me- I am remarkably like an animal. More like a heifer than a sunrise, I want to bite, stroke, swallow you so stop lying there trying to think of something to say and trying to understand me. I am the body next to but unlike yours. You already know me. You already know what I’m made of.

The mornings came hard, and our caddie master, Dick Millweed, had a temper that could make a hangover seem like a seismic fracture. He was a small man with a soft, friendly voice. He was not intimidating at all, until he lost it. In his defense, he took shit from all sides - from the members who wanted their favorite caddie and their preferred tee time, from the golf staff who wanted him to perform a million menial duties, and from us when we showed up bleary eyed and incoherent and sometimes didn't show up at all. And God forbid a caddie should stumble in late, because then Millweed's lips would begin to tremble and his blue eyes would explode from his head. They grew as large as saucers and shook as though his skull was suffering earthquake. And he appeared to grow with them. It was like some shaman or yogi trick. Pound for pound, I've never met anyone else who could so effectively deliver anger. He would yell, "You like fucking with me, don't you? You like making me look bad! You wake up and say, 'Today I'm gonna fuck with Millweed!' and it makes you happy, doesn't it?" And we had no choice but to stand there and take it - hang our heads and blubber apologies and promise never to be hung over again, never to show up late again, because he held the ultimate trump card _ he could fire us and cut us off from the golden tit. But once we were out on the course walking it off, the hanover and any cares associated with it (including Millweed) evaporated into the light mountain air. And after the round, with our pockets replenished and our spirits restored by the carefree, self-congratulatory ebullience of the uberrich, we were powerless to resist the siren song of clinking glasses, the inviting golden light of the street lamps and tavern windows in town, and the slopeside hot tubs steaming under the stars. We all jumped ship and dined, danced, and romanced the night away and then were dashed against the rocks of Millweed's wrath all over again the next morning.

With Barthes, signs no longer need to be signals: they have become clues. A seismic shift. They’re everywhere. From now on, semiology is ready to conquer the world.

In late 2018, a low-frequency seismic hum traveled around the world, evading mainstream earthquake-detection systems. Its trajectory and identity were pieced together in an impromptu collaboration between academic and citizen seismologists interacting on Twitter

Seismic shocks displaced people, shattered an antiquated system of water supply and sewerage, and damaged the fragile Haitian network of clinics and hospitals. Thus introduced and welcomed, V. El Tor multiplied exponentially in its new human hosts. Within weeks of the earthquake, every province of the country was infected, while 150,000 cases and 3,500 deaths had occurred.

Soon after he came on board, Clark, a cigarette dangling from his lips, signaled a seismic shift in the BBC’s news policy when he announced to his staff, “Well, brothers, now that war’s come, your job is to tell the truth. And if you aren’t sure it is the truth, don’t use it.” In an internal memo, he wrote, “It seems to me that the only way to strengthen the morale of the people whose morale is worth strengthening, is to tell them the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.

Let me suggest five pillars of practice that should underpin every behaviour policy in every school: Consistent, calm, adult behaviour. First attention for best conduct. Relentless routines. Scripting difficult interventions. Restorative follow-up.

At the end of his memorandum, almost as an afterthought, Schleicher included a remark which, in retrospect, would take on a chillingly prophetic overtone. “A final point,” he said, “is that flooding in response to seismic or other failure of the dam—probably most likely at the time of highest water—would make the flood of February 1962 look like small potatoes. Since such a flood could be anticipated, we might consider a series of strategically-placed motion-picture cameras to document the process . . .” (emphasis added).

There are some seismic cultural shifts that are underway online, and they are adding new vital layers to our digital landscape.

A game-changer for me was finding Belle’s Tired of Thinking About Drinking blog. She runs a 100-day challenge, whereby you commit to 100 alcohol-free days and have to email her every day saying whether you’re sober, or whether you’ve slipped. That simple shift, of having to check in and be honest, was a seismic one for me.

Second only to the San Andreas Fault in size, the New Madrid Seismic Zone runs through the boot-heel north into the southern tip of Illinois and south into northeastern Arkansas for about 150 miles, which includes parts of the states of Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, and Tennessee.

Bosconero’s homes were hundreds of years old. Nothing like this has happened here before, nothing so powerful as to wipe out the place. You know, there are laws, in Italy, on how houses should be built or strengthened in highly seismic areas. They’re often ignored. As you can see.’ ‘It can’t be!’ ‘This is Italy, Luce. Things are never straightforward, here. And it’s the common people who pay the price, as always. There will be an investigation on why the tower fell, for example, after having been refurbished according to the law. Too late for those who were under it.’ I had no answer to that. I proceeded to translate the whole thing to Ethan, who was as shocked as me. ‘Also, if there were tremors just before… why was there no alarm given?’ Ethan asked. ‘Maybe it was all too quick,’ I replied in English, but I also translated the question for Massimo. ‘Another Italian mystery,’ Massimo replied cryptically.

As Borgerding told me, nefarious forces led by the most powerful people in the world—titans of Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and big business—had forced these children to live in thousands of miles of underground tunnels. Hidden out of sight, these “mole children” are terrorized by pedophiles until their bodies produce adrenochrome, a highly coveted liquid that celebrities and the world’s richest financiers drink to stay young. Now Trump and the military were using the global Covid-19 pandemic as a cover to rescue the children. The Navy hospital ships deployed to respond to the virus were secretly treating the rescued mole children. For that matter, most earthquakes aren’t even earthquakes—they are seismic events created when the Army demolishes the pedophile lairs underground.

I can’t grow a beard. In case you didn’t notice, I’m a girl.” Something changes in his demeanor. I don’t know what it is, but he seems more aware of me, like I touched him without lifting a finger. It awakens every nerve ending in my body. “I noticed,” he murmurs. It seems he also touched me without putting a hand on me because I feel something rustling over my skin, electric and hot, causing seismic shivers.

The mountain I’ve climbed—the creating of video games—is undergoing a seismic shift, and its form is changing. But I suppose I will keep climbing. Not “because it’s there.” But rather, because it’s not there.

Being able to consider what lies ahead, to anticipate change and make plans emerged as survival mechanisms that made up for what our species might have lacked in strength, speed or agility.18 Four main factors have enabled this seismic cognitive leap: wayfinding, the “grandmother effect,” social cooperation, and tool innovation (see the following). Each of them represents an essential scene in the slow-time psychodrama of human evolution.

It's unfathomable to me that there are people behind every one of those lit windows, living and breathing and going about their lives while my world is so seismically shifting on its foundations. I'm standing on a fault line, the magnitude of his revelations like an earthquake, upending everything I thought I knew.

I increasingly feel that a part of me is missing, the part that is able to sit with the seismic changes that come, to sense them and experience them and integrate them, rather than to merely administrate them. As I grow older, this begins to feel like a desperate lack. There has been a yearning in me that I’m only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning-making. It’s not just that the world needs to change—I need to change, too. I need to soften, to let go of my tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being. I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.

whatever the machine was at Caltech that measured seismic activity,

(every child is etched with the sins of the adult world).