Siberian Quotes

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can't help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.

Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana? Try to imagine this: You're a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it's directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That's hysteria siberiana.

Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness.

Why did you want me to dress warmly?” she asks. “Are you taking me to a Siberian prison?” “Nope.” “Abandoned research station in Antarctica?” “Nope.” “You’re taking me to practice for our two-person skeleton race at the Olympics.” “Yes.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide.

It's best to love your family as you would a Siberian tiger-from a distance, preferably separated by bars.

Go shower. I’ll do penance and take Radulf out." Ben ruffled his hair. "It’s very cold. Not too long, yeah?" "For God’s sake, I survived a Siberian gulag." "I was talking about the dog.

Chi vuole troppo è un pazzo, perché un uomo non può possedere più di quello che il suo cuore riesce ad amare

Aware of her uneasy gaze straying to his rampant arousal, Sebastian shot her a scornful glance. “Pay it no mind,” he said, climbing into bed with her. “From now on, I have every expectation that proximity to you will affect my private parts like a prolonged swim in a Siberian lake.

was a clear, pale blue like the eyes of a Siberian husky dog. Human beings just didn't have eyes like that.

Scientists estimate that the Siberian permafrost holds the remains of 150 million mammoths—or about 8 million more than the 142 million Russians aboveground in Russia today.

Clearly, Siberian reindeer are not fighting over drugged urine for its nutrative value.

My poor life This shawl Frayed on strongboxes full of gold I roll along with Dream And smoke And the only flame in the universe

I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

It made you happy, to be used by me?” Perhaps not so promising. I raised my brows with amusement. “I orgasmed three times; you did once. Who’s using whom, Siberian?

I looked you up, Arkady. You have a checkered career." "I'm flattered. I was unaware of having any career at all.

And what good's a life that leaves nothing behind/Not a thought or a dream that might echo in time.

Music always reminded him of the voice of God, for it needed no translation and could reach and renew the soul like very few other things could.

As the Siberian saying goes: One hundred versts (roughly a hundred miles) is no distance. A hundred rubles isn't worthwhile money. And a hundred grams of vodka just makes you thirsty.

le lacrime umane non cadono mai per terra, il Signore le raccoglie prima

when that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray's River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places. And if that's not grace, I don't know what it.

Now this process was happening again, as the shash-ing sound that seemed to so delight the Siberian began to take on a definite form, one that fit both phonetically and with her cited heritage: Masha.

Wednesday, November 8th, 1893 Here I sit in the still winter night on the drifting ice-floe, and see only stars above me. Far off I see the threads of life twisting themselves into the intricate web which stretches unbroken from life’s sweet morning dawn to the eternal death-stillness of ice. Thought follows thought—you pick the whole to pieces, and it seems so small—but high above all towers one form … Why did you take this voyage? … Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill? My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of wind. Build up the most ingenious theories and you may be sure of one thing—that fact will defy them all. Was I so very sure? Yes, at times; but that was self-deception, intoxication. A secret doubt lurked behind all the reasoning. It seemed as though the longer I defended my theory, the nearer I came to doubting it. But no, there is not getting over the evidence of that Siberian drift-wood. But if, after all, we are on the wrong track, what then? Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity?

I'm a writer and I'm feeling like death, as you would too if you'd just flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan at some ungodly hour of the morning only to discover that you can't get into your hotel room for another three hours. In fact it's enough just to have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you are a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, then please assume that I am just kidding. Anyone else will surely realise that I am not. Having nowhere else to go, I am standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece. Well, a kind of mantelpiece. I don't know what it is, in fact. It's made of brass and some kind of plastic and was probably drawn in by the architect after a nasty night on the town. That reminds me of another favourite piece of information: there is a large kink in the trans-Siberian railway because when the Czar (I don't know which Czar it was because I am not in my study at home I'm leaning against something shamefully ugly in Michigan and there are no books) decreed that the trans-Siberian railway should be built, he drew a line on a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it.

Well, anyway, we walked around for a while, looking at the animals, and suddenly he asked me to marry him outside the cage of the Siberian yak". "No sir", exclaimed Sigsbee H with a sudden strange firmness, the indulgent father who for once in his life asserts himself. "When you get married, you'll get married in St Thomas's like any other nice girl".

Arkady was an Investigator of Special Cases, and if a bear running loose in the heart of Moscow was not a special case, he didn't know what was.

I’m writing you this letter from the edge of the world. According to a Siberian proverb, the forest was made by the devil. The devil did a good job; his forest is as big as the United States of America. But maybe the devil made the United States too.

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders - you don't see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet.

As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion —usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you.

I fall asleep Call it deep while all is well be- Cause my life seems like a freestyle mean- While asleep on the couch I dream it's a written piece and now The symphony's sounding Shouting out to these feet whose leaps feel foul but quite loud But how I'm allowed to live my dreams My Chimeran team brings the Siberian breed Riding reality free 'til these tires they freeze In mires in dire need of wires, fire and heat but I love a dark, hard cold heart in the wintery breeze

Today the Siberians, the White Russians, and the people of the steppes live extremely healthy lives. For that reason they are better equipped for development and in the long run biologically superior to the Germans. -- quoted by Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich, Chapter 7: Obersalzberg (years before the start of the war)

Everyone is too young when their mother dies.

Easy dosen't matter to Lyudmila. Easy has never mattered. Possible is what matters.

in this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected.

She felt like one of the luckless peasant girls in some Russian hagiography, left to fend for her family in deep Siberian snows.

scientists has recently mapped the genome of ancient mammoths, found frozen in the Siberian ice. They now plan to take a fertilised egg-cell of a present-day elephant, replace the elephantine DNA with a reconstructed mammoth DNA, and implant the egg in the womb of an elephant. After about twenty-two months, they expect the first mammoth in 5,000 years to be born.9

What I liked was the train ride. It took an hour and that was enough for me to be able to lean backwards against the seat with closed eyes, feel the joints in the rails come up and thump through my body and sometimes peer out of the windows and see windswept heathland and imagine I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I had read about it, seen pictures in a book and decided that no matter when and how life would turn out, one day I would travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on that train, and I practised saying the names: Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, they were difficult to pronounce with all their hard consonants, but ever since the trip to Skagen, every journey I made by train was a potential departure on my own great journey.

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary mentions a German lieutenant—for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost unbearable—who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery, perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone. And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

She felt like one of the luckless peasant girls in some Russian hagiography, left to fend for her family in deep Siberian snows. Ever a logical girl, she didn't like where the hints all around were leading her.

It's like this,' began the elder. 'All these sentences of hard labour in Siberian prisons, and formerly with flogging, too, do not reform anyone and, what's more, scarcely deter even one criminal, and, far from diminishing, the number of crimes are steadily increasing. You have to admit that. It therefore follows that society is not in the least protected, for though a harmful member is cut off automatically and exiled to some remote spot just to get rid of him, another criminal takes his place at once, and often, two, perhaps. If anything does protect society even today and indeed reforms the criminal himself and brings about his regeneration, it is, again, only the law of Christ, which reveals itself in the awareness of one's own consciousness. Only by recognizing his own guilt as a son of a Christian society, that is, of the Church, does the criminal recognize his guilt towards society itself, that is, towards the Church. The criminal today, therefore, is capable of recognizing his guilt only towards the Church, and not towards the State.

Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.

These were children, after all, who were taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, the twelve-year-old Young Pioneer who was made a national hero and icon for all Soviet children when he served his collective by ratting on his own father for trying to hide grain from the police. These were children raised in schools designed according to the “socialist family” theories of Anton Makarenko, an ideology officer of the KGB. Makarenko insisted that children learn the supremacy of the collective over the individual, the political unit over the family. The schools, he said, must employ an iron discipline modeled on that of the Red Army and Siberian labor camps.

Let’s put to rest one cliché. You can sell refrigerators to Eskimos. The people of Savoonga are Yupiks, the westernmost of the Eskimo tribes, closer to Siberians than American Eskimos in their appearance, and their customs, and their distinctive, liquidly sibilant native language. And, yes, they all have refrigerators. In the winter, food gets freezer burn if left out in the elements. Eskimos need refrigerators to keep their food warm.

The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian airports- to break the icy seal. Stepping outside was like stepping onto another planet, for at those low temperatures nothing seems quite normal. The air burns. Sounds are brittle. Every breath hovers in a strangle slow-motion cloud, adding to the mist of ice that pervades the city and blurs the sun. When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars.

...told me to stop being a stupid town boy. She said that if I ever tried to go away from her again, she'd break my legs. She's very romantic, that girl. Sweet as a kitten...if a kitten was a Siberian tiger with mood issues.

Karpo, as always, was dressed in black. His leather coat was black. Even his scarf and fur hat were black. Rostnikov thought that clothes reflected the people who wore them. Rostnikov himself dressed neatly, conservatively, in old comfortable suits and ties Sarah had bought for him at market stalls. As for Karpo's choice of black, Rostnikov was not given to simple judgment. He himself was rather fond of black, which was either the absence of color or the totality of color. There was a statement in black, he thought. Black said, You cannot penetrate my being by looking at my exterior. I am a dark cipher.

COMMISSAR ILLYA RUTKIN TUCKED his briefcase under his arm, adjusted his goatskin gloves, pulled down his fur hat to cover his ears and tightened the scarf over his mouth before opening the door of the wooden house and stepping out into the Siberian morning.

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data—one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed. Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.

The bride wore a dress of that peculiar style of calico known as "furniture prints," without trimming or ornaments of any kind. Whether it was cut "bias" or with "gores," I'm sorry to say I don't know, dress-making being as much of an occult science to me as divination.

Further north, I met a Siberian hermit who lived in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. His life’s passion was wrestling black bears ... in the nude (him not the bears). He did not know why he did it. All the hermit knew was that if he stopped wrestling bears, he would die.

It is an irony of history that the great powers should have discovered the unity of nations at Cairo in 1943. The geese of the world have had that notion for a longer time, and each March they stake their lives on its essential truth. In the beginning there was only the unity of the Ice Sheet. Then followed the unity of the March thaw, and the northward hegira of the international geese. Every March since the Pleistocene, the geese have honked unity from China Sea to Siberian Steppe, from Euphrates to Volga, from Nile to Murmansk, from Lincolnshire to Spitsbergen.

They were trying to escape. They asked us "Where's the railway?" We'd never seen a railway. They asked "Where's Moscow? Leningrad?" They were asking the wrong people: we'd never heard of those places. We're Ostyaks. People were running away starving. They were given a handful of flour. They mixed it with water and drank it and then they immediately got diarrhea. The things we saw! People were dying everywhere; they were killing each other.... On the island there was a guard named Kostia Venikov, a young fellow. He was courting a pretty girl who had been sent there. He protected her. One day he had to be away for a while, and he told one of his comrades, "Take care of her," but with all the people there the comrade couldn't do much.... People caught the girl, tied her to a poplar tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat, everything, everything.... They were hungry, they had to eat. When Kostia came back, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood.

You used to be able to tell a person’s nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders—you don’t see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet.

the single hero story that seemed to be repeating itself everywhere — in the oldest Sumerian epics, in folktales from the Pacific Islands and the Siberian forests and the African savannah, in the lives of great religious heroes like Gautama Śakyamūni and Jesus, in the case notes of psychiatric patients,

Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

In Siberian merchant weddings well into the 19th century, the bride's father would strike his daughter with a specially made whip, pronouncing the words, 'By these blows you, daughter, know the power of your father. Now instead of me, your husband will teach you with this lash.' The whip would be ceremonially passed from father to son-in-law.

When a holy was is declared, the end justifies any means to those crusaders.

How could they be on opposite sides when it came to protecting the planet that hosted all of them?

The Great King drew back his lips to reveal his fangs to me. It was a silent warning not to do anything foolish. The gesture drained the last bit of courage I had in me.

Colin could have been offended or irked by her presumptive attitude, but sharp women didn’t threaten him. In fact, he enjoyed watching them work. And, of course, there was the fact that he’d married one.

A nurse the size of a shipping hazard peered over him and smiled. Some of her teeth were missing, some were gold, and the sight was so unnerving that Arkady hoped he wouldn’t give her cause to smile again.

He wandered to the window. In that blast of snow, the shaft of the Plymouth National Bank Building was aspiring as a cathedral; twenty gray stories, with unbroken vertical lines swooping up beyond his vision into the snowy fog. It had nobility, but it seemed cruel, as lone and contemptuous of friendly human efforts as a forgotten tower on the Siberian steppes. How indifferently it would watch him starve and freeze!

helped me to make my superstorm as plausible as possible. Lydia Chilton helped me create a realistic AI. Mike Swirsky was a huge help with the Siberian drilling project, and Dr. Dave Goldberg helped a lot with the weird physics. I also learned a lot from the Cornell Bird Lab. Lightninglouie gave the book its epigraph. And my father helped me a lot with the book’s philosophical conundrums, while my mother helped me think about how

Just as the full absurdity of Trump was sinking in, crushing any hope that he would turn “presidential,” Putin, in the American imagination, was turning into a brilliant strategist, a skilled secret agent who was plotting the end of the Western world. In fact, Putin was and remains a poorly educated, underinformed, incurious man whose ambition is vastly out of proportion to his understanding of the world. To the extent that he has any interest in the business of governing, it is solely his own role—on the world stage or on Russian television—that concerns him. Whether he is attending a summit, piloting a plane, or hang gliding with Siberian cranes, it is the spectacle of power that interests him. In this, he and Trump are alike: to them, power is the beginning and the end of government, the presidency, politics—and public politics is only the performance of power.

Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?' Worries Forget your worries All the stations full of cracks tilted along the way The telegraph wires they hang from The grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle them The world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic hand In the cracks of the sky the locomotives in anger Flee And in the holes, The whirling wheels the mouths the voices And the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heels The demons are unleashed Iron rails Everything is off-key The broun-roun-roun of the wheels Shocks Bounces We are a storm under a deaf man's skull... 'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?' Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far away Overheated madness bellows in the locomotive Plague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our way We disappear in the war sucked into a tunnel Hunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding clouds And drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpses Do like her, do your job 'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?

Whatever the evolutionary precursors of drug use are, a permanently “drug-free” human culture has yet to be discovered. Like music, language, art, and tool use, the pursuit of altered states of consciousness is a human universal. With access to few alternatives, Siberian shamans imbibe reindeer and human urine to maximize the psychedelic yield of Amanita muscaria mushrooms (the metabolite that is excreted may be stronger than the substance initially ingested); on nearly the opposite side of the world, New Zealanders party with untested “research chemicals” synthesized by Chinese chemists. Drug use spans time and culture. It is a rare human who has never taken a drug to alter her mood; statistically, it is non-users who are abnormal. Indeed, today, around two thirds of Americans over 12 have had at least one drink in the last year, and 1 in 5 are current smokers. (In the 1940s and ’50s, a whopping 67% of men smoked.) Among people ages 21 to 25, 60% have taken an illegal drug at least once—overwhelmingly marijuana—and 20% have taken one in the past month. Moreover, around half of us could suffer from physical withdrawal symptoms if denied our daily coffee. While Americans are relatively prodigious drug users—topping the charts in the use of many substances—we are far from alone in our psychoactive predilections.

Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it “normal,” and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called “human nature” was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes’s dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana.

Her chest felt heavy, and tears welled up in her eyes. Should she just let go? The fall down the mountain would kill her before she landed in the river. Should she end her flight right now? If she did, at least it would be her choice.

You could also buy leopard cat, Chinese muntjac, Siberian weasel, Eurasian badger, Chinese bamboo rat, butterfly lizard, and Chinese toad, plus a long list of other reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, including two kinds of fruit bat. Quite an epicure’s menu. And of course birds: cattle egrets, spoonbills, cormorants, magpies, a vast selection of ducks and geese and pheasants and doves, plovers, crakes, rails, moorhens, coots, sandpipers, jays, several flavors of crow.

Before this grief, mountains must bend down And rivers stop, But prison locks are strong, And behind them are the labor-camp bunks And the deadly tedium. For others the fresh breeze is blowing, For others the extravagant sun sets — For us everything is the same, we know nothing, We hear only the keys and their hateful grinding. Only the soldiers' stiff steps. We get up as for early Mass in the city, The savaged city, and coming We meet ourselves, the dead, the unbreathing. The sun is low, the Neva misty, It is only in the distance that hope is singing. The sentence . . . and at once tears, Now everything has been taken, The rest of life, torn from her heart, Knocked backwards by a hoodlum And yet she walks . . . stumbles . . . alone . . . Where are they now, unwilling friends Of years in Hell? What visions do they see in Siberian snow-storms? What hallucinations in the circle of the moon? I send them this goodbye and wish them well.

When you next feel the wind brush by, think about where it has come from and where it goes. Some of it has touched the tops of mountains deep within the Sahara. Some carries the fragrant pine scent from the vast Siberian taiga forests. Or perhaps it has come from the yawning jaws of a lion on the African grasslands. Every breeze brings a story of its journey. If you listen hard enough, you can hear its whisper. It is the quiet call to adventure, asking you to step into the wild.

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

La vera arte è una forma di protesta, quindi ogni opera d'arte deve creare contraddizioni, far discutere. Per la sua filosofia, il tatuaggio criminale era la forma d'arte più pura che esisteva al mondo. La gente, -diceva - odia i criminali, però ama i loto tatuaggi.

Most of all Ginny--part Schnauzer, part Siberian Husky, part angel from heaven--has taught me the most important lesson in life, that life is not worth living without love, that giving love is more rewarding than getting it, and that the humblest creatures, the least advantaged creatures, are worthy of the greatest outpouring of love. It's a spiritual message, that all life is precious (matters), all life is short, and that, just as human beings have immortal souls, so do animals have immortal souls, because they, too, were created by God. (word in parentheses by poster)

Vladimir, released from prison in St. Petersburg, was given five days in St. Petersburg and four in Moscow to prepare for his exile. He traveled alone across the Urals, taking with him a thousand roubles and a trunk filled with a hundred books. His three years in the quiet backwater Siberian village of Shushenskoe near the Mongolian border were among the happiest of his life. The river Shush flowed nearby and was filled with fish, the woods teemed with bears, squirrels and sables. Vladimir rented rooms, went swimming twice a day, acquired a dog and a gun and went hunting for duck and snipe.

- Guarda gli animali, secondo te loro ne sanno qualcosa della felicità? - Beh, penso che anche gli animali ogni tanto si sentono tristi o felici, solo che non riescono a esprimere i loro sentimenti...- ho risposto io. Lui mi ha guardato in silenzio e poi ha detto : -E lo sai perché Dio ha dato all'uomo una vita più lunga di quella degli animali? -No, non ci ho mai pensato... -Perché gli animali vivono seguendo il loro istinto e non fanno sbagli. L'uomo vive seguendo la ragione, quindi ha bisogno di una parte della vita per fare sbagli, un'altra per poterli capire, e una terza per cercare di vivere senza sbagliare.

November 18, 2014: it’s a day that should live forever in history. On that day, in the city of Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang province, 300 kilometers south of Shanghai, the first train carrying 82 containers of export goods weighing more than 1,000 tons left a massive warehouse complex heading for Madrid. It arrived on December 9th. Welcome to the new trans-Eurasia choo-choo train. At over 13,000 kilometers, it will regularly traverse the longest freight train route in the world, 40% farther than the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway. Its cargo will cross China from East to West, then Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, France, and finally Spain.

The same kind of situation complicates many public debates, like that over global warming. Many scientists predict that altered atmospheric conditions will raise the average global temperature by several degrees. But such changes can also cause extreme weather, which may mean worse snowstorms in the southern United States. Global warming may alter ocean currents like the Gulf Stream and ultimately turn northern Europe into a much colder Siberian-type icebox. Anomalies like this fuel the global warming naysayers: scientists say the world is getting hotter, but you’ve just suffered through the biggest snowstorm in your region’s history. How should you respond? A judicious response is that nature is amazing—rich, varied, complex, and intricately interconnected, with a messy, long history. Anomalies, whether in planetary orbits or North American weather, are not just inconvenient details to brush aside: they are the very essence of understanding what really happened—how things really work. We develop grand and general models of how nature works, and then we use the odd details to refine the original imperfect model (or if the exceptions overwhelm the rule, we regroup around a new model). That’s why good scientists revel in anomalies. If we understood everything, if we could predict everything, there’d be no point in getting up in the morning and heading to the lab.

Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

These chunks of DNA are highly informative. For example, we can use their length to date the time of interbreeding. This relies on the fact that over time, long lengths of genome are chopped and swapped by recombination. The longer the intact sequence, the fewer generations undergone since interbreeding—the effect has been confirmed by looking at ancient DNA from Siberian contemporaries of the Neanderthals: modern-looking Homo sapiens sapiens, for whom Neanderthal interbreeding must have been a recent thing. These true Moderns have significantly longer Neanderthal regions in their genome. Such considerations put our Neanderthal hybridisation suggestively close to our recent African exodus, between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.*

At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any other century at all, for that matter, was a rum notion. Had the global plebiscite been acted upon in a democratic manner, the twentieth century would have forthwith ceased to exist, the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned and time, by popular consent, would have stood still.

As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion—usually while he’s lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina,” writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). “It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you.

As a young man, the seer became a rake. He drank and fought and made free with the village girls. He became a wagoner, carrying goods and passengers to other villages, an occupation that extended the range of his conquests. A good talker, sure of himself, he tried every girl he met. His method was direct: he grabbed and started undoing buttons. Naturally, he was frequently kicked and scratched and bitten, but the sheer volume of his efforts brought him notable success. He learned that even in the shyest and primmest of girls, the emptiness and loneliness of life in a Siberian village had bred a flickering appetite for romance and adventure. Gregory’s talent was for stimulating those appetites and overcoming all hesitations by direct, good-natured aggression.

Throughout war-torn Europe, civilian and military prisoners in other Soviet and German camps experienced similar revelations in the act of reading. Jorge Semprún, a Spanish writer working with anti-Franco forces in France, was arrested by the Gestapo and shipped to Buchenwald, where, he declared, he was saved by his focus on Goethe and Giraudoux. Yevgenia Ginzburg, a teacher and Communist Party member accused of Trotskyist sympathies, drew strength from Pushkin as she fought to stay alive in the Siberian Gulag. In his book If This Is a Man, Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi described the unexpected emergence of a jumble of lines of terza rima from The Divine Comedy as he was shouldering a vessel filled with a hundred pounds of murky soup out to a work detail in the fields at Auschwitz, a teenaged prisoner from Strasbourg at his side.

If you want to drive the isthmus lengthwise, down the gullet, Mexico to Colombia, where the land broadens and South America begins, your best bet is the Pan-American Highway, which starts in Alaska and continues thirty thousand miles to the bottom of the world. It’s a network of roads each charted by a conquistador or strongman. It’s disappointing in many places, rutted and small, climbing and descending, battling the jungle and mountains, then ending abruptly in the rain forest of Panama. It’s as if the road itself, defeated by nature, walked away muttering. It starts again sixty-five miles hence, on the other side of a chasm. This is called the Darién Gap. It symbolizes the incomplete nature of Central America, the IN PROGRESS sign that seems to hang over everything. Russia is the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Germany is the Autobahn. The United States is Route 66. Central America is the Darién Gap.

Of all the plants, trees have the largest surface area covered in leaves. For every square yard of forest, 27 square yards of leaves and needles blanket the crowns. Part of every rainfall is intercepted in the canopy and immediately evaporates again. In addition, each summer, trees use up to 8,500 cubic yards of water per square mile, which they release into the air through transpiration. This water vapor creates new clouds that travel farther inland to release their rain. As the cycle continues, water reaches even the most remote areas. This water pump works so well that the downpours in some large areas of the world, such as the Amazon basin, are almost as heavy thousands of miles inland as they are on the coast. There are a few requirements for the pump to work: from the ocean to the farthest corner, there must be forest. And, most importantly, the coastal forests are the foundations for this system. If they do not exist, the system falls apart. Scientists credit Anastassia Makarieva from Saint Petersburg in Russia for the discovery of these unbelievably important connections. They studied different forests around the world and everywhere the results were the same. It didn't matter if they were studying a rain forest or the Siberian taiga, it was always the trees that were transferring life-giving moisture into land-locked interiors. Researchers also discovered that the whole process breaks down if coastal forests are cleared. It's a bit like if you were using an electrical pump to distribute water and you pulled the intake pipe out of the pond. The fallout is already apparent in Brazil, where the Amazonian rain forest is steadily drying out. Central Europe is within the 400-mile zone and, therefore, close enough to the intake area. Thankfully, there are still forests here, even if they are greatly diminished.

Seymour studies the quantities of methane locked in melting Siberian permafrost. Reading about declining owl populations led him to deforestation which led to soil erosion which led to ocean pollution which led to coral bleaching, everything warming, melting, and dying faster than scientists predicted, every system on the planet connected by countless invisible threads to every other: cricket players in Delhi vomiting from Chinese air pollution, Indonesian peat fires pushing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere over California, million-acre bushfires in Australia turning what’s left of New Zealand’s glaciers pink. A warmer planet = more water vapor in the atmosphere = even warmer planet = more water vapor = warmer planet still = thawing permafrost = more carbon and methane trapped in that permafrost releasing into the atmosphere = more heat = less permafrost = less polar ice to reflect the sun’s energy, and all this evidence, all these studies are sitting there in the library for anybody to find, but as far as Seymour can tell, he’s the only one looking.

Christ. Study the roster. Study everybody’s photos,” she said. “Where’s the packing list for Earl?” Et cetera, et cetera . . . That spring, the gallery was putting up Ping Xi’s first solo show—“Bowwowwow”—and Natasha was up in arms about every little detail. She probably would have fired me sooner had she not been so busy. I tried to feign interest and mask my horror whenever Natasha talked about Ping Xi’s “dog pieces.” He had taxidermied a variety of pure breeds: a poodle, a Pomeranian, a Scottish terrier. Black Lab, Dachshund. Even a little Siberian husky pup. He’d been working on them for a long time. He and Natasha had grown close since his cum paintings had sold so well. During the installation, I overheard one of the interns whispering to the electrician. “There’s a rumor going around that the artist gets the dogs as puppies, raises them, then kills them when they’re the size he wants. He locks them in an industrial freezer because that’s the most humane way to euthanize them without compromising the look of the animal. When they thaw, he can get them into whatever position he wants.

The one thing that stung Zhenya was the insinuation that he ducked the best players, "Anyone I play it's their choice," Zhenya said. "I can't help it if I'm better than they are. Sometimes I play a rook or a bishop down. What could be fairer than that?" "They never know what hit them," Sosi said; her eyes grew as round as moons. She looked like the perfect fanatic to encourage a leap into a volcano. She rolled a rook back and forth on the Formica, as if she were gathering an electric charge. "Zhenya can turn any game into a slaughter." It was like visiting the Macbeths, Arkady thought.

Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.

It was one of those warm, still, almost tropical nights, so rarely seen on the northern waters, when a profound calm reigns in the moonless heavens, and the hush of absolute repose rests upon the tired, storm-vexed sea. There was not the faintest breath of air to stir even the reef-points of the motionless sails, or roughen the dark, polished mirror of water around the ship. A soft, almost imperceptible haze concealed the line of the far horizon, and blended sky and water into one great hollow sphere of twinkling stars. Earth and sea seemed to have passed away, and our motionless ship floated, spell-bound, in vacancy - the only earthly object in an encircling universe of stars and planets.

The period before fifty thousand years ago was a busy time in Eurasia, with multiple human populations arriving from Africa beginning at least 1.8 million years ago. These populations split into sister groups, diverged, and mixed again with each other and with new arrivals. Most of those groups have since gone extinct, at least in their “pure” forms. We have known for a while, from skeletons and archaeology, that there was some impressive human diversity prior to the migration of modern humans out of Africa. However, we did not know before ancient DNA was extracted and studied that Eurasia was a locus of human evolution that rivaled Africa. Against this background, the fierce debates about whether modern humans and Neanderthals interbred when they met in western Eurasia—which have been definitively resolved in favor of interbreeding events that made a contribution to billions of people living today—seem merely anticipatory. Europe is a peninsula, a modest-sized tip of Eurasia. Given the wide diversity of Denisovans and Neanderthals—already represented in DNA sequences from at least three populations separated from each other by hundreds of thousands of years, namely Siberian Denisovans, Australo-Denisovans, and Neanderthals—the right way to view these populations is as members of a loosely related family of highly evolved archaic humans who inhabited a vast region of Eurasia.

«It's not easy to believe.» «I» she told him, «I can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.» «Really?» «I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in "War of the Worlds". I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kind of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.»

Moscow can be a cold, hard place in winter. But the big old house on Tverskoy Boulevard had always seemed immune to these particular facts, the way that it had seemed immune to many things throughout the years. When breadlines filled the streets during the reign of the czars, the big house had caviar. When the rest of Russia stood shaking in the Siberian winds, that house had fires and gaslight in every room. And when the Second World War was over and places like Leningrad and Berlin were nothing but rubble and crumbling walls, the residents of the big house on Tverskoy Boulevard only had to take up a hammer and drive a single nail—to hang a painting on the landing at the top of the stairs—to mark the end of a long war. The canvas was small, perhaps only eight by ten inches. The brushstrokes were light but meticulous. And the subject, the countryside near Provence, was once a favorite of an artist named Cézanne. No one in the house spoke of how the painting had come to be there. Not a single member of the staff ever asked the man of the house, a high-ranking Soviet official, to talk about the canvas or the war or whatever services he may have performed in battle or beyond to earn such a lavish prize. The house on Tverskoy Boulevard was not one for stories, everybody knew. And besides, the war was over. The Nazis had lost. And to the victors went the spoils. Or, as the case may be, the paintings. Eventually, the wallpaper faded, and soon few people actually remembered the man who had brought the painting home from the newly liberated East Germany. None of the neighbors dared to whisper the letters K-G-B. Of the old Socialists and new socialites who flooded through the open doors for parties, not one ever dared to mention the Russian mob. And still the painting stayed hanging, the music kept playing, and the party itself seemed to last—echoing out onto the street, fading into the frigid air of the night. The party on the first Friday of February was a fund-raiser—though for what cause or foundation, no one really knew. It didn’t matter. The same people were invited. The same chef was preparing the same food. The men stood smoking the same cigars and drinking the same vodka. And, of course, the same painting still hung at the top of the stairs, looking down on the partygoers below. But one of the partygoers was not, actually, the same. When she gave the man at the door a name from the list, her Russian bore a slight accent. When she handed her coat to a maid, no one seemed to notice that it was far too light for someone who had spent too long in Moscow’s winter. She was too short; her black hair framed a face that was in every way too young. The women watched her pass, eyeing the competition. The men hardly noticed her at all as she nibbled and sipped and waited until the hour grew late and the people became tipsy. When that time finally came, not one soul watched as the girl with the soft pale skin climbed the stairs and slipped the small painting from the nail that held it. She walked to the window. And jumped. And neither the house on Tverskoy Boulevard nor any of its occupants ever saw the girl or the painting again.

I remember that a Korak once brought to me an old tattered fashion-plate from "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper," containing three or four full-length figures of imaginary ladies, in the widest expansion of crinoline which fashion at that time prescribed. The poor Korak said he had often wondered what those curious objects could be; and now, as I was an American, perhaps I could tell him. He evidently had not the most remote suspicion that they were intended to represent human beings. I told him that those curious objects, as he called them, were American women. He burst out into a "tyee-e-e-e" of amazement, and asked with a wondering look, "Are all the women in your country as big as that at the bottom?" It was a severe reflection upon our ladies' dress, and I did not venture to tell him that the bigness was artificial, but merely replied sadly that they were.

I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe." "Really?" "I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in this universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath. Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere