Shots Travel Quotes

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

Cracking his knuckles, Cary dramatically prepared to open his fortune cookie. “Let’s see. Will I be rich? Famous? About to meet Mr. or Ms. Tall, Dark, and Tasty? Traveling to distant lands? What’d you guys get?” “Mine’s lame,” I said. “In the end all things will be known. Duh. I didn’t need a fortune to figure that out.” Gideon opened his and read, “Prosperity will knock on your door soon.” I snorted. Cary shot me a look. “I know, right? You snatched someone else’s cookie, Cross.” “He better not be anywhere near someone else’s cookie,” I said dryly. Reaching over, Gideon plucked half of mine out of my fingers. “Don’t worry, angel. Your cookie is the only one I want.” He popped it in his mouth with a wink. “Gag,” Cary muttered. “Get a room.” He cracked his fortune with a flourish, and then scowled. “What the fuck?” I leaned forward. “What’s it say?” “Confucius say,” Gideon ad-libbed, “man with hand in pocket feel cocky all day.” Cary threw half his cookie at Gideon, who caught it deftly and grinned. “Give me that.” I snatched the fortune out from between Cary’s fingers and read it. Then laughed. “Fuck you, Eva.” “Well?” Gideon prodded. “Pick another cookie.” Gideon smiled. “Pwned by a fortune.” Cary threw the other half of his cookie.

Someone gave me a copy of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a fable about a shepherd boy who travels to the Pyramids in search of treasure when all the time it's at home. I loved that book and read it over and over again. 'When you want something all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it,' it says. I don't think that Paulo Coelho had come across the Taliban or our useless politicians.

If we wear our worst reviews like a backpack, they travel with us.

I had aimed at Mars and was about to hit Venus; unquestionably the all-time cosmic record for poor shots.

At the start of the trip, I took shots of the sights. The Colosseum. Belvedere Palace. Mozart Square. But I stopped. They never came out very well, and you could get postcards of these things. But there are no postcards of this. Of life.

It was hard to get lost in Missoula even if you wanted to. Wherever you were, all you had to do to get your bearings was look around and find the big letter M, embossed in white halfway up the steep shoulder of grass that reared on the south bank of the Clark Fork River. Though only a hill, it was called Mount Sentinel and if you had the legs and lungs and inclination to hike the trail that zigzagged up it, you could stand by the M and gaze out across the town at a travel-brochure shot of forest and mountain dusted from early fall with snow.

The wrought-iron gate squeaked as Lucas opened it. He lowered the rented bike down the stone steps and onto the sidewalk. To his right was the most famous Globe Hotel in Paris, disguised under another name. In front of the entrance five Curukians sat on mopeds. Lu-cas and his eighteen-month-old friend then shot out across the street and through the invisible beam of an-other security camera. He rode diagonally across the place de la Concorde and headed toward the river. It seemed only natural. The motorcycles trailed him. He pedaled fast across the Alex-andre III bridge and zipped past Les Invalides hospital. He tried to turn left at the Rodin Museum, but Goper rode next to him, blocking his escape.

had forgotten about the power of shadow-traveling—the way children of the Underworld could step into one shadow and appear from another, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Hades used to love sneaking up on me that way and yelling, “HI!” just as I shot an arrow of death. He found it amusing if I missed my target and accidentally wiped out the wrong city.

Describing something is like using it – it destroys; the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear. This applies most of all to places. Enormous damage has been done by travel literature – a veritable scourge, an epidemic. Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet; published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated places, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours. Even I, in my youthful naiveté, once took a shot at the description of places. But when I would go back to those descriptions later, when I’d try to take a deep breath and allow their intense presence to choke me up all over again, when I’d try to listen in on their murmurings, I was always in for a shock. The truth is terrible: describing is destroying.

John Kennedy’s family was rich, and he had enjoyed all the privileges that money could buy — a fine Harvard education, world travel, material possessions, leisure, and his father’s contacts.

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory––away the aeroplane shot.

How we hate to admit that we would like nothing better than to be the slave! Slave and master at the same time! For even in love the slave is always the master in disguise. The man who must conquer the woman, subjugate her, bend her to his will, form her according to his desires—is he not the slave of his slave? How easy it is, in this relationship, for the woman to upset the balance of power! The mere threat of self-dependence, on the woman’s part, and the gallant despot is seized with vertigo. But if they are able to throw themselves at one another recklessly, concealing nothing, surrendering all, if they admit to one another their interdependence, do they not enjoy a great and unsuspected freedom? The man who admits to himself that he is a coward has made a step towards conquering his fear; but the man who frankly admits it to every one, who asks that you recognize it in him and make allowance for it in dealing with him, is on the way to becoming a hero. Such a man is often surprised, when the crucial test comes, to find that he knows no fear. Having lost the fear of regarding himself as a coward he is one no longer: only the demonstration is needed to prove the metamorphosis. It is the same in love. The man who admits not only to himself but to his fellowmen, and even to the woman he adores, that he can be twisted around a woman’s finger, that he is helpless where the other sex is concerned, usually discovers that he is the more powerful of the two. Nothing breaks a woman down more quickly than complete surrender. A woman is prepared to resist, to be laid siege to: she has been trained to behave that way. When she meets no resistance she falls headlong into the trap. To be able to give oneself wholly and completely is the greatest luxury that life affords. Real love only begins at this point of dissolution. The personal life is altogether based on dependence, mutual dependence. Society is the aggregate of persons all interdependent. There is another richer life beyond the pale of society, beyond the personal, but there is no knowing it, no attainment possible, without firs traveling the heights and depths of the personal jungle. To become the great lover, the magnetiser and catalyzer, the blinding focus and inspiration of the world, one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool. The man whose greatness of heart leads him to folly and ruin is to a woman irresistible. To the woman who loves, that is to say. As to those who ask merely to be loved, who seek only their own reflection in the mirror, no love however great, will ever satisfy them. In a world so hungry for love it is no wonder that men and women are blinded by the glamour and glitter of their own reflected egos. No wonder that the revolver shot is the last summons. No wonder that the grinding wheels of the subway express, though they cut the body to pieces, fail to precipitate the elixir of love. In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage…

Washington reflected bitterly. He was short of money, gunpowder, shot, and food. All he had going for him was The Cause, the Rights of Man. Very noble and all that. But just add a whiff of money, gunpowder, shot, and food, and the old Cause might really click. Congress had pledged more help, of course, which, knowing Congress, meant that the aid might come in a decade or so, after the war was lost. He sighed and gazed heavenward. Was a tiny miracle too much to ask?

He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said. That’s what you think. You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot. Yes they will. But you wont. How do you figure that? Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.

Once," Balinda begins softly, "when I was in the emergency room with my mother they brought in a murderer who had been shot and was dying, right there in front of us. I watched as the nurse touched his face and reassured him and I could not believe they were being so nice to him." "What happened?" Jill asked. "My mother rose up, took my arm, gripped it as if she was a weight lifter and said, 'he was a beautiful baby once and his mother loved him'.

I. My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the workings of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. II. What else should he be set for, with his staff? What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him posted there, And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare. III. If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly I did turn as he pointed, neither pride Now hope rekindling at the end descried, So much as gladness that some end might be. IV. For, what with my whole world-wide wandering, What with my search drawn out through years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope With that obstreperous joy success would bring, I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope. V. As when a sick man very near to death Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end The tears and takes the farewell of each friend, And hears one bit the other go, draw breath Freelier outside, ('since all is o'er,' he saith And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;') VI. When some discuss if near the other graves be room enough for this, and when a day Suits best for carrying the corpse away, With care about the banners, scarves and staves And still the man hears all, and only craves He may not shame such tender love and stay. VII. Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest, Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ So many times among 'The Band' to wit, The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed Their steps - that just to fail as they, seemed best, And all the doubt was now - should I be fit? VIII. So, quiet as despair I turned from him, That hateful cripple, out of his highway Into the path he pointed. All the day Had been a dreary one at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. IX. For mark! No sooner was I fairly found Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, Than, pausing to throw backwards a last view O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round; Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. I might go on, naught else remained to do. X. So on I went. I think I never saw Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: For flowers - as well expect a cedar grove! But cockle, spurge, according to their law Might propagate their kind with none to awe, You'd think; a burr had been a treasure trove. XI. No! penury, inertness and grimace, In some strange sort, were the land's portion. 'See Or shut your eyes,' said Nature peevishly, It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: Tis the Last Judgement's fire must cure this place Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.

Hush!’ said the Cabby. They all listened. In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it… ‘Gawd!’ said the Cabby. ‘Ain’t it lovely?’ Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it , as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves who were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing. ‘Glory be!’ said the Cabby. ‘I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.’ …Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing…The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose. Digory had never seen such a sun…You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. And as its beams shot across the land the travellers could see for the first time what sort of place they were in. It was a valley through which a broad, swift river wound its way, flowing eastward towards the sun. Southward there were mountains, northward there were lower hills. But it was a valley of mere earth, rock and water; there was not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass to be seen. The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else. It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright it stood facing the risen sun. Its mouth was wide open in song and it was about three hundred yards away.

Someone gave me a copy of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a fable about a shepherd boy who travels to the Pyramids in search of treasure when all the time it’s at home. I loved that book and read it over and over again.

The three of us exchanged glances but said nothing. After all, what was there to say? The truth was that hookers did take credit cards—or at least ours did! In fact, hookers were so much a part of the Stratton subculture that we classified them like publicly traded stocks: Blue Chips were considered the top-of-the-line hooker, zee crème de la crème. They were usually struggling young models or exceptionally beautiful college girls in desperate need of tuition or designer clothing, and for a few thousand dollars they would do almost anything imaginable, either to you or to each other. Next came the NASDAQs, who were one step down from the Blue Chips. They were priced between three and five hundred dollars and made you wear a condom unless you gave them a hefty tip, which I always did. Then came the Pink Sheet hookers, who were the lowest form of all, usually a streetwalker or the sort of low-class hooker who showed up in response to a desperate late-night phone call to a number in Screw magazine or the yellow pages. They usually cost a hundred dollars or less, and if you didn’t wear a condom, you’d get a penicillin shot the next day and then pray that your dick didn’t fall off. Anyway, the Blue Chips took credit cards, so what was wrong with writing them off on your taxes? After all, the IRS knew about this sort of stuff, didn’t they? In fact, back in the good old days, when getting blasted over lunch was considered normal corporate behavior, the IRS referred to these types of expenses as three-martini lunches! They even had an accounting term for it: It was called T and E, which stood for Travel and Entertainment. All I’d done was taken the small liberty of moving things to their logical conclusion, changing T and E to T and A: Tits and Ass!

Remember the day doesn’t start at sunrise. Twilight starts about half an hour or so before sunrise and while it still looks dark the camera will pick up lots of light. If you get there really early you will have the opportunity to make some night shots too!

Meaninglessness woos us into spending our one shot at life on insignificant and trivial things. If we are not vigilant, we drift from God’s glorious ambition for our lives, losing sight of anything remotely grand, trading God-instilled passion for an easier and more often traveled road. And if our hearts aren’t awakened by majesty, our lives soon shrink into little bits of nothingness.

Without you having to do anything, the phone brackets the shot so that you can pretend to time travel, to pick the perfect instant when everyone is smiling. Skin is smoothed out; pores and small imperfections are erased. What used to take my father a day's work is now done in the blink of an eye, and far better. Do the people who take these photos believe them to be reality? Or have the digital paintings taken the place of reality in their memory? When they try to remember the captured moment, do they recall what they saw, or what the camera crafted for them?

A 22-caliber bullet can travel as fast as 1,022 mph. I learned that at Quantico. However, the bullet that hit him probably traveled at 818 mph. Sound travels at 761 mph. I hear the bullet after I see the shot enter his head. But in my mind it all goes so fast that it’s just a single message.

Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

An example of such was the story of three travelers who crash their car and are thrown back into prehistoric times. They encounter a Neanderthal man who doesn’t respond to reason and must be shot. “This is Oboler’s oblique approach to alerting the public that tyranny could only be dealt with by force of arms, not appeasement.

Then he thrust out, pulling the pistol back just before it touched the man’s clavicle, and then fired three shots in a downward trajectory, each one punching through the bottom of the man’s neck and traveling down through his body where they punched through organs and vertebrae and the pelvic bone and came out through the man’s leg, groin, and anus.

Siedler: ‘I remember talking to this young officer whose only concern was whether he would be shot or hanged. The noose, he

Are you… a time traveler? Alien?” She shot him a crooked smile. “Unexpectedly hitching a ride in a blue police call box?

Man-eaters are finally shot dead.

These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesmen.

A last, despairing thought shot through Aliya’s mind, Is this it? I don’t want to die! I want to live! Then everything went dark.

See that carefully. What you are holding is a desi katta, a locally made pistol. It can explode after two shots, and you have already made one. The next one, it might go off in your hand.

I think you’re born with the ability to hit. Rocky Marciano didn’t start boxing until after the war when he was already twenty-six, but he was a natural hitter. You need leverage, but a lot of your power comes from your forearm down into your wrist. There’s a snap to your punch that comes from your wrist to your fist, and that’s what knocks the other guy out. You can actually hear that snap; it sounds like a pistol shot when it’s working to perfection. Joe Louis had that famous six-inch punch. He’d knock a guy out with a punch that only traveled six inches. His power came from the snap. It’s like snapping a towel at somebody’s butt. There’s no power in your arms. Then

We came back [from Mars]," Pris said, "because nobody should have to live there. It wasn't conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It's so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age. Anyhow, at first I got drugs from Roy; I lived for that new synthetic pain-killer, that silenizine. And then I met Horst Hartman, who at that time ran a stamp store, rare postage stamps; there's so much time on your hands that you've got to have a hobby, something you can pore over endlessly. And Horst got me interested in pre-colonial fiction." "You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before - " "The writers," Pris said, "made it up." "Based on what?" "On imagination. A lot of times they turned out wrong [...] Anyhow, there's a fortune to be made in smuggling pre-colonial fiction, the old magazines and books and films, to Mars. Nothing is as exciting. To read about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonization. You can imagine what it might have been like. What Mars ought to be like. Canals." "Canals?" Dimly, he remembered reading about that; in the olden days they had believed in canals on Mars. "Crisscrossing the planet," Pris said. "And beings from other stars. With infinite wisdom. And stories about Earth, set in our time and even later. Where there's no radioactive dust." [...] "Did you bring any of that pre-colonial reading material back with you?" It occurred to him that he ought to try some. "It's worthless, here, because here on Earth the craze never caught on. Anyhow there's plenty here, in the libraries; that's where we get all of ours - stolen from libraries here on Earth and shot by autorocket to Mars. You're out at night humbling across the open space, and all of a sudden you see a flare, and there's a rocket, cracked open, with old pre-colonial fiction magazines spilling out everywhere. A fortune. But of course you read them before you sell them." She warmed to her topic. "Of all -

When I read things like, “The foundations of capitalism are shattering,” I’m like, maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. . . . ’Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. . . . Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. . . . They’re like, “It was the worst day of my life. . . . We get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.” . . . Oh really, then what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they fuckin’ put air in them? . . . You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now! . . . People say there’s delays? . . . Air travel’s too slow? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years! And a bunch of you would die on the way there, and you’d get shot in the neck with an arrow, and the other passengers would just bury you and put a stick there with your hat on it and keep walking. . . . The Wright Brothers would kick us all in the [crotch] if they knew.1

There were once three brothers who were traveling along a lonely, winding road at twilight--’” “Midnight, our mum always told us,” said Ron, who had stretched out, arms behind his head, to listen. Hermione shot him a look of annoyance. “Sorry, I just think it’s a bit spookier if it’s midnight!” said Ron. “Yeah, because we really need a bit more fear in our lives,” said Harry before he could stop himself. Xenophilius did not seem to be paying much attention, but was staring out of the window at the sky. “Go on, Hermione.” “‘In time, the brothers reached a river too deep to wade through and too dangerous to swim across. However, these brothers were learned in the magical arts, and so they simply waved their wands and made a bridge appear across the treacherous water. They were halfway across it when they found their path blocked by a hooded figure. “‘And Death spoke to them--’” “Sorry,” interjected Harry, “but Death spoke to them?” “It’s a fairy tale, Harry!” “Right, sorry. Go on.

I probably should say that this is what makes you a good traveler in my opinion, but deep down I really think this is just universal, incontrovertible truth. There is the right way to travel, and the wrong way. And if there is one philanthropic deed that can come from this book, maybe it will be that I teach a few more people how to do it right. So, in short, my list of what makes a good traveler, which I recommend you use when interviewing your next potential trip partner: 1. You are open. You say yes to whatever comes your way, whether it’s shots of a putrid-smelling yak-butter tea or an offer for an Albanian toe-licking. (How else are you going to get the volcano dust off?) You say yes because it is the only way to really experience another place, and let it change you. Which, in my opinion, is the mark of a great trip. 2. You venture to the places where the tourists aren’t, in addition to hitting the “must-sees.” If you are exclusively visiting places where busloads of Chinese are following a woman with a flag and a bullhorn, you’re not doing it. 3. You are easygoing about sleeping/eating/comfort issues. You don’t change rooms three times, you’ll take an overnight bus if you must, you can go without meat in India and without vegan soy gluten-free tempeh butter in Bolivia, and you can shut the hell up about it. 4. You are aware of your travel companions, and of not being contrary to their desires/​needs/​schedules more often than necessary. If you find that you want to do things differently than your companions, you happily tell them to go on without you in a way that does not sound like you’re saying, “This is a test.” 5. You can figure it out. How to read a map, how to order when you can’t read the menu, how to find a bathroom, or a train, or a castle. 6. You know what the trip is going to cost, and can afford it. If you can’t afford the trip, you don’t go. Conversely, if your travel companions can’t afford what you can afford, you are willing to slum it in the name of camaraderie. P.S.: Attractive single people almost exclusively stay at dumps. If you’re looking for them, don’t go posh. 7. You are aware of cultural differences, and go out of your way to blend. You don’t wear booty shorts to the Western Wall on Shabbat. You do hike your bathing suit up your booty on the beach in Brazil. Basically, just be aware to show the culturally correct amount of booty. 8. You behave yourself when dealing with local hotel clerks/​train operators/​tour guides etc. Whether it’s for selfish gain, helping the reputation of Americans traveling abroad, or simply the spreading of good vibes, you will make nice even when faced with cultural frustrations and repeated smug “not possible”s. This was an especially important trait for an American traveling during the George W. years, when the world collectively thought we were all either mentally disabled or bent on world destruction. (One anecdote from that dark time: in Greece, I came back to my table at a café to find that Emma had let a nearby [handsome] Greek stranger pick my camera up off our table. He had then stuck it down the front of his pants for a photo. After he snapped it, he handed the camera back to me and said, “Show that to George Bush.” Which was obviously extra funny because of the word bush.) 9. This last rule is the most important to me: you are able to go with the flow in a spontaneous, non-uptight way if you stumble into something amazing that will bump some plan off the day’s schedule. So you missed the freakin’ waterfall—you got invited to a Bahamian family’s post-Christening barbecue where you danced with three generations of locals in a backyard under flower-strewn balconies. You won. Shut the hell up about the waterfall. Sally

Everywhere I traveled I saw this death space in action, and I felt what it means to be held. At Ruriden columbarium in Japan, I was held by a sphere of Buddhas glowing soft blue and purple. At the cemetery in Mexico, I was held by a single wrought-iron fence in the light of tens of thousands of flickering amber candles. At the open-air pyre in Colorado, I was held within the elegant bamboo walls, which kept mourners safe as the flames shot high. There was magic to each of these places. There was grief, unimaginable grief. But in that grief there was no shame. These were places to meet despair face to face and say, 'I see you waiting there. And I feel you, strongly. But you do not demean me.

Even traveling despondently is better than arriving here.” To welcome visitors the arrivals hall featured a picture of the president of NowWhat, smiling. It was the only picture anybody could find of him, and it had been taken shortly after he had shot himself, so although the photo had been retouched as well as could be managed, the smile it wore was rather a ghastly one.

Are you bonded to another for life?” Her brow furrowed. “Do you mean romantically? Are you asking if I’m married?” “Yes.” “No.” She returned her attention to the road. “Are you?” “No.” A hint of humor entered her expressive features. “Then I don’t have to worry about some alien woman coming down and beating the crap out of me for seeing her man naked?” He laughed. Again agony shot through him. “No.” “Good.

a vast majority of us vandwellers are white. The reasons range from obvious to duh, but then there’s this.” Linked below the post was an article about the experience of “traveling while black.” That made me think: America makes it hard enough for people to live nomadically, regardless of race. Stealth camping in residential areas, in particular, is way outside the mainstream. Often it involves breaking local ordinances against sleeping in cars. Avoiding trouble—hassles with cops and suspicious passersby—can be challenging, even with the Get Out of Jail Free card of white privilege. And in an era when unarmed African Americans are getting shot by police during traffic stops, living in a vehicle seems like an especially dangerous gambit for anyone who might become a victim of racial profiling. All that made me think about the instances when I could have gotten in trouble and didn’t. One time I got pulled over at night while reporting in North Dakota. The cops asked where I was from and recommended some local tourist attractions before letting me off with a warning. In general, people didn’t give me grief when I was driving Halen. I wish I could chalk that up to good karma or some kind of cosmic benevolence, but the fact remains: I am white. Surely privilege played a role.

A dark carriage pulled by four strong horses shot through the forest like a cannonball. A pair of swinging lanterns illuminated the path ahead and made the carriage resemble an enormous creature with glowing eyes. Two French soldiers of Napoleon’s Grande Armée rode beside the carriage. Black cloaks covered the soldiers’ colorful uniforms so they could travel in secrecy – the world was never to know what their agenda was tonight

One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

Findings such as these can change the way we handle chronic stress. When we are mired in stress, what we desperately need to do is minimize the novelty in our lives. We need familiarity. But quite often we seek out the exact opposite, responding to chronic stress at work, for example, by taking a vacation in some exotic place, thinking that the change of scenery will do us good. And under normal circumstances it does. But not when we are highly stressed, because then the novelty we encounter abroad can just add to our physiological load. Instead of traveling, we may be better off remaining on home turf, surrounding ourselves with family and friends, listening to familiar music, watching old films. Exercise, of course, can help, in fact there are few things better at preparing our physiology for stress. But when someone is this far into chronic stress its effects, suggests Stephen Porges, are mostly analgesic, possibly because exercise treats us to a shot of natural opioids. Again, what we really need is familiarity.

Suppose..." And for the first time he linked his hand with hers. "He runs and wins and lives to a ripe old age writing his memoirs and traveling as an ambassador of goodwill or playing Parcheesi on the sun porch. You're going to be damned mad he had fifty years without you." She let out a long breath. "Yeah. But-" "We've already gone through the buts," he interrupted. "Of course, they're probably several million possibilities in between.He could get hit by a car crossing the street-or you could. He could lose the election and become a missionary or an anchor on the six o'clock news." "All right." Shelby dropped her forehead to their joined hands. "Nobody makes me see what a fool I am better than you." "One of my minor talents. Listen, walk out on the beach; clear your head. When you come back, eat something, then get about twelve hours' sleep, because you look like hell.Then..." He waited until she lifted her head to smile at him. "Go home.I've got work to do." "I love you,you creep." "Yeah." He shot her one of his quick grins. "Me too.

The eccentric passion of Shankly was underlined for me by my England team-mate Roger Hunt's version of the classic tale of the Liverpool manager's pre-game talk before playing Manchester United. The story has probably been told a thousand times in and out of football, and each time you hear it there are different details, but when Roger told it the occasion was still fresh in his mind and I've always believed it to be the definitive account. It was later on the same day, as Roger and I travelled together to report for England duty, after we had played our bruising match at Anfield. Ian St John had scored the winner, then squared up to Denis Law, with Nobby finally sealing the mood of the afternoon by giving the Kop the 'V' sign. After settling down in our railway carriage, Roger said, 'You may have lost today, but you would have been pleased with yourself before the game. Shanks mentioned you in the team talk. When he says anything positive about the opposition, normally he never singles out players.' According to Roger, Shankly burst into the dressing room in his usual aggressive style and said, 'We're playing Manchester United this afternoon, and really it's an insult that we have to let them on to our field because we are superior to them in every department, but they are in the league so I suppose we have to play them. In goal Dunne is hopeless- he never knows where he is going. At right back Brennan is a straw- any wind will blow him over. Foulkes the centre half kicks the ball anywhere. On the left Tony Dunne is fast but he only has one foot. Crerand couldn't beat a tortoise. It's true David Herd has got a fantastic shot, but if Ronnie Yeats can point him in the right direction he's likely to score for us. So there you are, Manchester United, useless...' Apparently it was at this point the Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan, who was never known to whisper a single word on such occasions, asked, 'What about Best, Law and Charlton, boss?' Shankly paused, narrowed his eyes, and said, 'What are you saying to me, Callaghan? I hope you're not saying we cannot play three men.

the Egyptian expedition would later attempt to explore the inside of the Great Pyramid, which had only been opened up again a few years previously. The French traveler Savary was one of the first to penetrate the interior, and most vividly evokes the atmosphere inside the pyramid at this time: We left our coats at the entrance to the passage which led into the interior, and began to descend, each holding a burning torch. Towards the bottom, we had to wriggle on our bellies like snakes in order to gain access to the inner passageway. . . . We scrambled up this on our knees, at the same time pressing our hands against the sides. Had we not done this, we risked slipping backwards, and the slight grooves on its surface would not have been able to stop us from sliding all the way down to the bottom. About halfway up we fired a pistol shot whose deafening noise echoed away forever through all the distant recesses of the immense edifice. This awakened thousands of bats, which hurtled down, striking us on our hands and face and extinguishing several of our torches.27

On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!" We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in. "Get down! Get down!" he barked. "Some American guests are coming this way. It is harmful to the prestige of our motherland for them to see all these messy heads!" We tried to crouch down, but the bus was too crowded. The man shouted, "It is the duty of everyone to safeguard the honor of our motherland! We must present an orderly and dignified appearance! Get down! Bend your knees!" Suddenly I heard Jin-ming's booming voice: "Doesn'T Chairman Mao instruct us never to bend our knees to American imperialists?" This was asking for trouble. Humor was not appreciated. The man shot a stern glance in our direction, but said nothing. He gave the bus another quick scan, and hurried off. He did not want the "American guests' to witness a scene. Any sign of discord had to be hidden from foreigners. Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Litfie evidence remained of China's ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.

Mama,” the child exclaimed, breathless and agitated. Phoebe looked down at him in concern. “Justin, what is it?” “Galoshes brought me a dead mouse. She dropped it on the floor right in front of me!” “Oh, dear.” Tenderly Phoebe smoothed his dark, ruffled hair. “I’m afraid that’s what cats do. She thought it was a fine gift.” “Nanny won’t touch it, and the housemaid screamed, and I had a fight with Ivo.” Although Phoebe’s younger brother Ivo was technically Justin’s uncle, the boys were close enough in age to play together and quarrel. “About the mouse?” Phoebe asked sympathetically. “No, before the mouse. Ivo said there’s going to be a honeymoon and I can’t go because it’s for grownups.” The boy tilted his head back to look up at her, his lower lip quivering. “You wouldn’t go to the honeymoon without me, would you, Mama?” “Darling, we’ve made no plans to travel yet. There’s too much to be done here, and we all need time to settle in. Perhaps in the spring—” “Dad wouldn’t want to leave me behind. I know he wouldn’t!” In the electrified silence that followed, Tom shot a glance at West, who looked blank and startled. Slowly Phoebe lowered to the ground until her face was level with her son’s. “Do you mean Uncle West?” she asked gently. “Is that what you’re calling him now?” Justin nodded. “I don’t want him to be my uncle—I already have too many of those. And if I don’t have a dad, I’ll never learn how to tie my shoes.” Phoebe began to smile. “Why not call him Papa?” she suggested. “If I did, you’d never know which one I was talking about,” Justin said reasonably, “the one in heaven or the one down here.” Phoebe let out a breath of amusement. “You’re right, my clever boy.” Justin looked up at the tall man beside him with a flicker of uncertainty. “I can call you Dad … can’t I? Do you like that name?” A change came over West’s face, his color deepening, small muscles contorting with some powerful emotion. He snatched Justin up, one of his large hands clasping the small head as he kissed his cheek. “I love that name,” West said unsteadily. “I love it.” The boy’s arms went around his neck. “Can we go to Africa for our honeymoon, Dad?” he heard Justin ask. “Yes,” came West’s muffled voice. “Can I have a pet crocodile, Dad?” “Yes.” Phoebe produced a handkerchief from seemingly out of nowhere and tucked it discreetly into one of West’s hands.

Prior to the beginning of the Shōwa period (1926–1989), few people visited the rock garden at Ryōanji, and within Japan itself, aside from a few professionals, there were not very many people who said it was particularly beautiful. Moreover, praise from foreigners did not come to be dominant until after the Zen boom in Europe and the United States started in the 1950s. As a Japanese, it is somewhat gratifying to know that Japan has a garden that foreigners praise and travel all the way across the ocean to visit. But this, again, is just a magic mirror that reflects a beautiful image of me.

We rescued the first two paintings and I've been tracking down more of them, while you've been here. You travelled all the way across Europe to get that notebook and spyglass, and nearly got yourself shot in the process. We've done the hard work - and I've had more than enough of the Chief keeping us in the dark. So when we get back to London, things are going to change. We're going to insist on knowing exactly what is going on. If we're going to keep working for the Bureau, he can't go on treating us like a couple of little girls who don't matter. I've had quite enough of that. - Lil, to Sophie

and approved for sale. Dr John Rock, champion of the pill, rejoiced that humanity’s rampant sex drive would finally be stripped of its consequences: ‘The greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy.’ The Cold War resumed at full intensity after an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. War hero Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president; it was his last year in office. The election campaign was a neck-and-neck race between man of the people Richard Nixon and rich kid Jack Kennedy. Nineteen sixty is the year in which this story begins.

The retaliation came in all varieties. One variety came largely from the Soviet soldiers. When they entered East Prussia in January, their propaganda officers hung up huge banners: ‘Soldier, you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’ The village of Nemmersdorf (now Mayakovskoya) was taken by the 2nd Red Army Guard, a few days later German troops launched a counteroffensive and entered the town again. They found bodies everywhere: refugees crushed under tanks, children shot in their gardens, raped women nailed to barn doors. The cameras rolled, the images were shown all over Germany: this is what happens when the Russians come in.

Catching my breath, I lean against the front of the car and focus on the individual blades of grass hedging my flip-flop, trying not to throw up or pass out or both. In the far distance, a vehicle approaches-the first one to witness the scene of our accident. A million explanations run through my mind, but I can’t imagine a single scenario that would solve all-or any-of our issues right now. None of us can risk going to the hospital. Mom technically doesn’t qualify as human, so I’m sure we’d get a pretty interesting diagnosis. Rachel is technically supposed to be deceased as of the last ten years or so, and while she probably has a plethora of fake IDs, she’s still antsy around cops, which will surely be called to the hospital in the event of a gunshot wound, even if it is just in the foot. And let’s not forget that Mom and Rachel are new handcuff buddies. There just isn’t an explanation for any of this. That’s when I decide I’m not the one who should do the talking. After all, I didn’t kidnap anyone. I didn’t shoot anyone. And I certainly didn’t handcuff myself to the person who shot me. Besides, both Mom and Rachel are obviously much more skilled at deception then I’ll ever be. “If someone pulls over to help us, one of you is explaining all this,” I inform them. “You’ll probably want to figure it out fast, because here comes a car.” But the car comes and goes without even slowing. In fact, a lot of cars come and go, and if the situation weren’t so strange and if I weren’t so thankful that they didn’t actually stop, I’d be forced to reexamine what the world is coming to, not helping strangers in an accident. Then it occurs to me that maybe the passerby don’t realize it’s the scene of an accident. Mom’s car is in the ditch, but the ditch might be steep enough to hide it. It’s possible that no one can even see Rachel and Mom from the side of the road. Still, I am standing at the front of Rachel’s car. An innocent-looking teenage girl just loitering for fun in the middle of nowhere and no one cares to stop? Seriously? Just as I decide that people suck, a vehicle coming from the opposite direction slows and pulls up a few feet behind us. It’s not a good Samaritan traveler pulling over to see what he or she can do to inadvertently complicate things. It’s not an ambulance. It’s not a state trooper. If only we could be so lucky. But, nope, it’s way worse. Because it’s Galen’s SUV. From where I stand, I can see him looking at me from behind the wheel. His face is stricken and tried and relieved and pained. I want to want to want to believe the look in his eyes right now. The look that clearly says he’s found what he’s looking for, in more ways than one.

Jay came over as soon as Violet called him; she didn’t even have to give him a reason. He was there in less than ten minutes. Of course, he’d heard about what had happened to Hailey. Everyone had. Buckley was a small town, and news traveled fast . . . especially bad news. When he got there she told him what she was thinking about doing. It was nothing dangerous, at least as far as she was concerned, and she hadn’t expected Jay to disagree with her about it. So when he did, she was more than a little bit surprised by his stubborn reaction. “No way,” he insisted, and his voice left little room for argument. “There is no way you’re going to go around looking for this guy.” Violet was shocked by the tone of his voice, and by the harsh look he shot at her. She thought maybe he misunderstood her plan, so she tried to explain it to him again. “Jay, I’m only going to public places, like malls and parks, to see if I can get a feeling for who this guy is. Who knows, maybe he goes to places like that to find them, maybe he hands out there waiting to pick out a girl to . . . you know, kidnap.” She tried to make her argument sound logical, but there was a desperate edge to her voice. “I’m not going out alone . . . you can go with me. We’ll just hang out at different places to see if we can find him. And if we do, we’ll call my uncle. It’s not like we’d do anything stupid.” “’Anything stupid’ would be going out to look for a killer. I won’t let you go looking for trouble, Violet. This guy is dangerous, and you need to leave it to the cops. They know what they’re doing. And they’re armed.” He sounded like he thought she’d lost her mind, and maybe she had, but she had already made her decision. “Look, I’m doing this. I was just asking you to come along with me.” “You’re not,” he insisted. “Even if I have to tell your uncle and your parents what you’re planning. I promise you, you’re not doing it.” She could feel her temper flaring. “You can’t stop me, Jay. If you tell on me, then I’ll lie. I’ll bat my eyes innocently and promise not to go looking for this guy. But I swear to you that every chance I get, even if I have to sneak out of the house to do it, I will be trying to find him.” She stood up, meaning to glare back at him, but instead found herself craning her neck just so she could see his face. The awkward position didn’t steal nay of her thunder. She refused to back down. “I mean it, Jay. You can’t stop me.” Jay glared incredulously back at her. Emotions ranging from disbelief to frustration and back to disbelief again flashed darkly across his face. He seemed to be fighting with himself now. But when she heard him sigh, and then saw him raking his hand restlessly through his hair, she knew she’d won. His icy determination seemed to melt right before her eyes. “Damn it, Violet.” He sighed brusquely, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tightly. “What choice do I have?” he asked as he practically squeezed the life out of her. She wasn’t sure how to react to him now. It definitely wasn’t a tender hug, but the close contact made her undisclosed desires stir all the same. She couldn’t help wondering if he felt even a fraction of what she did. His arms were strong, and she felt safe in the circle of them. She’d never imaged that she could feel so comfortable and so uncomfortable at the same time. She waited within the space of his embrace to see where this was going. “So, how is this going to work?” he demanded roughly against the top of her head.

There were a lot of botched kills throughout the eastern part of Kentucky when the work fell outside his control. Six or seven years ago, a man from Perry County was shot point blank in the head and left for dead in the middle of downtown. Problem was, the bullet had traveled between the man's scalp and his skull halfway across his head and exited the same way it had entered on the other side. The whole thing had left him with only fingernail-sized contusions on both sides of his head. He identified the guy who shot him and saw him arrested and convicted of attempted murder. Now, it's true that a situation like that was a rare one, but part of doing a job right was minimizing the chance for something to go wrong.

Lucy Gray drew back a bit. “That’s what you think people would do?” “I do. Unless there’s law, and someone enforcing it, I think we might as well be animals,” he said with more assurance. “Like it or not, the Capitol is the only thing keeping anyone safe.” “Hm. So they keep me safe. And what do I give up for that?” she asked. Coriolanus poked at the fire with a stick. “Give up? Why, nothing.” “The Covey did,” she said. “Can’t travel. Can’t perform without their say-so. Can only sing certain types of songs. Fight getting round up, and you get shot dead like my daddy. Try to keep your family together, and you get your head broken like my mama. What if I think that price is too high to pay? Maybe my freedom’s worth the risk.

about shape and style. A new era truly has dawned, was the feeling those cars gave you. At some point in that decade, American society changed abruptly in tone and mentality. Instead of being preoccupied above all with survival, it became a consumer society. A world of toil was transformed into a world of enjoyment. Domestic interiors were still full of things from the 1930s and 1940s, but amid the brown furniture and crocheted rugs a different lifestyle was emerging, with all the features of the old austerity but a cheerful sense of amazement as well. ‘What sort of fairyland is this we suddenly find ourselves in?’ was the general mood. These were the years of what became known as the ‘baby boom’. The birth rate shot up by

Her pinkie took matters into its own, er, pinkie, and moved oh-so-slightly, grazing his skin. His pinkie, judging by the shape and texture. Blood rushed and pounded through her veins, flushing her skin. This could not, in any way, be explained as an accidental touch. But he could feign sleep if he wasn’t interested. Did she want him to do that? What was she doing? She commanded her pinkie to drop, and thankfully, it obeyed. A jolt shot through her as his finger made a query, and the need clarified. The need represented her desire for some measure of control. Control over her general situation. Control over her attraction. She answered with a gentle finger stroke along his calloused, warm skin. A sharp breath pierced the dark air.

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me. Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.

In Pakistan and Iran, calls to raise the legal age of marriage are shot down as un-Islamic. Nearly every two seconds a girl under eighteen is married. ... Many Muslim-majority countries have enacted the marry-your-rapist law, which stipulates that if a girl is raped, she must marry her rapist because no one else will want her. She is used goods, her seal has been broken. It is important to remember that these ideas travel across borders. People with this mind-set do not magically change their minds when they move to another country. Girls all over the world are subjected to the same dehumanization, even if it is not the law in the new country they reside in. That is why it is essential for Western countries to protect their young girl citizens from the barbaric and archaic families and communities that engage in such atrocities.

Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Báez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesus de Galíndez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about Have Gun, Will Travel. It was said the power of Trujillo never left him; the fucker died of old age in Santo Domingo, Trujillista to the end, drowning his Haitian workers instead of paying them.

One method that Einstein employed to help people visualize this notion was to begin by imagining two-dimensional explorers on a two-dimensional universe, like a flat surface. These “flatlanders” can wander in any direction on this flat surface, but the concept of going up or down has no meaning to them. Now, imagine this variation: What if these flatlanders’ two dimensions were still on a surface, but this surface was (in a way very subtle to them) gently curved? What if they and their world were still confined to two dimensions, but their flat surface was like the surface of a globe? As Einstein put it, “Let us consider now a two-dimensional existence, but this time on a spherical surface instead of on a plane.” An arrow shot by these flatlanders would still seem to travel in a straight line, but eventually it would curve around and come back—just as a sailor on the surface of our planet heading straight off over the seas would eventually return from the other horizon. The curvature of the flatlanders’ two-dimensional space makes their surface finite, and yet they can find no boundaries. No matter what direction they travel, they reach no end or edge of their universe, but they eventually get back to the same place. As Einstein put it, “The great charm resulting from this consideration lies in the recognition that the universe of these beings is finite and yet has no limits.” And if the flatlanders’ surface was like that of an inflating balloon, their whole universe could be expanding, yet there would still be no boundaries to it.10 By extension, we can try to imagine, as Einstein has us do, how three-dimensional space can be similarly curved to create a closed and finite system that has no edge. It’s not easy for us three-dimensional creatures to visualize, but it is easily described mathematically by the non-Euclidean geometries pioneered by Gauss and Riemann. It can work for four dimensions of spacetime as well. In such a curved universe, a beam of light starting out in any direction could travel what seems to be a straight line and yet still curve back on itself. “This suggestion of a finite but unbounded space is one of the greatest ideas about the nature of the world which has ever been conceived,” the physicist Max Born has declared.

Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers — less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are — to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word. They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know — already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot. Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a million air.” [sic] A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.” Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children and giving up — giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.

Apply humor. Lightening up lends perspective to any situation. The following story, sent to me on the Internet, provides a good example of humor diffusing a tense situation: An irate crowd of air travelers stood in a long line at a United Airlines ticket counter after their flight had been canceled, when an angry man walked to the front of the line, threw his ticket on the counter, and yelled, “I want a first-class seat on the next flight out, now!” The harried ticket agent, brushing back a lock of hair, replied, “I'll be glad to help you, sir, as soon as I take care of the people in line.” “You want me to wait in line?“ he yelled even louder. “Do you know who I am?“ The ticket agent hesitated only a moment before picking up the microphone, turning up the PA system, and announcing to the waiting area, “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a man at gate seventeen who does not know who he is. If anyone can help him find his identity—” “Screw you, lady!” the man yelled, storming off. In a parting shot she added, “Sir, I'm afraid you'll have to wait in line for that, too.” Her humor didn't help improve his emotions, but it helped hers. And the previously irate people waiting in the line were now smiling or laughing. No one else complained.

Another way to picture this is to use Galileo’s ship. Imagine a light beam being shot down from the top of the mast to the deck. To an observer on the ship, the light beam will travel the exact length of the mast. To an observer on land, however, the light beam will travel a diagonal formed by the length of the mast plus the distance (it’s a fast ship) that the ship has traveled forward during the time it took the light to get from the top to the bottom of the mast. To both observers, the speed of light is the same. To the observer on land, it traveled farther before it reached the deck. In other words, the exact same event (a light beam sent from the top of the mast hitting the deck) took longer when viewed by a person on land than by a person on the ship.59 This phenomenon, called time dilation, leads to what is known as the twin paradox. If a man stays on the platform while his twin sister takes off in a spaceship that travels long distances at nearly the speed of light, when she returns she would be younger than he is. But because motion is relative, this seems to present a paradox. The sister on the spaceship might think it’s her brother on earth who is doing the fast traveling, and when they are rejoined she would expect to observe that it was he who did not age much.

Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent. In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn’t have anticipated. This isn’t to say we’re in a police state, a term that’s often misused. Generally speaking, we’re free to travel. We don’t face mass censorship. We still have habeus corpus. And the odds of any single person being victimized by a wrong-door raid, shot or beaten by a cop, or otherwise victimized by militarized police violence are slim to nil. But perhaps we have entered a police state writ small. At the individual level, a police officer’s power and authority over the people he interacts with day to day is near complete. Absent video, if the officer’s account an incident differs from that of a citizen— even several citizens— his superiors, the courts, and prosecutors will nearly always defer to the officer. If other officers are nearby, there are policies in place—official and unofficial—to encourage them to back one another up. Even if the officer does violate the citizen’s rights, the officer is protected by qualified immunity.

But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate–For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too–As I'll show–It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism–Says Dave "People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles–Isnt that amazing?give me a little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, "The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?"–The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one–In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip–Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, "Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?"–"Let's go tell him right now!"–"Why of course if we wait another minute...and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!"–We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner. (Big Sur, Chap. 11)

Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow. Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?" Pierre wondered. "Good for me, but bad for the next traveler, and anyway he can't help it - he has to eat. He told me an officer thrashed him for that. But the officer thrashed him because he was in a hurry. And I shot Dolokhov because I considered myself insulted. Louis XVI was executed because he was considered a criminal, and within a year the men who executed him were killed as well for doing something or other. What's bad and what's good? What should we love and what should we hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What kind of force is it that directs everything?" He kept asking himself. And there were no answers to any of these questions, except one illogical response that didn't answer any of them. And that response was: "You're going to die, and it will be over and done with. You're going to die and you'll either come to know everything or stop asking." But dying was horrible too. The Torzhok pedlar woman was whining away, offering her wares, especially some goatskin slippers. "I've got hundreds of roubles, money I don't know what to do with, and she stands there in her tatty coat hardly daring to look at me," Thought Pierre. "And what does she want money for? As if it could give her a hair's breadth of extra happiness or put her soul at rest. Is there anything in the world that can make her and me any less subject to evil and death? Death, the end of everything, and it must come today or tomorrow - either way it's a split second on the scale of eternity." And again he twisted the screw that wouldn't bite, and the screw went on turning in the same hole.

Trying to trick the creature, hoping that it would react without hesitation to the first sign of movement in the door way, Travis tucked the revolver under his belt, quietly picked up one of the dining-room chairs, eased to within six feet of the kitchen, and pitched the chair through the open door. He snatched the revolver out of his waistband and, as the chair sailed into the kitchen, assumed a shooter's stance. The chair crashed into the Formica-topped table, clattered to the floor, and banged against the dishwasher. The lantern-eyed enemy did not go for it. Nothing moved. When the chair finished tumbling, the kitchen was again marked by a hushed expectancy . Einstein was making a curious sound, a quiet shuddery huffing, and after a moment Travis realized the noise was a result of the dog's uncontrollable shivering. No question about it: the intruder in the kitchen was the very thing that had pursued them through the woods more than three months ago. During the intervening weeks, it had made its way north, probably traveling mostly in the wildlands to the east of the developed part of the state, relentlessly tracking the dog by some means that Travis could not understand and for reasons he could not even guess. In response to the chair he had thrown, a large white-enameled canister crashed to the floor just beyond the kitchen doorway, and Travis jumped back in surprise, squeezing off a wild shot before he realized he was only being taunted. The lid flew off the container when it hit the floor, and flour spilled across the tile. Silence again. By responding to Travis's taunt with one of its own, the intruder had displayed unnerving intelligence. Abruptly Travis realized that, coming from the same research lab as Einstein and being a product of related experiments, the creature might be as smart as the retriever. Which would explain Einstein's fear of it. If Travis had not already accommodated himself to the idea of a dog with humanlike intelligence, he might have been unable to credit this beast with more than mere animal cleverness; however, events of the past few months had primed him to accept-and quickly adapt to-almost anything.

St. Just lifted his mug and peered into the contents. “Higgins explained that Goliath is a horse of particulars. Westhaven, did Valentine spit in my mug?” Westhaven rolled his eyes as he glanced at first one brother then the other. “For God’s sake, nobody spat in your damned mug. Pass the butter and drop the other shoe. What manner of horse of particulars is Sophie’s great beast?” “He does not like to travel too far from Sophie. He’ll tool around Town all day with Sophie at the ribbons. He’ll take her to Surrey, he’ll haul her the length and breadth of the Home Counties, but if he’s separated from his lady beyond a few miles, he affects a limp.” “He affects a limp?” Vim picked up his mug and did not look too closely at the contents. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” “I’ll tell you what I’ve never heard of.” Westhaven shot him a peevish look. “I’ve never heard of my sister, a proper, sensible woman, spending a week holed up with a strange man and allowing that man unspeakable liberties.” Lord Val paused in the act of troweling butter on another roll. “Kissing isn’t unspeakable. We know the man slept in my bed, else he’d be dead by now.” And thank God that Sophie hadn’t obliterated the evidence of their separate bedrooms. “I have offered your sister the protection of my name,” Vim said. “More than once. She has declined that honor.” “We know.” Lord Val put down his second roll uneaten. “This has us in a quandary. We ought to be taking you quite to task, but with Sophie acting so out of character, it’s hard to know how to go on. I’m for beating you on general principles. Westhaven wants a special license, and St. Just, as usual, is pretending a wise silence.” “Not a wise silence,” St. Just said, picking up Lord Val’s roll and studying it. “I wonder how many cows you keep employed with this penchant you have for butter. You could write a symphony to the bovine.” Lord Val snatched his roll back. “Admit it, St. Just, you’ve no more clue what’s to be done here than I do or Westhaven does.” “Or I do.” The words were out of Vim’s mouth without his intention to speak them. But in for a penny… “I want Sophie to be happy. I do not know how to effect that result.” A small silence spread at the table, a thoughtful and perhaps not unfriendly silence. “We want her happy, as well,” Westhaven said, his glance taking in both brothers.

I DON'T WANT to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately-that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly ... anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there-some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers-well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out-maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out-such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party.

Both C.K. and Bieber are extremely gifted performers. Both climbed to the top of their industry, and in fact, both ultimately used the Internet to get big. But somehow Bieber “made it” in one-fifteenth of the time. How did he climb so much faster than the guy Rolling Stone calls the funniest man in America—and what does this have to do with Jimmy Fallon? The answer begins with a story from Homer’s Odyssey. When the Greek adventurer Odysseus embarked for war with Troy, he entrusted his son, Telemachus, to the care of a wise old friend named Mentor. Mentor raised and coached Telemachus in his father’s absence. But it was really the goddess Athena disguised as Mentor who counseled the young man through various important situations. Through Athena’s training and wisdom, Telemachus soon became a great hero. “Mentor” helped Telemachus shorten his ladder of success. The simple answer to the Bieber question is that the young singer shot to the top of pop with the help of two music industry mentors. And not just any run-of-the-mill coach, but R& B giant Usher Raymond and rising-star manager Scooter Braun. They reached from the top of the ladder where they were and pulled Bieber up, where his talent could be recognized by a wide audience. They helped him polish his performing skills, and in four years Bieber had sold 15 million records and been named by Forbes as the third most powerful celebrity in the world. Without Raymond’s and Braun’s mentorship, Biebs would probably still be playing acoustic guitar back home in Canada. He’d be hustling on his own just like Louis C.K., begging for attention amid a throng of hopeful entertainers. Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history. Socrates mentored young Plato, who in turn mentored Aristotle. Aristotle mentored a boy named Alexander, who went on to conquer the known world as Alexander the Great. From The Karate Kid to Star Wars to The Matrix, adventure stories often adhere to a template in which a protagonist forsakes humble beginnings and embarks on a great quest. Before the quest heats up, however, he or she receives training from a master: Obi Wan Kenobi. Mr. Miyagi. Mickey Goldmill. Haymitch. Morpheus. Quickly, the hero is ready to face overwhelming challenges. Much more quickly than if he’d gone to light-saber school. The mentor story is so common because it seems to work—especially when the mentor is not just a teacher, but someone who’s traveled the road herself. “A master can help you accelerate things,” explains Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and career coach behind the bestseller The Success Principles. He says that, like C.K., we can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.

Surely you’re not going to destroy another book, are you?” “I’ve decided my obsession with reading has gotten me absolutely nowhere, so . . . I’m tossing all the nonsense out of my life and intend to travel forth with less baggage.” “You love to read.” “And I’ll occasionally indulge that love, but enough is enough.” She held up her copy of Pride and Prejudice. “This, for all intent and purposes, is a fairy tale. I’m done with fairy tales for good, as well as anything by Shakespeare. I loathe his stories, don’t understand most of what he’s written, and I was only reading them because of any future children I hoped to have. But since I’m destined to remain a spinster forever . . . I’m chucking them into the fire.” “What do Shakespeare and any children you might have in the future have in common?” Millie sent him a look that clearly said she found him a little dense. “I wanted to be knowledgeable so that my children wouldn’t suffer any embarrassment because of my ignorance and lack of education.” Everett’s mouth dropped open before he had the presence of mind to snap it shut when she shot him a glare. Bracing himself in case she got it into her head to punch him as she’d done Mr. Victor, Everett stepped closer to her and pried the copy of Pride and Prejudice out of her hand. “Any child would be lucky to call you mother, Millie. You’re smart, well-read, curious about everything, and have a true love for children.” Staring at him for a long moment, Millie tilted her head. “I knew we should have summoned the physician to take a look at you after your last brawl.” “My wits are not addled, Millie. Quite honestly, my mind is clearer right now than it’s been in years.” He brought her hand up to his lips and kissed it, relieved when her eyes widened just a bit. “And I have to tell you something else.” “What?” she asked in a voice that sounded somewhat breathless. “I can’t allow you to burn any Jane Austen book—but especially not Pride and Prejudice.” “That’s what you have to say to me—that I can’t burn a silly book?” “I finished the story, Millie. I read Pride and Prejudice from cover to cover, and . . . I’m your Mr. Darcy and you’re my Lizzy.” “You . . . finished . . . the story?” “Indeed. And if you didn’t hear me the first time, I’m Mr. Darcy.” “I’m fairly certain Mr. Darcy would have had an English accent, but since Lizzy did enjoy reading, I suppose it’s not too much of a stretch to compare me with her, although. . . .” As Millie continued talking, really rapidly at that, Everett simply watched her, taking in every detail of her face. Her green eyes were sparkling and her cheeks were flushed a delicate shade of pink. Brown curls had begun to escape the pins someone had put in her hair, and a spray of flowers that had been tucked into that hair was hanging somewhat forlornly over her ear. Her lips were still moving incredibly fast, but the second his gaze settled on them, he couldn’t seem to look away. They were delightful lips, just the right shade of pink, and . . . Everett leaned forward and claimed those rapidly moving lips with his own. For

Seriously. There were three of them, all roughly in their thirties, and they spent their time traveling the world, putting together documentaries about the earth’s wonders. The on-screen talent, I learned, did indeed write his own scripts, and came off as the Boss Man for the trio. He was the one with all the responsibilities—deciding on shots, dealing with the Home Office, periodically having to shave, etc. The camera guy did all the heavy lifting and was always one hernia or one dropped camera away from ruin. And the sound guy? He just stands there holding a lightweight microphone and a headset. Then ka-ching, paycheck, and he trots off to the Andes. It sounded ideal to me, a lazy traveler’s ideal profession. No thinking. No lifting of heavy objects. Just keep the mike out of the camera’s view and know what a woofer is. Easy-peasy. Then they asked me what I did.

Chantal and I are on opposite teams, so we have to cover each other. The guys have this weird way with us. For example, if we travel or double-dribble they won't call us on it, or, if we get knocked down by a good block they'll yell, "Foul!" and one of us gets to take a shot. But this favouritism also has a downside because they're always telling us what to do, like we don't know the rules of basketball or something.

Cambodian dust whipped up in the wind and stuck to my clothes like clay. I put a hand between my face and the sun and blinked Phnom Penn dust from my tired eyes. One idea, drink, beamed light in all directions across my dark consciousness. A slim lady walked toward me with a big smile and a bigger head. Her left hand rested on her waggling hips and her right hand rose above her head, limp-wristed, like she’d just thrown a winning ball toward a basket and was leaving her hand in the shot position. The lady walking toward me was a man. At least that much was clear, but the nature or our relationship was still a fog to me. She wore blue jeans and a white top accentuating her breasts, but her Adam’s apple and cow sized hands revealed more in daylight than she could hide at night.

The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying and only wanted to get more money from the traveler. “Is this good or bad?” Pierre asked himself. “It is good for me, bad for another traveler, and for himself it’s unavoidable, because he needs money for food; the man said an officer had once given him a thrashing for letting a private traveler have the courier horses. But the officer thrashed him because he had to get on as quickly as possible. And I,” continued Pierre, “shot Dólokhov because I considered myself injured, and Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and a year later they executed those who executed him—also for some reason. What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?”1 There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: “You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.” But dying was also dreadful.

I return to my cot early that morning, and Tobias is already awake. He turns and walks toward the elevators, and I follow him, because I know that’s what he wants. We stand in the elevator, side by side. I hear ringing in my ears. The elevator sinks to the second floor, and I start to shake. It starts with my hands, but travels to my arms and my chest, until little shudders go through my entire body and I have no way to stop them. We stand between the elevators, right above another Candor symbol, the uneven scales. The symbol that is also drawn on the middle of his spine. He doesn’t look at me for a long time. He stands with his arms crossed and his head down until I can’t stand it anymore, until I feel like I might scream. I should say something, but I don’t know what to say. I can’t apologize, because I only told the truth, and I can’t change the truth into a lie. I can’t give excuses. “You didn’t tell me,” he says. “Why not?” “Because I didn’t…” I shake my head. “I didn’t know how to.” He scowls. “It’s pretty easy, Tris--” “Oh yeah,” I say, nodding. “It’s so easy. All I have to do is go up to you and say, ‘By the way, I shot Will, and now guilt is ripping me to shreds, but what’s for breakfast?’ Right? Right?” Suddenly it is too much, too much to contain. Tears fill my eyes, and I yell, “Why don’t you try killing one of your best friends and then dealing with the consequences?” I cover my face with my hands. I don’t want him to see me sobbing again. He touches my shoulder. “Tris,” he says, gently this time. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pretend that I understand. I just meant that…” He struggles for a moment. “I wish you trusted me enough to tell me things like that.” I do trust you, is what I want to say. But it isn’t true--I didn’t trust him to love me despite the terrible things I had done. I don’t trust anyone to do that, but that isn’t his problem; it’s mine. “I mean,” he says, “I had to find out that you almost drowned in a water tank from Caleb. Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?” Just when I was about to apologize. I wipe my cheeks hard with my fingertips and stare at him. “Other things seem stranger,” I say, trying to make my voice light. “Like finding out that your boyfriend’s supposedly dead mother is still alive by seeing her in person. Or overhearing his plans to ally with the factionless, but he never tells you about it. That seems a little strange to me.” He takes his hand from my shoulder. “Don’t pretend this is only my problem,” I say. “If I don’t trust you, you don’t trust me either.” “I thought we would get to those things eventually,” he says. “Do I have to tell you everything right away?” I feel so frustrated I can’t even speak for a few seconds. Heat fills my cheeks. “God, Four!” I snap. “You don’t want to have to tell me everything right away, but I have to tell you everything right away? Can’t you see how stupid that is?” “First of all, don’t use that name like a weapon against me,” he says, pointing at me. “Second, I was not making plans to ally with the factionless; I was just thinking it over. If I had made a decision, I would have said something to you. And third, it would be different if you had actually intended to tell me about Will at some point, but it’s obvious that you didn’t.” “I did tell you about Will!” I say. “That wasn’t truth serum; it was me. I said it because I chose to.” “What are you talking about?” “I was aware. Under the serum. I could have lied; I could have kept it from you. But I didn’t, because I thought you deserved to know the truth.” “What a way to tell me!” he says, scowling. “In front of over a hundred people! How intimate!

The aforementioned rules are the basic building blocks for an aesthetically pleasing image, but over the years I’ve come to grips with the fact that a good image is less about meeting the standards of what is “right” and more about what is intentional: What is the photographer trying to tell me? What mood or feeling is she trying to convey?

Something wet and cold fell into her lap. Aimee jumped in surprise, jolted out of her sensual daydreams. She stared as a large trout flopped up and down on her legs. Her gaze shot toward the river. Daniel wore a wolfish grin on his face. “You threw a fish at me?” she shouted in false anger. “I can’t believe you threw a fish at me!” In truth, it was hard to believe. Mr. Tall, Dark, and Scowly had actually done something funny. Imagine that. She bent down in pretense of picking up the wiggling fish, and gathered a handful of river mud from the bank, and squeezed it into a ball. As Daniel slowly waded toward her, still grinning from ear to ear, she aimed and threw the mud, hitting him in the shoulder. “Hah! Take that!”  Daniel’s grin faded quickly. “Two can play at that game.” Aimee kept taunting him, her hands on her hips. Daniel emerged from the river, and she swallowed hard. Her eyes roamed over his glistening wet body as he advanced. His feral virility stunned her. Several large jagged scars on his chest stood out against his olive skin. Why hadn’t she noticed them the day before? She swallowed nervously as her gaze traveled lower, and sighed in relief. He wasn’t completely nude. He wore a breechcloth, but it didn’t leave much to the imagination as to what it covered, and only served to accentuate his flat, rippled stomach and muscular thighs. The smoldering look in his eyes as he advanced sent her a few steps backwards, and the smile on her face froze. Oh God! Is he really this angry because I threw some mud at him?  In one lightning fast, predatory move, Daniel grabbed her up and flung her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and turned back to the water. “What are you doing? Put me down!” Aimee shrieked. Her fists pounded his hard back while her feet kicked uselessly in the air. He waded into the water a few feet, and unceremoniously threw her into the river. Before she hit the water, her thought was one of disbelief that he carried the game this far. It seemed so uncharacteristic of him. “You slimeball,” she yelled as her head emerged from the water. She was actually pleasantly surprised at this new, playful side of him. At least it solved her dilemma of wanting to go for a swim earlier. “How dare you!” she squealed in mock anger. Daniel dove into the river after her and came up inches from her face. She splashed water at him to ward him off. Daniel’s hands shot up and encircled her wrists. Flashing a devilish grin, he asked, “What is a slimeball?” She couldn’t keep up her false anger any more. “A slippery snake,” she laughed. “Like you, who preys on helpless women.” Daniel’s eyebrows shot up. “I thought you said you weren’t helpless.” “You’re right, I’m not helpless,” she confirmed, and flapped like a fish to try and free herself from his iron grip.

I’ll serve first, shall I?” Caroline called across the net as she plucked a ball out of her pocket, stepped up to the line, and tossed it into the air, leaving Millie, who was supposed to be the recipient of the serve, barely any time to get ready. All the breath seemed to leave him as the ball traveled rather slowly over the net. But then Millie drew back her racquet and . . . slammed the ball back Caroline’s way, the force of her swing completely unexpected given her small size. Before Caroline even moved, the ball shot past her. “Was that out?” Caroline demanded, swinging around. “It was in,” called a lady from the stands. Caroline spun to face Millie as Nora flashed a cheeky grin. “Love-fifteen,” Nora called. “I know how to keep score,” Caroline snapped back. Unfortunately, the game did not get better for Caroline after that. Millie had obviously not been exaggerating when she’d claimed she’d played tennis before, but it was clear that she hadn’t been playing with young boys. She was all over the court, hitting anything Caroline or Gertrude managed to get over the net, while Nora simply strolled back and forth, swinging her racquet, and at one point, whistling a jaunty tune. When it was Millie’s turn to serve, matters turned downright concerning. Gertrude was the first to try and return Millie’s serve, but when the ball came rushing at her, she screamed, dropped her racquet, and ran the other way, earning a screech from Caroline until she seemed to recall that her turn was next. “Give her a fast one, Miss Longfellow,” Thaddeus called. Millie lowered her racquet to send Thaddeus another wave. “Miss Longfellow, we are in the middle of a match here,” Caroline yelled across the net. “Forgive me, Miss Dixon. You’re quite right.” As if the world had suddenly slowed down, Everett watched as Millie threw the ball up, and then the racquet connected squarely with it, the thud of the connection reaching his ears. It began to move, and then the world sped up as the ball hurled at Caroline, and . . . smacked her right in the middle of the forehead, the impact knocking Caroline off her feet. Her skirt fluttered up, showing a bit of leg. Millie immediately began running across the court. Darting around the net, she raced to Caroline’s side, and yanked Caroline’s skirt back over her legs. Before Everett had a chance to see what Millie would do next, Abigail was tugging on his arm, and he realized he needed to act . . . the sooner the better. By the time he got to Caroline, made certain she wasn’t seriously hurt, and on her feet, he knew he had to get Millie as far away as possible from her. Caroline was shaking with rage and muttering threats under her breath. Telling Caroline he’d be right back, he nodded to Millie, who was still trying to apologize to Caroline, even though Caroline was not acknowledging the apologies and was resolutely looking the opposite way from Millie. “I really am so very, very sorry,” Millie said one last time before Abigail suddenly appeared right by her side and the crowd that had gathered around them fell silent. “Good heavens, Millie, it’s not as if you hit Miss Dixon on purpose—something Caroline knows all too well.” Abigail leveled a cool look on Caroline. “Why, your forehead is just a little pink. Granted the pink is perfectly circular, but . . . I’m sure it’ll fade soon, so no harm done.” Abigail

Looking down, she felt heat traveling up her face when she saw that, in her mad dash to get away from the goat, she’d completely neglected to realize that not only had she forgotten her shoes and stockings, she’d also forgotten that she hadn’t buttoned her gown up all the way. “Goodness,” she muttered as she yanked the neckline of her dress up as high as she could. “If it makes you feel better, I don’t believe anyone took note of your somewhat questionable state of dishabille.” Her head shot up as she met Bram’s eyes. “You obviously noticed.” He sent her a charming smile. “Noticed what?” He extended her his arm. “There’s a lovely grove right through those trees, which is nowhere near the barn, I might add. It’ll afford you a bit of privacy to set yourself to rights since I don’t believe you’ll be keen to face all the people still lingering outside the castle doors.” Glancing to where Bram was now looking, Lucetta found a small cluster of people looking her way, although Mr. Kenton and Archibald were walking back toward the castle, the skirts of their dresses fluttering in the breeze. Abigail, however, seemed to be in the midst of a heated conversation with her daughter, both women gesturing wildly with their hands as the remaining members of Bram’s staff edged ever so slowly away from them. “Should we intervene?” she asked with a nod Abigail’s way. “I willingly admit I’m not that familiar with my grandmother when she’s in a temper, but my mother is not a woman who would appreciate an intervention. I suggest you get yourself straightened about, and then I’ll take you for a lovely walk around the grounds. By the time we get back, they’ll have hopefully settled a few of their differences from the past thirty years.” “It’s fortunate your grounds seem to be extensive.” “Quite,” Bram agreed as she took the arm he was still holding out to her. He turned his attention back to Abigail and Iris. “I’m taking Miss Plum for a tour of the grounds,” he called. “We’ll be back in an hour or two.” Abigail and Iris stopped arguing and turned their attention Bram and Lucetta’s way. It was immediately clear that Abigail took no issue with Bram giving Lucetta a tour of the grounds. She lifted her arm and sent them a cheery wave before she spun on her heel and headed back toward the castle, spinning around again a moment later. Putting her hands on her hips, she marched her way back to Iris—who’d not moved at all—took her daughter’s arm, and with what looked to be a bit of wrestling, hauled Iris inside with her. “Perhaps we’ll mosey around the grounds for more than an hour or two,” Bram said as he steered Lucetta toward the trees.

Westcliff looked affronted. “Are you telling me in earnest that you are considering giving up your employment, your ambitions, your future … in favor of traveling the earth in a vardo?” “Yes. I’m considering it.” Westcliff’s coffee-colored eyes narrowed. “And you think after years of living a productive life in London that you would adjust happily to an existence of aimless wandering?” “It’s the life I was meant for. In your world, I’m nothing but a novelty.” “A damned successful novelty. And you have the opportunity to be a representative for your people—” “God help me.” Cam had begun to laugh helplessly. “If it ever comes to that, I should be shot.

The dynamic of addiction is that if you look to something that God created, to give you what it wasn’t intended to give you, either you get discouraged quickly, and wisely abandon those hopes, or you go back again and again, and in so doing, you begin to travel down addiction’s road. That created thing will give you a short-term buzz of euphoria, it will offer you temporary pleasure, it will provide a momentary sense of well-being, it will briefly make you feel that you’re something, and it may even make your problems seem not so bad for a bit. It’s all very intoxicating. It all feels great. The problem is that the created thing that you’re looking to has no capacity to satisfy your heart. It wasn’t designed to do that. It cannot give you inner peace. It cannot give you the heart rest of contentment. It cannot quiet your cravings. In a word, it cannot be your savior. And if you look outside of the Savior for something to be your savior, that thing will end up not being your savior but your master. You’ll love the short-term buzz, but you’ll hate how short it is. So you’ll have to go back again quickly to get another shot, and before long you’ve spent way too much time, energy, and money on something that can’t satisfy; but because of what it has briefly done for you each time, you’re convinced that you can’t live without it. You’re hooked and you may not know it. The thing you once desired, you’re now persuaded that you need, and once you’ve named it a need, it has you.

I told Benny that I had plans to go to Belarus and Lithuania t see the places where our European relatives had lived and died. Halfway through the week, Benny decided to join me on what he called the 'roots trip,' and by the end of the week Shimon and his oldest son, Amir, and Benny's son Rotem had signed on too. I enlisted my daughter Emily, who speaks Russian. In the middle of May 2011, the six of us met at a small wooden inn deep in the lush green Belarusian countryside. Together we visited Rakov and Volozhin; we walked through the crumbling hall of the Volozhin yeshiva, which has survived two world wars and the death of its students and teachers; we scouted out the street near Rakov's brick Catholic church where Sonia, Doba, and Etl grew up. We traveled to Vilna - now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania - and searched out the two apartment buildings where Doba and Shepseleh lived and raised their sons. We drove out to Ponar to say kaddish at the cratered pit where Shepseleh and tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews lay buried. We walked to a hillside at the edge of Volozhin and said kaddish over the pit where Chaim's brother Yishayahu may have been shot. We said kaddish in the small grassy clearing where the Rakov synagogue burned with Etl and her children inside.

Your Fingerprint and The Cyclone Fence Stand at the baseline. Raise your index and with your finger print about 8 to 12 inches from your face. Focus until you can see your fingerprint perfectly. Everything beyond your finger will be out of focus and most likely appear as double vision. From your fingerprint, shift your focus to the far fence, pick a small object on the fence on which to focus, preferably at the same height which you would be looking at the toss. Did you feel your focus shifting away? Take your focus back and forth from your fingerprint to the back fence until you experience your focus traveling back and forth in between these two objects you are taking turns to focus. Shift your focus as smoothly and quickly as possible between the two objects. This will exercise your eyes to smoothly shift focus. Once you begin to feel very comfortable, then experiment with focusing on the far fence all the way to your fingerprint and have your focus shift as fast as possible, as though you were following a ball in flight. Now do this faster and faster. The focus of your eyes, can shift at well over 100 MPH, but the exact number, or if any limit exists is not known by me. Now go and rally some tennis balls and try to maintain focus on the ball during an entire rally.  Of course, when you are tracking you can work to keep the ball fairly close to the center of your vision. Action Items: * Exercise above for up to 5 minutes each day for one week. * After one week, use as 30 second to 1 minute warm up. * Also use when you have been overpowered by speed of shot.

At first, the smoke in the Fiction stacks was as pale as onionskin. Then it deepened to dove gray. Then it turned black. It wound around Fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the shelves like bumper cars. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flame shot through the smoke and jabbed upward. More flames erupted. The heat built. The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering. Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened and then sprang away from their bindings, a ream of sooty scraps soaring on the updraft. The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. Every book in its path bloomed with flame. At the seventh tier, the fire banged into the concrete ceiling, doubled back, and mushroomed down again to the sixth tier. It poked around, looking for more air and fuel. Pages and book jackets and microfilm and magazines crumbled and vanished. On the sixth tier, flames crowded against the walls of the stacks, then decided to move laterally. The fire burned through sixth-tier shelves and then nosed around until it found the catwalk that connected the northeast stacks to the northwest stacks. It erupted into the catwalk and hurried along until it reached the patent collection stored in the northwest stacks. It gripped the blocky patent gazettes. They were so thick that they resisted, but the heat gathered until at last the gazettes smoked, flared, crackled, and dematerialized. Wind gusts filled the vacuum made by the fire. Hot air saturated the walls. The floor began to fracture. A spiderweb of hot cracks appeared. Ceiling beams spalled, sending chips of concrete shooting in every direction. The temperature reached 900 degrees, and the stacks' steel shelves brightened from gray to white, as if illuminated from within. Soon, glistening and nearly molten, they glowed cherry red. Then they twisted and slumped, pitching their books into the fire.

But she couldn’t stop. The smell of her burning house still filled her nostrils even as the chilly breeze swept by her enticingly. The screams that rang out were deafening; flames shot up everywhere. The screams were prolonged and were she, a little child of ten, not so scared, they would have been very irritating for they were constant; they were horror filled, they spelt death and terror.

am putting rot in our souls for all time, but this moment is our best shot at stopping the pipeline, our time-machine moment, our travel-back-and-kill-Leopold-II moment.

The land exerts itself and has its effect. I'm roughed up or soothed, exhilarated or depressed, wholly prevailed upon from outside myself. I expected serenity, but I am labile and mood-struck. I change as the scene changes, as the sky clouds or clears. I conclude that nature is alive - if I hadn't known it before - and she calls the shots.

know something happens between the time our mothers and fathers and teachers and mentors send us out into the world telling us, “The world is yours,” and “You are beautiful,” and “You can do anything” and the time we return to them. Something happens when people tell me I have a pretty face, ignoring me from the neck down. When I watch the news and see unarmed black men and women shot dead over and over, it’s kind of hard to believe this world is mine. Sometimes it feels like I leave home a whole person, sent off with kisses from Mom, who is hanging her every hope on my future. By the time I get home I feel like my soul has been shattered into a million pieces. Whenever Mom’s cooking is simmering on the stove …and I am making my art, I believe everything these women are saying about being worthy of good things. Those are the times I feel secure, feel just fine. I look in the mirror and see my dad’s eyes looking back at me, my mom’s thick hair, thick everything. And that’s when I believe my dark skin isn’t a curse, that my lips and hips, hair and nose don’t need fixing. That my dream of being an artist and traveling the world isn’t foolish. I feel like I can prove the negative stereotypes about girls like me wrong. That I can and will do more, be more. But when I leave? It happens again. The shattering. And this makes me wonder if a black girl’s life is only about being stitched together and coming undone, being stitched together and coming undone. I wonder if there’s ever a way for a girl like me to feel whole.

After greeting him I remarked, "Boy, I sure admire you. I've never been able to fix those kind of things or do anything like that." My neighbor, without a moment's hesitation, shot back, "That's because you don't take the time.

I always figured it this way: If I’m going to get hit, why let the guy who’s going to hit me get the easiest and best shot? I’d explode into the guy who’s trying to take me out. Explode first, ask questions later. Safe travels.” He

National Geographic wrote about how Instagram was changing travel: visits to Trolltunga, a photogenic cliff in Norway, increased from 500 a year in 2009 to 40,000 a year in 2014. "What photos of this iconic vista don't reveal is the long line of hikers weaving around the rocky terrain each morning, all waiting for their chance to capture their version of the Instagram-famous shot," the magazine wrote.

But there was no sign of life in the small fortified outpost as they drew nearer. “Gate’s open,” Halt muttered as they came closer and could make out more detail. “How many men usually garrison a place like this?” Horace asked. The Ranger shrugged. “Half a dozen. A dozen maybe.” “There don’t seem to be any of them around,” Horace observed, and Halt glanced sideways at him. “I’d noticed that part myself,” he replied, then added, “What’s that?” There was an indistinct shape apparent now in the shadows just inside the open gate. Acting on the same instinct, they both urged their horses into a canter and closed the distance between them and the fort. Halt already felt certain what the shape was. It was a dead Skandian, lying in a pool of blood that had soaked into the snow. Inside there were ten others, all of them killed the same way, with multiple wounds to their torsos and limbs. The two travelers dismounted carefully and moved among the bodies, studying the awful scene. “Who could have done this?” said Horace in a horrified voice. “They’ve been stabbed over and over again.” “Not stabbed,” Halt told him. “Shot. These are arrow wounds. And then the killers collected their arrows from the bodies. Except for this one.” He held up the broken half of an arrow that had been lying concealed under one of the bodies. The Skandian had probably broken it off in an attempt to remove it from the wound. The other half was still buried deeply in his thigh. Halt studied the fletching style and the identification marks painted at the

We could talk about it.” “Talk about what?” “Why you look like someone shot your dog. Shelby, I assume.” “Nah,” Luke said, taking a drink. “That’s not serious.” “I guess that has nothing to do with your sleeplessness or your mood then. Trouble with the cabins? The town? Your tenant/helper?” “Aiden, there’s nothing bothering me, except maybe that I’ve been working my ass off for three months getting a house and six cabins rebuilt and furnished.” Aiden took a sip of his drink. “Twenty-five, so Sean and Mom say. And gorgeous.” “Sean’s an idiot who can’t mind his own business. She’s just a girl.” “She’s just a girl who has you looking a little uptight.” “Thanks,” he said, standing. “You don’t look that great yourself—I’m going to bed.” He threw back the rest of his drink. “Nah, don’t,” Aiden said. “Fix another one. Give me ten minutes, huh? I can just ask a couple of questions, right? I’m not like Sean, I’m not going to get up your ass about this. But you haven’t talked about it much and I’m a little curious.” Luke thought about that for a second and against his better judgment, he went into the kitchen and poured himself a short shot. He went back and sat down, leaning his elbows on his knees. “What?” he asked abruptly. Aiden chuckled. “Okay. Relax. Just a girl? Not serious?” “That’s right. A town girl, sort of. She’s visiting her family and she’ll be leaving pretty soon.” “Ah—I didn’t know that. I guess I thought she lived there.” “Long visit,” Luke said. “Her mother died last spring. She’s spending a few months with her uncle until she gets on with things—like where she wants to live. College and travel and stuff. This is temporary, that’s all.” “But—if you felt serious, there isn’t any reason you wouldn’t let it…you know…evolve…?” “I don’t feel serious,” he said, his mouth in a firm line. “Okay, I get that. Does she? Feel serious?” “She has plans. I didn’t trap her, Aiden. I made sure she knew—I’m not interested in being a family man. I told her she could do better, I’m just not built that way. But when I’m with a woman, I know how to treat her right. If she needed something permanent, she was in the wrong place. That’s how it is.” “Never?” “What do you mean, never? No one in this family is interested in that.” “Bullshit. I am. Sean says he’s having too much fun, but the truth is he has the attention span of a cabbage. But me? I’d like a wife, a family.” “Didn’t you already try that once?” Luke asked, sitting back in his chair, relaxing a little bit since the attention had shifted to Aiden’s life. “Oh, yeah—I tried hard. Next time I try, I’m going to see if I can find a woman who’s not certifiable and off her meds.” He grinned. “Really, that’s what happens when you ignore all the symptoms because she’s such a friggin’ miracle in bed, it causes brain damage.” He shrugged. “I’m on the lookout for that.” Luke grinned. “She was hot.” “Oh, yeah.” “She was worse than nuts.” “Nightmare nuts,” Aiden agreed.