She Belongs To The Streets Quotes

[She] wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life was happening here, in this place, and not somewhere else far away.

She walks, on the streets, with a face that, doesn't belong. It smiles more than, many put together, whole day long. Her heart misfit, a little chipped. And she likes to, call it once broken, but now stitched.

Michael, this is an order from your mistress. Tell me what you want. Now.” “I want Griffin.” The words came out immediately. She had trained him too well. “I want Griffin so much it hurts. I love him, Nora. I have never felt anything like this before. And it’s absolutely stupid because he’s rich and he’s perfect and amazing and I’m a nobody. I’m a nobody, and I’m in love with someone I can’t be with. He’s so beautiful. I can’t stop looking at him, I can’t stop thinking about him. I dream about him at night. And he’s the first thing I think about when I wake up. And I want to touch him so much. I want to touch his face and that fucking perfect hair of his. And his lips and his chest and his arms— and I think about those arms around me, and it’s humiliating how much I want that. And, God, I want to live in his bed. I want to spend the rest of my life underneath him. I want to feel him on top of me and inside me. And I want submit to him. I want to go down on my knees in front of him. I want to call him sir and wear his collar and kiss his fucking feet if he told me to. And I want to walk down the busiest street in New York with him holding hands so the entire world can see us together and know that I belong to him. I love Griffin, Nora. I’m in love with him. And I can’t be with him. But that’s… that’s it.” Michael turned his head and buried it a little deeper into the cleft of Nora’s neck and shoulder. He wanted to stay there so he wouldn’t have to look her or anyone in the eyes ever again. “You won’t tell him, will you?” “She doesn’t have to.

She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.

What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of place for tough guy like you. Garbage cans. Rats galore. Plenty of cat-bums to gang around with. So scram,’ she said, dropping him… '...I told you. We just met by the river one day: that’s all. Independents, both of us. We never made each other any promises. We never -’ she said, and her voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized her face. The car had paused for a traffic light. Then she had the door open, she was running down the street; and I ran after her. ...she shuddered, she had to grip my arm to stand up: ‘Oh, Jesus God. We did belong to each other. He was mine.’ Then I made her a promise, I said I’d come back and find her cat. ‘I’ll take care of him, too. I promise.’ She smiled: that cheerless new pinch of a smile. ‘But what about me?’ she said, whispered, and shivered again. ‘I’m very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’re thrown it away. The mean reds, they’re nothing...

Yesterday's rain had left a bitter, springlike smell in the air; the vehemence that beat against her in the street and hummed above her had something a little wistful in it tonight, like a plaintive hand-organ tune. All the lovely things in the shop windows, the furs and jewels, roses and orchids, seemed to belong to her as she passed them. Not to have wrapped up and sent home, certainly; where would she put them? But they were hers to live among.

A friend once told me that what she fears most about growing old is becoming irrelevant, turning into a nostalgic old woman who cannot understand the world around her, or contribute much to it. This is what we fear collectively, as a species, when we hear of superhumans. We sense that in such a world, our identity, our dreams and even our fears will be irrelevant, and we will have nothing more to contribute. Whatever you are today – be it a devout Hindu cricket player or an aspiring lesbian journalist – in an upgraded world you will feel like a Neanderthal hunter in Wall Street. You won’t belong.

The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn't look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn't call to mind. She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.

she belonged entirely to that moment.

as we watched seaward-moving ships pass between the cliffs of burning skyline, she said: 'years from now, years and years, one of those ships will bring me back, me and my nine Brazillian brats, because yes, they must see this, these lights, the river-- I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.' And I said: 'Do shut up,' for I felt infuriatingly left out-- a tugboat in a dry-dock while she, glittery voyager of secure destination steamed down the harbor with whistles whistling and confetti in the air.

Ohhhhh." A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette-crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed. She's not thinking such a thought! Not her. She's an American girl healthy and clean as a Band-Aid. She's never had a soiled or a sulky thought. She's never had a melancholy thought. She's never had a savage thought. She's never had a desperate thought. She's never had an un-American thought. In the papery-thin sundress she's a nurse with tender hands. A nurse with luscious mouth. Sturdy thighs, bountiful breasts, tiny folds of baby fat at her armpits. She's laughing and squealing like a four year-old as another updraft lifts her skirt. Dimpled knees, a dancer's strong legs. This husky healthy girl. The shoulders, arms, breasts belong to a fully mature woman but the face is a girl's face. Shivering in New York City mid-summer as subway steam lifts her skirt like a lover's quickened breath. "Oh! Ohhhhh." It's nighttime in Manhattan, Lexington Avenue at 51st Street. Yet the white-white lights exude the heat of midday. The goddess of love has been standing like this, legs apart, in spike-heeled white sandals so steep and so tight they've permanently disfigured her smallest toes, for hours. She's been squealing and laughing, her mouth aches. There's a gathering pool of darkness at the back of her head like tarry water. Her scalp and her pubis burn from the morning's peroxide applications. The Girl with No Name. The glaring-white lights focus upon her, upon her alone, blond squealing, blond laughter, blond Venus, blond insomnia, blond smooth-shaven legs apart and blond hands fluttering in a futile effort to keep her skirt from lifting to reveal white cotton American-girl panties and the shadow, just the shadow, of the bleached crotch. "Ohhhhhh." Now she's hugging herself beneath her big bountiful breasts. Her eyelids fluttering. Between the legs, you can trust she's clean. She's not a dirty girl, nothing foreign or exotic. She's an American slash in the flesh. That emptiness. Guaranteed. She's been scooped out, drained clean, no scar tissue to interfere with your pleasure, and no odor. Especially no odor. The Girl with No Name, the girl with no memory. She has not lived long and she will not live long.

He remembered the night in Arlington when the news came: secession. He remembered a paneled wall and firelight. When we heard the news we went into mourning. But outside there was cheering in the streets, bonfires of joy. They had their war at last. But where was there ever any choice? The sight of fire against wood paneling, a bonfire seen far off at night through a window, soft and sparky glows always to remind him of that embedded night when he found that he had no choice. The war had come. He was a member of the army that would march against his home, his sons. He was not only to serve in it but actually to lead it, to make the plans and issue the orders to kill and burn and ruin. He could not do that. Each man would make his own decision, but Lee could not raise his hand against his own. And so what then? To stand by and watch, observer at the death? To do nothing? To wait until the war was over? And if so, from what vantage point and what distance? How far do you stand from the attack on your home, whatever the cause, so that you can bear it? It had nothing to do with causes; it was no longer a matter of vows. When Virginia left the Union she bore his home away as surely as if she were a ship setting out to sea, and what was left behind on the shore was not his any more. So it was no cause and no country he fought for, no ideal and no justice. He fought for his people, for the children and the kin, and not even the land, because not even the land was worth the war, but the people were, wrong as they were, insane even as many of them were, they were his own, he belonged with his own. And so he took up arms willfully, knowingly, in perhaps the wrong cause against his own sacred oath and stood now upon alien ground he had once sworn to defend, sworn in honor, and he had arrived there really in the hands of God, without any choice at all; there had never been an alternative except to run away, and he could not do that. But Longstreet was right, of course: he had broken the vow. And he would pay. He knew that and accepted it. He had already paid. He closed his eyes. Dear God, let it end soon.

She was decidedly attractive, he saw, but in an ill-natured, ungracious way. Because of his connection with Fitzgerald, Carstairs & Scott, Johnnie had an extensive knowledge of the external appearance and different modes of behavior of a great variety of attractive women: they came up to the office in shoals, with their nails dipped in blood and their faces covered with pale cocoa. And some were charming and simple beneath their masks, and some were complex and arrogant. This girl belonged to the latter type, the type which would ignore or stare surlily at him if he spoke to them, until they learned that the actual money came through him, when their manner sweetened wonderfully. This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left, and which she would only employ to please when it suited her purpose. They were like bad-tempered street-walkers, without walking the street.

She sat up straight, her back tight but strong, her head held high as she rode through the streets of Niran, looking fear in the face and putting it where it belonged. At her feet.

She sat up straight, her back tight but strong, her head held high as she rode through the streets of Niran, looking fear in the face and putting it where it belonged. At her feet.

She was no different from the photographers, or Chance’s parents, or the random fans passing in the street. Just another person publicly laying claim to Chance, in ways I wasn’t allowed to. He belonged to the whole world more than he belonged to me.

Maybe it wasn’t rational, but she didn’t like the idea of Leo invading her little world. Yesterday, Brooklyn had belonged to her. The Long Island ’burbs where she’d grown up had felt far away from the brick streets and renovated factory spaces of Brooklyn. In this job, she’d felt truly independent, putting down her own fragile roots in a new place. Fast forward twenty-four hours, and her daddy had joined the workplace and her ex-boyfriend had shown up to remind her of all that she’d lost. Really, a girl could be forgiven for feeling slightly hysterical. Not that there was any time to panic.

It was the end of a winter; this one was the winter of 2002-3. Elisabeth was eighteen. It was February. She had gone down to London to march in the protest. Not In Her Name. All across the country people had done the same thing and millions more people had all across the world. On the Monday after, she wandered through the city; strange to be walking streets where life was going on as normal, traffic and people going their usual backwards and forwards along streets that had had no traffic, had felt like they’d belonged to the two million people from their feet on the pavement all the way up to sky because of something to do with truth, when she’d walked the exact same route only the day before yesterday.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]

By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which we had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged more to me. Her psonality was not constantly escaping, as when we talked, by the outlets of her unacknowledged thoughts and of her eyes. She had called back into herself everything of her that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. In keeping her in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath. I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight, that was her sleep. So long as it lasted, I was free to dream about her and yet at the same time to look at her, and when that sleep grew deeper, to touch, to kiss her. What I felt then was a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious, as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures which are the beauties of nature. And indeed, as soon as her sleep became at all deep, she ceased to be merely the plant that she had been; her sleep,on the margin of which I remained musing, with a fresh delight of which I never tired, which I could have gone on enjoying indefinitely, was to me a whole lanscape. Her sleep brought within my reach something as serene, as sensually delicious as those nights of full moon on the bay of Balbec, calm as a lake over which the branches barely stir, where, stretched out upon the stand, one could listen for hours on end to the surf breaking and receding. On entering the room, I would remain standing in the doorway, not venturing to make a sound, and hearing none but that of her breath rising to expire upon her lips at regular intervals, like the reflux of the sea, but drowsier and softer. And at the moment when my ear absorbed that divine sound, I felt that there was condensed in it the whole person, the whole life of the charming captive outstretched there before my eyes. Carriages went rattling past in the street, but her brow remained as smooth and untroubled, her breath as light, reduced to the simple expulsion of the necessary quantity of air. Then, seeing that her sleep would not be disturbed, I would advance cautiously, sit down on the chair that stood by the bedside, then on the bed itself.

Oh, the river!' over and over again. 'I know it's like me!' she exclaimed. 'I know that I belong to it. I know that it's the natural company of such as I am! It comes from country places, where there was once no harm in it—and it creeps through the dismal streets, defiled and miserable—and it goes away, like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled—and I feel that I must go with it!

She was the first to discover that wood, gone green with decay, can be made, at some expense, into little boxes; she went into the question of funguses; she painted on china; emblazoned heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the tails of pigeons, produced wonderful effects "as of an aerial orchestra" when they flew through the air. To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit of investigating the proper way of cooking guinea pigs; but Lady Dorothy was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at luncheon in Charles Street.

I must have roamed dementedly about for a time in the streets. When I at last got back to my own place, Faustine was again there ahead of me, coiled torpid in the bed like a loathsome boa-constrictor. She was already in the never-never land where ghouls like her belonged. I covered her face with one of the pillows, pressed down upon it with the weight of my whole body, held it there until she should have been dead ten times over. Yet when I removed the pillow to look, the black of strangulation was missing from her face. She was still in that state of suspended animation that defied me, a taunting smile visible about her lips. I had a gun in my valise, from years before when I'd been on an engineering job in the jungles of Ecuador. I got it out, looked it over. It was still in good working order, although it only had one bullet left in it. That one would be enough. She wasn't going to escape me! I pressed the muzzle to her smooth white forehead, mid-center. "Die, damn you!" I growled, and pulled the trigger back. It exploded with a crash. A film of smoke hid her face from me for a minute. When it had cleared again, I looked. There was no bullet-hole in her skull! A black powder-smudge marked the point of contact. The gun dropped to the floor with a thud. That ineradicable smile still glimmered up at me, as if to say: "You see? You can't." I rubbed my finger over the black; the skin was unbroken underneath. A blank cartridge, that must have been it. I raised her head; there was a rent in the sheet under it. I probed through it with two fingers. I could feel the bullet lying imbedded down in the stuffing of the mattress. ("Vampire's Honeymoon)

The little Swallow is fond. It belongs, of course, to her life that some one should come here, take her in his arms, and then go away again. Then the sewing machine hums, another comes, the Swallow laughs, the Swallow weeps, and sews away for ever. —She casts a gay coverlet over the sewing machine, thereby transforming it from a nickel and steel creature of toil into a hillock of red and blue silk flowers. She does not want to be reminded now of the day. In her light, soft dress she nestles down in my arms; she chatters, she whispers and murmurs and sings. So slender and pale—half-starved she is too—and so light that one can easily carry her to the bed, the iron camp bed. Such a sweet air of surrender as she clings about one’s neck! She sighs and she smiles—a child with closed eyes—sighs and trembles and stammers a little bit. She breathes deep and she utters small cries. I look at her. I look again and again. I too would be so. Silently I ask, Is this it? Is this it? And the Swallow names me with all kinds of fair names and is embarrassed and tender and nestles close to me. And as I leave her, I ask, “Are you happy, little Swallow?” Then she kisses me many times and makes faces and waves and nods and nods. But I go down the stairs and am full of wonder. She is happy! How easily! —I can not understand. For is she not still another being, a life unto herself, wherein I can never come? Would she not still be so, though I came with all the fires of love? Ach, love—it is a torch falling into an abyss, revealing nothing but only how deep it is? I set off down the street to the station. This is not it; no, this is not it, either. One is only more alone there than ever. 3

Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade. "She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts." Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers. "On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia." The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić. The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone, in his act lay an ocean of hope.

Once upon a time there was a child who had a golden brain. His parents only discovered this by chance when he injured his head and gold instead of blood flowed out. They then began to look after him carefully and would not let him play with other children for fear of being robbed. When the boy was grown up and wanted to go out into the world, his mother said: “We have done so much for you,we ought to be able to share your wealth.” Then her son took a large piece of gold out of his brain and gave it to his mother. He lived in great style with a friend who, however, robbed him one night and ran away. After that the man resolved to guard his secret and to go out to work, because his reserves were visibly dwindling. One day he fell in love with a beautiful girl who loved him too, but no more than the beautiful clothes he gave her so lavishly. He married her and was very happy, but after two years she died and he spent the rest of his wealth on her funeral, which had to be splendid. Once, as he was creeping through the streets,weak,poor, and unhappy, he saw a beautiful little pair of boots that would have been perfect for his wife. He forgot that she was dead- perhaps because his emptied brain no longer worked- and entered the shop to buy the boots. But in that very moment he fell, and the shopkeeper saw a dead man lying on the ground. This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?

There was a strength that ran in her, something he'd known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he'd known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew - he remembered - as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

Entering the office, Evie found Sebastian and Cam on opposite sides of the desk. They both mulled over account ledgers, scratching out some entries with freshly inked pens, and making notations beside the long columns. Both men looked up as she crossed the threshold. Evie met Sebastian’s gaze only briefly; she found it hard to maintain her composure around him after the intimacy of the previous night. He paused in mid-sentence as he stared at her, seeming to forget what he had been saying to Cam. It seemed that neither of them was yet comfortable with feelings that were still too new and powerful. Murmuring good morning to them both, she bid them to remain seated, and she went to stand beside Sebastian’s chair. “Have you breakfasted yet, my lord?” she asked. Sebastian shook his head, a smile glinting in his eyes. “Not yet.” “I’ll go to the kitchen and see what is to be had.” “Stay a moment,” he urged. “We’re almost finished.” As the two men discussed a few last points of business, which pertained to a potential investment in a proposed shopping bazaar to be constructed on St. James Street, Sebastian picked up Evie’s hand, which was resting on the desk. Absently he drew the backs of her fingers against the edge of his jaw and his ear while contemplating the written proposal on the desk before him. Although Sebastian was not aware of what the casual familiarity of the gesture revealed, Evie felt her color rise as she met Cam’s gaze over her husband’s downbent head. The boy sent her a glance of mock reproof, like that of a nursemaid who had caught two children playing a kissing game, and he grinned as her blush heightened further. Oblivious to the byplay, Sebastian handed the proposal to Cam, who sobered instantly. “I don’t like the looks of this,” Sebastian commented. “It’s doubtful there will be enough business in the area to sustain an entire bazaar, especially at those rents. I suspect within a year it will turn into a white elephant.” “White elephant?” Evie asked. A new voice came from the doorway, belonging to Lord Westcliff. “A white elephant is a rare animal,” the earl replied, smiling, “that is not only expensive but difficult to maintain. Historically, when an ancient king wished to ruin someone he would gift him with a white elephant.” Stepping into the office, Westcliff bowed over Evie’s hand and spoke to Sebastian. “Your assessment of the proposed bazaar is correct, in my opinion. I was approached with the same investment opportunity not long ago, and I rejected it on the same grounds.” “No doubt we’ll both be proven wrong,” Sebastian said wryly. “One should never try to predict anything regarding women and their shopping.

I'm going to throw some suggestions at you now in rapid succession, assuming you are a father of one or more boys. Here we go: If you speak disparagingly of the opposite sex, or if you refer to females as sex objects, those attitudes will translate directly into dating and marital relationships later on. Remember that your goal is to prepare a boy to lead a family when he's grown and to show him how to earn the respect of those he serves. Tell him it is great to laugh and have fun with his friends, but advise him not to be "goofy." Guys who are goofy are not respected, and people, especially girls and women, do not follow boys and men whom they disrespect. Also, tell your son that he is never to hit a girl under any circumstances. Remind him that she is not as strong as he is and that she is deserving of his respect. Not only should he not hurt her, but he should protect her if she is threatened. When he is strolling along with a girl on the street, he should walk on the outside, nearer the cars. That is symbolic of his responsibility to take care of her. When he is on a date, he should pay for her food and entertainment. Also (and this is simply my opinion), girls should not call boys on the telephone-at least not until a committed relationship has developed. Guys must be the initiators, planning the dates and asking for the girl's company. Teach your son to open doors for girls and to help them with their coats or their chairs in a restaurant. When a guy goes to her house to pick up his date, tell him to get out of the car and knock on the door. Never honk. Teach him to stand, in formal situations, when a woman leaves the room or a table or when she returns. This is a way of showing respect for her. If he treats her like a lady, she will treat him like a man. It's a great plan. Make a concerted effort to teach sexual abstinence to your teenagers, just as you teach them to abstain from drug and alcohol usage and other harmful behavior. Of course you can do it! Young people are fully capable of understanding that irresponsible sex is not in their best interest and that it leads to disease, unwanted pregnancy, rejection, etc. In many cases today, no one is sharing this truth with teenagers. Parents are embarrassed to talk about sex, and, it disturbs me to say, churches are often unwilling to address the issue. That creates a vacuum into which liberal sex counselors have intruded to say, "We know you're going to have sex anyway, so why not do it right?" What a damning message that is. It is why herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases are spreading exponentially through the population and why unwanted pregnancies stalk school campuses. Despite these terrible social consequences, very little support is provided even for young people who are desperately looking for a valid reason to say no. They're told that "safe sex" is fine if they just use the right equipment. You as a father must counterbalance those messages at home. Tell your sons that there is no safety-no place to hide-when one lives in contradiction to the laws of God! Remind them repeatedly and emphatically of the biblical teaching about sexual immorality-and why someone who violates those laws not only hurts himself, but also wounds the girl and cheats the man she will eventually marry. Tell them not to take anything that doesn't belong to them-especially the moral purity of a woman.

That girl has been listening,” she said. The culprit snatched up her brush, and scrambled to her feet. She caught at the coal box and simply scuttled out of the room like a frightened rabbit. Sara felt rather hot-tempered. “I knew she was listening,” she said. “Why shouldn’t she?” Lavinia tossed her head with great elegance. “Well,” she remarked, “I do not know whether your mamma would like you to tell stories to servant girls, but I know my manna wouldn’t like me to do it.” “My mamma!” said Sara, looking odd. “I don’t believe she would mind in the least. She knows that stories belong to everybody.” “I thought,” retorted Lavinia, in severe recollection, “that your mamma was dead. How can she know things?” “Do you think she doesn’t know things?” said Sara, in her stern little voice. Sometimes she had a rather stern little voice. “Sara’s mamma knows everything,” piped in Lottie. “So does my mamma--’cept Sara is my mamma at Miss Minchin’s--my other one knows everything. The streets are shining, and there are fields and fields of lilies, and everybody gathers them. Sara tells me when she puts me to bed.” “You wicked thing,” said Lavinia, turning on Sara; “making fairy stories about heaven.” “There are much more splendid stories in Revelation,” returned Sara. “Just look and see! How do you know mine are fairy stories? But I can tell you”--with a fine bit of unheavenly temper--“you will never find out whether they are or not if you’re not kinder to people than you are now. Come along, Lottie.

Lilian was very soon well on her way into the mysterious retreat. The lure of the waters, the thought of the remote, unknown head of the valley, carried her forward. She was alone, excited, even happy in this craggy, tangled, gradually darkening, thoroughly wonderful, increasingly fascinating wild retreat. Here was her dear childhood again. Here was the original wholeness she had lost: fresh life, young knowledge of abundance, no inkling of loss or defeat. And here, at last (not in the lewd streets of the cities), her glorious beauty was clean, her life was clean, her sex. Like a growing, lovely flower, a supple shoot, a burgeoning tree, Lilian knew that this, this lovely mountain-womb, was her home; the world to which her radiant body belonged was this living world of the bursting flowers and the trees.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth,

Cassandra gave him a reproachful glance. “I thought you liked Mr. Severin.” “I do, absolutely. He occupies a high place on the list of things I don’t respect myself for liking, right between street food and filthy drinking songs.” Cassandra was aware that it had always been West’s habit—as well as Devon’s and Winterborne’s—to make sarcastic remarks about Tom Severin, in the way of longstanding friends. But it rankled now in a way it never had before. “After all Mr. Severin has done for our family,” she said quietly, “he deserves more respect than that.” They were all silent, darting surprised glances at her. Until that moment, Cassandra had never dared to utter one word of reproof to him. To West’s credit, he considered the point, and relented. “You’re right,” he said in a different tone. “I beg your pardon for being a facetious arse. But I know both of you well enough to be certain you don’t belong together.” Cassandra met his gaze without blinking. “Is it possible that Mr. Severin and I might know each other in a different way than you know either of us?” “Touché. Is it possible that you might think you know him far less than you actually do?” “Touché,” Cassandra replied reluctantly.

Dunia was a consummate whisperer, but she possessed, additionally, a rarer skill: the gift of listening, of approaching a sleeping man and placing her ear very gently against his chest and, by deciphering the secret language that the self speaks only to itself, discovering his heart’s desire. As she listened to Geronimo Manezes, she heard first his most predictable wishes, please let me sink down towards the earth so that my feet touch solid ground again, and beneath that the sadder unfulfillable wishes of old age, let me be young again, give me back the strength of youth and the confidence that life is long, and beneath that the dreams of the displaced, let me belong again to that faraway place I left so long ago, from which I am alienated, and which has forgotten me, in which I am an alien now even though it was the place where I began, let me belong again, walk those streets knowing they are mine, knowing that my story is a part of the story of those streets, even though it isn’t, it hasn’t been for most of a lifetime, let it be so, let it be so, let me see French cricket being played and listen to music at the bandstand and hear once more the children’s back-street rhymes. Still she listened and then she heard it, below everything else, the deepest note of his heart’s music, and she knew what she must do. —

I was never good at the future. I grew up with girls whose chief occupation was the future—designing it, instigating it. They could talk about it with so much confidence that it sounded like the past. During those talks, I had contributed nothing. I had visions, too abstract and flat for me to hang on to. For years I saw a generic city lit up at night. I would use those remote, artificial lights to soothe myself to sleep. One day I was quitting my job with no sense of exhilaration, one day I was leaving a note for my father, pulling out of his driveway, slightly bewildered, and two days later I was sitting in front of Howard. That was the way the future came to me. The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn’t look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn’t call to mind. She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.

You’re awfully quiet,” Travis said, glancing up from the road. “Are you falling asleep on me?” “Not yet.” Cat swallowed a yawn. “Just thinking.” “About what?” “This and that. Mostly that.” Travis smiled. “Sounds important.” Cat gave up and yawned openly. “Nope. You’ve unraveled my brain.” He changed lanes to pass a huge motor home that belonged on the multilane interstate highway, not on Laguna’s crowded street. She enjoyed watching him control the car with ease and precision. When he downshifted, sunlight ran like gold water over the tawny hair on his arm. As he transferred his grip from gearshift to steering wheel, the tendons on the back of his hand moved beneath tanned skin. His fingers closed firmly over the leather-sheathed wheel. Cat remembered the intense pleasure Travis could give to her with a simple caress. Sudden, stark need coursed through her, leaving her shaken. She wanted to touch him, taste him, take him so deeply into her body that she could feel every wild pulse of his release. “If you keep looking at me like that,” Travis said, “I’m going to pull over to the side of the road and do things to you that will get us arrested.” His husky drawl did nothing to cool Cat’s blood. She looked away from his knowing hands to his lips smiling beneath his tawny mustache. She remembered the feel of his beard sliding down her skin, the exciting silky roughness against her neck, her breasts, her stomach. She wondered what it would be like to feel him . . . everywhere. With a small groan Cat closed her eyes. “What am I going to do with you?” “I’ll pull over so we can find out.” “Not a good idea.” “Chicken.” “Cluck cluck. I can’t afford bail.” “I can.” “They’ll put us in separate cells.” “Damn. I didn’t think of that.

When my best friend came to say goodbye the day before I went into exile—we embraced thinking we would never see each other again because I would never be allowed to return to Romania and she would never be able to leave the country—we couldn't bear to let go of each other. She walked out of the door three times and returned each time. Only after the third time did she leave me, walking straight down the street. I could see her pale jacket getting smaller and smaller and, in a strange way, brighter and brighter the more distant it became. I don't know if it was the winter sunshine of that February day, or the tears making my eyes glisten, or perhaps her jacket was made of some shiny fabric, but one thing I know for sure: as I watched her walk away her back glittered like a silver spoon. In this way, intuitively, I was able to put our parting into words. And that is also the best description of that moment. But what does a silver spoon have to do with a jacket? Nothing at all. Nor does it have anything to do with parting. Yet as a poetic image the spoon and the jacket need one another. That is why I am mistrustful of language. I know from my own experience that to be accurate, language must always usurp something that doesn't belong to it. I keep asking myself what makes verbal images such thieves, why the most apt comparison appropriates qualities that don't belong to it. To get closer to reality we need to catch the imagination unawares. Only when one perception plunders another, when an object snatches material that belongs to another and starts to exploit it—only when things that in reality are mutually exclusive become plausible in a sentence can the sentence hold its own against reality. I am happy when I succeed in doing that.

I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood -- she was already almost a block away -- so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they'd written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it's the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don't? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don't calmly think, as you're scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before teaching class before reassuring people their hard lives would only get harder, Fuck this whole existence. You're running down the street and you're screaming at a university to which you no longer belong, you're wearing a sweatshirt not even branded with the insignia of the university on which you blame your breakdown, the university to which you are no longer affiliated, because you are so deeply unaffiliated that you are barely even affiliated with your own face.

Why should I side with you? Why should I care if you win?” The phouka raked fingers through his hair. “You have seen one of them, one of their forms. That is what seeks domination over every natural thing in this place. We of the Seelie Court are capricious, and not always well-disposed toward humankind. But would you hand this city over to the likes of what you saw tonight? That is the Unseelie Court. If we fall, every park, every boulevard tree, every grassy lawn would be their dwelling place.” Eddi sighed. “It’s not just for you, it’s for the entire seven-country metro area. Couldn’t we just let them have St. Paul?” The phouka made a disgusted noise. “All right. What if they did take over? Would we all be eaten in our beds?” He shook his head. “There are places,” he began slowly, “that belong to them. Have you ever passed through some small town, surrounded by fertile country and fed by commerce, that seemed to be rotting away even as you watched? Where the houses and the people were faded, and all the storefronts stood empty?” Eddi remembered a few. “Or a city whose new buildings looked tawdry, whose old ones were ramshackle, where the streets were grimy and the wind was never fresh, where money passed from hand to hand yet benefited no one?” His words were quicker now. “This city is alive with the best magic of mortal folk. The very light off the skyscrapers and the lakes vibrate with it. If the Unseelie Court takes up residence here, this will be a place where people fear their neighbors, where life drains the living until art and wit are luxuries, where any pleasant thing must be imported and soon loses its savor.” He fell silent, as if embarrassed by his own eloquence. Eddi rubbed her hands over her face, trying to rub away her confusion, her anger, her fear. Finally she asked the only question she had left. “Can’t you get somebody else?” The phouka began to laugh weakly. “Oh, go to bed, Eddi McCandry. You could befuddle a stone. Go to bed, and sleep soundly, and tempt me not into some foolish flap of the tongue.

You wonder what had happened, when a feller like that, in a place like that, talked of a childhood that might have as easily belonged to a millionaire, a lawyer, a schoolteacher, you. You had to think he was defective somehow, or had fucked up not once, not twice, but again and again, a peculiar resolve to his life. That was the thing, that resolve. We didn’t credit it. You looked at him and your brain said he was on the losing end of one of the two bargains that America made with you. There was the romantic one, that of the rambler, the man out seeking his destiny, living by his wits, all that horseshit. Then there was the classical American dare, that you could risk all, take an internal grudge and make of it a billion dollars and get a monumental tomb in the bargain. But the truth was neither. America was a grindstone. She used those notions as twin abrasives to wear you down into a dutiful drudge walking the straight and narrow. But there was something in the hearts of the some men, some of whom became Fritz, that wouldn’t accept that. These men in crummy bars, some of them, most of them, they were main-chance fellers. You could take ten of these wrecks and offer them a salesman’s job, a dozen white shirts and ties, forty Gs a year and perks, a neat house on a quiet street, a yard, a car, a dog, a wife, an expense account, a Chinese laundryman, membership in a church, grandkids who’d bounce on their knees, and you’d be lucky if one or two took you up on it. And those two would be the most defeated, the most broken and worn down. Take the same ten and offer them eight dollars a day to be litter bearers on a great adventure, a hike after a lost civilization, a one in hundred shot at survival, a one in thousand shot at a fabulous fortune of jewels and gold, and if you provided rum along the way, nine of the ten would sign up. I guarantee it. I guarantee too that the one or two who took the salesman’s job—within a year or two or three, he’d be fucking up again and again, no matter how many chances you gave him. He’s a main-chance feller, and even if he didn’t have the brains or the luck to make it work, he still couldn’t abide the line others toed, even if he couldn’t think of anything else to do with his life but the miserable American two step—toe the line, fuck up, toe the line, fuck up....

When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.

FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND What exactly do you mean by “watching the thinker”? When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.

As Frank promised, there was no other public explosion. Still. The multiple times when she came home to find him idle again, just sitting on the sofa staring at the rug, were unnerving. She tried; she really tried. But every bit of housework—however minor—was hers: his clothes scattered on the floor, food-encrusted dishes in the sink, ketchup bottles left open, beard hair in the drain, waterlogged towels bunched on bathroom tiles. Lily could go on and on. And did. Complaints grew into one-sided arguments, since he wouldn’t engage. “Where were you?” “Just out.” “Out where?” “Down the street.” Bar? Barbershop? Pool hall. He certainly wasn’t sitting in the park. “Frank, could you rinse the milk bottles before you put them on the stoop?” “Sorry. I’ll do it now.” “Too late. I’ve done it already. You know, I can’t do everything.” “Nobody can.” “But you can do something, can’t you?” “Lily, please. I’ll do anything you want.” “What I want? This place is ours.” The fog of displeasure surrounding Lily thickened. Her resentment was justified by his clear indifference, along with his combination of need and irresponsibility. Their bed work, once so downright good to a young woman who had known no other, became a duty. On that snowy day when he asked to borrow all that money to take care of his sick sister in Georgia, Lily’s disgust fought with relief and lost. She picked up the dog tags he’d left on the bathroom sink and hid them away in a drawer next to her bankbook. Now the apartment was all hers to clean properly, put things where they belonged, and wake up knowing they’d not been moved or smashed to pieces. The loneliness she felt before Frank walked her home from Wang’s cleaners began to dissolve and in its place a shiver of freedom, of earned solitude, of choosing the wall she wanted to break through, minus the burden of shouldering a tilted man. Unobstructed and undistracted, she could get serious and develop a plan to match her ambition and succeed. That was what her parents had taught her and what she had promised them: To choose, they insisted, and not ever be moved. Let no insult or slight knock her off her ground. Or, as her father was fond of misquoting, “Gather up your loins, daughter. You named Lillian Florence Jones after my mother. A tougher lady never lived. Find your talent and drive it.” The afternoon Frank left, Lily moved to the front window, startled to see heavy snowflakes powdering the street. She decided to shop right away in case the weather became an impediment. Once outside, she spotted a leather change purse on the sidewalk. Opening it she saw it was full of coins—mostly quarters and fifty-cent pieces. Immediately she wondered if anybody was watching her. Did the curtains across the street shift a little? The passengers in the car rolling by—did they see? Lily closed the purse and placed it on the porch post. When she returned with a shopping bag full of emergency food and supplies the purse was still there, though covered in a fluff of snow. Lily didn’t look around. Casually she scooped it up and dropped it into the groceries. Later, spread out on the side of the bed where Frank had slept, the coins, cold and bright, seemed a perfectly fair trade. In Frank Money’s empty space real money glittered. Who could mistake a sign that clear? Not Lillian Florence Jones.

These Claudines, then…they want to know because they believe they already do know, the way one who loves fruit knows, when offered a mango from the moon, what to expect; and they expect the loyal tender teasing affection of the schoolgirl crush to continue: the close and confiding companionship, the pleasure of the undemanding caress, the cuddle which consummates only closeness; yet in addition they want motherly putting right, fatherly forgiveness and almost papal indulgence; they expect that the sights and sounds, the glorious affairs of the world which their husbands will now bring before them gleaming like bolts of silk, will belong to the same happy activities as catching toads, peeling back tree bark, or powdering the cheeks with dandelions and oranging the nose; that music will ravish the ear the way the trill of the blackbird does; that literature will hold the mind in sweet suspense the way fairy tales once did; that paintings will crowd the eye with the delights of a colorful garden, and the city streets will be filled with the same cool dew-moist country morning air they fed on as children. But they shall not receive what they expect; the tongue will be about other business; one will hear in masterpieces only pride and bitter contention; buildings will have grandeur but no flowerpots or chickens; and these Claudines will exchange the flushed cheek for the swollen vein, and instead of companionship, they will get sex and absurd games composed of pinch, leer, and giggle—that’s what will happen to “let’s pretend.” 'The great male will disappear into the jungle like the back of an elusive ape, and Claudine shall see little of his strength again, his intelligence or industry, his heroics on the Bourse like Horatio at the bridge (didn’t Colette see Henri de Jouvenel, editor and diplomat and duelist and hero of the war, away to work each day, and didn’t he often bring his mistress home with him, as Willy had when he was husband number one?); the great affairs of the world will turn into tawdry liaisons, important meetings into assignations, deals into vulgar dealings, and the en famille hero will be weary and whining and weak, reminding her of all those dumb boys she knew as a child, selfish, full of fat and vanity like patrons waiting to be served and humored, admired and not observed. 'Is the occasional orgasm sufficient compensation? Is it the prize of pure surrender, what’s gained from all that giving up? There’ll be silk stockings and velvet sofas maybe, the customary caviar, tasting at first of frog water but later of money and the secretions of sex, then divine champagne, the supreme soda, and rubber-tired rides through the Bois de Boulogne; perhaps there’ll be rich ugly friends, ritzy at homes, a few young men with whom one may flirt, a homosexual confidant with long fingers, soft skin, and a beautiful cravat, perfumes and powders of an unimaginable subtlety with which to dust and wet the body, many deep baths, bonbons filled with sweet liqueurs, a procession of mildly salacious and sentimental books by Paul de Kock and company—good heavens, what’s the problem?—new uses for the limbs, a tantalizing glimpse of the abyss, the latest sins, envy certainly, a little spite, jealousy like a vaginal itch, and perfect boredom. 'And the mirror, like justice, is your aid but never your friend.' -- From "Three Photos of Colette," The World Within the Word, reprinted from NYRB April 1977

In fact, I am generally proud of having had so many adventures. But today, I had barely pronounced the words than I was seized with contrition; it seems as though I am lying, that I have never had the slightest adventure in my life, or rather, that I don't even know what the word means any more. [...] Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures. It isn't a question of words; I am beginning to understand. [...] There is nothing brilliant about my life now: but from time to time, for example, for example, when they play music in the cafes, I look back and tell myself: in old days, in London, Meknes, Tokyo, I have known great moments, I have had adventures. Now I am deprived of this. I have suddenly learned, without apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. [...] ... adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makese sense when dead. [...] Each instant appears only as a part of a sequence. I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplacable-and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated. [...] I shall never rediscover either this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn on early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass. All of a sudden something breaks off sharply. The adventure is over, time resumes its daily routine. I turn; behind me, this beautiful melodious form sinks entirely into the past. It grows smaller, contracts as it declines, and now the end makes one with the beginning. Following this gold spot with my eyes I think I would accept-even if I had to risk death, lost a fortune, a friend-to live it all over again, in the same circumstances, from end to end. But an adventure never returns nor is prolonged." (p.56-57) "... Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life? [...] This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather they way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you *in* the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content. You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you *see* her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure. If I remember correctly, they call that the irreversibility of time. The feeling of advanture would simply be that of the irreversibility of time. But why don't we always have it? Is it that time is not always irreversible? There are moments when you have the impression that you can do what you want, go forward or backward, that it has no importance; and then other times when you might say that the links have been tightened and, in that case, it's not a questino of missing your turn because you could never start again.

I don’t…believe you,” she lied, her blood running wild through her veins. His gleaming gaze impaled her. “Then believe this.” And suddenly his mouth was on hers. This was not what she’d set out to get from him. But oh, the joy of it. The heat of it. His mouth covered hers, seeking, coaxing. Without breaking the kiss, he pushed her back against the wall, and she grabbed for his shoulders, his surprisingly broad and muscular shoulders. As he sent her plummeting into unfamiliar territory, she held on for dear life. Time rewound to when they were in her uncle’s garden, sneaking a moment alone. But this time there was no hesitation, no fear of being caught. Glorying in that, she slid her hands about his neck to bring him closer. He groaned, and his kiss turned intimate. He used lips and tongue, delving inside her mouth in a tender exploration that stunned her. Enchanted her. Confused her. Something both sweet and alien pooled in her belly, a kind of yearning she’d never felt with Edwin. With any man but Dom. As if he sensed it, he pulled back to look at her, his eyes searching hers, full of surprise. “My God, Jane,” he said hoarsely, turning her name into a prayer. Or a curse? She had no time to figure out which before he clasped her head to hold her for another darkly ravishing kiss. Only this one was greedier, needier. His mouth consumed hers with all the boldness of Viking raiders of yore. His tongue drove repeatedly inside in a rhythm that made her feel all trembly and hot, and his thumbs caressed her throat, rousing the pulse there. Thank heaven there was a wall to hold her up, or she was quite sure she would dissolve into a puddle at his feet. Because after all these years apart, he was riding roughshod over her life again. And she was letting him. How could she not? His scent of leather and bergamot engulfed her, made her dizzy with the pleasure of it. He roused urges she’d never known she had, sparked fires in places she’d thought were frozen. Then his hands swept down her possessively as if to memorize her body…or mark it as belonging to him. Belonging to him. Oh, Lord! She shoved him away. How could she have fallen for his kisses after what he’d done? How could she have let him slip that far under her guard? Never again, curse him! Never! For a moment, he looked as stunned by what had flared between them as she. Then he reached for her, and she slipped from between him and the wall, panic rising in her chest. “You do not have the right to kiss me anymore,” she hissed. “I’m engaged, for pity’s sake!” As soon as her words registered, his eyes went cold. “It certainly took you long enough to remember it.” She gaped at him. “You have the audacity to…to…” She stabbed his shoulder with one finger. “You have no business criticizing me! You threw me away years ago, and now you want to just…just take me up again, as if nothing ever happened between us?” A shadow crossed his face. “I did not throw you away. You jilted me, remember?” That was the last straw. “Right. I jilted you.” Turning on her heel, she stalked back toward the road. “Just keep telling yourself that, since you’re obviously determined to believe your own fiction.” “Fiction?” He hurried after her. “What are you talking about?” “Oh, why can’t you just admit what you really did and be done with it?” Grabbing her by the arm, he forced her to stop just short of the street. He stared into her face, and she could see when awareness dawned in his eyes. “Good God. You know the truth. You know what really happened in the library that night.” “That you manufactured that dalliance between you and Nancy to force me into jilting you?” She snatched her arm free. “Yes, I know.” Then she strode out of the alley, leaving him to stew in his own juices.

Luna left, too, with a cheery, “Thanks for the morning entertainment. That provided a better jolt than a cup of espresso.” Then it was just Arabella, her brother, and the really, really big man, who had just turned his gaze on her. Given his threats and violent solution, Arabella should have been quaking. At the very least staring at her toes lest she incur his wrath. But the gentlest blue eyes caught hers, and his tone was soft and soothing when he addressed her. “You must be Arabella. I’m Leo, the pride’s omega.” “More like enforcer,” Jeoff muttered, still rubbing his head. “If you behave, then I don’t have to resort to my methods.” “He started it,” Jeoff accused, pointing at finger at Hayder, who emerged from the bedroom clad in low-hipped jeans that hugged his corded thighs and a soft T-shirt that clung to his chest. “Hey, it’s not my fault you jumped to the wrong conclusion when I answered the door.” “What else was I to think? You’re in my sister’s condo wearing only a rag.” “Protecting her.” “The same way you protected her last night when you took her out and flaunted her?” “I took her to dinner.” “What the hell do you mean you took her out to dinner? You put my baby sister in danger.” “She wasn’t in danger.” “They snatched her off the street!” “And I got her back.” The men glared at each, toe-to-toe, bodies bristling. Leo, who’d seated himself on a stool by the kitchen island, cleared his throat. “Don’t make me get off this stool.” The tension remained, but the impending violence moved down a few notches. Seeming satisfied, Leo turned to her. “Coffee?” He addressed that to Arabella, holding out a cup he’d brewed from the machine on the counter. With a wary look at both Hayder and her brother, she went toward him but then almost scalded herself when Hayder barked, “Baby, where are your pants?” Oh yeah. She peeked down at her bare legs. To his credit, Leo didn’t, but he did smile. “How about I add some sugar and milk to this while you find some pants? You look like you need something sweet.” She couldn’t help but return his smile. “Yes, please.” Still ignoring the other two men, she stepped past them to the bedroom, where she scrounged in a drawer for pants. As she dressed, she listened to the arguing. “She’s leaving with me.” Her brother hadn’t relented. Neither did Hayder. “Wrong. Arabella isn’t going anywhere.” Ouch. She knew her brother wouldn’t like that. She was right. “Excuse me? You don’t get a say. She’s my sister, my responsibility. I’m taking her.” Arabella stepped back into the living room. “What of the danger though, Jeoff? The pack is in town, and they’re looking for me.” “We’ll figure something out.” “We already have. She’ll stay here with me where she’s safe.” Hayder crossed his arms over his impressive chest, looking much too determined— and sexy. A certain brother wasn’t impressed. “As safe as she was last night?” Hayder rolled his eyes. “Oh please. What part of ‘we had the situation under control’ can you not grasp? Leo, tell the wolf that Arabella was never in any danger.” “I don’t lie to my friends,” Leo said as he re-handed Arabella her coffee. She took a sip of the hot brew and sighed as she listened to the arguing. When Leo patted the stool beside him, she hopped on. For such a big man, he offered a strangely calming effect. On her at least. Hayder and Jeoff, on the other hand, just couldn’t stem their tirade. “I was wrong to stick her here. So you can forget I asked.” “Too late. She’s part of the pride now.” “She’s a wolf, or have you forgotten? She belongs with her own kind.” Jeoff crooked his finger at her and inclined his head to the door. Arabella didn’t move, more because Hayder’s next words froze her. “She belongs with me. Arabella is my mate.

If you’d convinced Nancy to marry you, you might not have had to go off to be a Bow Street runner. You could have had an easier life, a better life in high society than you could have had with me if you’d married me. Without being able to access my fortune, I could only have dragged you down.” “You don’t really believe that I wanted to marry her for her money,” he gritted out. “It’s either that or assume that you fell madly in love with her in the few weeks we were apart.” They were nearly to the inn now, so she added a plaintive note to her voice. “Or perhaps it was her you wanted all along. You knew my uncle would never accept a second son as a husband for his rich heiress of a daughter, so you courted me to get close to her. Nancy was always so beautiful, so--” “Enough!” Without warning, he dragged her into one of the many alleyways that crisscrossed York. This one was deeply shadowed, the houses leaning into each other overhead, and as he pulled her around to face him, the brilliance of his eyes shone starkly in the dim light. “I never cared one whit about Nancy.” She tamped down her triumph--he hadn’t admitted the whole truth yet. “It certainly didn’t look that way to me. It looked like you had already forgotten me, forgotten what we meant to each--” “The hell I had.” He shoved his face close to hers. “I never forgot you for one day, one hour, one moment. It was you--always you. Everything I did was for you, damn it. No one else.” The passionate profession threw her off course. Dom had never been the sort to say such sweet things. But the fervent look in his eyes roused memories of how he used to look at her. And his hands gripping her arms, his body angling in closer, were so painfully familiar... “I don’t…believe you,” she lied, her blood running wild through her veins. His gleaming gaze impaled her. “Then believe this.” And suddenly his mouth was on hers. This was not what she’d set out to get from him. But oh, the joy of it. The heat of it. His mouth covered hers, seeking, coaxing. Without breaking the kiss, he pushed her back against the wall, and she grabbed for his shoulders, his surprisingly broad and muscular shoulders. As he sent her plummeting into unfamiliar territory, she held on for dear life. Time rewound to when they were in her uncle’s garden, sneaking a moment alone. But this time there was no hesitation, no fear of being caught. Glorying in that, she slid her hands about his neck to bring him closer. He groaned, and his kiss turned intimate. He used lips and tongue, delving inside her mouth in a tender exploration that stunned her. Enchanted her. Confused her. Something both sweet and alien pooled in her belly, a kind of yearning she’d never felt with Edwin. With any man but Dom. As if he sensed it, he pulled back to look at her, his eyes searching hers, full of surprise. “My God, Jane,” he said hoarsely, turning her name into a prayer. Or a curse? She had no time to figure out which before he clasped her head to hold her for another darkly ravishing kiss. Only this one was greedier, needier. His mouth consumed hers with all the boldness of Viking raiders of yore. His tongue drove repeatedly inside in a rhythm that made her feel all trembly and hot, and his thumbs caressed her throat, rousing the pulse there. Thank heaven there was a wall to hold her up, or she was quite sure she would dissolve into a puddle at his feet. Because after all these years apart, he was riding roughshod over her life again. And she was letting him. How could she not? His scent of leather and bergamot engulfed her, made her dizzy with the pleasure of it. He roused urges she’d never known she had, sparked fires in places she’d thought were frozen. Then his hands swept down her possessively as if to memorize her body…or mark it as belonging to him. Belonging to him.

Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade. "She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts." Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers. "On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia." The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić. The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone. In his act lay an ocean of hope.

You'll let me bed you in return for my money and protection," he said, as if the word mistress required definition. He threw a cautious glance at her. "You will live with me, and accompany me in public, regardless of the shame it causes you. Is that what you're saying?" Her cheeks turned bright red, but she did not look away from him. "Yes." Desire flooded every part of his body with primal heat. The realization that he was going to have her, that she would give herself to him willingly, made him light-headed. His mistress... but that wasn't enough. He needed more of her. All of her. Deliberately he went to the settee, a somewhat utilitarian piece upholstered in stiff burgundy leather, and he sat with his legs spread. He let his gaze travel over her with pure sexual appraisal. "Before I agree to anything, I want a sample of what you're offering." She stiffened. "I think you've sampled quite enough already." "You're referring to our interlude in the woods this evening?" He made his voice very soft, while his heart pounded violently in his chest. "That was nothing, Lottie. I want more than a few innocent kisses from you. Keeping a mistress can be an expensive proposition- you'll have to prove that you're worth it." She came to him slowly, her slim form silhouetted in the firelight. Clearly she knew that he was playing some kind of game with her, but she hadn't yet realized what the stakes were. "What do you want from me?" she asked softly. What he'd had from Gemma. No, more than Gemma had ever given him. He wanted someone to belong to him. To care about him. To need him in some way. He didn't know if that was possible... but he was willing to gamble everything on Lottie. She was his only chance. "I'll show you.

Ease up on the reins,” Kathleen said. “Just give the horse more slack and let him pick his way through.” West complied immediately. “Would a bit more advice be unwelcome?” she dared to ask. “Fire away.” “You tend to slouch in the saddle. That makes it difficult for you to follow the horse’s motion, and it will make your back sore later. If you sit tall and relaxed…yes, like that…now you’re centered.” “Thank you.” Kathleen smiled, pleased by his willingness to take direction from a woman. “You don’t ride badly. With regular practice, you would be quite proficient.” She paused. “I take it you don’t ride often in town?” “No, I travel by foot or hackney.” “But your brother…” Kathleen began, thinking of Devon’s assured horsemanship. “He rides every morning. A big dapple gray that’s as mean as the devil if it goes one day without hard exercise.” A pause. “They have that in common.” “So that’s why Trenear is so fit,” Kathleen murmured. “It doesn’t stop at riding. He belongs to a pugilism club where they batter each other senseless, in the savate style.” “What is that?” “A kind of fighting that developed in the streets of Old Paris. Quite vicious. My brother secretly hopes to be attacked by ruffians someday, but so far, no luck.

A bag lady of indeterminate race pushed her belongings in a cart, on top of which she had balanced a broken-legged plastic chair and a bag full of returnable bottles she was plucking out of garbage cans. At one garbage can, she reached right between the legs of a black man who had draped himself like a corpse over the wire mesh. His snores blended into the throbbing from dozens of radios passing by on people’s shoulders. A tall, dramatic woman with remarkably high heels strode by, and as she passed, Stephen thought, That’s a man! He would have given this some consideration except that as they waited to cross the next street, he stood next to an unshaven and filthy white person, from whose toothless gums hung long yellow strands of some terrible food or disease.

the path of those belonging to the Church circumscribes the whole world, as possessing the sure tradition from the apostles, and gives unto us to see that the faith of all is one and the same, since all receive one and the same God the Father, and believe in the same dispensation regarding the incarnation of the Son of God, and are cognizant of the same gift of the Spirit, and are conversant with the same commandments, and preserve the same form of ecclesiastical constitution, and expect the same advent of the Lord, and await the same salvation of the complete man, that is, of the soul and body. And undoubtedly the preaching of the Church is true and stedfast, in which one and the same way of salvation is shown throughout the whole world. For to her is entrusted the light of God; and therefore the “wisdom” of God, by means of which she saves all men, “is declared in [its] going forth; it uttereth [its voice] faithfully in the streets, is preached on the tops of the walls, and speaks continually in the gates of the city.” For the Church preaches the truth everywhere, and she is the seven-branched candlestick which bears the light of Christ.

In many societies women were simply the property of men, most often their fathers, husbands or brothers. Rape, in many legal systems, falls under property violation – in other words, the victim is not the woman who was raped but the male who owns her. This being the case, the legal remedy was the transfer of ownership – the rapist was required to pay a bride price to the woman’s father or brother, upon which she became the rapist’s property. The Bible decrees that ‘If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife’ (Deuteronomy 22:28–9). The ancient Hebrews considered this a reasonable arrangement. Raping a woman who did not belong to any man was not considered a crime at all, just as picking up a lost coin on a busy street is not considered theft. And if a husband raped his own wife, he had committed no crime. In fact, the idea that a husband could rape his wife was an oxymoron. To be a husband was to have full control of your wife’s sexuality. To say that a husband ‘raped’ his wife was as illogical as saying that a man stole his own wallet. Such thinking was not confined to the ancient Middle East. As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife. Even in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.

Despite every mathematical improbability, we had been waiting for each other. Passing each other in coffeehouses, on the streets of Beacon Hill, and on beaches of Cape Cod, waiting for the moment when our universes collided. Until she fell into my arms. We belonged to each other.

At first I felt something like an oppressed anxiety when I was near the little sick girl, which later changed into pious and reverential awe in face of this dumb and strangely moving suffering. Whenever I saw her, an obscure sensation would arise in me that she must surely die. And then I grew afraid to look her in the face. Whenever I roamed the forests during the day, feeling so joyful in this solitude and peace, when I stretched out wearily on the moss and gazed for hours together into the bright, shimmering sky, into whose very depths one could see, when a strange and profound sense of joy thrilled me, I would suddenly think of the sick Maria - then I would get up and roam aimlessly about, overwhelmed by inexplicable thoughts and feel a dull pressure in my head and my heart which brought me to the verge of tears. At times when I walked in the evening along the dusty main street which was filled with the scent of the blossoming lime and watched whispering couples as they stood in the shadows of the trees; when I saw two people pressed close together as though they were one being, sauntering slowly beside the fountain as it quietly played in the moolight, and a feverish thrill of presentiment coursed through me as I thought of poor sick Maria; then I was seized by a quiet yearning for something inexplicable and all at once I saw myself strolling arm in arm with her in the shade of the fragrant lime trees. And a strange radiance shone from Maria's great dark eyes, and the moon made her slender little face appear still paler and more transparent. Then I fled upstairs into my attic, leaned against the window, looked up into the deep dark heavens where the stars appeared to have gone out and for hours abandoned myself to formless and confusing dreams until overcome by sleep. And yet - and yet I did not exchange so much as ten words with poor sick Maria. She never spoke. I would only sit at her side for hours gazing into her sick, suffering face, feeling ever and again that she must die. In the garden I lay in the grass and breathed in the fragrance of a thousand flowers; my eye was intoxicated by the gleaming colours of blossoms flooded with sunlight, and I listened too for the silence in the air above, interrupted only by the mating call of a bird. I sensed the ferment of the fruitful, torrid earth, that mysterious sound of ever-creative life. I could then darkly feel the greatness and beauty of life. Then it semed to me as if life belonged to me. But then my eye lit upon the bay-window of the house. I could see the sick Maria sitting there - silent and motionless and with closed eyes. And all my thinking was again drawn to the suffering of this being and remained there - became a painful but shyly conceded yearning which struck me as puzzling and confusing. And I left the garden timidly, silently, as though I had no right to linger in this temple.

At the next street-lamp, she sees a woman with painted lips and smudged eyes waiting in a doorway. A hansom cab drives up, stops, and a man in a tail coat and a shining silk top-hat gets out. Even though the woman in the doorway wears a low-cut evening gown that might once have belonged to a lady of the gentleman’s social class, the black-clad watcher does not think the gentleman is here to go dancing. She sees the prostitute’s haggard eyes, haunted with fear no matter how much her red-smeared lips smile. One like her was recently found dead a few streets away, slit wide open. Averting her gaze, the searcher in black walks on. An unshaven man lounging against a wall winks at her. “Missus, what yer doing all alone? Don’t yer want some company?” If he were a gentleman, he would not have spoken to her without being introduced. Ignoring him, she hastens past. She must speak to no one. She does not belong here. The knowledge does not trouble her, for she has never belonged anywhere. And in a sense she has always been alone. But her heart is not without pain as she scans the shadows, for she has no home now, she is a stranger in the world’s

All my life,” she said in a sweet confidential voice, “I’ve been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid. “And now, in this darkness, I fear nothing. If you were to leave me here, I would feel nothing. I would walk as I am walking now. As a man, you can’t know what I mean by what I say. You can’t know a woman’s vulnerability. You can’t know the sense of power that belongs to me now.

Darling one…” She wraps an arm around my shoulders. “Every child must eventually leave. Sometimes, it is to a house down the street. Other times, it is to somewhere very far away. But if that child ends up where they belong, and are happy and loved…that’s all a parent wants.

No one would doubt that I love my children, and even a quantitative social psychologist would find no fault with my list of loving behaviors: nurturing health and well-being protection from harm encouraging individual growth and development desire to be together generous sharing of resources working together for a common goal celebration of shared values interdependence sacrifice by one for the other creation of beauty If we observed these behaviors between humans, we would say, “She loves that person.” You might also observe these actions between a person and a bit of carefully tended ground and say, “She loves that garden.” Why then, seeing this list, would you not make the leap to say that the garden loves her back? The exchange between plants and people has shaped the evolutionary history of both. Farms, orchards, and vineyards are stocked with species we have domesticated. Our appetite for their fruits leads us to till, prune, irrigate, fertilize, and weed on their behalf. Perhaps they have domesticated us. Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming. We are linked in a co-evolutionary circle. The sweeter the peach, the more frequently we disperse its seeds, nurture its young, and protect them from harm. Food plants and people act as selective forces on each other’s evolution—the thriving of one in the best interest of the other. This, to me, sounds a bit like love. I sat once in a graduate writing workshop on relationships to the land. The students all demonstrated a deep respect and affection for nature. They said that nature was the place where they experienced the greatest sense of belonging and well-being. They professed without reservation that they loved the earth. And then I asked them, “Do you think that the earth loves you back?” No one was willing to answer that. It was as if I had brought a two-headed porcupine into the classroom. Unexpected. Prickly. They backed slowly away. Here was a room full of writers, passionately wallowing in unrequited love of nature. So I made it hypothetical and asked, “What do you suppose would happen if people believed this crazy notion that the earth loved them back?” The floodgates opened. They all wanted to talk at once. We were suddenly off the deep end, heading for world peace and perfect harmony. One student summed it up: “You wouldn’t harm what gives you love.” Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.

Brennan credited his time in the army with shaping his deep suspicion of government. While he was fighting at the front, his draft board sent a letter to his home stating he would be fined and imprisoned if he did not turn up for his physical. “Just goes to show how much the government knows about what’s going on,” he said. On April 4, 1919, Walter Brennan was one of six thousand returning troops that Governor Calvin Coolidge saluted as their ship docked. Six days later, while the demobbed Brennan was marching in a Swampscott parade, he spotted Ruth Wells, the daughter Lynn’s local sheriff, crossing the street. Walter’s and Ruth’s families knew one another, but Walter, three years older than Ruth, had not paid that much attention to her until he went away to war and began writing letters to her. When Ruth was six, she broke a bottle belonging to Walter’s mother, and nine-year-old Walter teased her to tears by telling her, “she’d get it when they got home.” During the war, she attended Simmons College, graduating in 1919 from a three-year program in secretarial studies, having taken courses not only in shorthand, typing, business practices, commercial law, and economics, but also in English, History, French, and German. Her yearbook entry in The Microcosm gives the impression of a lively and sociable personality with interests in the theater, parties, and dances. She was not one to sulk or spend much time worrying. “He kind of discovered you,” Ralph Edwards said to Ruth. “Oh, I did that,” she explained. “We were invited by Walter’s mother to dinner, my mother and my two sisters . . . Walter

Report,” Narian ordered, umbrage in his tone. He did not appreciate the lack of respect Saadi was displaying by coming straight to him. Saadi pulled my dagger from somewhere on his belt, flipping it around to hand it to his commanding officer. “I caught her with this illegal weapon on the street, sir. Considering the interest you took in her welfare last time, I thought it best this matter be brought directly to you.” “A good decision,” Narian said, examining the knife. “Now return to your post.” Saadi gave a deferential nod to him and, to my surprise, a slight bow to Queen Alera before departing. In the silence that briefly reigned, Cannan’s gaze fell upon me, unwavering, unwelcoming and especially dark considering the reprimand he’d given me in the barn. I was in so much trouble. “Where did you get this?” Narian asked, and my attention snapped from my uncle to the Cokyrian commander, who was brandishing my dagger. Which of them was the fiercer opponent? I didn’t speak, afraid to find out, certain this was how a cornered animal felt. “Shaselle, from whom did you obtain that weapon?” It was Queen Alera addressing me now, her voice softer, kinder, but I hardly looked at her, for she was not where the problem lay. When I still did not answer, Narian turned to Cannan. “You tell us then.” “I have no more knowledge than do you,” the former captain said, not outwardly disturbed by the fact that my conduct had brought him under suspicion. “I need to know how she came by this dagger,” Narian said more forcefully, but I knew he was wasting his breath. Cannan was not about to be intimidated--certainly not by a young man of my age, regardless of whatever mythical powers he possessed. “These have been outlawed and removed from Hytanican hands. No young girl could wrangle one. Not unless she had access to some that were kept from my soldiers. Not unless she was the captain’s niece.” “My answer remains the same,” Cannan replied, unflappable as ever. “I suggest you stop accusing me.” A silent challenge passed between the powerful men, to be interrupted by the Queen, who spoke but one word--the Cokyrian commander’s name. He looked to her more quickly than I would have believed possible, and his demeanor changed along with his focus, becoming softer, more cooperative. “May I see the dagger?” she asked. Without demanding a reason, he passed her the blade. Perhaps she had more influence than I thought. She perused the weapon with a crease in her brow. “I think I recognize this.” “You do?” Narian sounded skeptical, while I was flabbergasted, and Cannan’s eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. “I believe this was Lord Baelic’s. It must have been missed by the Cokyrians sweeping his home. A house of Hytanican women--they might not have been thorough.” She paused and met my gaze. “This is your father’s, is it not, Shaselle?” I started nodding before I could even process what was happening. Was she mistaken? Did she actually believe the weapon had belonged to my papa? Or was she trying to help me? Whatever the case, I wasn’t about to argue with her, seizing the excuse and hoping it would be good enough to save me, at least from Cokyrian punishment. Narian scrutinized both me and the Queen with eyes so deeply blue I could not break away from them. I was glad he was no longer questioning me, for those eyes made me want to tell him everything. At the same time, those eyes revealed something to me. Was he in love with Alera?

I am SAM, and this is my latest mission. This one’s like a cross between a house of cards and a hand grenade with a missing pin. One wrong move, and—BOOM! The whole thing comes down. I’ve got to be in a dozen different places at just the right time, and in just the right order. Not only that, but this high-tech fortress disguised as a middle school is crawling with guards in the middle of the day. The trick is to act natural when anyone’s looking, and then move like the wind when they’re not. So I walk casually up the corridor, like I belong here. Deputy Marshal Stonecase passes me by and I give her a friendly (but not too friendly) nod. She has no idea I’m working undercover. That’s what the street clothes and prosthetics are for. As soon as I find myself alone, I swing into action. First I check my scanners, perfectly camouflaged inside an ordinary-looking backpack. Once they give me the all clear, I continue to the gymnasium. My first stop is the so-called equipment room. I know it’s a flimsy cover for Sergeant Stricker’s missile silo, but I can’t worry about that now. I work fast. I work carefully. I try not to think about the pair of fully armed heat-seeking missiles just under the floor. And the millisecond my package is delivered, I move on. This next maneuver is what you call a speed round. I cruise through the building like a ninja-tornado, dropping tiny subpackages of coded instructions in every empty corner I can locate. Once the inmates start finding them—and they will find them—they’ll know what to do. That’s it. Within twenty minutes, my mission is complete. The rest of this operation is out of my hands. So I go back to undercover mode and continue my day like none of this ever happened. In fact, none of it did. (You’ve got my back, right?) SAM out!

What am I, crazy? I just flung four-hundred-dollar pumps down the street. “Shall we return to Harksbury? Your journey must have tired you more than you expected. You need proper rest, yes?” She’s looking at me like I’ve gone a little loco, her cute button nose wrinkled up and her wide hazel eyes narrowed to tiny little slits. How am I going to return to Harksbury after telling them all off? Maybe knocking my head wouldn’t be that bad. Stay calm. That’s what everyone says about emergencies. You have to stay calm and everything will resolve itself. “Yes. Let me, uh, let me go grab my shoes.” I hobble, barefoot, down the walk and retrieve my pumps, jam my feet back into them, and then follow her back to the carriage. The servants are silent, but I know they’re staring at me when my back is turned. I have to pull it together. I can’t just lose it like that, throwing my shoes like I’m in a shot-put competition. If I think clearly, maybe I’ll come up with a real plan. But until then, my name is Rebecca. I am a prim and proper Regency girl. I wear dresses and I curtsy. I belong here.

They came to a tall juniper hedge beyond which extended a flagstoned walkway that bordered the side of the manor. As they made their way to an opening of the hedge, they heard a pair of masculine voices engaged in conversation. The voices were not loud. In fact, the strictly moderated volume of the conversation betrayed that something secret— and therefore intriguing— was being discussed. Pausing behind the hedge, Daisy motioned for Evie to be still and quiet. “… doesn’t promise to be much of a breeder…” one of them was saying. The comment was met with a low but indignant objection. “Timid? Holy hell, the woman has enough spirit to climb Mont-Blanc with a pen-knife and a ball of twine. Her children will be perfect hellions.” Daisy and Evie stared at each other with mutual astonishment. Both voices were easily recognizable as those belonging to Lord Llandrindon and Matthew Swift. “Really,” Llandrindon said skeptically. “My impression is that she is a literary-minded girl. Rather a bluestocking.” “Yes, she loves books. She also happens to love adventure. She has a remarkable imagination accompanied by a passionate enthusiasm for life and an iron constitution. You’re not going to find a girl her equal on your side of the Atlantic or mine.” “I had no intention of looking on your side,” Llandrindon said dryly. “English girls possess all the traits I would desire in a wife.” They were talking about her, Daisy realized, her mouth dropping open. She was torn between delight at Matthew Swift’s description of her, and indignation that he was trying to sell her to Llandrindon as if she were a bottle of patent medicine from a street vendor’s cart. “I require a wife who is poised,” Llandrindon continued, “sheltered, restful…” “Restful? What about natural and intelligent? What about a girl with the confidence to be herself rather than trying to imitate some pallid ideal of subservient womanhood?” “I have a question,” Llandrindon said. “Yes?” “If she’s so bloody remarkable, why don’t you marry her?” Daisy held her breath, straining to hear Swift’s reply. To her supreme frustration his voice was muffled by the filter of the hedges. “Drat,” she muttered and made to follow them. Evie yanked her back behind the hedge. “No,” she whispered sharply. “Don’t test our luck, Daisy. It was a miracle they didn’t realize we were here.” “But I wanted to hear the rest of it!” “So did I.” They stared at each other with round eyes. “Daisy…” Evie said in wonder, “… I think Matthew Swift is in love with you.

It is easier,” she replied frankly, “and often more emotionally satisfying to be mortally offended on behalf of your God than to serve Him by altering one’s style and manner of life—and in a short space, it is certainly much more comfortable. One can feel righteous, very much one who belongs, while heaping vengeance on the heads of sinners. It costs a lot less than giving time or money to the poor.” He ate the last of his salmon and offered her more wine. “You are becoming cynical, my dear.” “I was never anything else”—she accepted the wine—“where the self-proclaimed righteous were concerned. Was the case really so different from most?” “Yes.” He pushed his plate away and like a shadow the butler removed it. “There was a distinct alien culture which could be blamed,” Thelonius continued grimly, his eyes sad and angry. “Godman was a Jew, and the resultant anti-Semitic emotions were among the most unpleasant manifestations of human behavior that I have seen: anti-Semitic slogans daubed on walls, hysterical pamphlets scattered all over the place, even people hurling stones in the streets at those they took to be Jews—windows smashed in synagogues, one set fire to.

It’s so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen… She stares out of her window at the busy street, where the British go about their daily business, taking it for granted that they will never be arrested for not voting the right way, praying the right way, dressing the right way or for belonging to a different tribe.

Pastor Jill’s sons glared as he approached. The street went quiet, like in a Western. The people were ready for a showdown. Matt said, “How are you doing?” The brothers might have been twins. One kept up the stare. The other started loading Eva’s belongings into the trunk. Matt did not blink. He kept smiling and walking. “I’d like you to stop that now.” Crossed-Tree-Trunk-Arms said, “Who are you?” Pastor Jill came out. She looked over at Matt and scowled too.

You do realize she has a boyfriend. And she’s rich. And white. And wears designer clothes you’ll never be able to afford.” Yeah, I know that. And I’m sick and tired of being reminded of it. “I need your help, Isa. Not a lecture. I’ve got Paco givin’ me his crap already.” Isa holds up her hands. “I’m just pointing out facts. You’re a smart guy, Alex. Add it up. No matter how much you might want her in your life, she doesn’t belong. A triangle can’t fit into a square. Now I’ll shut up.” “Gracias.” I don’t point out that if it’s a big enough square, a small triangle can fit inside perfectly. All you have to do is make a few adjustments in the equation. I’m too drunk and high to explain it now. “I’m parked across the street,” Isa says. She lets out a big, frustrated sigh. “Follow me.” I follow Isabel to her car, hoping we can walk in silence. No such luck. “I was in class with her last year, too,” Isa says. “Uh-huh.” She shrugs. “Nice girl. Wears too much makeup.” “Most chicks hate her.” “Most chicks wish they looked like her. And they wish they had her money and boyfriend.” I stop and regard her in disgust. “Burro Face?” “Oh, please, Alex. Colin Adams is cute, he’s the captain of the football team and Fairfield’s hero. You’re like Danny Zuko in Grease. You smoke, you’re in a gang, and you’ve dated the hottest bad girls around. Brittany is like Sandy…a Sandy who’ll never show up to school in a black leather jacket with a ciggie hangin’ from her mouth. Give up the fantasy.

ONCE, IN A HOUSE ON EGYPT STREET, there lived a rabbit who was made almost entirely of china. He had china arms and china legs, china paws and a china head, a china torso and a china nose. His arms and legs were jointed and joined by wire so that his china elbows and china knees could be bent, giving him much freedom of movement. His ears were made of real rabbit fur, and beneath the fur, there were strong, bendable wires, which allowed the ears to be arranged into poses that reflected the rabbit’s mood — jaunty, tired, full of ennui. His tail, too, was made of real rabbit fur and was fluffy and soft and well shaped. The rabbit’s name was Edward Tulane, and he was tall. He measured almost three feet from the tip of his ears to the tip of his feet; his eyes were painted a penetrating and intelligent blue. In all, Edward Tulane felt himself to be an exceptional specimen. Only his whiskers gave him pause. They were long and elegant (as they should be), but they were of uncertain origin. Edward felt quite strongly that they were not the whiskers of a rabbit. Whom the whiskers had belonged to initially — what unsavory animal — was a question that Edward could not bear to consider for too long. And so he did not. He preferred, as a rule, not to think unpleasant thoughts. Edward’s mistress was a ten-year-old, dark-haired girl named Abilene Tulane, who thought almost as highly of Edward as Edward thought of himself. Each morning after she dressed herself for school, Abilene dressed Edward. The china rabbit was in possession of an extraordinary wardrobe composed of handmade silk suits, custom shoes fashioned from the finest leather and designed specifically for his rabbit feet, and a wide array of hats equipped with holes so that they could easily fit over Edward’s large and expressive ears. Each pair of well-cut pants had a small pocket for Edward’s gold pocket watch. Abilene wound this watch for him each morning.

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged, somewhere, to somebody. She had belonged to no one, for she had never wanted chick nor child. Her idea of home had been any side-alley entrance and a pint of tinted gin. All she had ever striven for was small change left lying by strangers on North Clark Street bars; and any man's bottle at all.

Once upon a time there was a child who had a golden brain. His parents only discovered this by chance when he injured his head and gold instead of blood flowed out. They then began to look after him carefully and would not let him play with other children for fear of being robbed. When the boy was grown up and wanted to go out into the world, his mother said: “We have done so much for you,we ought to be able to share your wealth.” Then her son took a large piece of gold out of his brain and gave it to his mother. He lived in great style with a friend who, however, robbed him one night and ran away. After that the man resolved to guard his secret and to go out to work, because his reserves were visibly dwindling. One day he fell in love with a beautiful girl who loved him too, but no more than the beautiful clothes he gave her so lavishly. He married her and was very happy, but after two years she died and he spent the rest of his wealth on her funeral, which had to be splendid. Once, as he was creeping through the streets,weak,poor, and unhappy, he saw a beautiful little pair of boots that would have been perfect for his wife. He forgot that she was dead- perhaps because his emptied brain no longer worked- and entered the shop to buy the boots. But in that very moment he fell, and the shopkeeper saw a dead man lying on the ground. Daudet, who was to die from an illness of the spinal cord, wrote following this story: This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?

I've thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course they mean nothing, when you start to think about them. A good man, one says; a good woman; a nice man, a nice woman. Only in talk of course, these are not words you'd use in a novel. I'd be careful not to use them. Yet of that group, I will say simply, without further analysis, that George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And furthermore, I'd bet that ten people picked at random off the street to meet them, or invited to sit in that party under the eucalyptus trees that night, would instantly agree with this classification-would, if I used the word good, simply like that, know what I meant. And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality.' Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I've even been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and re-create them in my memory,suddenly I know it's nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later,she'd make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she'd be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she 'broke down,' or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this talk, this antihumanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at that point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create in memory some human being I've known. I sit down, and remember the smell of the dust and the moonlight, and see Ted handing a glass of wine to George, and George's over-grateful response to the gesture. Or I see, as in a slow-motion film, Maryrose turn her head, with her terrifyingly patient smile... I've written the word film. Yes. The moments I remember all have the absolute assurance of a smile, a look, a gesture, in a painting or a film. Am I saying then that the certainty I'm clinging to belongs to the visual arts, and not to the novel, not to the novel at all, which has been claimed by the disintegration and the collapse? What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing I so well the complexities behind them? Yet if I did not, I'd never be able to set a word down on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on my skin. And so I'll write again that George was a good man.

Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity. When Lady Russell not long afterwards, was entering Bath on a wet afternoon, and driving through the lng course of streets from the Old Bridge to Camden Place, amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of pattens, she made no complaint. No, these were noises which belonged to the winter pleasures; her spirits rose under their influence; and like Mrs Musgrove, she was feeling, though not saying, that after being long in the country, nothing could be so good for her as a little quiet cheerfulness.

Shanecia was mine and she always would be. Even if she left me, until I stopped having feelings for her ass, she belonged to me. “She

Next morning I finally arrived at the place. The two sisters had already left for work, but the landlady of the pension admitted me into their room. I fell asleep with exhaustion. By late afternoon, when they arrived, they were more shocked than elated about my presence. They took me within an hour to a coffee house, on Lipscani Street, where many Czernowitzers congregated. Sure enough, I met Jancu, the uncle of my former student Vera. He immediately took me with my belongings, to his family, to his parents. They were the warmest, friendliest people imaginable. Vera's mother was happy, because now, she thought, Vera would pass the grade, with my help.

How strange," she said, "not to recognize one's own face." "You have no cause for complaint," Grant said huskily. Even bruised and pale and ravaged, her face was incomparable. "Do you think so?" She stared into the looking glass without a trace of self-satisfactionshe had displayed at the ball. *That* Vivien had had no doubt of her many attractions. This woman was far less confident. "Everyone thinks so. You're known as one of the great beauties of London." "I don't see why." Catching his skeptical expression, she added, "Truly, I'm not fishing for compliments, it's just... seems a very ordinary face." She produced a comical, clownish expression, like a child experimenting with her reflection. A shaken laugh escaped her. "It doesn't seem to belong to me.

Victoria stared at her sister with a beaming smile. She was struck as always by the sense that Vivien was at once familiar and exotic. How was it possible to love someone and yet never understand her? Vivien belonged to a world so far removed from her own that it seemed impossible they had come from the same family, much less that they were twins. Vivien was the first to break the silence. "It turns out you were right to refuse all my invitations to come to town. London is definitely not the place for you, country mouse.

She had the face of an angel, and the hair of the Devil's handmaiden. The freshly washed locks flowed around her in a waist-length curtain, waves and curls of molten red that contained every shade from cinnamon to strawberry-gold. It was the kind of hair that nature usually bestowed on homely women to atone for their lack of physical beauty. But Vivien had a face and form that belonged in a Renaissance painting, except that the reality of her was more delicate and fresh than any painted image could convey. Now that her eyes were no longer swollen, the pure blue intensity of her gaze shone full and direct on him. Her mouth, tender and rose-tinted, was a marvel of nature.

After she was gone, I stared at the trunk for a moment, uncertainty rolling back in. The termination of my job should’ve been a good thing, especially since I was still getting paid. I would totally take that check and nod in thanks. Who was I to say boo? I mean, Kieran was a nightmare of a boss: possessive, controlling, and he often stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong. And then there was the danger from Valens. It would be way safer to distance myself from the lot of them. I could move somewhere nice, with better weather and cleaner streets. We could start over, with the money to do it right.

AKKA MAHADEVI Around nine hundred years ago in southern India, there lived a female mystic called Akka Mahadevi. Akka was a devotee of Shiva. Ever since her childhood, she had regarded Shiva as her beloved, her husband. It was not just a belief; for her it was a living reality. The king saw this beautiful young woman one day, and decided he wanted her as his wife. She refused. But the king was adamant and threatened her parents, so she yielded. She married the man, but she kept him at a physical distance. He tried to woo her, but her constant refrain was, “Shiva is my husband.” Time passed and the king’s patience wore thin. Infuriated, he tried to lay his hands upon her. She refused. “I have another husband. His name is Shiva. He visits me, and I am with him. I cannot be with you.” Because she claimed to have another husband, she was brought to court for prosecution. Akka is said to have announced to all present, “Being a queen doesn’t mean a thing to me. I will leave.” When the king saw the ease with which she was walking away from everything, he made a last futile effort to salvage his dignity. He said, “Everything on your person—your jewels, your garments—belongs to me. Leave it all here and go.” So, in the full assembly, Akka just dropped her jewelry, all her clothes, and walked away naked. From that day on, she refused to wear clothes even though many tried to convince her otherwise. It was unbelievable for a woman to be walking naked on the streets of India at the time—and this was a beautiful young woman. She lived out her life as a wandering mendicant and composed some exquisite poetry that lives on to this very day. In a poem (translated by A. K. Ramanujan), she says: People, male and female, blush when a cloth covering their shame comes loose. When the lord of lives lives drowned without a face in the world, how can you be modest? When all the world is the eye of the lord, onlooking everywhere, what can you cover and conceal? Devotees of this kind may be in this world but not of it. The power and passion with which they lived their lives make them inspirations for generations of humanity. Akka continues to be a living presence in the Indian collective consciousness, and her lyrical poems remain among the most prized works of South Indian literature to this very day. Embracing

Whenever she walked home from the library and turned onto Magnolia Street, Kylie had no desire to be anywhere else. In every generation there was someone who stayed, who planted the garden early in the spring, and kept the bees, and switched on the porch light at twilight so the neighbors knew they were welcome to come for cures and elixirs. As it turned out, Kylie was quite good at magic. She took good care of the red Grimoire Franny had left for them, kept under lock and key in the greenhouse. All they had ever known and all they would need to know had been written down in it, and not a single line had been lost. Kylie was in residence on Magnolia Street, and by rights the book belonged to her now.

ran in families, she’d read it somewhere. Her mother ended up the same way, found wandering the streets at six in the morning (postman, nightdress) and putting everything where it didn’t belong (slippers, bread bin). Mad as a box of frogs, Harold had called her. She was around Dorothy’s age when she first started to lose her mind,

People think all kinds of things,” the priest said with a shrug. “Including that calling a city their home is a two-way street. But the DFZ doesn’t work that way. She’s not kind. Not moral or fair. She has no compassion, no sympathy for the plight of those who live with her. That’s not her fault. She doesn’t have the freedom we mortals enjoy. Her mind, her soul, even her body does not belong to her. She is not an individual. She is a spirit, the soul of a living city. She can only be what we’ve made her. Do you understand?

Then, not as memory, but as an experience of the present, she felt herself reliving the moment when she had stood at the window of her room in New York, looking at a fogbound city, at the unattainable shape of Atlantis sinking out of reach—and she knew that she was now seeing the answer to that moment. She felt, not the words she had then addressed to the city, but that untranslated sensation from which the words had come: You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon— Aloud, she said, “I want you to know this. I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle”—you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city, the wordless voice within her was saying, and whose world I had wanted to build—“Now I know that I was fighting for this valley”—it is my love for you that had kept me moving—“It was this valley that I saw as possible and would exchange for nothing less and would not give up to a mindless evil”—my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face—“I am going back to fight for this valley—to release it from its underground, to regain for it its full and rightful realm, to let the earth belong to you in fact, as it does in spirit—and to meet you again on the day when I’m able to deliver to you the whole of the world—or, if I fail, to remain in exile from this valley to the end of my life”—but what is left of my life will still be yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’m never to pronounce, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t—“I will fight for it, even if I have to fight against you, even if you damn me as a traitor . . . even if I am never to see you again.

During the Revolution,” she explained. “A brilliant mind made to roll through the filthy streets. Power might belong in the hands of the people, Miss Sinnett, but that doesn’t mean mobs are always wise. People need leaders. Good men like Mr. Lewis here.

And she got the feeling that Boots Smith's relationship to this swiftly moving car was no ordinary one. He wasn't just a black man driving a car at a pell-mell pace. He had lost all sense of time and space as the car plunged forward into the cold, white night. The act of driving the car made him feel he was a powerful being who could conquer the world. Up over hills, fast down on the other side. It was like playing god and commanding everything within hearing to awaken and listen to him. The people sleeping in the white farmhouses were at the mercy of the sound of his engine roaring past in the night. It brought them half-awake—disturbed, uneasy. The cattle in the barns moved in protest, the chickens stirred on their roosts and before any of them could analyze the sound that had alarmed them, he was gone—on and on into the night. And she knew, too, that this was the reason white people turned scornfully to look at Negroes who swooped past them on the highways. 'Crazy niggers with autos' in the way they looked. Because they sensed that the black men had to roar past them, had for a brief moment to feel equal, feel superior; had to take reckless chances going around curves, passing on hills, so that they would be better able to face a world that took pains to make them feel that they didn't belong, that they were inferior. Because in that one moment of passing a white man in a car they could feel good and the good feeling would last long enough so that they could hold their heads up the next day and the day after that. And the white people in the cars hated it because—and her mind stumbled over the thought and then went on—because possibly they, too, needed to go on feeling superior. Because if they didn't, it upset the delicate balance of the world they moved in when they could see for themselves that a black man in a ratclap car could overtake and pass them on a hill. Because if there was nothing left for them but that business of feeling superior to black people, and that was taken away even for the split second of one car going ahead of another, it left them with nothing.

One more scary story, especially if you’re lucky enough to hear it on Halloween night, or late around a dying campfire, is about the innocent man who picks up a young hitchhiker who turns out to be a ghost. The man saw a thin figure hitchhiking at a dark corner near the local cemetery on his way home late one night. He stopped to give the person a ride, and the figure got in quietly beside him. It was raining hard, and despite his attempts at conversation, the hitchhiker only said, “10 Capen Street, please,” in a soft, sad voice. When the man stopped at a traffic light, he could see the soft features of a 12-year-old girl, he guessed, staring straight ahead. She might have been crying, the man thought, or her face was wet from the rain. After he dropped her off at 10 Capen Street at a house surrounded by spooky-looking pine trees that swayed in the wind, he went home, only to find that his rider had left her hooded sweatshirt in the car. The next night after work, the man swung by the unlit house at 10 Capen Street. He waited a good long while at the front door after ringing the doorbell. Finally, a frowning older woman answered, and the man offered the sweatshirt that the girl had mistakenly left in his car. The woman looked suddenly shocked, and said, “This belongs to my granddaughter who was hit by a car a year ago while walking near the cemetery!

it's not just sex. She's one of us. She belongs here.

She doesn’t belong here, Ivy,” he said, and I rolled my eyes. After draining the water bottle, I put the cap back on it and then flung it. It bounced right off his head and he blinked at me. “Stop deciding where people belong. I swear, you were a damn hall monitor when you were a kid.” He retrieved the bottle, eyeing me with what looked suspiciously like a smile, even if he fought it. “Did no one ever tell you that throwing things at people isn’t nice?” “Nope,” I informed him, popping the p. “I skipped that lesson with Ms. Manners. Didn’t Liam tell you? I’m a hellspawn.

My mother, who somehow managed to stay politically active while raising four children, roped me into canvassing door-to-door for Tom Bradley, Sam Yorty’s opponent for mayor, in our precinct in Woodland Hills. Bradley would be, if he won, the first black mayor of L.A., so it felt like a historic election. Bradley polled well in our precinct, and we were optimistic. Then Yorty won the election, and the precinct breakdowns showed that our neighbors had evidently been lying when they told us canvassers that they would vote for Bradley. It was a well-known phenomenon, apparently, among white voters, these voting-booth reversals. Still, I was outraged, and my cynicism about organized politics and the broad mass of what I was learning to call the bourgeoisie deepened. Robert Kennedy was assassinated, as everyone knows, on the night of the 1968 California primary. I watched the news on a small black-and-white TV, sitting cross-legged on the foot of my girlfriend’s bed. Her name was Charlene. We were fifteen. She was asleep, believing I had left after our evening’s usual heated, inconclusive cuddle. I had stopped, however, to watch the TV after I saw that Kennedy had been shot. It was after midnight and Charlene’s parents were out watching the voting results with friends. They were Republican Party activists. I heard them pull in the driveway and come in the house. I knew that Charlene’s father, who was an older man, always came in to kiss her good night, and I knew, well, the way out her window and how to catfoot it down to the street. Still, I sat there, unthinking yet cruelly resolved, until the bedroom door opened. Her father did not have a heart attack at the sight of me, calmly watching TV in my underwear, though he could have. I snatched up my clothes and dived out the window before he said a word. Charlene’s mother called my mother, and my mother gave me a serious talk about different types of girls, emphasizing the sanctity of “good girls,” such as Charlene, who belonged to some debutante club. I was embarrassed but unrepentant. Charlene and I had never had much to talk about.

Love is what fills us up inside and what makes us feel like we belong on this planet,’ she says. ‘Love is a sense of purpose. To be in love and to love in return is the best gift you can ever give or receive.

My favorite chapter is about dogs. In it the author explains that dogs are not animals. According to him, or her (I don't know what sex authors are in the same way I don't know their names), dogs are a concept. A Doberman is not much like a Cocker Spaniel which shares few characteristics with a Chihuahua; a Saint-Bernard can meet a Pekingese and, theoretically, they can mate, but does that ever happen and would it be a good thing? Because, although zoologically they belong to the same species, in practical terms it's blindingly obvious they're not made for each other. The author went on to say how amazed he (or she) was that his three-year-old daughter (the tendency to mix personal life with reasoning makes me incline towards an Anglo-Saxon writer) could always recognize a dog when she saw one in the street, even though the animals she pointed at so enthusiastically- delighted by an opportunity to display her combined mastery of language and categorization- didn't look anything like each other. If a cat appeared, even a big beefy one, she would not be fooled. If a pony turned up, even the smallest of its lineage, smaller at the wither than a Great Dane, she would not cry 'Dog! Dog!' She knew. Even if they don't bark, have their ears trimmed so they prick up, or are bundled into miniature anoraks to protect them from inclement weather, dogs maintain their conceptual integrity.

When he puts it like this, it sounds surprisingly sensible. Danes have a collective sense of responsibility – of belonging, even. They pay into the system because they believe it to be worthwhile. The insanely high taxation also has some happy side effects. It means that Denmark has the lowest income inequality among all the OECD countries, so the difference in take-home wages between, for instance, Lego’s CEO and its lowliest cleaner, isn’t as vast as it might be elsewhere. Studies show that people who live in neighbourhoods where most people earn about the same amount are happier, according to research from San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley. In Denmark, even people working in wildly different fields will probably have a similar amount left in the bank each month after tax. I’m interested in the idea that income equality makes for better neighbours and want to put it to the test. But since I live in what is essentially a retirement village, where no one apart from Friendly Neighbour works, there isn’t much of an opportunity in Sticksville. So I ask Helena C about hers. She tells me that the street she lives in is populated by shop assistants, supermarket workers, accountants, lawyers, marketers and a landscape gardener. ‘Everyone has a nice home and a good quality of life,’ she says, ‘it doesn’t matter so much what you do for work here.’ Regardless of their various careers and the earning potential that this might afford them in other countries with lower taxes, professionals and non-professionals live harmoniously side by side in Denmark. This also makes social mobility easier, according to studies from The Equality Trust on the impact of income equality. So you’re more likely to be able to get on in life, get educated and get a good job, regardless of who your parents are and what they do in Denmark than anywhere else. It turns out that it’s easier to live ‘The American Dream’ here than it’s ever likely to be in the US.

Her mind carries all of the worry and the weight. Sometimes, when she’s in a new place, wandering and learning its streets, she just hears herself sighing, I must belong somewhere. She hasn’t found it yet, but she hasn’t given up on the idea of it.

The former medical director of Planned Parenthood, Calderone had come up with the idea for her organization, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, at a 1961 conference of the National Association of Churches. By the 1964–65 school year SIECUS’s “Guidelines for Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade” had been requested by over a thousand school districts. A typical exercise for kindergarten was watching eggs hatch in an incubator. Her supporters saw themselves as the opposite of subversives. “The churches have to take the lead,” Dr. Calderone, herself a Quaker, would say, “home, school, church, and community all working cooperatively.” The American Medical Association, the National Education Association, and the American Association of School Administrators all published resolutions in support of the vision. Her theory was that citizens would be more sexually responsible if they learned the facts of life frankly and in the open, otherwise the vacuum would be filled by the kind of talk that children picked up in the streets. An Illinois school district argued that her program would fight “‘situation ethics’ and an emerging, but not yet widely accepted standard of premarital sex.” Even Billy Graham’s magazine, Christianity Today, gave the movement a cautious seal of approval. They didn’t see it as “liberal.” But it was liberal. The SIECUS curriculum encouraged children to ask questions. In her speeches Calderone said her favorite four-letter word ended with a k: T-A-L-K. She advised ministers to tell congregants who asked them about premarital sex, “Nobody can judge that but yourself, but here are the facts about it.” She taught that people “are being moral when they are being true to themselves,” that “it’s the highest morality to live up to the best in yourself, whether you call it God or whatever.” Which, simply, was a subversive message to those who believed such judgments came from God—or at least from parental authority. The anti-sex-education movement was also intimately related to a crusade against “sensitivity training”: children talking about their feelings, about their home lives, another pollution of prerogatives that properly belonged to family and church. “SOCIALISTS USE SEX WEDGE in Public School to Separate Children from Parental Authority,” one of their pamphlets put it. Maybe not socialists, but at the very least someone was separating children from parental authority. More and more, it looked like the Establishment. And, given that the explosion issued from liberals obliviously blundering into the most explosive questions of where moral authority came from, thinking themselves advancing an unquestionable moral good, it is appropriate that the powder keg came in one of America’s most conservative suburbs: Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, in Orange County, California, where officials had, ironically enough, established a pioneering flagship sex education program four years earlier.

Matthew loved Elspeth Harmony – he loved her to the extent that everything that was associated with her, her possessions, her sayings, her friends and connections, were all endowed with a quality of specialness that attached to nothing else. The mug from which she drank her morning coffee was special because her lips had touched it; the tortoiseshell comb that she kept on top of the dressing table was special because it had belonged to Elspeth’s grandmother rather than to any other grandmother; the shopping list that she wrote out to take with her to Valvona & Crolla was special because it was in her handwriting. His affection for her was total, and touching.

I don’t want you anywhere near our world anymore.” “I don’t think it was ever my world.” That earned me a haughty lift to her chin as she gave me a look. “It is your world. You belong there every bit as much as I do. We just have to knock a few players off the board permanently. Then you can reclaim what belongs to you.