Short Description Quotes

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist. A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

I told him I'd always found the description a little too long on adjectives and a little too short on specifics.

A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a Happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little better for anything else.

So many misconceptions surround the notion of heroism. Far too many categorize a hero as a champion on the battlefield, a commander of legions, a master of rare talent or ability. Granted, there have been heroes who fit those descriptions. But many men of great evil as well. Heed me. A hero sacrifices for the greater good. A hero is true to his or her conscience. In short, heroism means doing the right thing regardless of the consequences. Although any person could fit that description, very few do. Choose this day to be one of them." (Beyonders - A World Without Heroes)

A hero sacrifices for the greater good. A hero is true to his or her conscience. In short, heroism means doing the right thing regardless of the consequences. Although any person could fit that description, very few do. Choose this day to be one of them.

But the floor retained an unparalleled measure of excellence with a decorative array of ceramic tiles precisely laid by an anonymous Muslim artisan with limitless patience, pride, or skill.  He left behind an ornate work of art in a short, squat, non-descript building near the most dangerous piece of real estate on the planet.  Silva often wondered how an architect so careless came to work with a craftsman so precise.  Looking at that floor, she often thought that if everyone applied just a fraction of his dedication to their own work, it might cancel out the hatred driving the destruction.

If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Gospels] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor... We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications... That sect [Jews] had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust... Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law... That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. [Letter to William Short, 4 August, 1820]

Weapons weren't in the class description. It's about basic self-defense and hand-to-hand." "Why bother then?" Adrian strolled over to a glass case displaying several types of brass knuckles. "That's the kind of stuff Castile does all day. He could have showed us." "I wanted someone a little more approachable," I explained. "What, like Captain McTropicalShorts back there? Where on earth did you find him anyway?" "Just did an Internet search." Feeling a need to defend my research, I added, "He comes highly recommended." "By who? Long John Silver?

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else's blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn't trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn't trust them.

I know a person who, though no poet, composed some verses in a very short time, which were full of feeling and admirably descriptive of her pain: they did not come from her understanding, but, in order the better to enjoy the bliss which came to her from such delectable pain, she complained of it to her God. She would have been so glad if she could have been cut to pieces, body and soul, to show what joy this pain caused her. What torments could have been set before her at such a time which she would not have found it delectable to endure for her Lord's sake?

It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure.

Eldredge has just said gives a pretty good short description of ADD: You don’t mean to do the things you do do, and you don’t do the things you mean to do.

Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we’re going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will fully appreciated that the power of governments should be limited; that governments ought not to be empowered to decide the validity of scientific theories, that this is a ridiculous thing for them to try to do; that they are not to decide the description of history or of economic theory or of philosophy.

Life is Beautiful? Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful. No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions inside this body is a marvel, we grow with these life experiences, we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day, in this race where the goal is imminent death sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway and connects us to the server of the matrix once more, debugging and updating our database, erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood, waiting to return to earth again. "Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior about people who looked like a bundle of light and left this platform for no apparent reason, but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings, she has a script for each of us because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels. You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own. inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend, that comes from our fears of our imagination not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma "rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day. We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms and in the jobs, we pay our taxes, we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us the system the marketing of disinformation, Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story! It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky, Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better! Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us, 'Cause one way or another we're doomed to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter. It is almost always like that. Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare. A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome. As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life. The terrors that lurk in the shadows, the dangers lurking around every corner. We realize that reality is much harsher and ruthless than we ever imagined. And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell, we can do nothing but cling to our own existence, summon all our might and fight with all our might so as not to be dragged into the abyss. But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough. Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about, leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness. And in that moment, when all seems lost, we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap, a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose. And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us, we remember the words that once seemed to us so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie, that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.

How frail the bloom, how short the stay That terminates us all! Today we flourish green and gay, Like leaves tomorrow fall.

When you are describing things and places the reader has seen, keep description short by reminding him of the pictures he has on file. When you are describing things and places the reader has not seen, keep description short by using pieces of the pictures he has on file to create new pictures.

Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.

Later, when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport?

She had short curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.

Since Sienna was in an unusually cooperative mood, the session went well. He was returning from it midmorning - after a short detour - when a small naked body barreled into him in one of the main corridors. Steadying the boy with Tk, he looked down. The child lifted a finger to his lips. "Shh. I'm hiding." With that, he went behind Judd and scrambled into a small alcove. "Quickly! Not sure why he obeyed the order, Judd backed up to stand in front of the alcove, arms crossed. A flustered Lara came running around the corner a few seconds later. "Have you seen Ben? Four-year-old. Naked as a jaybird?" "How tall is he?" Judd asked in his most overbearing Psy manner. Lara stared. "He's four. How tall do you think he is? Have you seen him or not?" "Let me think...did you say he was naked?" "He was about to be bathed. Slippery little monkey." A giggle from behind Judd. Lara's eyes widened and then her lips twitched. "So you haven't seen him?" "Without a proper description, I can't be sure." The healer was obviously trying not to laugh. "You shouldn't encourage him - he's incorrigible as it is." Judd felt childish hands on his left calf and then Ben poked his head out. "I'm incorwigeable, did ya hear?" Judd nodded. "I do believe you've been found. Why don't you go have your bath?" "Come on, munchkin." Lara held out a hand. Surprisingly strong baby arms and legs wrapped around Judd's leg. "No. I wanna stay with Uncle Judd." Lara anticipated his question. "Ben spends a lot of time with Marlee." "I spend a lot of time with Marlee," a small voice piped up.

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.

There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.

I like you," she whispered, and he thought that her scent was like lilies, secret and hidden in cracks furred with green moss—places where sunshine is short and shadows long.

The geographer Oren Yiftachel from Ben-Gurion University, depicted Israel as an ethnocracy, a regime governing a mixed ethnic state with a legal and formal preference for one ethnic group over all the others. Others went further, labeling Israel an apartheid state or a settler colonial state. In short, whatever description these critical scholars offered, "democracy" was not among them.

Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured. They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts—and even pretend to revere them—the result is (this is not a description without generosity) 'unappetizing'.

William Butler Yeats’s “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able to fully engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists. It is here that Yeats’s diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction-their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true “racist” conviction of one’s own superiority.

They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to disgust we will only seek to explain by supposing that this mysterious composition which we call society, is nothing absolutely good or bad in itself, but has a spirit in it, volatile but potent, which either makes you drunk when you think it, as Orlando thought it, delightful, or gives you a headache when you think it, as Orlando thought it, repulsive. That the faculty of speech has much to do with it either way, we take leave to doubt. Often a dumb hour is the most ravishing of all; brilliant wit can be tedious beyond description. But to the poets we leave it, and so on with our story.

Humboldt's glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth,he averred." The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold.

Actresses talking about characters they’ve played often use the phrase “strong woman”, which kind of irks me. Firstly, the description appears to be reserved for two kinds of female: the gun-toting chick in tiny-vest-and-shorts combo, or the tough-talking businesswoman who secretly longs for a man to bring out her softer side. So obviously, our idea of strength is pretty narrow and one-dimensional. Secondly, why isn’t Brad Pitt ever asked about how much he enjoys playing a “strong man”? Is it automatically assumed that men’s roles will be complex and interesting?

She pushed her chair away from the desk and wandered into the kitchen where she gazed out the window and thought. There were birds chirping cheerfully and two squirrels chasing each other without a care in the world. She wanted to be like those squirrels. Or at least to appear like them to the rest of the world.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? I change my physiology. If I am near waves, I go surf them. If not, a short, intense kettlebell workout, a bike ride, a swim, a cold shower or ice plunge, Wim Hof or heart rate variability breathing [see Adam Robinson, for a description]. It’s remarkable how the mind follows the body.

People don't tend to employ me. I'm the wrong personality type. Or rather, people do tend to employ me for a short time and then they sack me. A film broker once told me, as she terminated my contract, that I have a misleading sort of face. "You're pretty", she complained. "Your features are symmetrical and there was an article in Grazia that says human beings are programmed to find those with symmetrical features more pleasing to they eye. So this isn't my fault, I was simply responding to a biological imperative. You've even teeth, so when you smile, you look...sweet, I suppose. But you're not, are you?" "I hope not," I said. "You see, there you go again. You're a smart-arse and you've no ability to filter your thoughts---" "And my thoughts are often abrasive." "Exactly." "I'll just get my brushes and sponges and leave." "If you would.

I steal," Winkle said, with a smile that said I’m joking and a glint in his eye that said I’m not.

Mrs. Shah was a media favorite and the paparazzi loved her but only because she could be entertainingly obnoxious with her potty mouth and caustic mannerisms

succinct description

She resents the chipped paint of the table and the dingy closet they call a dressing room. (Dark City Lights)

A buyer persona profile is a short biography of the typical customer, not just a job description but a person description,” says Adele Revella,

In Hobbes' memorable description, life outside society would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

In writing short stories—as in writing novels—take one thing at a time. (For some writers, this advice I'm giving may apply best to a first draft; for others, it may hinder the flow at first but be useful when time for revision comes.) Treat a short passage of description as a complete unit and make that one small unit as perfect as you can; then turn to the next unit— a passage of dialogue, say—and make that as perfect as you can. Move to larger units, the individual scenes that together make up the plot, and work each scene until it sparkles.

A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature...

Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that ‘Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou’wester’. And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince. Was

Her fat neck jiggled as the words came out of her botoxed, pink mouth. Her heavy bosoms moved up and down from her agitated breathing, like two mountains that rose and fell from the turbulence of the earth beneath it.

Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosophers of our century, described how he achieved personal happiness: “Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.” There could be no better short description of how to build for oneself an autotelic personality.

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism.

In 1970, I wrote in the New York Times, of all uncongenial places, It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect—good or bad—the drug will have on the taker. This will require heroic honesty. Don’t say that marijuana is addictive or dangerous when it is neither, as millions of people know—unlike “speed,” which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin, which can be addictive and difficult to kick. Along with exhortation and warning, it might be good for our citizens to recall (or learn for the first time) that the United States was the creation of men who believed that each person has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he does not interfere with his neighbors’ pursuit of happiness (that his neighbor’s idea of happiness is persecuting others does confuse matters a bit).

So long as our untried senses and our naïve heart recognize themselves and delight in the universe of qualifications, they flourish with the aid and at the risk of the adjective, which, once dissected, proves inadequate, deficient. We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly.... Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing—each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture—pryrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness.

In Murakami's short story 'The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day,' the main character is a writer. In describing the act of writing to a tightrope walker, he says, 'What a writer is *supposed* to do is observe and observe and observe again, and put off making judgments to the last possible moment.' I think that is a beautiful description of writing; it lets the world be, but also there is a moment, finally, of some kind of opinion. There is that moment, but to hold it off is a lovely and worthwhile goal.

The best description of this book is found within the title. The full title of this book is: "This is the story my great-grandfather told my father, who then told my grandfather, who then told me about how The Mythical Mr. Boo, Charles Manseur Fizzlebush Grissham III, better known as Mr. Fizzlebush, and Orafoura are all in fact me and Dora J. Arod, who sometimes shares my pen, paper, thoughts, mind, body, and soul, because Dora J. Arod is my pseudonym, as he/it incorporates both my first and middle name, and is also a palindrome that can be read forwards or backwards no matter if you are an upright man in the eyes of God or you are upside down in a tank of water wearing purple goggles and grape jelly discussing how best to spread your time between your work, your wife, and the toasted bread being eaten by the man you are talking to who goes by the name of Dendrite McDowell, who is only wearing a towel on his head and has an hourglass obscuring his “time machine”--or the thing that he says can keep him young forever by producing young versions of himself the way I avert disaster in that I ramble and bumble like a bee until I pollinate my way through flowery situations that might otherwise have ended up being more than less than, but not equal to two short parallel lines stacked on top of each other that mathematicians use to balance equations like a tightrope walker running on a wire stretched between two white stretched limos parked on a long cloud that looks like Salt Lake City minus the sodium and Mormons, but with a dash of pepper and Protestants, who may or may not be spiritual descendents of Mr. Maynot, who didn’t come over to America in the Mayflower, but only because he was “Too lazy to get off the sofa,” and therefore impacted this continent centuries before the first television was ever thrown out of a speeding vehicle at a man who looked exactly like my great-grandfather, who happens to look exactly like the clone science has yet to allow me to create

I beg you not to read anything threatening, or even prophetic, into my words, Mr. Clarke. Simply take them as a description, or a 'law' if you like. This circle around a law is a world in miniature within our world, which itself is a miniature. We create the world to fit in with our personal system, so that man can become world. In other words, so that the miniature can become miniature. But miniatures have their own laws, you know. It is not only space which can become minute: it also happens to the corresponding time, which becomes extremely fast. That is why life is so short.

Her description of a perfect day sounds perfectly ordinary: “I will sleep long, have a relaxed breakfast. Then I’ll go out for some fresh air, chat with my husband or with friends. I might go to the theater, to the opera, or listen to a concert. If I’m rested, I might read a good book. And I would cook dinner. I like cooking!” These are the dreams of a person who had not been truly free for the last sixteen years. Though no longer young, Merkel is spry enough to enjoy the simplest of pleasures: country rambles, leisurely meals with (nonpolitical) friends, and music and books instead of charts, polls, and position papers. These pleasures will not replace the satisfaction of outsmarting a foe with her legendary stamina and command of facts. But, never one to ruminate over feelings, she will observe her own reaction to this new life with a scientist’s curiosity. In the short term, she is likely to spend time near her childhood home in the province of Brandenburg, where she first learned to love nature and which she still regards as her Heimat, or spiritual home. She’ll travel, too. Among her stated dreams is to fly over the Andes Mountains—an idealized destination; a metaphor for freedom.

I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish me for this and rob me of these treasures, I carefully hid them in secret places where I could enjoy them unmolested. As I grew older, my love for strange stories became even stronger, and I learned of things stranger than what I had read in my childhood. When I was in my thirties, my memory was full of these stories accumulated through years of eager seeking. l have always admired such writers of the T'ang Dynasty as Tuan Ch'eng-shih [author of the Yu-yang tsa-tsu] and Niu Sheng [author of the Hsuan-kuai lu]. Who wrote short stories so excellent in portrayal of men and description of things. I often had the ambition to write a book (of stories) which might be compared with theirs. But I was too lazy to write, and as my laziness persisted, I gradually forgot most of the stories which I had learned. Now only these few stories, less than a score, have survived and have so successfully battled against my laziness that they are at last written down. Hence this Book of Monsters. I have sometimes laughingly said to myself that it is not I who have found these ghosts and monsters, but they, the monstrosities themselves, which have found me! ... Although my book is called a book or monsters, it is not confined to them: it also records the strange things of the human world and sometimes conveys a little bit of moral lesson.

Darwin, landing in Brazil in 1832, had a similar reaction, colored by his reading of his predecessor." Humboldt's glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth,he averred." The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold.

...he understood from my poor description something of the vibrant personality that had been my father's and something too of the love my mother had for him, making it a vital living force, with a spark of divinity about it, so much that when he died...she lingered behind him for five short weeks and stayed no more.

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue--or in any ad for lingerie--where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed. Lingerie ads and storytelling balance the veiled and the unveiled, the seen and the unseen, the shown and the about-to-be-shown. In short, it is the art of the tease, the craft of selective 'coverage,' that, not just in lingerie but in storytelling, works to enthrall.

His body was tubby but his arms apparently couldn’t understand that, for they were long and scrawny. From his brow to an inch below his eyes, his nose turned up; from there on, down. His short upper lip slanted sharply toward his tonsils, which had the effect of making his chinlessness positively jut. (...) The bartender was fascinated by the way the teardrops proceeded down Biddiver’s amazing nose. One drop would dash almost halfway, and then hesitate, daunted by the hump. Then it would be joined by another teardrop, and the two, merging, would surmount the obstacle and slip down to hang glittering over the disappearing lip until a sob came along to shake them off.

Howard Wynn did not suffer boredom or mediocrity well. He felt equally dismissive of willful ignorance—his description of the modern press—and smug stupidity, his bon mot for politicians. To his mind, they were a gang of vapid and arrogant thugs all, who greedily snatched their information from one another like disappearing crumbs as society spiraled merrily toward hell. With the current crop of pundits, bureaucrats, and hired guns in charge, America was destined to repeat the cycles of intellectual torpor that toppled Rome and Greece and Mali and the Incas and every empire that stumbled into short-lived, debauched existence. Show man ignoble work and easy sex, and there went civilization.

My mother, who hated what she called his Americanisms, ended up calling him Il cauboi—the cowboy. It started as a putdown and soon enough became an endearment, to go along with her other nickname for him, conferred during his first week, when he came down to the dinner table after showering, his glistening hair combed back. La star, she had said, short for la muvi star.

Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this world. He that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be but little the better for anything else. Men’s happiness or misery is most part of their own making. He, whose mind directs not wisely, will never take the right way; and he, whose body is crazy and feeble, will never be able to advance in it.

Short, square, cleanshaven, his head seemed carved out of an elephant's tusk, the whole massive cone of ivory left more or less complete in its original shape, eyes hollowed out deep in the roots, the rest of the protuberance accommodating his other features, terminating in a perfectly colossal nose that stretched directly forward from the totally bald cranium. The nose was preposterous, grotesque, slapstick, a mask from a Goldoni comedy.

More than anything, I dream of love, crazy crazy mad love. Not the love of rings and white dresses and churches, but of lust and insanity, the love where you can’t stop touching, kissing, licking, sucking, and fucking. The love that breaks hearts, starts wars, ruins lives, the love that sears itself into your soul, that you can feel every time your heart beats, that scorches your memory and comes back to you whenever you’re alone and it’s quiet and the world falls away, the love that still hurts, that makes you sit and stare at the floor and wonder what the fuck happened and why. I dream of crazy crazy mad love the kind that starts with a look, with eyes that meet, a smile, a touch, a laugh, a kiss. The kind of love that hurts and makes you love the pain, makes you want the pain, makes you yearn for the fucking pain, keeps you awake until the sun rises, stirs you while you’re still asleep. The kind of love you can feel with every step you take, every word you speak, every breath, every movement, is part of every thought you have every minute of the day. Love that overwhelms. That justifies our existence. That provides proof we are here for a reason. That either confirms the existence of God and divinity, or renders it utterly meaningless. Love that makes life more than just whatever we know and see and feel. That elevates it. Love for which so many words have been spoken and written and read and cried and screamed and sung and sobbed, but is beyond any real description of it. I’ve known much in my short, silly, unstable, sometimes wonderful sometimes brutal always reckless wreck of a life, but I’ve never known love. Crazy crazy mad love. Fear and pain, insecurity, rage, occasional joy, fleeting peace, they are all friends of mine. Kindness and familial love have always come my way. Disdain, contempt, and rage are constant companions. But never love.

In short, there are surprising new structures that looping gives rise to that constitute a new level of reality that could in principle be deduced from the basic loop and its detailed properties, but that in practice have a different kind of “life of their own” and that demand — at least when it comes to extremely finite, simplicity-seeking, pattern-loving creatures like us — a new vocabulary and a new level of description that transcend the basic level out of which they emerge.

A book is open in front of me and this is what it has to say about the symptoms of morphine withdrawal: '... morbid anxiety, a nervous depressed condition, irritability, weakening of the memory, occasional hallucinations and a mild impairment of consciousness ...' I have not experienced any hallucinations, but I can only say that the rest of this description is dull, pedestrian and totally inadequate. 'Depressed condition' indeed! Having suffered from this appalling malady, I hereby enjoin all doctors to be more compassionate toward their patients. What overtakes the addict deprived of morphine for a mere hour or two is not a 'depressed condition': it is slow death. Air is insubstantial, gulping it down is useless ... there is not a cell in one's body that does not crave ... but crave what? This is something which defies analysis and explanation. In short, the individual ceases to exist: he is eliminated. The body which moves, agonises and suffers is a corpse. It wants nothing, can think of nothing but morphine. To die of thirst is a heavenly, blissful death compared with the craving for morphine. The feeling must be something like that of a man buried alive, clawing at the skin on his chest in the effort to catch the last tiny bubbles of air in his coffin, or of a heretic at the stake, groaning and writhing as the first tongues of flame lick at his feet. Death. A dry, slow death. That is what lurks behind that clinical, academic phrase 'a depressed condition'.

One day the thought hit me—could the whole story of the Jews in Egypt have simply been a poem? More or less like Homer describing magical cattle, and ravenous women and so on? Ancient peoples saw no difference between a vivid description of marvels and what we call reality—for them the description itself was the reality. In short, the Jews may never have been literally enslaved in Egypt; or perhaps some had been, but the story as we know it may have been largely fictional, an overwhelmingly powerful act of imagination.

I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will be fully appreciated that the power of government should be limited; that governments ought not to be empowered to decide the validity of scientific theories, that that is a ridiculous thing for them to try to do; that they are not to decide the various descriptions of history or of economic theory or of philosophy. Only in this way can the real possibilities of the future human race be ultimately developed.

During her lifetime, people across the globe furiously debated whether [Blavatsky] was a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three. Born in Russia in 1831, Blavatsky was short and fat with bulging eyes and folds of skin falling from her multiple chins. Her face was so broad that some people suspected she was a man. She professed to be a virgin; in fact, she had two husbands and an illegitimate son, and an apostle of asceticism. She smoked up to 200 cigarettes a day and swore like a solider.

As for the description, it might, like most other tabulated descriptions, have fitted tens of thousands of men. With most persons, recognition, even of an intimate, was based on the perception of vague, half-observed quantities which together formed a caricature significant more in its relation to the observer than to the observed. A short man, conscious of his lack of height, would describe a man of medium height as tall. For the ordinary business of hating and loving and getting from the cradle to the deathbed with the least possible discomfort, such caricatures were, no doubt, satisfactory.

It was Oppenheimer’s good fortune to arrive shortly before an extraordinary revolution in theoretical physics drew to its close: Max Planck’s discovery of quanta (photons); Einstein’s magnificent achievement—the special theory of relativity; Niels Bohr’s description of the hydrogen atom; Werner Heisenberg’s formulation of matrix mechanics; and Erwin Schrödinger’s theory of wave mechanics. This truly innovative period began to wind down with Born’s 1926 paper on probability and causality. It was completed in 1927 with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s formulation of the theory of complementarity.

Capitalism has this strange ability to kind of paralyse the altruistic part of humans. So at the weekends, they're altruistic, they love their grandchildren. Then during the week they take on the character of the corporation whose only job description, says Milton Friedman, is to maximize short term profits. If a human being does nothing except maximize their self interest, they're a sociopath. That's how it's defined. So during the week you behave like a sociopath and as if you have no grandchildren-or as if you hate the ones you have. And then at the weekend you become a loving grandfather again. That is apparently what capitalism does to us, based on the evidence.

The naturalist Stephen Jay Gould described his own struggle with the Linda problem. He knew the correct answer, of course, and yet, he wrote, “a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me—‘but she can’t just be a bank teller; read the description.’” The little homunculus is of course Gould’s System 1 speaking to him in insistent tones. (The two-system terminology had not yet been introduced when he wrote.) The correct answer to the short version of the Linda problem was the majority response in only one of our studies: 64% of a group of graduate students in the social sciences at Stanford and at Berkeley correctly judged “feminist bank teller” to be less probable

There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short market-gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown-paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting. The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out of their local stagnation many such creatures, blind and helpless, like moles disinterred. Valentin was a skeptic in the severe style of France, and could have no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and this one might have provoked pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had to be careful, because he had something made of real silver "with blue stones" in one of his brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness with saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham with all his parcels, and came back for his umbrella.

Sweeping the dorm soon's it's empty, I'm after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that the big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells - smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they're fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair - but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.

Nature writers are supposed to be able to summon from the literary ether the precise words to describe their subjects or the feelings they evince. Sometimes the Muse attends, but by no means on demand. It is one of the great delights of trying to be a writer that words can suddenly appear, like blackcap's jubilant song, absent for months and then unexpectedly and ecstatically there, winging into your head just when you need them most. The more emotive the subject or the more deeply personal the experience, the easier it ought to be. But not necessarily so. Some experiences transcend ready description as though making a point: words - at least those available to the generality of writers - sometimes fall hopelessly short; they dish out despair in bucket loads. Others fare much better.

George was the biggest fella I’ve ever met. If you found his skeleton in the woods, you’d think it the leftovers of a dead shire horse, need the skin of one to cobble him some shoes. Could be mistaken for a mountain when he stood against the skyline thanks to his hump, his crooked back stuck out under his shirt like someone had harpooned him and broke the shaft off. The other fella they called Bog and I’ve no idea what it was short for. For a bloke with fewer teeth than things to say, he could scarce get his words out. His tongue could’ve been swollen from the way he mumbled and his voice—maybe thick or foreign or from a part of England where they made a dog mayor and not for a laugh. Not so big as George but you could tell him to fight a brick wall and he’d do it thinking it a fair match.

The first person to describe a cell was Robert Hooke, whom we last encountered squabbling with Isaac Newton over credit for the invention of the inverse square law. Hooke achieved many things in his sixty-eight years—he was both an accomplished theoretician and a dab hand at making ingenious and useful instruments—but nothing he did brought him greater admiration than his popular book Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Miniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, produced in 1665. It revealed to an enchanted public a universe of the very small that was far more diverse, crowded, and finely structured than anyone had ever come close to imagining. Among the microscopic features first identified by Hooke were little chambers in plants that he called “cells” because they reminded

It is certain, that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV., there would have been no documents in the trial of Ravaillac deposited in the clerk's office of the Palais de Justice, no accomplices interested in causing the said documents to disappear; hence, no incendiaries obliged, for lack of better means, to burn the clerk's office in order to burn the documents, and to burn the Palais de Justice in order to burn the clerk's office; consequently, in short, no conflagration in 1618. The old Palais would be standing still, with its ancient grand hall; I should be able to say to the reader, "Go and look at it," and we should thus both escape the necessity,—I of making, and he of reading, a description of it, such as it is. Which demonstrates a new truth: that great events have incalculable results.

Never before have I had such dreams at dawn. They're double dreams. What's more, the principal one, I'd say, is made of glass. It's transparent. And so, then -- I dream of an eerily lit lamp, and out of it blazes a multicolored ribbon of lights. Amneris is waving a green feather and singing. The orchestra, utterly unearthly, is extraordinarily sonorous. I can't convey it in words, though. In short, in a normal dream music is soundless ... (in a normal one? That's another question, which dream is more normal?! I'm joking, though...") soundless, but in my dream it's quite sublimely audible. And the main thing is that, using my will, I can amplify or soften the music. I seem to recall in War and Peace there's a description of Petya Rosrov, when half asleep, experienced the same state. Leo Tolstoy's a remarkable writer!

I felt that it was not a historical work, but that, under the guise of physical warfare, it described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind, and that physical warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring. This preliminary intuition became more confirmed on a closer study of religion and the Gita. A study of the Mahabharata gave it added confirmation. I do not regard the Mahabharata as a historical work in the accepted sense. The Adiparva contains powerful evidence in support of my opinion. By ascribing to the chief actors superhuman or subhuman origins, the great Vyasa made short work the history of kings and their peoples. The persons therein described may be historical, but the author of the Mahabharata has used them merely to drive home his religious theme.

Yet it is the Outsider’s belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante’s description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen is the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone. The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to ‘praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies: the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary, but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the Existential view, first expressed by Soren Kierkegaard, the Outsider’s view and, incidentally, the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel’s book, The Philosophy of History, and James Joyce’s phrase, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake’s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later.

Jean Kurek looked a bit like a field mouse herself, with her close-cut gray hair, in her shapeless gray dress—no zippers, no buttons. Stroke clothes. Her appearance was no more or less distinguished than it had been all her sixty-eight years, the most likely description of her a string of negatives. Not really tall or short, you wouldn’t say she’s heavy but she isn’t particularly thin, not ugly, not at all, but not pretty either, her hair is that color that isn’t blond or brown. Arguably, her most striking feature was the absence of any striking feature—though her hair had finally claimed a color, gray. She’d certainly never been considered beautiful, not by anyone other than Cliff, who had been adamant on the point for over forty years; but if she’d ever yearned for greater consensus, that yearning had been tempered by her knowledge of how she would loathe the attention it would bring. Jean had spent a lifetime trying to be inconspicuous, appreciating that nature had given her a head start.

They saw the governor himself erect and formal within his silkmullioned sulky clatter forth from the double doors of the palace courtyard and they saw one day a pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowieknives the size of claymores and short twobarreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of half-naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh.

Corruption has become a short-cut accusation, a term used by those who are angry at the system to express dissatisfaction and cast aspersions. It is a (rhetorical) weapon of the weak – all the more credible as there indeed is a lot of corruption in Burundi. This is related to what we ended the previous section with, where we said that Burundians desire ‘better people’ rather than ‘better structures.’ Corruption as described by Burundians is a ‘bad person’s’ fault – not a structural issue. Corruption, then, is in part to the masses what human rights are to the well educated. Both are ways to ‘stick it to the man,’ terms whose currency in protest and dissatisfaction is useful. Hence, more than simply accurate descriptions of a social fact, talking about these things is a political act – a way the jargon of the international community has become reappropriated in local political struggles. Given that in Burundi both corruption and human rights violations are indeed prevalent, this makes understanding these discourses very complicated.

Aside from actual sex crimes, masturbation is one of the most frowned upon sexual acts. During the last century, innumerable texts were written describing the horrific consequences of masturbation. Practically all physical or mental illnesses were attributed to the evils of masturbation. Pallor of the complexion, shortness of breath, furtive expression, sunken chest, nervousness, pimples and loss of appetite are only a few of the many characteristics supposedly resulting from masturbation; total physical and mental collapse was assured if one did not heed the warnings in those handbooks for young men. The lurid descriptions in such texts would be almost humorous, were it not for the unhappy fact that even though contemporary sexologists, doctors, writers, etc. have done much to removed the stigma of masturbation, the deep-seated guilts induced by the nonsense in those sexual primers have been only partially erased. A large percentage of people, especially those over forty, cannot emotionally accept the fact that masturbation is natural and healthy, even if they now accept it intellectually, and they, in turn, relate their repugnance, often subconsciously, to their children.

Philotheo. I will do so. If the world is finite and if nothing lieth beyond, I ask you Where is the world? Where is the universe? Aristotle replieth, it is in itself. [1] The convex surface of the primal heaven is universal space, which being the primal container is by naught contained. For position in space is no other than the surfaces and limit of the containing body, so that he who hath no containing body hath no position in space. [2] What then dost thou mean, O Aristotle, by this phrase, that "space is within itself"? What will be thy conclusion concerning that which is beyond the world? If thou sayest, there is nothing, then the heaven [3] and the world will certainly not be anywhere. Fracastoro. The world will then be nowhere. Everything will be nowhere. Philotheo. The world is something which is past finding out. If thou sayest (and it certainly appeareth to me that thou seekest to say something in order to escape Vacuum and Nullity), if thou sayest that beyond the world is a divine intellect, so that God doth become the position in space of all things, why then thou thyself wilt be much embarrassed to explain to us how that which is incorporeal [yet] intelligible, and without dimension can be the very position in space occupied by a dimensional body; and if thou sayest that this incorporeal space containeth as it were a form, as the soul containeth the body, then thou dost not reply to the question of that which lieth beyond, nor to the enquiry concerning that which is outside the universe. And if thou wouldst excuse thyself by asserting that where naught is, and nothing existeth, there can be no question of position in space nor of beyond or outside, yet I shall in no wise be satisfied. For these are mere words and excuses, which cannot form part of our thought. For it is wholly impossible that in any sense or fantasy (even though there may be various senses and various fantasies), it is I say impossible that I can with any true meaning assert that there existeth such a surface, boundary or limit, beyond which is neither body, nor empty space, even though God be there. For divinity hath not as aim to fill space, nor therefore doth it by any means appertain to the nature of divinity that it should be the boundary of a body. For aught which can be termed a limiting body must either be the exterior shape or else a containing body. And by no description of this quality canst thou render it compatible with the dignity of divine and universal nature. [4]

And that had led to all the trouble with How to Dynamically Manage People for Dynamic Results in a Caring Empowering Way in Quite a Short Time Dynamically. Ponder didn't know when this book would be written, or even in which world it might be published, but it was obviously going to be popular because random trawls in the depths of L-space often turned up fragments. Perhaps it wasn't even just one book. And the fragments had been on Ponder's desk when Ridcully had been poking around. Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association. His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled "Me, who does the telling" and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled "Everyone else." Until now this had worked quite well, because, although Ridcully was an impossible manager, the University was impossible to manage and so everything worked seamlessly. And it would have continued to do so if he hadn't suddenly started to see the point in preparing career development packages and, worst of all, job descriptions.

Thus that Upright Judge, whose three Letters my Friend having read, did well approve of 'em, acknowledging, that with great Exactness he had distinguished between Religion and Priest-craft: And he added, If you will shew me, Sir, any Christian Church where that distinction is observed, I will become a Member of it. I recommended the Church of England; he presently told me that he had read the 39 Articles, and observed that 3 of them were wholly design'd to uphold the Power of the Clergy over the People. And then he bad me only compare the Design, which has been, and still is, carrying on under the Name of the Church of England, with the Design of the Christian Religion, as 'tis described by Sir Matthew Hale; and I should find one in all its parts a Contradiction to the other. 'Tis plain (said he) the Clergy do not allow of Sir Matthew's Notions, nor will they suffer us to take any thing for Religion, that is distinguished from their particular Interest. To what end have so many Persecutions and Penal Laws been set a foot by the Clergy in Christendom? was it to bring Men to any one Point of that full Description of Christian Religion, which you cited from Sir Matthew Hale? or only to bring them to that short Article of their Clergy Religion, i.e. to submit to their Power?

Allowing the utmost latitude to the love of power which any reasonable man can require, I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description. The regulation of the mere domestic police of a State appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend all the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion; and all the powers necessary to those objects ought, in the first instance, to be lodged in the national depository. The administration of private justice between the citizens of the same State, the supervision of agriculture and of other concerns of a similar nature, all those things, in short, which are proper to be provided for by local legislation, can never be desirable cares of a general jurisdiction. It is therefore improbable that there should exist a disposition in the federal councils to usurp the powers with which they are connected; because the attempt to exercise those powers would be as troublesome as it would be nugatory; and the possession of them, for that reason, would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendor of the national government.

America’s approach to Iran’s nuclear challenge over the past decade has reprised too much of what led up to our two recent ill-fated wars. Exaggerated descriptions of the threat, false assumptions, and overly narrow reasoning have been resounding through the foreign policy punditry’s echo chamber. It is taken for granted that Iran’s nuclear program is a national and global security concern—especially in light of that country’s fairly advanced missile-delivery system—and an existential threat to Israel, an unacceptable strategic game changer that will destabilize the Middle East by eventually placing nuclear material in the hands of terrorists or leading to a regional nuclear arms race and more broadly endangering world peace by fueling nuclear proliferation. In short, Iranian nukes are a red line that must not be crossed. America will “not countenance” Iran getting nuclear weapons, said President Obama as he insisted that an American policy of pressure and coercion would ensure that that would not be the case.4 Bending Iran’s will thus became a key test of U.S. power and effectiveness, in American minds as well as those of friends and foes alike. This approach came with a large downside risk, however, for it committed America to a path of increasing pressure, backed by military threats, to realize what was from the outset an improbable goal.

To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was get rid of my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature.” In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. Since I was willing to try anything, I figured, why not give that a shot? Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape. Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed.

Berossos compiled his History from the temple archives of Babylon (reputed to have contained "public records" that had been preserved for "over 150,000 years"). He has passed on to us a description of Oannes as a "monster," or a "creature." However, what Berossos has to say is surely more suggestive of a man wearing some sort of fish-costume--in short, some sort of disguise. The monster, Berossos tells us: "had the whole body of a fish, but underneath and attached to the head of the fish there was another head, human, and joined to the tail of the fish, feet like those of a man, and it had a human voice ... At the end of the day, this monster, Oannes, went back to the sea and spent the night. It was amphibious, able to live both on land and in the sea ... Later, other monsters similar to Oannes appeared." Bearing in mind that the curious containers carried by Oannes and the Apkallu sages are also depicted on one of the megalithic pillars at Göbekli Tepe (and [...] as far afield as ancient Mexico as well), what are we to make of all this? The mystery deepends when we follow the Mesopotamian traditions further. In summary, Oannes and the brotherhood of Apkallu sages are depicted as tutoring mankind for many thousands of years. It is during this long passage of time that the five antediluvian cities arise, the centers of a great civilization, and that kingship is "lowered from heaven." Prior to the first appearance of Oannes, Berossos says, the people of Mesopotamia 'lived in a lawless manner, like the beasts of a field.

But, after one quick trace of his tongue between her lips, he abruptly pulled away and stepped back from her. She was leaning into him so hard he had to put his hands on her shoulders to steady her. Catherine’s eyes flew open. Releasing her shoulders, he pointed past her to the books he’d set on the desk. She opened her mouth to protest, but closed it again. As she followed Jim, she caught a glimpse of his profile when he picked up the books and slate. There was a smug grin on his face. He was toying with her, teaching her a lesson—that two could play at heating things up and abruptly cooling them down. Indignation and amusement competed in her as she took her seat beside him and he handed her the paper he’d written. She hadn’t set him any homework. He’d done it on his own, printed a brief description of their picnic in short sentences or single words. It was almost like a poem without rhyme. “Fish swim water. Sky. Trees. Leaves. Eat food. Drink.” She smiled at him. “Very good.” He touched his lips, puckering them in a kiss, and tapped the signing book. “Kiss,” she said and looked up the sign for it. “Fingers touching thumbs as both hands come together,” the text said. Her cheeks flushed as she read, “trembling slightly to indicate the degree of passion.” Catherine made the movement as she repeated the word aloud. “Kiss.” Jim copied the movement, shaping his lips like hers. He pointed to the slate and offered her the chalk so she could spell the word. He studied each letter as she wrote it, before printing them himself: K-i-s-s. Catherine’s cheeks flamed even hotter from seeing it written in glaring white against the black slate. Kiss. Kiss. Somehow there seemed to be no denying or hiding it now that it was written down. She glanced at Jim’s lips and her nipples tightened at the memory of his mouth sucking them.

See? I long to be your spiritual guide. I really do, and I will. Love is my motive, rather than any elevated belief in my own knowledge, contemplative work, experience, or maturity. And may God correct what I get wrong. For he knows everything, and I only know in part.1 Now to satisfy your proud intellect, I will praise the work of contemplation. You should know that if those engaged in this work had the linguistic talent to express exactly what they’re experiencing, then every scholar of Christianity would be amazed by their wisdom. It’s true! In comparison, all theological erudition would look like total nonsense. No wonder, then, that my clumsy human speech can’t describe the immense value of this work to you, and God forbid that the limitations of our finite language should desecrate and distort it. No, this must not and will not happen. God forbid that I would ever want that! For our analysis of contemplation and the exercise itself are two entirely different things. What we say of it is not it, but merely a description. So, since we can’t define it, let’s describe it. This will baffle all intellectual conceit, especially yours, which is the sole reason I’m writing this letter. I want to start off by asking you a question. What is the essence of human spiritual perfection, and what are its qualities? I’ll answer this for you. On earth, spiritual perfection is only possible through the union between God and the human soul in consummate love. This perfection is pure and so sublime that it surpasses our human understanding, and that’s why it can’t be directly grasped or observed. But wherever we see its consequences, we know that the essence of contemplation abounds there. So, if I tell you that this spiritual discipline is better than all others, then I must first prove it by describing what mature love looks like. This spiritual exercise grows virtues. Look within yourself as you contemplate and also examine the nature of every virtue. You’ll find that all virtues are found in and nurtured by contemplation with no distortion or degeneration of their purposes. I’m not going to single out any particular virtue here for discussion. I don’t need to because you can find them described in other things I’ve written.2 I’ll only comment here that contemplative prayer, when done right, is the respectful love and ripe fruit that I discuss in your little Letter on Prayer. It’s the cloud of unknowing, the hidden love-longing offered by a pure spirit. It’s the Ark of the Covenant.3 It’s the mystical theology of Dionysius, the wisdom and treasure of his “bright darkness” and “unknown knowing.” It takes you into silence, far from thoughts and words. It makes your prayer very short. In it, you learn how to reject and forget the world.

Gandhian nonviolence as interpreted in Næss: 1. The character of the means used in a group struggle determines the character of the results. 2. In a group struggle you can keep the goal-directed motivation and the ability to work effectively for the realization of the goal stronger than the destructive, violent tendencies, and the tendencies to passivity, despondency, or destruction, only by making a constructive program part of your campaign and by giving all phases of your struggle, as far as possible a positive character. 3. Short-term violence contradicts long-term universal reduction of violence. 4. You can give a struggle a constructive character only if you conceive of it and carry it out as a struggle in favour of living beings and certain values, thus eventually fighting antagonisms, not antagonists. 5. It increases your understanding of the conflict, of the participants, and of your own motivation, to live together with the participants, especially with those for whom you primarily fight. The most adequate form for living together is that of jointly doing constructive work. 6. If you live together with those for whom you primarily struggle and do constructive work with them, this will create a natural basis for trust and confidence in you. 7. All human (and non-human) beings have long-term interests in common. 8. Cooperation on common goals reduces the chance that the actions and attitudes of the participants in the conflict will become violent. 9. You invite violence from your opponent by humiliating or provoking him. 10. Thorough understanding of the relevant facts and factors increases the chance of a nonviolent realization of the goals of your campaign. 11. Incompleteness and distortion in your description of your case and the plans for your struggle reduce the chance of a nonviolent realization of your goals 12. Secrecy reduce the chance of a nonviolent realization of your goals. 13. You are less likely to take a violent attitude, the better you make clear to yourself the essential points in your cause and your struggle. 14. Your opponent is less likely to use violent means the better he understands your conduct and your case. 15. There is a strong disposition in every opponent such that wholehearted, intelligent, strong, and persistent appeal in favour of a good cause is able ultimately to convince him. 16. Mistrust stems from misjudgement, especially of the disposition of your opponent to answer trust with trust, mistrust with mistrust. 17. The tendency to misjudge and misunderstand your opponent and his case in an unfavourable direction increases his and your tendency to resort to violence. 18. You win conclusively when you turn your opponent into a believer and supporter of your case.

In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffee house and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia, Hemy Cavendish’s weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings. We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being-a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up. The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose-a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence. So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s "osseous fragments" and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg. From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.