Sheer Beauty Quotes

We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. Fly. We write poetry. You probably hate poetry, but it’s hard to argue with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ in terms of sheer beauty. We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.

Henry’s a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman — very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He’s a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he’s made himself what he is by sheer strength of will. His aspiration is to be this Platonic creature of pure rationality and that’s why he’s attracted to the Classics, and particularly to the Greeks — all those high, cold ideas of beauty and perfection.

The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books.

It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.

Oh, do you understand what I mean? Have you ever felt that about the Moon? Have you ever ached with the sheer beauty of it?

You're the brightest thing I've ever seen, Kaylee. You're this beautiful ball of fire spitting sparks out at the world, burning fiercely, holding back the dark by sheer will. And I always knew that if I reached out -- if i tried to touch you -- I'd get burned. Because you're not mine. I'm not supposed to feel the fire. I'm not supposed to want it. But I do. I want you, Kaylee, like I've never wanted anything. Ever. I want the fire. I want the heat, and the light, and I want the burn.

Only two years dead, and it was getting harder for me to feel…anything. I was starting to slip into the darkness. The numbness. And the worst part is that it wasn’t even scary. I was losing myself, and I didn’t even care. Then I met you, and at first I didn’t understand what had happened. What had changed. All I knew was that I wanted to be near you. Then you helped me with Addison, even though it nearly got you killed—I nearly got you killed—and I started to understand how special you are. But by then, you were getting serious with Nash. With my brother—one of few people in the whole world I still gave a damn about. So I tried to stay away. I tried so hard.” His voice cracked on the last word, and my heart cracked with it. Tears stood in my eyes, but I was afraid to let them fall. I was afraid to even breathe for fear of missing a single word. "But you kept pulling me back. You’re the brightest thing I’ve ever seen, Kaylee. You’re this beautiful ball of fire spitting sparks out at the world, burning fiercely, holding back the dark by sheer will. And I always knew that if I reached out—if I tried to touch you—I’d get burned. Because you’re not mine. I’m not supposed to feel the fire. I’m not supposed to want it. But I do. I want you, Kaylee, like I’ve never wanted anything. Ever. I want the fire. I want the heat, and the light, and I want the burn.

As always, just the sight of him gave her a quick inner jolt. His face was like a painting, a depiction in perfect oils of some fallen angel. The sheer beauty of it, framed by all that rich black hair, was forever a surprise to her.

It was when he tried to talk about 'the boat' that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his eyes...Finally, watching Joe struggle for composure over and over, I realized that 'the boat' was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it encompassed but transcended both - it was something mysterious and almost beyond definition. It was a shared experience - a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love. Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.

She always told us there were two types of women. Those who are lit from the outside and those who are lit from within. The first needs the shimmer of a diamond to maker her sparkle, but for the other, her beauty is illuminated through the sheer light of her soul.

The sheer splendor of the sight made my chest tighten and tears sting my eyes. All the darkness lately made it easy to forget the world contained more than people trying to hurt other people. It had beauty, too, if you knew where to look--and remembered to open your eyes.

At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves.

Isn't it a riddle . . . and awe-inspiring, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the horror. Lately I've noticed something grand and mysterious peering through my sheer joy in all that is beautiful, a sense of its creator . . . Only man can be truly ugly, because he has the free will to estrange himself from this song of praise. It often seems that he'll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won't be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor.

I wanted to be strong when I went back to Persuasion. Strong and beautiful and totally together. I dreamed of the day I’d get to rub all your faces in my sheer awesomeness.

There is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through its blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.

All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side made my heart race, I would have travelled a thousand miles to see this. I had never imagined such a place.

It's the simple truth that mortal men cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower, while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amidst the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the life lines and fate lines of men.

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

You can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language.

We often seek beauty in the outside, in the unknown, and often lack to realize the sheer beauty right in front of our very eyes, back home.

I know. I’m just trying to keep things simple.” Trenton took a step toward me. “This isn’t simple. Not even close.” “It is simple. Black and white. Cut and dry.” Trenton grabbed me by the shoulders and planted a kiss on my mouth. Sheer shock made my lips hard and unforgiving, but then they melted against his, along with the rest of my body. I relaxed, but my breathing picked up, and my heart beat so loud I was sure Trenton could hear it. His tongue slipped between my lips, and his hands slid down my arms to my hips, his fingers digging into my skin. He pulled my hips against his as he kissed me, and then sucked my bottom lip when he pulled away. “Now it’s complicated.” He grabbed his keys and shut the door behind him.

I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful of the animals that we are, an animal who bows to the incomparable power of natural forces when standing on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, an animal who understands a sense of humility when watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs in the lodgepole pines of the northern Rockies, an animal who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes above the Bosque del Apache in November, an animal who is not afraid to cry with delight in the middle of a midnight swim in a phospherescent tide, an animal who has not forgotten what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the source of all true visions. As we step over the threshold of the twenty-first century, let us acknowledge that the preservation of wilderness is not so much a political process as a spiritual one, that the language of law and science used so successfully to define and defend what wilderness has been in the past century must now be fully joined with the language of the heart to illuminate what these lands mean to the future.

At that moment there were two feelings inside Celeste's tiny, rapidly beating heart that made her feel as full, and as empty, as a gourd. The sheer beauty of this moment was perfect and sublime. But she was alone.

The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big.

Everything that God sends us is beautiful, even though we may not understand it - and we only need to give it some proper thought to see that what God gives is just sheer happiness; the suffering is what we add to it.

Effective stewardship leads to generative work and a generative culture. We turn wheat into bread—and bread into community. We turn grapes into wine—and wine into occasions for joyful camaraderie, conviviality, conversation, and creativity. We turn minerals into paints—and paints into works that lift the heart or stir the spirit. We turn ideas and experiences into imaginative worlds for sheer enjoyment and to expand the scope of our empathy.

The world is rational and creative. It's a wonderful mystery for our minds to discover and celebrate . God's everywhere and we are all different. That's the beauty of it-the sheer diversity. What a tapestry to enjoy.

In grace and beauty and sheer fascination, they were alike. But where Katherine had been a white kitten, Elena was a snow-white tigress.

Are the roses not also--even as the owl is--excessive? Each flower is small and lovely, but in their sheer and silent abundance the roses become an immutable force, as though the work of the wild roses was to make sure that all of us, who come wandering over the sand, may be, for a while, struck to the heart and saturated with a simple joy.

I think that when you consider the beauty of the world and you wonder how it came to be what it is, you are naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of admiration and you almost feel a desire to worship something. I feel this, I recognise that other scientists such as Carl Sagan feel this, Einstein felt it. We, all of us, share a kind of religious reverence for the beauties of the universe, for the complexity of life. For the sheer magnitude of the cosmos, the sheer magnitude of geological time. And it’s tempting to translate that feeling of awe and worship into a desire to worship some particular thing, a person, an agent. You want to attribute it to a maker, to a creator. What science has now achieved is an emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator. -- God Delusion debate Professor Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox

There is nothing to suggest a trangression of the universal laws of egotism and malice. It is ridiculous to imagine that at the edge of the cosmos, other well-intentioned and wise beings await to guide us toward some sort of harmony. In order to imagine how they might treat us were we to come into contact with them, it might be best to recall how we treat "inferior intelligences" such as rabbits and frogs. In the best cases they serve as food for us, sometimes also, often in fact, we kill them for the sheer pleasure of killing. Thus, [Author: Lovecraft] warned, would be the true picture of our future relationship to those other intelligent beings. Perhaps some of the more beautiful human species would be honored and would end up on a dissection table - that's all.

This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.

An angel with a broken wing, patched together with sheer determination to survive and live and be… so fucking beautiful.

I was a lowly puddle of plasma, trading “I am alive” for a vague “I tend to exist” and weeping for joy over the sheer revelation.

. . .it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.

You’re made to feel ugly, and I made ugly beautiful. Just by sheer persistence. Nobody has the right to say that I am ugly, and I will not be a professional victim, you know. Sorry!

Will it be the same in the future?  Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?  Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?  Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

Doctor Spielvogel, it alleviates nothing fixing the blame - blaming is still ailing, of course, of course - but nonetheless, what was it with these Jewish parents, what, that they were able to make us little Jewish boys believe ourselves to be princes on the one hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the history of childhood - saviors and sheer perfection on the one hand, and such bumbling, incompetent, thoughtless, helpless, selfish, evil little shits, little ingrates, on the other!

Yet even so, Jon Snow was not sorry he had come. There were wonders here as well. He had seen sunlight flashing on icy thin waterfalls as they plunged over the lips of sheer stone cliffs, and a mountain meadow full of autumn wildflowers, blue coldsnaps and bright scarlet frostfires and stands of piper's grass in russet and gold. He had peered down ravines so deep and black they seemed certain to end in some hell, and he had ridden his garron over a wind-eaten bridge of natural stone with nothing but sky to either side. Eagles nested in the heights and came down to hunt the valleys, circling effortlessly on great blue-grey wings that seemed almost part of the sky.

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than an asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in supposing that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp, conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and liking for everything self-dependent, anything an ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to attempt through sheer reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from observation, is idle. You cannot make us think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant, it is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere perculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew; but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without co-ordination? Guarding the infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re- membered too violently, your thorns are the best part of you.

Bottom line: you never ever saw him looking wrong. Knowing this, I felt a cold shiver down my spine when I read in the Minneapolis StarTribune that when his body was found in the elevator at Paisley Park, "Prince was wearing a black shirt and pants - both were on backward - and his socks were inside out." This made no sense to me. The sheer irony of it broke my heart all over again.

Every evening, they enjoyed the moonlit streams, and in the day they explored the valleys, searching for plum blossoms. When they happened upon a sheer cliff face they would compose poems and play the lute in the shade of the pine trees.

Idealized media images of women are far from being the only important target when it comes to our beauty-sick culture, but their sheer ubiquity means we can't underestimate their impact. We also cannot pretend that what we see in the media doesn't shape our thoughts and behaviors. It might be tempting to think that your mind is locked behind some protective wall, safe from the influence of the media onslaught, but that's not how brains work. We are all affected by these images. Their influence is insidious, and there is no magic force field to keep it out.

It's not every day a guy, or even a Sheer, gets bitten by his own hand. At least I hoped it wasn't.

She missed New York, the sheer wattage of the place, its mighty abundance, its chaos, its kinetic energy a comfort somehow.

I know what you’re trying to do, and…no. You can’t make something that’s beautiful but complicated into something simple and ugly out of sheer force of will.

They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.

Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?  Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?  Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? China

Life is less clear to me every day. The world’s harsh technicolor swirls jumble before my eyes until I’m dizzy. Amidst sheer chaos, you are my only black and white and nothing is more beautiful to me.

My basic philosophy of teaching was straightforward and deeply personal. I wanted to teach the way I wished that I myself had been taught. Which is to say, I hoped to convey the sheer joy of learning, the thrill of understanding things about the universe. I wanted to pass along to students not only the logic but the beauty of math and science. Furthermore, I wanted to do this in a way that would be equally helpful to kids studying a subject for the first time and for adults who wanted to refresh their knowledge; for students grappling with homework and for older people hoping to keep their minds active and supple.

With the years his dislike of humbug had increased; the orthodoxy he had worn in the 'sixties', as he had worn side-whiskers out of sheer exuberance , had long dropped off, leaving him reverent before three things alone - beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these now was beauty.

What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such—of what lies beyond the human and the made—and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

He left the visions of a perfectly just society to the philosophers; in his experience they usually required assuming one could simply ignore some fundamental element of human nature. He had spent his lifetime working within an ancient, complex, and corrupt bureaucracy and court. He no longer believed one could legislate out of existence greed, or stupidity, or sheer perversity of will. It reassured him that neither could one legislate out of existence love, or hope, or the desire for beauty.

Sean: Yeah? You got a lady now? Will: Yeah, I went on a date last week. Sean: How'd it go? Will: Fine. Sean: Well, are you going out again? Will: I don't know. Sean: Why not? Will: Haven't called her. Sean: Jesus Christ, you are an amateur. Will: I know what I'm doing. She's different from the other girls I met. We have a really good time. She's smart, beautiful, fun... Sean: So Christ, call her up. Will: Why? So I can realize she's not so smart. That she's boring. You don't get it. Right now she's perfect, I don't want to ruin that. Sean: And right now you're perfect too. Maybe you don't want to ruin that. Well, I think that's a great philosophy Will, that way you can go through your entire life without ever having to really know anybody. My wife used to turn the alarm clock off in her sleep. I was late for work all the time because in the middle of the night she'd roll over and turn the damn thing off. Eventually I got a second clock and put it under my side of the bed, but it got to where she was gettin' to that one too. She was afraid of the dark, so the closet light was on all night. Thing kept me up half the night. Eventually I'd fall asleep, out of sheer exhaustion and not wake up when I was supposed to cause she'd have already gotten to my alarms. My wife's been dead two years, Will. And when I think about her, those are the things I think about most. Little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about. Those made her my wife. And she had the goods on me too. Little things I do out of habit. People call these things imperfections Will. It's just who we are. And we get to choose who we're going to let into out weird little worlds. You're not perfect. And let me save you the suspense, this girl you met isn't either. The question is, whether or not you're perfect for each other. You can know everything in the world, but the only way you're findin' that one out is by giving it a shot. You sure won't get the answer from an old fucker like me. And even if I did know, I wouldn't tell you. Will: Why not? You told me every other fuckin' thing. You talk more than any shrink I ever met. Sean: I teach this shit, I didn't say I knew how to do it. Will: You ever think about gettin' remarried? Sean: My wife's dead. Will: Hence, the word remarried. Sean: My wife's dead. Will: Well I think that's a wonderful philosophy, Sean. That way you can go through the rest of your life without having to really know anyone. Sean: Time's up.

There's a reason why I tell this story. To me these Sunday painters represent myo—the strangeness of beauty—an idea that transcendence can be found in what's common and small. Rather than wishing for singularity and celebrity and genius (and growing all gloomy in its absence), these painters recognize the ordinariness of their talents and remain undaunted. It's the blessings in life, not in self, that they mean to express. And therein lies the transcendence. For as people pursue their plain, decent goals, as they whittle their crude flutes, paint their flat landscapes, make unexceptional love to their spouses—in their numbers across cultures and time, in their sheer tenacity as in the face of a random universe they perform their small acts of awareness and appreciation—there is a mysterious, strange beauty.

I don't remember the song she sang – I never really liked her songs – but standing in the empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no support of any kind, I found that the sheer beauty of the voice, it's monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental, or whatever it is that people are referring to when they talk about their own "good taste," going instead straight into my spine, where it convulsed a muscle and undid me.

Some instantaneous connection had occurred between them. The very air in the room seemed to crackle with the awareness of it. A wave of heat suffused her body to centre between her legs, suddenly she felt breathless and hyper aware of him. There was no way this man could remain unaffected by the sheer magnitude of the invisible bonds that had just linked them irretrievably together. She wondered what he was thinking behind those beautiful navy blue eyes. Okay so she didn’t really expect him to open his mouth and spout poetry or declare his undying love but she certainly wasn’t prepared for his next words. “You aren’t going to throw up are you? This is one of my favourite suits.

Everything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen. By the same token, namely, in its sheer worldly existence, every thing also transcends the sphere of pure instrumentality once it is completed.

Customers who are fully satisfied require no further satisfaction. They must be sold a version of themselves that is constantly just out of reach. I believe in the same approach for music. Too harmonious, and everyone falls asleep. It’s the sheer grip, that bit of nail, that has always made my playing what it is. That fine line between beauty and ugliness, ripeness and rot, is what keeps an audience listening with held breath.

As the physicist Richard Feynman once observed, “[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is— absurd.” Quantum mechanics seems to study that which doesn’t exist—but nevertheless proves true. It works. In the decades to come, quantum physics would open the door to a host of practical inventions that now define the digital age, including the modern personal computer, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and laser technology (from which we get such consumer products as the CD player and the bar-code reader commonly used in supermarkets). If the youthful Oppenheimer loved quantum mechanics for the sheer beauty of its abstractions, it was nevertheless a theory that would soon spawn a revolution in how human beings relate to the world.

On the surface, ojalá translates to “hopefully” in English. But that’s just on paper, merely the dictionary definition. The reality is that there are some words that defy translation; their meaning contains a whole host of things simmering beneath the surface. There’s beauty contained in the word, more than the flippancy of an idle hope. It speaks to the tenor of life, the low points and the high, the sheer unpredictability of it all. And at the heart of it, the word takes everything and puts it into the hands of a higher power, acknowledging the limits of those here on earth, and the hope, the sheer hope, the kind you hitch your life to, that your deepest wish, your deepest yearning will eventually be yours.

I tell you, they were not men after spoils and glory; they were boys riding the sheer tremendous tidal wave of desperate living. Boys. Because this. This is beautiful. Listen. Try to see it. Here is that fine shape of eternal youth and virginal desire which makes heroes. That makes the doings of heroes border so close upon the unbelievable that it is no wonder that their doings must emerge now and then like gunflashes in the smoke, and that their very physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand faces before breath is out of them, lest paradoxical truth outrage itself.

It scared me, a little, to not feel like I was getting used to this, to instead feel like I was growing more desperate for her every day. I had her. I lived with her. I married her. But my feelings for Hanna were foreign to me in their intensity, and the sheer unknown of our future left me feeling unsteady.

My bridal gown. So beautiful in design but it was never sewed. So lovely, ivory lace, ivory silk, sheer lace back, pleated bodice and flared skirt never sewed. My veil, my "train." (So foolish the bridal train, trailing along the ground, on dirty steps. What possible purpose, beautiful and costly dazzling-white silk so quickly spoiled.) The bridal design held us captive. My dear mother, and me. And so, when I was married to my husband it seemed to me a second marriage.

Do you know what the best thing about getting my sight back will be?” he asked softly. “No,” she replied, all of the bravado gone from her voice. Straightening, he took one step toward her, then another. She refused to give ground until he was almost on top of her. Feeling the air shift as she retreated, he clumsily flanked her until their positions were reversed and she was the one backing toward the door. “Some might believe it would be the joy of watching the sun dip below a lavender horizon at the end of a perfect summer day.” When he heard her back come up against the door, he splayed one palm against the thick mahogany behind her. “Others might judge it to be perusing the velvety petals of a ruby red rose…”—leaning forward until he felt the warm tickle of her breath against his face, he deepened his voice to a smoky caress—“or gazing tenderly into the eyes of a beautiful woman. But I can promise you, Miss Wickersham, that all of those pleasures will pale in comparison to the sheer unmitigated joy of being rid of you.

Once his hair was smooth and free of mats, Martise ran the comb through it for sheer pleasure. He had beautiful hair, straight and black and falling to his waist. It spread across a strong back and wide shoulders, dampening his shirt to a transparent thinness. She slid her hand under its weight and caressed his nape with light strokes of the comb. His shoulders slumped, and he lowered his head in mute invitation for her to continue. He breathed deep, relaxing under her touch. Martise was anything but relaxed. She was on fire, recalling those moments in the library when he’d given her a taste of the passion burning within him. He was her dreams manifested, a bright and volatile star in a winter sky.

The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall.

...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.

Paris is a sensuous woman every man has loved, even if only in his dreams. Once he has been deep inside her, walked her streets and tasted her delights, he can never forget her. Yet no matter how strong the memory of her remains, it cannot prepare him for the sheer beauty of her nakedness as he gazes upon her for the second time; the intoxicating fragrance of her hair as it brushes against him as it did when she let him love her; the softness of her skin beneath his fingertips as he strokes her breathtakingly graceful form; or the searing fire which courses through every fiber of his soul now that she is within reach. For every man blessed with a woman's love, she is a shrine to his happiness now that he need search no more. But for those who reside in obscurity within the lonely domicile of an empty heart, she is the hope of finding love. In his tortured heart, love waits for him at a corner cafe in the woman's smile two tables away; it lingers in the melodic laughter of a girl riding past him on a bicycle; and sometimes, when the woman is smiling at someone else, and the girl rides past him without notice, he finds love beneath the skirt of the darkly sensual woman waiting for him under a streetlamp.

I fancy that the true explanation is this: It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. In the present case, what is it that has really happened? Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life. The people who have adored me—there have not been very many, but there have been some—have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. They have become stout and tedious, and when I meet them, they go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

The woods are so human," wrote John Foster, "that to know them one must live with them. An occasional saunter through them, keeping to the well-trodden paths, will never admit us to their intimacy. If we wish to be friends we must seek them out and win them by frequent, reverent visits at all hours; by morning, by noon, and by night; and at all seasons, in spring, in summer, in autumn, in winter. Otherwise we can never really know them and any pretence we may make to the contrary will never impose on them. They have their own effective way of keeping aliens at a distance and shutting their hearts to mere casual sightseers. It is of no use to seek the woods from any motive except sheer love of them; they will find us out at once and hide all their sweet, old-world secrets from us. But if they know we come to them because we love them they will be very kind to us and give us such treasures of beauty and delight as are not bought or sold in any market-place. For the woods, when they give at all, give unstintedly and hold nothing back from their true worshippers. We must go to them lovingly, humbly, patiently, watchfully, and we shall learn what poignant loveliness lurks in the wild places and silent intervales, lying under starshine and sunset, what cadences of unearthly music are harped on aged pine boughs or crooned in copses of fir, what delicate savours exhale from mosses and ferns in sunny corners or on damp brooklands, what dreams and myths and legends of an older time haunt them. Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship.

Pandora, who walked down the aisle of the estate chapel on Devon's arm, was radiantly beautiful in a dress of white silk, the billowing skirts so intricately gathered and draped that no lace or ornamental trim had been necessary. She wore a coronet of fresh daisies and a veil of sheer tulle and carried a small bouquet of roses and daisies. If West had any remaining doubts about St. Vincent's true feelings for his bride, they were forever banished as he saw the man's expression. St. Vincent stared at Pandora as if she were a miracle, his cool composure disrupted by a faint flush of emotion. When Pandora reached him and the veil was pushed back, St. Vincent broke with etiquette by leaning down to press a tender kiss on her forehead. "That part isn't 'til later," Pandora whispered to him, but it was loud enough that the people around them overheard, and a rustle of laughter swept through the crowd.

There was something fundamentally aberrant about a man who could sit with an infant propped in one arm and still have erotic thoughts about the woman encircled with the other arm. Though they weren’t truly erotic thoughts. They were more the kind of thoughts that noticed the way firelight brought out red highlights in Sophie Windham’s hair, or saw how graceful the curve of her cheek was, or heard the sheer cultured beauty of her voice as she did Wordsworth proud.

I asked the earth and it answered, “I am not He”; and all things that are in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things, and they answered, “We are not your God, seek higher.” I asked the winds that blow, and the whole air with all that is in it answered, “Anaximenes was wrong; I am not God.” I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they answered, “Neither are we God whom you seek.” And I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: “Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.” And they cried out in a great voice: “He made us.” My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty. Man is a silent, incarnate word of God. The moon, the stars, the sun, the sea, the firmament are the visible proof of the existence and omnipotence of God, who created them out of sheer love. These creatures are the powerful, mysterious voice of God.

Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man’s utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant feminine beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out—the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill: to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

I tell you, because military training is not publicly recognised by the state, you must not make that an excuse for being a whit less careful in attending to it yourself. For you may rest assured that there is no kind of struggle, apart from war, and no undertaking in which you will be worse off by keeping your body in better fettle. "For in everything that men do the body is useful; and in all uses of the body it is of great importance to be in as high a state of physical efficiency as possible. Why, even in the process of thinking, in which the use of the body seems to be reduced to a minimum, it is matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. "And because the body is in a bad condition, loss of memory, depression, discontent, insanity often assail the mind so violently as to drive whatever knowledge it contains clean out of it. But a sound and healthy body is a strong protection to a man, and at least there is no danger then of such a calamity happening to him through physical weakness: on the contrary, it is likely that his sound condition will serve to produce effects the opposite of those that arise from bad condition. And surely a man of sense would submit to anything to obtain the effects that are the opposite of those mentioned in my list. "Besides, it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit. But you cannot see that, if you are careless; for it will not come of its own accord.

Erwin Strauss, in his brilliant monograph on obsession, similarly earlier showed how repulsed Swift was by the animality of the body, by its dirt and decay. Straus pronounced a more clinical judgment on Swift's disgust, seeing it as part of the typical obsessive's worldview: "For all obsessives sex is severed from unification and procreation....Through the...isolation of the genitals from the whole of the body, sexual functions are experienced as excretions and as decay." This degree of fragmentation is extreme, but we all see the world through obsessive eyes at least part of the time and to some degree; and as Freud said, not only neurotics take exception to the fact that "we are born between urine and feces." In t his horror of the incongruity of man Swift the poet gives more tormented voice to the dilemma that haunts us all, and it is worth summing it up one final time: Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man's utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant female beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out-the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill; to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present loss. But I knew I would never go to Bill with a troubling personal matter, a boy who liked me too much, a teacher who scolded unfairly. I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive.

Thinking about sadness and loneliness, and what it means to be sad, how to live with it, walk through it and grow from it. There is a loneliness in sadness that one can find distractions to escape, but at the end of the day, there it is again. So, how to embrace that loneliness, and trust the uncertainty of tomorrow and the next days, weeks, and months? Loneliness seems like a constantly expanding universe and the sadness is like a sheer veil surrounding it. The two work hand in hand, and there is only one way to navigate; go deep into oneself, as no one else has the map. None of this is a terrible thing; sadness adds rich meaningful layers into life, painful as it is, and loneliness is only a state of mind. Profound changes can come from living your sadness, feeling it completely, and housing it in solitude. The day will come when one emerges, brave and beautiful.

He knew he needed to release her, but once he allowed his physical connection to drop away, he was uncertain if he’d ever have a chance to reconnect. Instinctively, he knew Azami was elusive, like water flowing through fingers, or the wind shifting in the trees. He needed a way to seal her to him. “How does one court a woman in Japan? Do I need your brothers’ permission?” She blinked again. Shocked. A hint of uncertainty crept into her eyes. She frowned, and he bent his head to swallow her protest before she could utter it. Her mouth trembled beneath his, and then she opened to him, like a flower, luring him deeper. Her arms slid around his neck, her body pressing tightly against his. He tightened his fingers in her hair. He was burning, through and through, from the inside out, a hot melting of bone and tissue. He hadn’t known he was lonely or even looking for something. He’d been complete. He loved his wife. He was a man with teammates he trusted implicitly. He lived in wild places of beauty he enjoyed. He hadn’t considered there would be a woman who could ever fit with him, who would ever turn his insides soft and his body hard. Feel the same way, Azami. He didn’t lift his mouth, kissing her again and again because one he’d made the mistake, he was addicted and what was the use fighting it? Not when it felt so damn right. Somewhere along the line, his kiss went from sheer aggression and command, to absolute tenderness. The emotion for her rose like a volcano, encompassing him entirely, drawn from some part of him he’d never known even existed. His mouth was gentle, his hands on her, possessive, yet just as gentle. Another claiming, this coming from that deep unknown well. Feel the same way, Azami, he whispered into her mind. An enticement. A need. He waited, something in him going still, waiting for her answer. Tell me how you’re feeling? She hadn’t pulled away. If anything, her arms had tightened around his neck. He shared every single breath she took, feeling the slight movement of her rib cage and breasts against him, the warm air they exchanged. Like I’m burning alive. Drowning. Like I never want this moment to end. He wasn’t a man to say flowery things to a woman, nor did he even think them, but he shared the honest truth with her. Like we belong. Once he let her go, the world would slip back into kilter. He wanted her to stay with him, to give him a chance with her. She didn’t hesitate, and he loved that about her as well. She gave herself in truth in the same way he did. I feel the same, but one of us has to be sane. She initiated the kiss when he pulled back slightly, chasing after him with her soft mouth, fingers digging tightly into the heavy muscle at his neck, sighing when his lips settled once more over hers. He took his time, kissing her thoroughly, again and again, all the while slipping deeper into her spell and hoping she was falling under his. Is this your idea of sanity? He’d make it his reality. He was falling further down the rabbit hole and he’d make her his sanity if she’d fall with him. Her soft laughter slipped inside his heart, winding there until there was no shaking her loose. Not really, but you have to be the strong one. He kissed her again. And again. Why is that? You started this.

I pressed inside her, inch by inch, gazing into her face. Her beauty. Mesmerizing. I was awed that I was inside her . . . or nearly. When I came to the barrier of her virginity, I met her eyes, full of trust and wonder, and whispered, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, sweet Lydia. Mo Chroí." And then I pressed inside, tearing her. She cried out in pain. I wanted to comfort her, but it felt so blessedly good that I could only bring my forehead to hers, holding myself still by sheer force of will, gritting my teeth to stop myself from thrusting, while she became used to my invasion. Why did it have to be that something that felt so wonderful to me hurt her?

I opened it. At first sight it appeared to contain nothing except thin white paper, but when I lifted the paper I found a pair of shoes. They were made of canvas of a blue-green colour that reminded me of the Tides of the Southern Halls. The rubber soles were thick and white and they had white laces. I removed them from the box and put them on. They fitted perfectly. I tried walking about in them. My feet felt beautifully cushioned and bouncible. All day long I have been running and dancing for the sheer pleasure of feeling my feet in their new shoes. ‘Look!’ I said to the crows in the First Northern Hall when they flew down from the High Statues to see what I was doing, ‘I have new shoes!’ But the crows only cawed and flew back to their perches.

ON TIME RUTH HALEY BARTON There have to be times in your life when you move slow, times when you walk rather than run, settling into each step . . . There have to be times when you stop and gaze admiringly at loved ones, marveling that they have been given to you for this life . . . times when hugs linger and kisses are real, when food and drink are savored with gratitude and humility rather than gulped down on your way to something else. There have to be times when you read for the sheer pleasure of it, marveling at the beauty of words and the endless creativity in putting them together . . . times when you settle into the comforts of home and become human once again. There have to be times when you light a candle and find the tender place inside you that loves or sorrows or sings and you pray from that place, times when you let yourself feel, when you allow the tears to come rather than blinking them back because you don’t have time to cry. There have to be times to sink into the soft body of yourself and love what you love simply because love itself is a grace . . . times when you sit with gratitude for the good gifts of your life that get lost and forgotten in the rush of things . . . times to celebrate and play to roll down hills to splash in water or make leaf piles to spread paint on paper or walls or each other. There have to be times to sit and wait for the fullness of God that replenishes body, mind, and soul— if you can even stand to be so full. There has to be time for the fullness of time or time is meaningless.

Galaxies are as mothers, every star a child, every planet a grandchild. The eyes many. The sheer size of the universe offer a chilling stream of terror down the spines of those who truly fathom. Most, unaware how terrified they should be. Astronomers are very rarely barbaric. Just as gravity keeps us grounded, those few enlightened with ability to grasp (even a little) the awes (and threats) of our cosmos, unwilling to obtain the strengths and powers necessary to get our affairs in order. Too few world leaders as terrified as reality demands, and whatever could be said of the majority. Without full realization of the skies can they never hope to know the true meaning of horror and hopelessness [even with all its beauty]. To the strongest, wisest, most heartful. To the bravest, most fearless [warrior philosopher kings]. May (the god of) luck be with us.

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was. We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.” The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.

Ego or fixed identity doesn’t just mean we have a fixed idea about ourselves. It also means that we have a fixed idea about everything we perceive. I have a fixed idea about you; you have a fixed idea about me. And once there is that feeling of separation, it gives rise to strong emotions. In Buddhism, strong emotions like anger, craving, pride, and jealousy are known as kleshas—conflicting emotions that cloud the mind. The kleshas are our vehicle for escaping groundlessness, and therefore every time we give in to them, our preexisting habits are reinforced. In Buddhism, going around and around, recycling the same patterns, is called samsara. And samsara equals pain. We keep trying to get away from the fundamental ambiguity of being human, and we can’t. We can’t escape it any more than we can escape change, any more than we can escape death. The cause of our suffering is our reaction to the reality of no escape: ego clinging and all the trouble that stems from it, all the things that make it difficult for us to be comfortable in our own skin and get along with one another. If the way to deal with those feelings is to stay present with them without fueling the story line, then it begs the question: How do we get in touch with the fundamental ambiguity of being human in the first place? In fact, it’s not difficult, because underlying uneasiness is usually present in our lives. It’s pretty easy to recognize but not so easy to interrupt. We may experience this uneasiness as anything from slight edginess to sheer terror. Anxiety makes us feel vulnerable, which we generally don’t like. Vulnerability comes in many guises. We may feel off balance, as if we don’t know what’s going on, don’t have a handle on things. We may feel lonely or depressed or angry. Most of us want to avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, so we’ll do almost anything to get away from them. But if, instead of thinking of these feelings as bad, we could think of them as road signs or barometers that tell us we’re in touch with groundlessness, then we would see the feelings for what they really are: the gateway to liberation, an open doorway to freedom from suffering, the path to our deepest well-being and joy. We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased. So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug of shenpa when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the story line. Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises? This is the challenge. This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

That night, while you were asleep, I unbuttoned your pajama jacket and looked at what he’d done to you. Afterward, I drove back to his house and very nearly killed him. If he hadn’t started crying and begging me to stop, I…” He let out the angry breath. “That was when I realized how I felt about you,” he added, his eyes meeting hers. “A man wants to protect what he considers his own. It started then, that night.” She was surprised by what he was telling her. “You…looked at me?” He nodded. His eyes narrowed. “You had the most beautiful little breasts,” he said roughly. “And they were covered with bruises. I wanted to kiss the bruises, take you into my bed and hold you, just hold you, all night long so that you’d be safe. I didn’t dare give in to the impulse, of course,” he added with the first touch of amusement he’d shown since her arrival. “My mother would have horsewhipped me.” She felt waves of surprised pleasure lance through her body. “I never knew.” “I was always known for my poker face,” he murmured. “But it was sheer agony to be around you. The older you got, the worse it was. It was inevitable that one day I’d go mad and take you.” He sighed. “The most hellish part of the whole thing was knowing that all I had to do was touch you and you’d let me do anything I liked to you.” She traced the mouth of her coffee cup. “I loved you,” she said quietly. “I know.” There was a world of pain in the words. She looked up into his black eyes and saw an answering emotion in them. “You never told me.” “I couldn’t.

I am very often asked why, at the age of eighty-five, I continue to practice. Tip number eighty-five (sheer coincidence that I am now eighty-five years old) begins with a simple declaration: my work with patients enriches my life in that it provides meaning in life. Rarely do I hear therapists complain of a lack of meaning. We live lives of service in which we fix our gaze on the needs of others. We take pleasure not only in helping our patients change, but also in hoping their changes will ripple beyond them toward others. We are also privileged by our role as cradlers of secrets. Every day patients grace us with their secrets, often never before shared. The secrets provide a backstage view of the human condition without social frills, role-playing, bravado, or stage posturing. Being entrusted with such secrets is a privilege given to very few. Sometimes the secrets scorch me and I go home and hold my wife and count my blessings. Moreover, our work provides the opportunity to transcend ourselves and to envision the true and tragic knowledge of the human condition. But we are offered even more. We become explorers immersed in the grandest of pursuits—the development and maintenance of the human mind. Hand in hand with patients, we savor the pleasure of discovery—the “aha” experience when disparate ideational fragments suddenly slide smoothly together into a coherent whole. Sometimes I feel like a guide escorting others through the rooms of their own house. What a treat it is to watch them open doors to rooms never before entered, discover unopened wings of their house containing beautiful and creative pieces of identity. Recently I attended a Christmas service at the Stanford Chapel to hear a sermon by Rev. Jane Shaw that underscored the vital importance of love and compassion. I was moved by her call to put such sentiments into practice whenever we can. Acts of caring and generosity can enrich any environment in which we find ourselves. Her words motivated me to reconsider the role of love in my own profession. I became aware that I have never, not once, used the word love or compassion in my discussions of the practice of psychotherapy. It is a huge omission, which I wish now to correct, for I know that I regularly experience love and compassion in my work as a therapist and do all I can to help patients liberate their love and generosity toward others. If I do not experience these feelings for a particular patient, then it is unlikely I will be of much help. Hence I try to remain alert to my loving feelings or absence of such feelings for my patients.

A handsome prince fights a terrible, beautiful dragon and slays him then carries the head home strapped to his saddle. The lesson is obvious. When one is a monster, one does well to beware knights in shining armor. A good lesson for Eleanor." Zach heard the meaning behind Søren's words. "Nora is not a monster. She's not perfect obviously. But she's a good person, and to call her a monster is ridiculous." "You know her that well, do you?" Soren asked, turning to face him full-on. "Before tonight she scared you, didn't she? Her fearlessness, her brazeness, I'm sure it's terrifying at first. Foreign to those who lead proverbial life of quiet desperation as I imagine you do. She scared you with the sheer force of her life and being. But now you look around and think her courage is merely a byproduct of her damage. You imagine I abused her, changed her. And you would save her, as Wesley imagines he can? You would be her knight in shining armor? Yes, before you feared her and now you pity her. I assure you, Zachary, you were right the first time.

He knew he needed to release her, but once he allowed his physical connection to drop away, he was uncertain if he’d ever have a chance to reconnect. Instinctively, he knew Azami was elusive, like water flowing through fingers, or the wind shifting in the trees. He needed a way to seal her to him. “How does one court a woman in Japan? Do I need your brothers’ permission?” She blinked again. Shocked. A hint of uncertainty crept into her eyes. She frowned, and he bent his head to swallow her protest before she could utter it. Her mouth trembled beneath his, and then she opened to him, like a flower, luring him deeper. Her arms slid around his neck, her body pressing tightly against his. He tightened his fingers in her hair. He was burning, through and through, from the inside out, a hot melting of bone and tissue. He hadn’t known he was lonely or even looking for something. He’d been complete. He loved his life. He was a man with teammates he trusted implicitly. He lived in wild places of beauty he enjoyed. He hadn’t considered there would be a woman who could ever fit with him, who would ever turn his insides soft and his body hard. Feel the same way, Azami. He didn’t lift his mouth, kissing her again and again because one he’d made the mistake, he was addicted and what was the use fighting it? Not when it felt so damn right. Somewhere along the line, his kiss went from sheer aggression and command, to absolute tenderness. The emotion for her rose like a volcano, encompassing him entirely, drawn from some part of him he’d never known even existed. His mouth was gentle, his hands on her, possessive, yet just as gentle. Another claiming, this coming from that deep unknown well. Feel the same way, Azami, he whispered into her mind. An enticement. A need. He waited, something in him going still, waiting for her answer.

The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all. As for using the artifices of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or preserve these fresh pinks and roses, that was not their way. The withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers. Plucked they must be before nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all.

Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue. Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You are unworthy of her. Yes. No. Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky. They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination. Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turns skyward. Is this drizzle? It is. Sound of small sheers closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty and here it is, the separation.

Well, she would marry a man who didn't need or want her fortune. Mr. Pinter didn't fall into that category. And given how blank his expression became as his gaze met hers, she'd been right to be skeptical. he would never be interested in her in that way. He confirmed it by saying, with his usual formality, "I doubt any man would consider your ladyship unacceptable as a wife." Oh, when he turned all hoity-toity, she could just murder him. "Then we agree that the gentlemen in question would find me satisfactory," she said, matching his cold tone. "So I don't see why you assume they'd be unfaithful." "Some men are unfaithful no matter how beautiful their wives are," Mr. Pinter growled. He thought her beautiful? There she went again, reading too much into his words. He was only making a point. "But you have no reason to believe that these gentleman would be. Unless there's some dark secret you already know about them that I do not?" Glancing away, he muttered a curse under his breath. "No." "Then here's your chance to find out the truth about their characters. Because I prefer facts to opinions. And I was under the impression that you do, too." Take that, Mr. Pinter! Hoist by your own petard. The man always insisted on sticking to the facts. And he was well aware that she'd caught him out, for he scowled, then crossed his arms over his chest. His rather impressive chest, from what she could tell beneath his black coat and plain buff waistcoat. "I can't believe I'm the only person who would object to these gentlemen," he said. "What about your grandmother? Have you consulted her?" She lifted her eyes heavenward. He was being surprisingly resistant to her plans. "I don't need to. Every time one of them asks to dance with me, she beams. She's forever urging me to smile at them or attempt flirtation. And if they so much as press my hand or take my for a stroll, she quizzes me with great glee on what was said and done." "She's been letting you go out on private strolls with these scoundrels?" Mr. Pinter said in sheer outrage. "They aren't scoundrels." "I swear to God, you're a lamb among the wolves," he muttered. That image of her, so unlike how she saw herself, made her laugh. "I've spent half my life in the company of my brothers. Every time Gabe went to shoot, I went with him. At every house party that involved his friends, I was urged to show off my abilities with a rifle. I think I know how to handle a man, Mr. Pinter." His glittering gaze bored into her. "There's a vast difference between gamboling about in your brother's company with a group of his friends and letting a rakehell like Devonmont or a devilish foreigner like Basto stroll alone with you down some dark garden path." A blush heated her cheeks. "I didn't mean strolls of that sort, sir. I meant daytime walks about our gardens and such, with servants in plain view. All perfectly innocent." He snorted. "I doubt it will stay that way." "Oh, for heaven's sake, why are you being so stubborn? You know I must marry. Why do you even care whom I choose?" "I don't care," he protested. "I'm merely thinking of how much of my time will be wasted investigating suitors I already know are unacceptable." She let out an exasperated breath. Of course. With him, it was always about money. Heaven forbid he should waste his time helping her.

Did you ever notice how very fickle males are?” she asked the horse. “And how very foolish females are about them?” she added, aware of how inexplicably deflated she felt. She realized as well that she was being completely irrational-she had not intended to come here, had not wanted him to be waiting, and now she felt almost like crying because he wasn’t! Giving the ribbons of her bonnet an impatient jerk, she untied them. Pulling the bonnet off, she pushed the back door of the cottage open, stepped inside-and froze in shock! Standing at the opposite side of the small room, his back to her, was Ian Thornton. His dark head was slightly bent as he gazed at the cheery little fire crackling in the fireplace, his hands shoved into the back waistband of his gray riding breeches, his booted foot upon the grate. He’d taken off his jacket, and beneath his soft lawn shirt his muscles flexed as he withdrew his right hand and shoved it through the side of his hair. Elizabeth’s gaze took in the sheer male beauty of his wide, masculine shoulders, his broad back and narrow waist. Something in the somber way he was standing-added to the fact that he’d waited more than two hours for her-made her doubt her earlier conviction that he hadn’t truly cared whether she came or not. And that was before she glanced sideways and saw the table. Her heart turned over when she saw the trouble he’d taken: A cream linen tablecloth covered with crude china, obviously borrowed from Charise’s house. In the center of the table a candle was lit, and a half-empty bottle of wine stood beside a platter of cold meat and cheese. In all her life Elizabeth had never known that a man could actually arrange a luncheon and set a table. Women did that. Women and servants. Not men who were so handsome they made one’s pulse race. It seemed she’d been standing there for several minutes, not mere seconds, when he stiffened suddenly, as if sensing her presence. He turned, and his harsh face softened with a wry smile: “You aren’t very punctual.” “I didn’t intend to come,” Elizabeth admitted, fighting to recover her balance and ignore the tug of his eyes and voice. “I got caught in the rain on my way to the village.” “You’re wet.” “I know.” “Come over by the fire.” When she continued to watch him warily, he took his foot off the grate and walked over to her. Elizabeth stood rooted to the floor, while all of Lucinda’s dark warnings about being alone with a man rushed through her mind. “What do you want?” she asked him breathlessly, feeling dwarfed by his towering height. “Your jacket.” “No-I think I’d like to keep it on.” “Off,” he insisted quietly. “It’s wet.” “Now see here!” she burst out backing toward the open door, clutching the edges of her jacket. “Elizabeth,” he said with reassuring calm, “I gave you my word you’d be safe if you came today.” Elizabeth briefly closed her eyes and nodded, “I know. I also know I shouldn’t be here. I really ought to leave. I should, shouldn’t I?” Opening her eyes again, she looked beseechingly into his-the seduced asking the seducer for advice. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think I’m the one you ought to ask.

It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River. He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. Charleston was my father’s ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. His bloodstream lit up my own with a passion for the city that I’ve never lost nor ever will. I’m Charleston-born, and bred. The city’s two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of my life on this storied peninsula. I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St. Michael’s calling cadence in the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street. Deep in my bones, I knew early that I was one of those incorrigible creatures known as Charlestonians. It comes to me as a surprising form of knowledge that my time in the city is more vocation than gift; it is my destiny, not my choice. I consider it a high privilege to be a native of one of the loveliest American cities, not a high-kicking, glossy, or lipsticked city, not a city with bells on its fingers or brightly painted toenails, but a ruffled, low-slung city, understated and tolerant of nothing mismade or ostentatious. Though Charleston feels a seersuckered, tuxedoed view of itself, it approves of restraint far more than vainglory. As a boy, in my own backyard I could catch a basket of blue crabs, a string of flounder, a dozen redfish, or a net full of white shrimp. All this I could do in a city enchanting enough to charm cobras out of baskets, one so corniced and filigreed and elaborate that it leaves strangers awed and natives self-satisfied. In its shadows you can find metalwork as delicate as lace and spiral staircases as elaborate as yachts. In the secrecy of its gardens you can discover jasmine and camellias and hundreds of other plants that look embroidered and stolen from the Garden of Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from the gods. In its kitchens, the stoves are lit up in happiness as the lamb is marinating in red wine sauce, vinaigrette is prepared for the salad, crabmeat is anointed with sherry, custards are baked in the oven, and buttermilk biscuits cool on the counter.

Mike continued to walk unhurriedly toward the crowd until he loomed up in the stereo tank in life size, as if he were in the room with his water brothers. He stopped on the grass verge in front of the hotel, a few feet from the crowd. "You called me?" He was answered with a growl. The sky held scattered clouds; at that instant the sun came out from behind one and a shaft of golden light hit him. His clothes vanished. He stood before them, a golden youth, clothed only in his own beauty, beauty that made Jubal's heart ache, thinking that Michelangelo in his ancient years would have climbed down from his high scaffolding to record it for generations unborn. Mike said gently, "Look at me. I am a son of man." . . . . "God damn you!" A half brick caught Mike in the ribs. He turned his face slightly toward his assailant. "But you yourself are God. You can damn only yourself and you can never escape yourself." "Blasphemer!" A rock caught him just over his left eye and blood welled forth. Mike said calmly, "In fighting me, you fight yourself... for Thou art God and I am God * . . and all that groks is God-there is no other." More rocks hit him, from various directions; he began to bleed in several places. "Hear the Truth. You need not hate, you need not fight, you need not fear. I offer you the water of life-" Suddenly his hand held a tumbler of water, sparkling in the sunlight. "-and you may share it whenever you so will . . . and walk in peace and love and happiness together." A rock caught the glass and shattered it. Another struck him in the mouth. Through bruised and bleeding lips he smiled at them, looking straight into the camera with an expression of yearning tenderness on his face. Some trick of sunlight and stereo formed a golden halo back of his head. "Oh my brothers, I love you so! Drink deep. Share and grow closer without end. Thou art God." Jubal whispered it back to him. . . . "Lynch him! Give the bastard a nigger necktie!" A heavy-gauge shotgun blasted at close range and Mike's right arm was struck off at the elbow and fell. It floated gently down, then came to rest on the cool grasses, its hand curved open in invitation. "Give him the other barrel, Shortie-and aim closer!" The crowd laughed and applauded. A brick smashed Mike's nose and more rocks gave him a crown of blood. "The Truth is simple but the Way of Man is hard. First you must learn to control yourself. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes." Another shotgun blast was followed by two more shots. One shot, a forty-five slug, hit Mike over the heart, shattering the sixth rib near the sternum and making a large wound; the buckshot and the other slug sheered through his left tibia five inches below the patella and left the fibula sticking out at an angle, broken and white against the yellow and red of the wound. Mike staggered slightly and laughed, went on talking, his words clear and unhurried. "Thou art God. Know that and the Way is opened." "God damn it-let's stop this taking the Name of the Lord in vain!"- "Come on, men! Let's finish him!" The mob surged forward, led by one bold with a club; they were on him with rocks and fists, and then with feet as he went down. He went on talking while they kicked his ribs in and smashed his golden body, broke his bones and tore an ear loose. At last someone called out, "Back away a little so we can get the gasoline on him!" The mob opened up a little at that waning and the camera zoomed to pick up his face and shoulders. The Man from Mars smiled at his brothers, said once more, softly and clearly, "I love you." An incautious grasshopper came whirring to a landing on the grass a few inches from his face; Mike turned his head, looked at it as it stared back at him. "Thou art God," he said happily and discorporated.