Sleep Early Quotes

EARLY BIRD Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird And catch the worm for your breakfast plate. If you’re a bird, be an early early bird-- But if you’re a worm, sleep late.

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

A farmer once told me one of the greatest luxuries of his life was to wake up early only to go back to sleep again.

Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep 'til noon.

If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger-- If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early-- If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless-- If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.

It's superb to be out in the early, early morning before the sun comes up. There's this sense of being super-alive. You're in on a secret that all the dull, sleeping people don't know about. Unlike them, you're alert and aware of existing right here in this precise moment between what happened and what's going to happen.

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type up your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the tv programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want what you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really don't want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you.

Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.

early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable!

Every morning I tell myself, "I'll sleep early tonight." And every night I say, "One more chapter.

Let the future sleep for now, as it deserves. If you wake it too early, you get a groggy present.

Have you ever seen the dawn? Not a dawn groggy with lack of sleep or hectic with mindless obligations and you about to rush off on an early adventure or business, but full of deep silence and absolute clarity of perception? A dawning which you truly observe, degree by degree. It is the most amazing moment of birth. And more than anything it can spur you to action. Have a burning day.

Why are you being loud? Is it fun being so loud, this early in the morning? Do you know what happens to loud morning people? They die. They die horrible deaths, mutilated in their sleep and are then buried with their balls in their loud fucking mouths.

He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.

anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts [...] That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on [...] That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused [...] That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer [...] That loneliness is not a function of solitude [...] That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt [...] That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness [...] That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating [...] That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused [...] That it is permissible to want [...] That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

Sleep just go to sleep. Cam lived across the hall? You need to get up early. Go to sleep. How in the world was that possible? He was everywhere I went. Go to sleep. And why did he have a pet turtle and did he seriously name it after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, because that was kind of funny. Morning's going to come soon. Did he only wear a shirt during class? Oh my God, he seriously lived across the hall. Jacob was going to flip...and probably move in. That would be fun. I really liked Jacob, but I had a feeling he'd borrow my clothes. Go the fuck to sleep.

anyone know where Kell is?" "Sleeping," Vin said. "He came in late last night, and hasn't gotten up yet." Ham grunted, taking a bite of baywrap. "Dox?" "In his room on the third floor," Vin said. "He got up early, came down to get something to eat, and went back upstairs." ... Ham raised an eyebrow. "You always keep track of where everyone is like that?" "Yes.

I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as "quothe." Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I've had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it's spoken, can mean The Flame, The Thunder, or The Broken Tree. "The Flame" is obvious if you've ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple of hundred years ago I would probably have been burned as a demon. I keep it short but it's unruly. When left to its own devices, it sticks up and makes me look as if I have been set afire. "The Thunder" I attribute to a strong baritone and a great deal of stage training at an early age. I've never thought of "The Broken Tree" as very significant. Although in retrospect, I suppose it could be considered at least partially prophetic. My first mentor called me E'lir because I was clever and I knew it. My first real lover called me Dulator because she liked the sound of it. I have been called Shadicar, Lightfinger, and Six-String. I have been called Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, and Kvothe Kingkiller. I have earned those names. Bought and paid for them. But I was brought up as Kvothe. My father once told me it meant "to know." I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned. I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.

I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.

Two-thirty in the morning was kind of a bitch as times went. It fell into the in-between, nowhere land. Too late to get a really good night's sleep, but much too early to start the day.

At least I want to get up early one more morning, before sunrise. Before the birds, even. I want to throw cold water on my face and be at my work table when the sky lightens and smoke begins to rise from the chimneys of the other houses. I want to see the waves break on this rocky beach, not just hear them break as I did in my sleep. I want to see again the ships that pass through the Strait from every seafaring country in the world - old, dirty freighters just barely moving along, and the swift new cargo vessels painted every color under the sun that cut the water as they pass. I want to keep an eye out for them. And for the little boat that plies the water between the ships and the pilot station near the lighthouse. I want to see them take a man off the ship and put another one up on board. I want to spend the day watching this happen and reach my own conclusions. I hate to seem greedy - I have so much to be thankful for already. But I want to get up early one more morning, at least. And go to my place with some coffee and wait. Just wait, to see what's going to happen.

It was a night of early spring, The winter-sleep was scarcely broken; Around us shadows and the wind Listened for what was never spoken. Though half a score of years are gone, Spring comes as sharply now as then— But if we had it all to do It would be done the same again. It was a spring that never came; But we have lived enough to know That what we never have, remains; It is the things we have that go.

You know you love him when you can't sleep at night and get up early to talk to him the next morning.

The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.

I like idling when I ought not to be idling; not when it is the only thing I have to do. Thatis my pig-headed nature. The time when I like best to stand with my back to the fire, calculating how much I owe, is when my desk is heaped highest with letters that must be answered by the next post. When I like to dawdle longest over my dinner is when I have a heavy evening's work before me. And if, for some urgent reason, I ought to be up particularly early in the morning, it is then, more than at any other time, that I love to lie an extra half-hour in bed. Ah! how delicious it is to turn over and go to sleep again: "just for five minutes." Is there any human being, I wonder, besides the hero of a Sunday-school "tale for boys," who ever gets up willingly?

you are good but you are too emotional the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,study it and put it to sleep in the abstract. is there anything less abstract than dying everyday and on the last day?

And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bed early - postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape.

You can't oversleep if you don't make plans to wake up early.

Sleeping on a plank has one advantage - it encourages early rising.

Early bird gets the worm. But cookie taste better than worm. So me sleep in.

When you get older, you notice your sheets are dirty. Sometimes, you do something about it. And sometimes, you read the front page of the newspaper and sometimes you floss and sometimes you stop biting your nails and sometimes you meet a friend for lunch. You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, five years ago. You remember your umbrella, you check up on people to see if they got home, you leave places early to go home and make toast. You stand by the toaster in your underwear and a big t-shirt, wondering if you should just turn in or watch one more hour of television. You laugh at different things. You stop laughing at other things. You think about old loves almost like they are in a museum. The socks, you notice, aren’t organized into pairs and you mentally make a note of it. You cover your mouth when you sneeze, reaching for the box of tissues you bought, contains aloe. When you get older, you try different shampoos. You find one you like. You try sleeping early and spin class and jogging again. You try a book you almost read but couldn’t finish. You wrap yourself in the blankets of: familiar t-shirts, caffe au lait, dim tv light, texts with old friends or new people you really want to like and love you. You lose contact with friends from college, and only sometimes you think about it. When you do, it feels bad and almost bitter. You lose people, and when other people bring them up, you almost pretend like you know what they are doing. You try to stop touching your face and become invested in things like expensive salads and trying parsnips and saving up for a vacation you really want. You keep a spare pen in a drawer. You look at old pictures of yourself and they feel foreign and misleading. You forget things like: purchasing stamps, buying more butter, putting lotion on your elbows, calling your mother back. You learn things like balance: checkbooks, social life, work life, time to work out and time to enjoy yourself. When you get older, you find yourself more in control. You find your convictions appealing, you find you like your body more, you learn to take things in stride. You begin to crave respect and comfort and adventure, all at the same time. You lay in your bed, fearing death, just like you did. You pull lint off your shirt. You smile less and feel content more. You think about changing and then often, you do.

The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.

4 is the worst time to wake up, as anyone with the normal human sensitivities will tell you. Far too late to make a cup of tea or go back to sleep. Far too early to get up and do something constructive. There's nothing on television but arrogant evangelists and people selling acne solutions and motivational tapes. For me, base 12 philosophy aside, midnight is not the witching hour. 4:00 is.

It's four A.M.! Who goes to bed this early!?

After a heavy snowfall one night in early December the snow formed a thick quilt from which the old man's face emerged like a sleeping child's above an eiderdown. Jim told himself that he never moved because he was warm under the snow.

He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again.

Drinking tea is as sacred as doing yoga. Sleeping silently, relaxed, is as sacred as prayer. Looking at a tree, talking to a friend, walking early in the morning, working in the factory or in the office, is as holy as anything else. This is the understanding that is needed for Tao to happen.

The rain is speaking quietly, you can sleep now. Near my bed, the rustle of newspaper wings. There are no other angles. I’ll wake up early and bribe the coming day to be kind to us.

In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep.

Now that I’m a little more awake, I realize someone is breathing into my neck and wriggling closer to me. Deeper into my butt. When I near Nox whine in his sleep, my eyes widen. I ask my brain, “Is that what I think it is?” My drooling brain replies, “It’s early, we have a hard-on pressed against our ass, and a delicious man in our bed. I’m out.” Then it disconnects.

The Tomorrow Man theory. It’s pretty basic. Today, right here, you are who you are. Tomorrow, you will be who you will be. Each and every night, we lie down to die, and each morning we arise, reborn. Now, those who are in good spirits, with strong mental health, they look out for their Tomorrow Man. They eat right today, they drink right today, they go to sleep early today–all so that Tomorrow Man, when he awakes in his bed reborn as Today Man, thanks Yesterday Man. He looks upon him fondly as a child might a good parent. He knows that someone–himself–was looking out for him. He feels cared for, and respected. Loved, in a word. And now he has a legacy to pass on to his subsequent selves…. But those who are in a bad way, with poor mental health, they constantly leave these messes for Tomorrow Man to clean up. They eat whatever the hell they want, drink like the night will never end, and then fall asleep to forget. They don’t respect Tomorrow Man because they don’t think through the fact that Tomorrow Man will be them. So then they wake up, new Today Man, groaning at the disrespect Yesterday Man showed them. Wondering why does that guy–myself–keep punishing me? But they never learn and instead come to settle for that behavior, eventually learning to ask and expect nothing of themselves. They pass along these same bad habits tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and it becomes psychologically genetic, like a curse. Looking at you now, Maven, I can see exactly where you fall on this spectrum. You are a man constantly trying to fix today what Yesterday Man did to you. You make up your bed, you clean those dirty dishes from the night before, and pledge not to start drinking until six, thinking that’s the way to keep an even keel. But in reality you’re always playing catch-up. I know this because I’ve been there. The thing is–you can’t fix the mistakes of Yesterday. Yesterday Man is dead, he’s gone forever, and blame and atonement aren’t worth a damn. What you can do is help yourself today. Eat a vegetable. Read a book. Cut that hair of yours. Leave Tomorrow Man something more than a headache and a jam-packed colon. Do for Tomorrow Man what you would have wanted Yesterday Man to do for you.

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

THE DREAM THAT MUST BE INTERPRETED This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there's a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted. All the mean laughing, all the quick, sexual wanting, those torn coats of Joseph, they change into powerful wolves that you must face. The retaliation that sometimes comes now, the swift, payback hit, is just a boy's game to what the other will be. You know about circumcision here. It's full castration there! And this groggy time we live, this is what it's like: A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he's living in another town. In the dream, he doesn't remember the town he's sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep. The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again. That's how a young person turns toward a teacher. That's how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.

love doesn’t exist without sacrifice. Sometimes those sacrifices are waking up ten minutes early to make your partner coffee. Sometimes it’s taking on a second job to support your family. Sometimes it’s staying up all night with a newborn so your significant other can finally sleep. Sometimes it’s shoveling the other person’s car out of the driveway after a snowstorm.” She places her palm against my wet cheek and smiles softly. “And sometimes it’s making the ultimate sacrifice and walking away for the greater good.

Alas ! How few of Nature's faces are left alone to gladden us with their beauty ! The cares, and sorrows, and the hungerings, of the world, change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass off, and leave Heaven's surface clear. It is a common thing for the countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to subside into the long-forgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and settle into the very look of early life; so calm, so peaceful, do they grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel even upon earth.

On the brightening air drifts a scent of refreshed stone, moistened soil. She feels the earthy fingerprint of the cold morning air spread over her skin as if she is in the act of undressing. Her body has an early morning weightlessness about it. She might almost be a memory of herself. Conjured up by the sleeping city.

yoga soul today. instant resonation. Spring Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her – her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

In Plaster I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints. 
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality -- She lay in bed with me like a dead body 
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was 
 Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints. I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold. I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer. 
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior! 
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist. 
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her: She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages. 

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful. 
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose 
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain, And it was I who attracted everybody's attention, 
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed. 
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up -- 
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality. 

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it. 
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun 
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice 
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience: She humored my weakness like the best of nurses, 
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly. In time our relationship grew more intense. 

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish. 
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself, 
As if my habits offended her in some way. She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded. 
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces 
Simply because she looked after me so badly. Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal. She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior, 
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful -- Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse! 
And secretly she began to hope I'd die. Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely, 
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water. 

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her. She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp -- I had forgotten how to walk or sit, So I was careful not to upset her in any way 
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself. Living with her was like living with my own coffin: Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully. I used to think we might make a go of it together -- 
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close. 
Now I see it must be one or the other of us. She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy, 
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit. I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, 
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me. --written 26 Feburary 1961

And kid, you’ve got to love yourself. You’ve got wake up at four in the morning, brew black coffee, and stare at the birds drowning in the darkness of the dawn. You’ve got to sit next to the man at the train station who’s reading your favorite book and start a conversation. You’ve got to come home after a bad day and burn your skin from a shower. Then you’ve got to wash all your sheets until they smell of lemon detergent you bought for four dollars at the local grocery store. You’ve got to stop taking everything so goddam personally. You are not the moon kissing the black sky. You’ve got to compliment someones crooked brows at an art fair and tell them that their eyes remind you of green swimming pools in mid July. You’ve got to stop letting yourself get upset about things that won’t matter in two years. Sleep in on Saturday mornings and wake yourself up early on Sunday. You’ve got to stop worrying about what you’re going to tell her when she finds out. You’ve got to stop over thinking why he stopped caring about you over six months ago. You’ve got to stop asking everyone for their opinions. Fuck it. Love yourself, kiddo. You’ve got to love yourself.

Because to him, who ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of the dim wisdoms old and deep That God gives unto man in sleep

Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home - alone - and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that 'self-care' to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break.

Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason. The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless. Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.

Why are you being loud? Is it fun being so loud, this early in the morning? Do you know what happens to loud morning people? They die. They die horrible deaths, mutilated in their sleep and are then buried with their balls in their loud fucking mouths." Meryn glared at him through half shut eyes. The men gulped. "Here

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a

I know you’re still awake.” “Good for you. Shut up and go to sleep.” Another snicker. “What you have to ask yourself,” he continued, “is whether I’m the type who would stay awake long enough to kill you after you fall asleep, or if I’m an early riser who would kill you before you wake up.” “If you want your head to stay on your neck, you’d better be neither,” I growled, though his words sent a cold spear of dread through my stomach. My hands tightened on my sword hilt, and Jackal laughed somewhere in the darkness, unseen. “I’m just kidding, sis,” he said. “Or am I? Something to think about, before you fall asleep. Nighty-night, then. Sleep tight.

Sometimes, I think, that in the mornings when you first wake up, every thing that happened in the previous day rushes through our mind so fast, we, A: Don't realize it. B: Become more tired, die a little inside, and become groggy. Since everyday, we die a little inside we age closer and closer to death. We constantly grow older, and we're constantly dying. Therefore, don't wake me up early, or I'll take it that you wanted to kill me.

Why does getting ahead always have to involve getting up early?

Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird And catch the worm for your breakfast plate. If you’re a bird, be an early bird But if you’re a worm, sleep late.

He slid back into his previous position. 'Getting up so early,' he thought, 'makes one entirely stupid. People must have their sleep.

This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of death, Dark Angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind, to Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities, to Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, to the Akhkharu, who such the blood of men since they desire to become men, to the Lalussu, who haunt the places of men, to Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men and whose children are born in secret places, to Addu, raiser of storms who can fill the night sky with brightness, to Malah, Lord of Courage and Bravery, to Zahgurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in an unnatural fashion, to Zahrim, a warrior among warriors, to Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers, to Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches-the-Dew-of-Morning, to Zuhuy Kak, Virgin Fire, to Ah Dziz, the Master of Cold, to Kak U Pacat, who works in fire, to Ix Tab, Goddess of Ropes and Snares, patroness of those who hang themselves, to Schmuun, the Silent One, twin brother of Ix Tab, to Xolotl the Unformed, Lord of Rebirth, to Aguchi, Master of Ejaculations, to Osiris and Amen in phallic form, to Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One, to Ah Pook, the Destroyer, to the Great Old One and the Star Beast, to Pan, God of Panic, to the nameless gods of dispersal and emptiness, to Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins. To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested…. NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

A time will come, Casey had told him in those early white-knuckle days, when your mental defenses will fail and the only thing left standing between you and a drink will be your Higher Power.

He slept once again in the small tent by his side, even though he thought Temeraire was well over his distress, and was rewarded in the morning by being woken early, Temeraire peering into the tent with one great eye and inquiring if perhaps Laurence would like to go to Dover and arrange for the concert today. “I would like to sleep until a civilized hour, but as that is evidently not to be, perhaps I will ask leave of Lenton to go,” Laurence said, yawning as he crawled from the tent. “May I have my breakfast first?” “Oh, certainly,” Temeraire said, with an air of generosity.

If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming. But perhaps it is too early in the year, she thought after that, and besides, he is not a bear.

To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! … Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!

Society conspires against her from early infancy. Her brain is steadily filled with plaster until it sets: ‘If you’re not married by the time you’re twenty-five, you’ll have good reason to be ashamed’; ‘if you laugh, you won’t look dignified’ ; ‘if your face betrays your feelings, you’ll look coarse’; ‘if you mention the existence of a single body hair, you’re repulsive’ ; ‘if a boy kisses you on the cheek in public, you’re a whore’; if you enjoy eating, you’re a pig’; ‘if you take pleasure in sleeping, you’re no better than a cow’; and so on. These precepts would be merely anecdotal if they weren’t taken so much to heart.

Sometimes, Arin almost understood what Kestrel had done. Even now, as he felt the drift of the boat and didn't fight its pull, Arin remembered the yearning in Kestrel's face whatever she'd mentioned her father. Like a homesickness. Arin had wanted to shake it out of her. Especially during those early months when she had owned him. He had wanted to force her to see her father for what he was. He had wanted her to acknowledge what she was, how she was wrong, how she shouldn't long for her father's love. It was soacked in blood. Didn't she see that? How could she not? Once, he'd hated her for it. Then it had somehow touched him. He knew it himself. He, too, wanted what he shouldn't. He, too, felt the heart chooses its own home and refuses reason. Not here, he'd tried to say. Not this. Not mine. Never. But he had felt the same sickness. In retrospect, Kestrel's role in the taking of the eastern plains was predictable. Sometimes he damned her for currying favor with the emperor, or blamed her playing war like a game just because she could. Yet he thought he knew the truth of her reasons. She'd done it for her father. It almost made sense. At least, it did when he was near sleep and his mind was quiet, and it was harder to help what entered. Right before sleep, he came close to understanding. But he was awake now.

I'm pretty sure that when babies are born in Oregon, they leave the hospital with birth certificates - and teeny-tiny sleeping bags. Everyone in the state camps. The hippies and the rednecks. The hunters and the tree huggers. Rich people. Poor people. Even rock musicians. Especially rock musicians. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. Sometimes, on tour, back in the early hardscrabble days, we'd even camp as an alternative to crashing in another crowded, roach-infested rock 'n' roll house. I don't know if it's because no matter where you live, the wilderness is never that far off, but it just seemed like everyone in Oregon camped.

Sometimes, when I went to the spring to wash early in the morning," he murmured, "there'd be tiny fairies flitting around above the water, not much bigger than the butterflies you have here, and blue as violet petals. They liked to fly into my hair. Sometimes they spat in my face. They weren't very friendly, but they shone like glowworms by night. I sometimes caught one and put it in a jar. If I let it out at night before going to sleep I had wonderful dreams." "Capricorn said there were trolls and giants, too," said Meggie quietly. Dustfinger gave her a thoughtful look. "Yes, there were," he said. "But Capricorn wasn't particularly fond of them. He'd have liked to do away with them all. He had them hunted. He hunted anything that could run." "It must be a dangerous world." Meggie was trying to imagine it all: the giants, the trolls, and the fairies. Mo had once given her a book about fairies. Dustfinger shrugged. "Yes, it's dangerous, so what? This world's dangerous, too, isn't it?

I will wake up early with my heavy heartbeat. You will say. Can't we just sleep in, and I will say, No, trust me. You don't want to miss a thing.

I was in some one else's house, so I woke up early - at eight - with that crazy sleeping-at-someone-else's-house energy.

As the proverb said, “Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night.” Too late for thinking now. Too early for eating.

I sleep in my sunglasses. They’re two miles away and I’m awake at the time, thanks to my ducks and their quacking and their loud jazz music in the early morning hours between 3-5 PM.

In the cage is the lion. She paces with her memories. Her body is a record of her past. As she moves back and forth, one may see it all: the lean frame, the muscular legs, the paw enclosing long sharp claws, the astonishing speed of her response. She was born in this garden. She has never in her life stretched those legs. Never darted farther than twenty yards at a time. Only once did she use her claws. Only once did she feel them sink into flesh. And it was her keeper's flesh. Her keeper whom she loves, who feeds her, who would never dream of harming her, who protects her. Who in his mercy forgave her mad attack, saying this was in her nature, to be cruel at a whim, to try to kill what she loves. He had come into her cage as he usually did early in the morning to change her water, always at the same time of day, in the same manner, speaking softly to her, careful to make no sudden movement, keeping his distance, when suddenly she sank down, deep down into herself, the way wild animals do before they spring, and then she had risen on all her strong legs, and swiped him in one long, powerful, graceful movement across the arm. How lucky for her he survived the blow. The keeper and his friends shot her with a gun to make her sleep. Through her half-open lids she knew they made movements around her. They fed her with tubes. They observed her. They wrote comments in notebooks. And finally they rendered a judgment. She was normal. She was a normal wild beast, whose power is dangerous, whose anger can kill, they had said. Be more careful of her, they advised. Allow her less excitement. Perhaps let her exercise more. She understood none of this. She understood only the look of fear in her keeper's eyes. And now she paces. Paces as if she were angry, as if she were on the edge of frenzy. The spectators imagine she is going through the movements of the hunt, or that she is readying her body for survival. But she knows no life outside the garden. She has no notion of anger over what she could have been, or might be. No idea of rebellion. It is only her body that knows of these things, moving her, daily, hourly, back and forth, back and forth, before the bars of her cage.

An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.

I will wake you up early even though I know you like to stay through the credits. I will leave pennies in your pockets, postage stamps of superheroes in between the pages of your books, sugar packets on your kitchen counter. I will Hansel and Gretel you home. I talk through movies. Even ones I have never seen before. I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks. There will be more sweat than you are used to. More skin. More words than are necessary. My hair in the shower drain, my smell on your sweaters, bobby pins all over the window sills. I make the best sandwiches you've ever tasted. You'll be in charge of napkins. I can't do a pull-up. But I'm great at excuses. I count broken umbrellas after every thunderstorm, and I fall asleep repeating the words thank you. I will wake you up early with my heavy heartbeat. You will say, Can't we just sleep in, and I will say, No, trust me. You don't want to miss a thing.

One of the Georges," said Psmith, "I forget which, once said that a certain number of hours' sleep a day--I cannot recall for the moment how many--made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. However, there you are. I've given you the main idea of the thing; and a German doctor says that early rising causes insanity.

Lila harboured an unspoken belief that motherhood was the best possible rehearsal for a prospective police officer.. Mothers were naturals for law enforcement, because toddlers, like criminals, were often belligerent and destructive. If you could get through those early years without losing your cool or blowing your top, you might be able to deal with grown-up crime. The key was to not react, to stay adult..

Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.’ I

Because some people are so stupid to believe there are thick neon lines separating good and evil. That it's easy to make that kind of distinction and go to sleep at night with a clear conscience. Because it's okay. It's okay to kill a man if someone else deems him unfit to live. What I really want to say is who the hell are you and who are you to decide who gets to die. Who are you to decide who should be killed. Who are you tell me which father I should destroy and which child I should orphan and which mother should be left without her son, which brother should be left without a sister, which grandmother should spend the rest of her life crying in the early hours of the morning because the body of her grandchild was buried in the ground before her own.

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops. His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it. Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

You don't even know me.” “I know that your feet and hands are always cold no matter the weather. I know that you prefer to wake up early on the weekends because you would rather take a nap in the afternoon than sleep in. I know you love sour candy and hate repeating yourself. I know you're always on time, and I know you're lying about hating country music. I know you.” “No, you don't. Those are all little things. Tiny things.” “The little things are the big things, Ada. They're the things all the big things are made of. I might not know you al the way, but I want to, and I'm just asking you to give me a chance to do that.

Why hadn’t they told him that love was not a soft and gentle wind, but a storm determined to rip you apart and build its home in the wreckage? That it brought with it uninvited guests, new fears and worries and paranoias beyond the reach of any reason. How in those early days, before he knew what was happening, he would lose his breath at the thought of a future without her. A future where the guests would be gone, but so would his new home. The home she had carved inside him, where the air smelled like her hair and the bells sounded like her laugh. A place where he could rest until he was old and weary, where he could only sleep with his hand settled over her heart, because even so many years later, that steady pulse was the only pillar Arin would ever lean on. Death, he learned, did not change anything. It didn’t destroy their home; it simply barred Arin from entering. It meant years waiting on the steps.

Wandering back into the bedroom, my gaze immediately strayed to the large bed along the wall and the lump beneath the covers. Pale light streamed through the half-open curtains, settling around the still-sleeping form of a Winter sidhe. Or a former Winter sidhe. Pausing in the doorframe, I took advantage of the serene moment just to watch him, a tiny flutter going through my stomach. Sometimes, it was still hard to believe that he was here, that this wasn’t a dream or a mirage or a figment of my imagination. That he was mine forever: my husband, my knight. My faery with a soul. He lay on his stomach, arms beneath the pillow, breathing peacefully, his dark hair falling over his eyes. The covers had slipped off his lean, muscular shoulders, and the early morning rays caressed his pale skin. Normally, I didn’t get to watch him sleep; he was usually up before me, in the courtyard sparring with Glitch or just prowling the halls of the castle. In the early days of our marriage, especially, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find him gone, the hyper-awareness of his warrior days making it impossible for him to stay in one place, even to sleep. He’d grown up in the Unseelie Court, where you had to watch your back every second of every day, and centuries of fey survival could not be forgotten so easily. That paranoia would never really fade, but he was gradually starting to relax now, to the point where sometimes, though not often, I would wake with him still beside me, his arm curled around my waist. And given how rare it was, to see him truly unguarded and at ease, I hated to disturb him. But I walked across the room to the side of the bed and gently touched his shoulder. He was awake in an instant, silver eyes cracking open to meet mine, never failing to take my breath away. “Hey,” I greeted, smiling. “Sorry to wake you, but we have to be somewhere soon, remember?

The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded itself in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset-cloud was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string music has announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.

Leonard’s being up early constituted a new change in his sleeping patterns, was part of the former change in his sleeping patterns, or indicated a beneficial development. She didn’t know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

55 But I was born for peaceful roaming, For country calm and lack of strife; My lyre sings! And in the gloaming My fertile fancies spring to life. I give myself to harmless pleasures And far niente rules my leisures: Each morning early I’m awake To wander by the lonely lake Or seek some other sweet employment: I read a little, often sleep, For fleeting fame I do not weep. And was it not in past enjoyment Of shaded, idle times like this, I spent my days of deepest bliss?

An early fly landed on Mara's eyelid. She shooed it off with a dozy paw as she awakened to peachgold dawn stealing softly over the sleeping dunes.The land lay in a pool of serinity;the sand,now still and cool,awaited sun-warmed day.Somewhere a lark began trilling as it fluttered its morning ascent into the airy heights.

Not long after, and while it was still twilight, the grandfather also went to bed, for he was up every morning at sunrise, and the sun came climbing up over the mountains at a very early hour during these summer months. The wind grew so tempestuous during the night, and blew in such gusts against the walls, that the hut trembled and the old beams groaned and creaked. It came howling and wailing down the chimney like voices of those in pain, and it raged with such fury among the old fir trees that here and there a branch was snapped and fell. In the middle of the night the old man got up. "The child will be frightened," he murmured half aloud. He mounted the ladder and went and stood by the child's bed. Outside the moon was struggling with the dark, fast-driving clouds, which at one moment left it clear and shining, and the next swept over it, and all again was dark. Just now the moonlight was falling through the round window straight on to Heidi's bed. She lay under the heavy coverlid, her cheeks rosy with sleep, her head peacefully resting on her little round arm, and with a happy expression on her baby face as if dreaming of something pleasant. The old man stood looking down on the sleeping child until the moon again disappeared behind the clouds and he could see no more, then he went back to bed.

Mike’s statement that he wanted to get up early and have a ride had been received by Psmith, with whom early rising was not a hobby, with honest amazement and a flood of advice and warning on the subject. “One of the Georges,” said Psmith, “I forget which, once said that a certain number of hours’ sleep a day—I cannot recall for the moment how many—made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. However, there you are. I’ve given you the main idea of the thing; and a German doctor says that early rising causes insanity. Still, if you’re bent on it….

One morning early, I couldn't sleep, so I walked down to the beach. And I saw you. For a minute- I didn't realize it was you. You were wearing this long scarf thing tied around your waist, lots of wild colors, and it blew around your legs. You had on a red bathing suit under it." "You..." She literally had to catch her breath. "You remember what I was wearing?" "Yes I do. And I remember your hair was longer than it is now, halfway down your back. All those mad curls flying. Bare feet. All that golden skin, wild colors, mad curls. My heart just stopped. I thought: That's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. And I wanted that woman, in a way I'd never wanted one before." He stopped, turned a little as she simply stared at him. "Then I saw it was you. You walked off, down the beach, the surf foaming up over your bare feet, your ankles, your calves. And I wanted you. I thought I'd lost my my mind.

SPRING Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her— her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

Why are you being loud? Is it fun being so loud, this early in the morning? Do you know what happens to loud morning people? They die. They die horrible deaths, mutilated in their sleep, and are then buried with their balls in their loud fucking mouths.

Dear Deborah, Words do not come easily for so many men. We are taught to be strong, to provide, to put away our emotions. A father can work his way through his days and never see that his years are going by. If I could go back in time, I would say some things to that young father as he holds, somewhat uncertainly, his daughter for the very first time. These are the things I would say: When you hear the first whimper in the night, go to the nursery leaving your wife sleeping. Rock in a chair, walk the floor, sing a lullaby so that she will know a man can be gentle. When Mother is away for the evening, come home from work, do the babysitting. Learn to cook a hotdog or a pot of spaghetti, so that your daughter will know a man can serve another's needs. When she performs in school plays or dances in recitals, arrive early, sit in the front seat, devote your full attention. Clap the loudest, so that she will know a man can have eyes only for her. When she asks for a tree house, don't just build it, but build it with her. Sit high among the branches and talk about clouds, and caterpillars, and leaves. Ask her about her dreams and wait for her answers, so that she will know a man can listen. When you pass by her door as she dresses for a date, tell her she is beautiful. Take her on a date yourself. Open doors, buy flowers, look her in the eye, so that she will know a man can respect her. When she moves away from home, send a card, write a note, call on the phone. If something reminds you of her, take a minute to tell her, so that she will know a man can think of her even when she is away. Tell her you love her, so that she will know a man can say the words. If you hurt her, apologize, so that she will know a man can admit that he's wrong. These seem like such small things, such a fraction of time in the course of two lives. But a thread does not require much space. It can be too fine for the eye to see, yet, it is the very thing that binds, that takes pieces and laces them into a whole. Without it, there are tatters. It is never too late for a man to learn to stitch, to begin mending. These are the things I would tell that young father, if I could. A daughter grown up quickly. There isn't time to waste. I love you, Dad

But it is necessary that you let me put you to sleep as early as possible. It’s important that you get your beauty rest.

Wake late, win late.

Early to bed, early to rise," Ziggy said. "Early or late, sleep is sleep," Victor grunted

Steady the feet of those who stumble and extend your hands to the sick. Feed the hungry and give rest to the weary. Awaken those who wish to arise and rouse those who sleep, for you embody vigorous understanding. If what is strong acts like this, it becomes even stronger.

One of the more tiring aspects of hitchhiking is a need to be sociable and make conversation with whoever is driving you. It would be considered poor form to accept a ride, hop into the passenger seat and then simply to crash out until you reached your destination. How I longed to do just that, but instead I chatted merrily away, energy ebbing from me with each sentence, until Chris dropped me at the address of the lady who had offered me free B&B. One of the more tiring aspect of accepting an offer of free accommodation is a need to be sociable and make conversation with whoever had offered it to you. It would be considered poor form to turn up, dumb your bags, crawl into your bedroom and order an early morning alarm call. How I longed to do just that, but instead I chatted merrily away to Marjorie, energy ebbing from me with each sentence, until the tea was drunk, the cake was eaten and I finally plucked up the courage to mention just how exhausted I was. I apologised and said that I simply had to grab a couple of hours sleep, and Marjorie understandingly showed me to my room.

Full of meal plans today. Lunch?” “Sorry? Oh, yes. Apparently Magdelana remembered I’m an early riser.” He slipped the date book he had on his desk into his pocket as he got to his feet. “We’ll have lunch.” “So I heard. You’re going to want to be careful there, pal.” “Of what?” “It wouldn’t be the first old friend you’ve had come around hoping you’d dip back into the game for old times’ sake. You might want to remind her you’re sleeping with a cop these days.

He slid back again into his earlier position. "This getting up early," he thought, "makes a man quite idiotic. A man must have his sleep. Other travelling salesmen live like harem women. For instance, when I come back to the inn during the course of the morning to write up the necessary orders, these gentlemen are just sitting down to breakfast. If I were to try that with my boss, I'd be thrown out on the spot. Still, who knows whether that mightn't be really good for me? If I didn't hold back for my parents' sake, I'd have quit ages ago. I would've gone to the boss and told him just what I think from the bottom of my heart. He would've fallen right off his desk! How weird it is to sit up at that desk and talk down to the employee from way up there. The boss has trouble hearing, so the employee has to step up quite close to him. Anyway, I haven't completely given up that hope yet. Once I've got together the money to pay off my parents' debt to him—that should take another five or six years—I'll do it for sure. Then I'll make the big break. In any case, right now I have to get up. My train leaves at five o'clock

Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi

In the early hours of the morning the house was dark and quiet. […] and Elizabeth lay in bed wide awake. Images of Mr. Darcy’s face, his nod, and his tall, handsome demeanour flooded her thoughts. She knew that even if she were spared these thoughts by sleep coming upon her, he would invade her dreams. And when she did fall asleep just before dawn,he was there just as she had expected.

Before the Industrial Revolution, it was normal to divide the night into two periods of sleep: the “first sleep,” or “dead sleep,” lasting from the evening until the early hours of the morning; and the “second” or “morning” sleep, which took the slumberer safely to daybreak. In between, there was an hour or more of wakefulness known as the “watch,” in which “Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Many others made love, prayed, and . . . reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.” In the intimacy of the darkness, families and lovers could hold deep, rich, wandering conversations that had no place in the busy daytime.

I should be exhausted, but I'm not. I'm much too keyed up to sleep. Probably it's myour imagination, but when I close my eyes and sit very still, I swear I can feel the baby inside me. Not moving, nothing like that, it's far too early. Just a kind of warm and hopeful presence, this new soul my body carries, waiting to be born into the world. I feel ... what's the word? Happy. I feel happy. Shots outside. I am going to look. *****END OF DOCUMENT***** Recovered at Roswell Site ("Roswell Massacre")

She rose and washed and dressed herself and braided her hair freshly, and having made her room neat for the day she went into the peach-tree garden. It lay in the silence of the spring morning. Under the early sun the dew still hung in a bright mist on the grass, and the pool in the center of the garden was brimming its stone walls. The water was clear and the fish were flashing their golden sides near the surface. The great low-built house that surrounded the garden was still in sleep. Birds twittered in the eaves undisturbed and a small Pekingese dog slept on the threshold like a small lioness.

What would happen if I came back after everyone went to sleep, and I spent the night, and left really early in the morning? Like, before dawn?” Smiling, I say, “You can’t, so we’ll never know.” “But what if?” “My dad would kill me.” “No, he wouldn’t.” “He’d kill you.” “No, he wouldn’t.” “No, he wouldn’t,” I agree. “But he’d be pretty disappointed in me. And he’d be mad at you.” “Only if we got caught,” Peter says.

His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley. I wish I had time to tell you even a few of the tales or one or two of the songs that they heard in that house. All of them, the ponies as well, grew refreshed and strong in a few days there. Their clothes were mended as well as their bruises, their tempers and their hopes. Their bags were filled with food and provisions light to carry but strong to bring them over the mountain passes. Their plans were improved with the best advice. So the time came to midsummer eve, and they were to go on again with the early sun on midsummer morning.

Without the sleeping bag I'm just somebody up early in the morning, sitting under a tree. With the sleeping bag I'm nobody up early, sitting under a tree: a slight, but important difference in how I’ll be perceived.

I Ask for Silence" Now they can leave me in peace. Now they grow used to my absence. I am going to close my eyes. I want only five things, five chosen roots. One is an endless love. Two is to see the autumn. I cannot exist without leaves flying and falling to the earth. The third is the solemn winter, the rain I loved, the caress of fire in the rough cold. Fourth, the summer, plump as a watermelon. And fifthly, your eyes, Matilde, my dear love, I won’t sleep without your eyes, I won’t exist without your gaze, I adjust the spring for you to follow me with your eyes. That, friends, is all I want. Next to nothing, close to everything. Now they can go if they wish. I have lived so much that some day they will have to forget me forcibly, rubbing me off the blackboard. My heart was inexhaustible. But because I ask for silence, don’t think I’m going to die. The opposite is true; it happens I am going to live. To be, and to go on being. I will not be, however, if inside me, the crop does not keep sprouting, the shoots first, breaking through the earth to reach the light; but the mothering earth is dark, and, deep inside me, I am dark. I am a well in the water of which the night leaves behind stars and goes on alone across fields. It’s a question of having lived so much that I want to live a bit more. I never felt my voice so clear, never have been so rich in kisses. Now, as always, it is early. The light is a swarm of bees. Let me alone with the day. I ask leave to be born.

He awakens from this dream unable to remember exactly what it was, or much at all beyond the simple fact that he has dreamed about being a child again. He touches his wife’s smooth back as she sleeps her warm sleep and dreams her own dreams; he thinks that it is good to be a child, but it is also good to be grownup and able to consider the mystery of childhood ... its beliefs and desires. I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it’s just a dawn thought, an after-dreaming thought. But it’s nice to think so for awhile in the morning’s clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel. Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.

We’re a dream drifting down on a beach in the rain in the sleep of our lives … We are troubled by sea and sky. Our words dissolve in the waves. On the edges of speech is the sound of the rain coming down. It comes down.

What will that mean to each of you? “It will mean that those of you who might have lived to be seventy-one must die at seventy. Some of you who might have lived to be eighty-six must cough up your ghost at eighty-five. That’s a great age. A year more or less doesn’t sound like much. When the time comes, boys, you may regret. But, you will be able to say, this year I spent well, I gave for Pip, I made a loan of life for sweet Pipkin, the fairest apple that ever almost fell too early off the harvest tree. Some of you at forty-nine must cross life off at forty-eight. Some at fifty-five must lay them down to Forever’s Sleep at fifty-four. Do you catch the whole thing intact now, boys? Do you add the figures? Is the arithmetic plain? A year! Who will bid three hundred and sixty-five entire days from out his own soul, to get old Pipkin back? Think, boys. Silence. Then, speak.

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book:

Good night then. I will wake you in the morning.” “You’re my alarm clock,” the boy said. “Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?” “I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.” “I can remember it,” the old man said. “I’ll waken you in time.

Morning. I didn't wake you, did I?' God, he looks gorgeous, even at this early hour. 'No. I've been awake a while. Couldn't sleep.' 'Me eighter. I've has this girl on my mind all night' 'Anyone I know?' 'You might know her. Blond hair, blue eyes ... beautiful. We went out on a date last night as it happens.' ' Really? So how was the date?' 'Well, that's the thing... The date was amazing, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about her... or her gorgeous mouth ever since...And the thing is, I really need to kiss her again.' ' I think she needs you to kiss her too.' 'You do?' 'Mmm

Hey, Megan?" She peeked one lid open. "Hmm?" "Can we have ice cream for breakfast?" Her mouth curved into a grin. She couldn't think of anyone, save maybe Kate, who could draw a smile from her so quickly. But he was just unexpectedly adorable. "Maybe. If you're a good boy." She cringed. Why the hell did she say that? Was she...flirting with him? Restraining a grimace, she chanced a look at him. His dark gaze shifted from playful to scorching. "And what would that entail?" Heat shot through her body, and unfamiliar desire pooled in her belly. Flustered, she kicked off the top cover. "Not asking questions like that, to start. Now go back to sleep. It's too damn early to be awake." She heaved a deep breath to calm her racing heart . "if you say so." Even with his eyes closed, a smile continued to play around his lips.

Coming in from the factory or warehouse, tired enough, there seemed little use for the night except to eat, sleep and then return to the menial job. But there was the typewriter waiting for me in those many old rooms with torn shades and worn rugs, the tub and toilet down the hall, and the feeling in the air of all the losers who had proceeded me. Sometimes the typewriter was there when the job wasn't and the food wasn't and the rent wasn't. Sometimes the typer was in hock. Sometimes there was only the park bench. But at the best of times there was the small room and the machine and the bottle. The sound of the keys, on and on, and shouts: 'HEY! KNOCK THAT OFF, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! WE'RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE'VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!' With broom sticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines...

I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan--the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness.

You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.

What do you want to know?” I want to know if Julius was afraid of the dark when he was younger. If he ever believed in ghosts or Santa or the Loch Ness monster. I want to know where he studies, whether it’s by the light of the living room window or alone in his bedroom, if he keeps the door wide open or closed. I want to know what he would dress up as for Halloween, what song he picks out at karaoke. How early he rises, how late he sleeps. What dishes their mother cooks for the Spring Festival, what he talks about on long car rides. I want to collect these pieces of information like ammunition. Part of me wants to embarrass him, and part of me is simply, overwhelmingly curious.

Once upon a time Sister Mary Margaret had answered a loud knocking at the door of the orphanage. It was very early one morning, before the city was awake. All the pigeons had their heads tucked under their wings and all the rats were curled up tight behind the dustbins. All the cars and lorries were asleep in their garages and depots, and all the trains slumbered on their tracks at Connolly Station. All the boats bobbed gently in the harbor, dreaming of the high seas, and all the bicycles slept leaning along the fences. Even the angels were asleep at the foot of the O’Connell Monument, fluttering their wings as they dreamt, quite forgetting to hold still and pretend to be statues.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past 11; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake. I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night, sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes three times, and I never waste any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and precious to me that if I should break it I should feel as you, Sir, would feel if you should lose the only moral you've got.

The more time that passes, what begins to seem uncanny to Ben is the fact that all the days ahead are such a darkness, that all of us move through our hours as if blindfolded, never knowing what will happen next. How can he send his daughter out into a world like that? But even an infant’s brain can predict the rough path of a falling object in flight. And so, maybe, in a way, Ben can see what’s coming: His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid. The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body. And her heart—now thrumming strong and steady, against her father’s chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life—that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat. And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.

Craftsman Ilmarinen wept Every evening for his woman, Weeping sleepless through the nights And fasting through the days; In the early hours complaining, Every morning sighing for her, Lamenting for his lovely lost one, For his dear one in the grave. For a month he swung no hammer, Did not touch the copper handle, and the clinking forge was silent. Said the craftsman Ilmarinen: "I poor fellow, do not know How to live or how survive; Sitting up or lying down Nights are long and time is tedious. I am troubled, low in spirit. 'Lonely are the nights now,lonely And the mornings dreary, dreary. In my sleeping I am troubled, But the waking is the saddest. It's not for evening that I'm lonely, Not for morning that I'm dreary, Not for olden times lamenting, But I'm lonely for my loved one, Dreary for the missing of her, Lamenting for my dark-browed lovely. 'Often in these days it happens, Happens in my midnight dreaming that I stretch my hand out touching, touching something that is nothing...

A man goes out to work, he earns a wage, he comes back home, he eats, he sleeps. That’s what he does. Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where the power lies. They don’t think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children. In our house my mother managed everything because my father was so busy. It was my mother who would wake up early in the morning, iron our school clothes, make our breakfast and teach us how to behave. It was my mother who would go to the market, shop for us and cook. All those things she did.

There was a muffled tap again, and I heard a familiar voice whisper faintly, “Kelsey, it’s me.” I unlocked the door and peeked out. Ren was standing there dressed in his white clothes, barefoot, with a triumphant grin on his face. I pulled him inside and hissed out thickly, “What are you doing here? It’s dangerous coming into town! You could have been seen, and they’d send hunters out after you!” He shrugged his shoulders and grinned. “I missed you.” My mouth quirked up in a half smile. “I missed you too.” He leaned a shoulder nonchalantly against the doorframe. “Does that mean you’ll let me stay here? I’ll sleep on the floor and leave before daylight. No one will see me. I promise.” I let out a deep breath. “Okay, but promise you’ll leave early. I don’t like you risking yourself like this.” “I promise.” He sat down on the bed, took my hand, and pulled me down to sit beside him. “I don’t like sleeping in the dark jungle by myself.” “I wouldn’t either.” He looked down at our entwined hands. “When I’m with you, I feel like a man again. When I’m out there all alone, I feel like a beast, an animal.” His eyes darted up to mine. I squeezed his hand. “I understand. It’s fine. Really.” He grinned. “You were hard to track, you know. Lucky for me you two decided to walk to dinner, so I could follow your scent right to your door.” Something on the nightstand caught his attention. Leaning around me, he reached over and picked up my open journal. I had drawn a new picture of a tiger-my tiger. My circus drawings were okay, but this latest one was more personal and full of life. Ren stared at it for a moment while a bright crimson flush colored my cheeks. He traced the tiger with his finger, and then whispered gently, "Someday, I'll give you a portrait of the real me." Setting the journal down carefully, he took both of my hands in his, turned to me with an intense expression, and said, "I don't want you to see only a tiger when you look at me. I want you to see me. The man." Reaching out, he almost touched my cheek but he stopped and withdrew his hand. "I've worn the tiger's face for far too many years. He's stolen my humanity." I nodded while he squeezed my hands and whispered quietly, "Kells, I don't want to be him anymore. I want to be me. I want to have a life." "I know," I said softly. I reached up to stroke his cheek. "Ren, I-" I froze in place as he pulled my hand slowly down to his lips and kissed my palm. My hand tingled. His blue eyes searched my face desperately, wanting, needing something from me. I wanted to say something to reassure him. I wanted to offer him comfort. I just couldn't frame the words. His supplication stirred me. I felt a deep bond with him, a strong connection. I wanted to help him, I wanted to be his friend, and I wanted...maybe something more. I tried to identify and categorize my reactions to him. What I felt for him seemed too complicated to define, but it soon became obvious to me that the strongest emotion I felt, the one that was stirring my heart, was...love.

The story is that while a child named Servius Tullius lay sleeping, his head burst into flames in the sight of many. The general outcry which so great a miracle called forth brought the king and queen to the place. One of the servants fetched water to quench the fire, but was checked by the queen, who stilled the uproar and commanded that the boy should not be disturbed until he awoke of himself. Soon afterwards sleep left him, and with it disappeared the flames. Then, talking her husband aside, Tanaquil Said: 'Do you see this child whom we are bringing up in so humble a fashion? Be assured he will one day be a lamp to our dubious fortunes, and a protector to the royal house in the day of its distress. Let us therefore rear with all solicitude one who will lend high renowen to the state and to our family.' It is said that from that moment the boy began to be looked upon as a son, and to be trained in the studies by which men are inspired to bear themselves greatly.

They did not talk, not because they hated conversation, but because they wanted to listen intently to the voice of God in silence; they did not dislike eating, but were feeding on the Word of God so that they did not have room for earthly food or time to bother with it; they did not avoid company because it bored them, but, as one of them said, ‘I cannot be with you and with God.’34 It was not a dislike of sleep that made them keep vigil, but an eager and longing attitude of waiting for the coming of Christ:

Tipsy, they tumbled early into bed - to get as much sleep as they could. So they would feel less hunger. The summer catch had been poor; there wasn't much food. They ate with care and looked sideways at the old: the old were gluttons, everybody knew it, and what was the good of feeding them? It wouldn't harm them to starve a little. The hungry dogs howled. The women rinsed the children's bellies with hot water three times a day, so they wouldn't cry so much for food. The old starved silently. ("The North")

One of the skills of grief that Lusa had learned was to hold on tight to the last moments between sleep and waking. Sometimes, then, in the early morning, taking care not to open her eyes or rouse her mind through its warm drowse to the surface where pain broke clear and could, she found she could choose her dreams. She could call a memory and patiently follow it backward into flesh, sound, and scents. It would be come her life once again and she was held and safe. Everything undecided. Everything still new.

Later, early Christmas morning, I was still awake, and Susan was asleep, on her back, with her mouth open slightly. I looked at her face. Her eyes moved slightly behind her eyelids. I watched her sleep; watched her while she dreamed in some remote incorporeal place away from me; watched her with the growing certainty that some of her would always be remote, away from me, unknowable, unobtainable, never mine. Watched her and thought these things and knew, as I could know nothing else so surely, that it didn’t matter.

I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist. Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter. Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?

I was lucky to meet you, yes.' 'Me too . . .' she said, looking me in the eyes. 'I was lucky too. The men I know are a disaster, not one of them believes in love; so they give you this big spiel about friendship, affection, a whole load of stuff that doesn't commit them to anything. I've got to the point where I can't stand the word 'friendship' any more, it makes me physically sick. Or there's the other lot, the ones who get married, who get hitched as early as possible and think about nothing but their careers afterwards. You obviously weren't one of those; but I also immediately sensed that you would never talk to me about friendship, that you would never be that vulgar. From the very beginning I hoped we would sleep together, that something important would happen; but it was possible that nothing would happen, in fact it was more than likely.' She stopped and sighed in irritation.

The best time to harvest herbs was after the early-morning dew dried, and Nellie had a long list of things to do, starting with her herb garden. While the sun rose higher and Richard kept sleeping, Nellie used her kitchen shears to trim leaves and stalks from her herb plants to later dry for her seasoning mix. Rosemary. Sage. Parsley. Dill. Lemon balm. Mint. Marjoram.

love doesn’t exist without sacrifice. Sometimes those sacrifices are waking up ten minutes early to make your partner coffee. Sometimes it’s taking on a second job to support your family. Sometimes it’s staying up all night with a newborn so your significant other can finally sleep. Sometimes it’s shoveling the other person’s car out of the driveway after a snowstorm.

Big and little they went on together to Molalla, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange-dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.

Every child starts out loving animals, identifying with them. But early on, adults start sending them contradictory messages. They’ll give a kid a stuffed animal to hug and love and sleep with. But at the same time, they’re serving them animals for dinner every night. It’s crazy, if you think about it. But when you’re young, you just accept what grown-ups tell you as the truth.

The night was fading. It was too early to be called dawn yet, but Taylor could just make out the outline of Will's weary, unshaven face. His deep blue eyes were the only color in the gray world of rain and shadows. Will leaned in, and his mouth covered Taylor's, rough but sweet, his tongue seeking Taylor's. Taylor opened willingly to that kiss, forgetting for a second his scratched, scraped hands and the rain running down the back of his neck. They kissed a lot these days, especially for men who had never been much for kissing. Taylor had become expert in all Will's kisses, from the hungry, lustful kisses that always made his own cock rise so fast it hurt, to the tender, almost cherishing kisses that Will generally saved for when he thought Taylor was sleeping. That dawn kiss beneath the pine trees rippled through him like an electric shock, a reminder that, tired, wet, and lost as they might be, so long as they were together, they were all right.

French parents do offer a few sleep tips. They almost all say that in the early months, they kept their babies with them in the light during the day, even for naps, and put them to bed in the dark at night. And almost all say that, from birth, they carefully “observed” their babies, and then followed the babies’ own “rhythms.” French parents talk so much about rhythm, you’d think they were starting rock bands, not raising kids. “From zero to six months, the best is to respect the rhythms of their sleep,” explains Alexandra, the mother whose babies slept through the night practically from birth.

Amazing. Chamberlain let his eyes close down to the slits, retreating within himself. He had learned that you could sleep on your feet on the long marches. You set your feet to going and after a while they went by themselves and you sort of turned your attention away and your feet went on walking painlessly, almost without feeling, and gradually you closed down your eyes so that all you could see were the heels of the man in front of you, one heel, other heel, one heel, other heel, and so you moved on dreamily in the heat and the dust, closing your eyes against the sweat, head down and gradually darkening, so you actually slept with the sight of the heels in front of you, one heel, other heel, and often when the man in front of you stopped you bumped into him. There were no heels today, but there was the horse he led by the reins. He did not know the name of this horse. He did not bother any more; the horses were all dead too soon. Yet you learn to love it. Isn’t that amazing? Long marches and no rest, up very early in the morning and asleep late in the rain, and there’s a marvelous excitement to it, a joy to wake in the morning and feel the army all around you and see the campfires in the morning and smell the coffee… … awake all night in front of Fredericksburg. We attacked in the afternoon, just at dusk, and the stone wall was aflame from one end to the other, too much smoke, couldn’t see, the attack failed, couldn’t withdraw, lay there all night in the dark, in the cold among the wounded and dying. Piled-up bodies in front of you to catch the bullets, using the dead for a shield; remember the sound? Of bullets in dead bodies? Like a shot into a rotten leg, a wet thick leg. All a man is: wet leg of blood. Remember the flap of a torn curtain in a blasted window, fragment-whispering in that awful breeze: never, forever, never, forever. You have a professor’s mind. But that is the way it sounded. Never. Forever. Love that too? Not love it. Not quite. And yet, I was never so alive.

I suspect that you cannot recall any truly significant action in your life that wasn’t governed by two very simple rules: staying away from something that would feed bad, or trying to accomplish something that would feel good. This law of approach and avoidance dictates most of human and animal behavior from a very early age. The forces that implement this law are positive and negative emotions. Emotions make us do things, as the name suggests (remove the first letter from the word). They motivate our remarkable achievements, incite us to try again when we fail, keep us safe from potential harm, urge us to accomplish rewarding and beneficial outcomes, and compel us to cultivate social and romantic relationships. In short, emotions in appropriate amounts make life worth living. They offer a healthy and vital existence, psychologically and biologically speaking. Take them away, and you face a sterile existence with no highs or lows to speak of. Emotionless, you will simply exist, rather than live.

Things I Used to Get Hit For: Talking back. Being smart. Acting stupid. Not listening. Not answering the first time. Not doing what I’m told. Not doing it the second time I’m told. Running, jumping, yelling, laughing, falling down, skipping stairs, lying in the snow, rolling in the grass, playing in the dirt, walking in mud, not wiping my feet, not taking my shoes off. Sliding down the banister, acting like a wild Indian in the hallway. Making a mess and leaving it. Pissing my pants, just a little. Peeing the bed, hardly at all. Sleeping with a butter knife under my pillow. Shitting the bed because I was sick and it just ran out of me, but still my fault because I’m old enough to know better. Saying shit instead of crap or poop or number two. Not knowing better. Knowing something and doing it wrong anyway. Lying. Not confessing the truth even when I don’t know it. Telling white lies, even little ones, because fibbing isn’t fooling and not the least bit funny. Laughing at anything that’s not funny, especially cripples and retards. Covering up my white lies with more lies, black lies. Not coming the exact second I’m called. Getting out of bed too early, sometimes before the birds, and turning on the TV, which is one reason the picture tube died. Wearing out the cheap plastic hole on the channel selector by turning it so fast it sounds like a machine gun. Playing flip-and-catch with the TV’s volume button then losing it down the hole next to the radiator pipe. Vomiting. Gagging like I’m going to vomit. Saying puke instead of vomit. Throwing up anyplace but in the toilet or in a designated throw-up bucket. Using scissors on my hair. Cutting Kelly’s doll’s hair really short. Pinching Kelly. Punching Kelly even though she kicked me first. Tickling her too hard. Taking food without asking. Eating sugar from the sugar bowl. Not sharing. Not remembering to say please and thank you. Mumbling like an idiot. Using the emergency flashlight to read a comic book in bed because batteries don’t grow on trees. Splashing in puddles, even the puddles I don’t see until it’s too late. Giving my mother’s good rhinestone earrings to the teacher for Valentine’s Day. Splashing in the bathtub and getting the floor wet. Using the good towels. Leaving the good towels on the floor, though sometimes they fall all by themselves. Eating crackers in bed. Staining my shirt, tearing the knee in my pants, ruining my good clothes. Not changing into old clothes that don’t fit the minute I get home. Wasting food. Not eating everything on my plate. Hiding lumpy mashed potatoes and butternut squash and rubbery string beans or any food I don’t like under the vinyl seat cushions Mom bought for the wooden kitchen chairs. Leaving the butter dish out in summer and ruining the tablecloth. Making bubbles in my milk. Using a straw like a pee shooter. Throwing tooth picks at my sister. Wasting toothpicks and glue making junky little things that no one wants. School papers. Notes from the teacher. Report cards. Whispering in church. Sleeping in church. Notes from the assistant principal. Being late for anything. Walking out of Woolworth’s eating a candy bar I didn’t pay for. Riding my bike in the street. Leaving my bike out in the rain. Getting my bike stolen while visiting Grandpa Rudy at the hospital because I didn’t put a lock on it. Not washing my feet. Spitting. Getting a nosebleed in church. Embarrassing my mother in any way, anywhere, anytime, especially in public. Being a jerk. Acting shy. Being impolite. Forgetting what good manners are for. Being alive in all the wrong places with all the wrong people at all the wrong times.

Show me the telegrams they sent you, one every day for six days while they were walking six hundred miles on their pigeon toes." .. 1. Feet are as good as wings if you have to. Chickamauga. ... 3. In the night sleeping you forget whether you have wings or feet or neither. Chattahoochee. ... 6. Pity me. Far is far. Near is near. and there is no place like home when the yellow roses climb up the ladders and sing in the early summer. Pity me. Wednesday Evening In The Twilight And The Gloaming. .. Well, Wednesday Evening was the only one I noticed making any mention of the yellow roses in her telegram," Hatrack the Horse explained. Then the old man and the girl sat on the cracker box saying nothing, only listening to the yellow roses all on fire with early summer climbing up th ecrooked ladders, up and down and crossways, some of them leaning out and curving and nearly falling.

Wild Peaches" When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown. The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. 2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass. Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear. 3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well. The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback. 4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

During the winter the day tires early, and is out of the door by five: coat on, heading west, see you tomorrow. The night then takes the long shift, and though it sleeps through most of it, and pays scant attention to what’s occurring in its quieter corners, one way or the other it muddles through until morning. But while summer’s here the day hangs around to enjoy the sunshine, and allowing for a post-lunch lull, and the odd faltering step when its five o’clock shadows appear, generally powers on as long as it’s able. And in those unexpectedly stretched-out hours, there’s more opportunity for things to come to light; or, failing that, for light to fall on things.

Find something new to live for,” said Peter softly. “I had to do that when I lost my family. Granted, they weren’t dead, but they were as good as dead for twelve years.” “What did you learn to live for?” “Sunrises. I never used to be an early riser, but the centaurs don’t believe in sleeping in. I found that there’s nothing quite like watching the sunlight come over the prairie and make it shine like gold.” Peter sighed and added, “Sometimes, it’s all about the little things.

By the time she’d run full circle, reaching her house, her T-shirt was saturated in sweat, and she felt relaxed from head to toe. It was the car in the driveway, and the man-boy perched on the hood waiting for her, that made her lose some of her newfound tranquility. He was grinning at her in a way that made her legs feel like they were made her legs feel like they were made of nothing more solid then gelatin. They might have even quivered from something other than her early-morning run. “What are you doing here?” she asked as she slowed from a jog to a walk and places her hands on her hips. It would take her a few minutes to get her breathing back to normal. Longer if he kept smiling at her like that. He shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep. What about you?” She opted for the obvious and filled her voice with as much sarcasm as she could. “I live here, actually.” “Ha-ha, smart-ass. I was asking if maybe you couldn’t sleep too.” He shook his head at her wisecrack. “You know, since you were running at six-thirty in the morning? I was gonna see if you wanted to go for a walk or something.” He eyes her up and down, looking a little disappointed as he hopped down from the car’s hood. “But it looks like you already went without me. That’s okay, it was a long shot anyway.” Violet didn’t like the way she was suddenly so eager to be near him. Even though they’d been nearly inseparable for the past ten years, it now felt urgent to keep him close. “All right, let’s go.

Lots of nights I would go to bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the train, which hasn't come yet. You look way up the track, but can't see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all at once you stop in the middle of your fidgeting, and listen. You can't hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the first soundless rustle which will come in the rail long before the little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the steps, and says, "Yassuh, little boss, yassuh.

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there’s a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted. All the mean laughing, all the quick, sexual wanting, those torn coats of Joseph, they change into powerful wolves that you must face. The retaliation that sometimes comes now, the swift, payback hit, is just a boy’s game to what the other will be. You know about circumcision here. It’s full castration there! And this groggy time we live, this is what it’s like:      A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he’s living in another town.      In the dream, he doesn’t remember the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep. The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities.           We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.      That’s how a young person turns toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.

Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here. ("New York Blues")

Call it arrogance or male chauvinism, the male ego just doesn’t allow a woman to participate in key issues in family. Men seldom realize that it’s the housewife who has the most difficult job in the world: waking up early, preparing breakfast, getting the children ready for school, preparing lunch, cleaning up the mess at home and so much more. Even before they can some rest, the doorbell would ring and the children are back from school. Then, the routine again, and by the end of the day, they were tired. Women in the family are the last to sleep and the first to wake up. Sometimes, even during a crisis in the family or when there is a dispute, it’s the lady of the house that stands rock solid to calm things down and face challenges head on.

written by one Willard Waller and published in 1932—contains the terms of a contract that female teachers in “a certain southern community” had to sign in the early 1930s. The contract obligated the teacher to engage in “all phases of Sunday-school work,” to get at least eight hours of sleep while maintaining a healthy diet, and to consider herself “at all times the willing servant of the school board and the townspeople.” She had to promise not to go out dancing, not to “dress immodestly,” not to be in the company of “any young man” outside Sunday school, and not to “encourage or tolerate the least familiarity from her male pupils.” The contract also contained this provision: I promise not to fall in love, to become engaged or secretly married.

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a lone one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. - For the Sake of a Single Poem

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with ‘Goodnight Moon’ and ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. . . . The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make. . . .I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of [my children] sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.

When Congress approved the decision to retire the SR-71, the Smithsonian Institution requested that a Blackbird be delivered for eventual display in the Air and Space Museum in Washington and that we set a new transcontinental speed record delivering it from California to Dulles. I had the honor of piloting that final flight on March 6, 1990, for its final 2,300-mile flight between L.A. and D.C. I took off with my backseat navigator, Lt. Col. Joe Vida, at 4:30 in the morning from Palmdale, just outside L.A., and despite the early hour, a huge crowd cheered us off. We hit a tanker over the Pacific then turned and dashed east, accelerating to 2.6 Mach and about sixty thousand feet. Below stretched hundreds of miles of California coastline in the early morning light. In the east and above, the hint of a red sunrise and the bright twinkling lights from Venus, Mars, and Saturn. A moment later we were directly over central California, with the Blackbird’s continual sonic boom serving as an early wake-up call to the millions sleeping below on this special day. I pushed out to Mach 3.3.

प्रातः स्मरामि हृदि संस्फुरदात्मतत्त्वं सच्चित्सुखं परमहंसगतिं तुरीयम् । यत्स्वप्नजागरसुषुप्तिमवैति नित्यं तद्ब्रह्म निष्कलमहं न च भूतसङ्घः ॥१॥ prātaḥ smarāmi hṛdi saṃsphuradātmatattvaṃ saccitsukhaṃ paramahaṃsagatiṃ turīyam | yatsvapnajāgarasuṣuptimavaiti nityaṃ tadbrahma niṣkalamahaṃ na ca bhūtasaṅghaḥ ||1|| ~ At dawn, I meditate in my heart on the truth of the radiant inner Self. This true Self is Pure Being, Awareness, and Joy, the transcendent goal of the great sages. The eternal witness of the waking, dream and deep sleep states. I am more than my body, mind and emotions, I am that undivided Spirit. At dawn, I worship the true Self that is beyond the reach of mind and speech, By whose grace, speech is even made possible, This Self is described in the scriptures as “Not this, Not this”. It is called the God of the Gods, It is unborn, undying, one with the All. At dawn, I salute the true Self that is beyond all darkness, brilliant as the sun, The infinite, eternal reality, the highest. On whom this whole universe of infinite forms is superimposed. It is like a snake on a rope. The snake seems so real, but when you pick it up, it’s just a rope. This world is ever-changing, fleeting, but this eternal Light is real and everlasting. Who recites in the early morning these three sacred Slokas, which are the ornaments of the three worlds, obtains the Supreme Abode. ~ Adi Shankara (8th century)

Let us suppose you give your three-year-old daughter a coloring book and a box of crayons for her birthday. The following day, with the proud smile only a little once can muster, she presents her first pictures for inspection. She has colored the sun black, the grass purple, and the sky green. In the lower right-hand corner, she has added woozy wonders of floating slabs and hovering rings; on the left, a panoply of colorful, carefree squiggles. You marvel at her bold strokes and intuit that her psyche is railing against its own cosmic puniness in the face of a big, ugly world. Later at the office, you share with your staff your daughter's first artistic effort and you make veiled references to the early work of van Gogh. A little child can not do a bad coloring; nor can a child of God do bad prayer. "A father is delighted when his little one, leaving off her toys and friends, runs to him and climbs into his arms. As he holds hi little one close to him, he cared little whether the child is looking around, her attention flittering from one thing to another or just settling down to sleep. Essentially the child is choosing to be with the father, confident of the love, the care, the security that is hers in those arms. Our prayer is much like that. We settle down in our Father's arms, in his loving hands. Our minds, our thoughts, our imagination may flit about here and there; we might even fall asleep; but essentially we are choosing for this time to remain intimately with our Father, giving ourselves to him, receiving his love and care, letting him enjoy us as he will. It is very simple prayer. It is very childlike prayer. It is prayer that opens us out to all the delights of the kingdom.

Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.

Ty and Livvy were the last to come say good-bye to Jules; Livvy embraced him fiercely, and Ty gave him a soft, shy smile. Julian wondered where Kit was. He'd been glued to Ty's and Livvy's sides the whole time they'd been in London, but he appeared to have vanished for the family farewell. "I've got something for you," Ty said. He held out a box, which Julian took with some surprise. Ty was absolutely punctual about Christmas and birthday presents, but he rarely gave gifs spontaneously. Curious, Julian popped open the top of the box to find a set of colored pencils. He didn't know the brand, but they looked pristine and unused. "Where did you get these?" "Fleet Street," said Ty. "I went out early this morning." An ache of love pressed against the back of Julian's throat. It reminded him of when Ty was a baby, serious and quiet. He hadn't been able to go to sleep for a long time without someone holding him, and though Julian had been very small himself, he remembered holding Ty while he fell asleep, all round wrists and straight black hair and long lashes. He'd felt so much love for his brother even then it had been like an explosion in his heart. "Thanks. I've missed drawing," Julian said, and tucked the box into his duffel bag. He didn't fuss; Ty didn't like fuss, but Julian made his tone as warm as he could, and Ty beamed. Jules thought of Livvy, the night before, the way she'd kissed his forehead. Her thank-you. This was Ty's.

I can’t sleep,” he says so quietly that only I can hear. “I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep.” “Nor I.” “You neither?” “No.” “Truly?” “Yes.” He sighs a deep sigh, as if he is relieved. “Is this love then?” “I suppose so.” “I can’t eat.” “No.” “I can’t think of anything but you. I can’t go on another moment like this; I can’t ride out into battle like this. I am as foolish as a boy. I am mad for you, like a boy. I cannot be without you; I will not be without you. Whatever it costs me.” I can feel my color rising like heat in my cheeks, and for the first time in days I can feel myself smile. “I can’t think of anything but you,” I whisper. “Nothing. I thought I was sick.” The ring like a crown is heavy in my pocket, my headdress is pulling at my hair; but I stand without awareness, seeing nothing but him, feeling nothing but his warm breath on my cheek and scenting the smell of his horse, the leather of his saddle, and the smell of him: spices, rosewater, sweat. “I am mad for you,” he says. I feel my smile turn up my lips as I look into his face at last. “And I for you,” I say quietly. “Truly.” “Well then, marry me.” “What?” “Marry me. There is nothing else for it.” I give a nervous little laugh. “You are joking with me.” “I mean it. I think I will die if I don’t have you. Will you marry me?” “Yes,” I breathe. “Tomorrow morning, I will ride in early. Marry me tomorrow morning at your little chapel. I will bring my chaplain, you bring witnesses. Choose someone you can trust. It will have to be a secret for a while. Do you want to?” “Yes.” For the first time he smiles, a warm beam that spreads across his fair broad face. “Good God, I could take you in my arms right now,” he says. “Tomorrow,” I whisper. “At nine in the morning,” he says.

Marriages are nesting dolls, too. We carry each iteration: the marriage we had before the children, the marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France; the marriage we had after the children, the marriage of tenderness but transactional communication—who’s doing what, and when, and how—and early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied; the marriage we had toward the end before we knew there was an end, the marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. Houses live and die: there is a time for building And a time for living and for generation And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto. In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon, Where you lean against a bank while a van passes, And the deep lane insists on the direction Into the village, in the electric heat Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone. The dahlias sleep in the empty silence. Wait for the early owl. In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing around the bonfire The association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— A dignified and commodiois sacrament. Two and two, necessarye coniunction, Holding eche other by the hand or the arm Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles, Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth Mirth of those long since under earth Nourishing the corn. Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death. Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind Wrinkles and slides. I am here Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

I see that both her parents are here. I'm pleased that they are, because I'd like to take the opportunity, early in what I fear will be a long and bitter battle, to tell them what I think of what they're doing to their child. I'm not spearking here about their fight for custody of her. I'm speaking here about their decision to get divorced. Let's not fool ourselves about what divorce is. Divorice is a failure of parenting. It does more damage to children than just About anything else that might happen to them in the years before they become adults. It takes from them the only things they hold dear. It breaks up their home. It destroys their sense of family. It removes them from the comfort of having one bed, in one safe, secure, familiar house, where they go to sleep every night of the week. It fills them with sadness and, probably, guilt. They can't help but think that they must somehow be to blame. It sets them up for a world in which nothing is certain and nobody can be trusted.

She begins to strip like a roommate and climb into bed. They have fallen asleep. Dean wakes first, in the early afternoon. He unfastens her stockings and slowly rolls them off. Her skirt is next and then her underpants. She opens her eyes. The garter belt he leaves on, to confirm her nakedness. He rests his head there. Her hand touches his chest and begins to fall in excruciating slow designs. He lies still as a dog beneath it, still as an idiot. The next morning she is recovered. His prick is hard. She takes it in her hand. They always sleep naked. Their flesh is innocent and warm. In the end she is arranged across the pillows, a ritual she accepts without a word. It is half an hour before they fall apart, spent, and call for breakfast. She eats both her rolls and one of his. “There was a lot,” she says. She glistens with it. The inside of her thighs is wet. “How long does it take to make again?” she asks. Dean tries to think. He is remembering biology. “Two or three days,” he guesses. “Non, non!” she cries. That is not what she meant. She begins to make him hard again. In a few minutes he rolls her over and puts it in as if the intermission were ended. This time she is wild. The great bed begins creaking. Her breath becomes short. Dean has to brace his hands on the wall. He hooks his knees outside her legs and drives himself deeper. “Oh,” she breathes, “that’s the best.

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy’s and talk about the day and type your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don’t listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you’re sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the the programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you’re late and be amazed when you’re early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I’m black and be sorry when I’m wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I’d known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin (...) .

CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)

One day there came from the South a stranger who was unlike any man that Shasta had seen before. He rode upon a strong dappled horse with flowing mane and tail, and his stirrups and bridle were inlaid with silver. The spike of a helmet projected from the middle of his silken turban and he wore a shirt of chain mail. By his side hung a curving scimitar; a round shield studded with bosses of brass hung at his back, and his right hand grasped a lance. His face was dark, but this did not surprise Shasta because all the people of Calormen are like that; what did surprise him was the man’s beard which was dyed crimson, and curled and gleaming with scented oil. But Arsheesh knew by the gold on the stranger’s bare arm that he was a Tarkaan or great lord, and he bowed kneeling before him till his beard touched the earth, and made signs to Shasta to kneel also. The stranger demanded hospitality for the night which of course the fisherman dared not refuse. All the best they had was set before the Tarkaan for supper (and he didn’t think much of it) and Shasta, as always happened when the fisherman had company, was given a hunk of bread and turned out of the cottage. On these occasions he usually slept with the donkey in its little thatched stable. But it was much too early to go to sleep yet, and Shasta, who had never learned that it is wrong to listen behind doors, sat down with his ear to a crack in the wooden wall of the cottage to hear what the grown-ups were talking about.

Duroy, who felt light hearted that evening, said with a smile: "You are gloomy to-day, dear master." The poet replied: "I am always so, young man, so will you be in a few years. Life is a hill. As long as one is climbing up one looks towards the summit and is happy, but when one reaches the top one suddenly perceives the descent before one, and its bottom, which is death. One climbs up slowly, but one goes down quickly. At your age a man is happy. He hopes for many things, which, by the way, never come to pass. At mine, one no longer expects anything - but death." Duroy began to laugh: "You make me shudder all over." Norbert de Varenne went on: "No, you do not understand me now, but later on you will remember what I am saying to you at this moment. A day comes, and it comes early for many, when there is an end to mirth, for behind everything one looks at one sees death. You do not even understand the word. At your age it means nothing; at mine it is terrible. Yes, one understands it all at once, one does not know how or why, and then everything in life changes its aspect. For fifteen years I have felt death assail me as if I bore within me some gnawing beast. I have felt myself decaying little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house crumbling to ruin. Death has disfigured me so completely that I do not recognize myself. I have no longer anything about me of myself - of the fresh, strong man I was at thirty. I have seen death whiten my black hairs, and with what skillful and spiteful slowness. Death has taken my firm skin, my muscles, my teeth, my whole body of old, only leaving me a despairing soul, soon to be taken too. Every step brings me nearer to death, every movemebt, every breath hastens his odious work. To breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work, dream, everything we do is to die. To live, in short, is to die. Oh, you will realize this. If you stop and think for a moment you will understand. What do you expect? Love? A few more kisses and you will be impotent. Then money? For what? Women? Much fun that will be! In order to eat a lot and grow fat and lie awake at night suffering from gout? And after that? Glory? What use is that when it does not take the form of love? And after that? Death is always the end. I now see death so near that I often want to stretch my arms to push it back. It covers the earth and fills the universe. I see it everywhere. The insects crushed on the path, the falling leaves, the white hair in a friend's head, rend my heart and cry to me, 'Behold it!' It spoils for me all I do, all I see, all that I eat and drink, all that I love; the bright moonlight, the sunrise, the broad ocean, the noble rivers, and the soft summer evening air so sweet to breath." He walked on slowly, dreaming aloud, almost forgetting that he had a listener: "And no one ever returns - never. The model of a statue may be preserved, but my body, my face, my thoughts, my desires will never reappear again. And yet millions of beings will be born with a nose, eyes, forehead, cheeks, and mouth like me, and also a soul like me, without my ever returning, without even anything recognizable of me appearing in these countless different beings. What can we cling to? What can we believe in? All religions are stupid, with their puerile morality and their egotistical promises, monstrously absurd. Death alone is certain." "Think of that, young man. Think of it for days, and months and years, and life will seem different to you. Try to get away from all the things that shut you in. Make a superhuman effort to emerge alive from your own body, from your own interests, from your thoughts, from humanity in general, so that your eyes may be turned in the opposite direction. Then you understand how unimportant is the quarrel between Romanticism and Realism, or the Budget debates.

Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough),–they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to the mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars–and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labour, and of light, white sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves–not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

His eyes ran over her hungrily. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” he said, almost to himself, “the way it felt, back at my mother’s house. I was never so hungry for anyone, but it wasn’t completely physical, even then.” He frowned. “I want you, Cecily, and I hate myself for it.” “What else is new?” She gestured toward the door. “Go home. And I hope you don’t sleep a wink.” “I probably won’t,” he said ruefully. He moved toward the door, hesitating. “Good night,” she said firmly, not moving. He stood with his back to her, his spine very straight. “I can trace my ancestors back before the Mexican War in the early 1800s, pure Lakota blood, undiluted even by white settlement. There are so few of us left…” She could have wept for what she knew, and he didn’t know. “You don’t have to explain it to me,” she said solemnly. “I know how you feel.” “You don’t,” he bit off. He straightened again. “I’d die to have you, just once.” He turned, and the fire was in his eyes as they met hers, glittering across the room. “It’s like that for you, too.” “It’s a corruption of the senses. You don’t love me,” she said quietly. “Without love, it’s just sex.” He breathed deliberately, slowly. He didn’t want to ask. He couldn’t help it. “Something you know?” “Yes. Something I know,” she said, lying with a straight face and a smile that she hoped was worldly. She was not going to settle for crumbs from him, stolen hours in his bed. Men were devious when desire rode them, even men like Tate. She couldn’t afford for him to know that she was incapable of wanting any man except him. The words stung. They were meant to. He hesitated, only for a minute, before he jerked open the door and went out. Cecily closed her eyes and thanked providence that she’d had the good sense to deny herself what she wanted most in the world. Tate had said once that sex alone wasn’t enough. He was right. She repeated it, like a mantra, to her starving body until she finally fell asleep.

I’m about to hop out when Peter reaches across me and stops me from opening the door. “Give me my good-night kiss,” he says. I laugh. “Peter! I have to go.” Stubbornly he closes his eyes and waits, and I lean forward and plant a quick kiss on his lips. “There. Satisfied?” “No.” He kisses me again like we have all the time in the world and says, “What would happen if I came back after everyone went to sleep, and I spent the night, and left really early in the morning? Like, before dawn?” Smiling, I say, “You can’t, so we’ll never know.” “But what if?” “My dad would kill me.” “No, he wouldn’t.” “He’d kill you.” “No, he wouldn’t.” “No, he wouldn’t,” I agree. “But he’d be pretty disappointed in me. And he’d be mad at you.” “Only if we got caught,” Peter says, but it’s halfhearted. He won’t risk it either. He’s too careful about staying in my dad’s good graces. “You know what I’m really looking forward to the most?” He gives my braid a tug before saying, “Not having to say good night. I hate saying good night.” “Me too,” I say. “I can’t wait until we’re at college.” “Me too,” I say, and I kiss him one more time before jumping out of the car and running toward my house.

He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.

Scene I. A little dark Parlour in Boston: Guards standing at the door. Hazlerod, Crusty Crowbar, Simple Sapling, Hateall, and Hector Mushroom. Simple. I know not what to think of these sad times, The people arm'd,—and all resolv'd to die Ere they'll submit.—— Crusty Crowbar. I too am almost sick of the parade Of honours purchas'd at the price of peace. Simple. Fond as I am of greatness and her charms, Elate with prospects of my rising name, Push'd into place,—a place I ne'er expected, My bounding heart leapt in my feeble breast. And ecstasies entranc'd my slender brain.— But yet, ere this I hop'd more solid gains, As my low purse demands a quick supply.— Poor Sylvia weeps,—and urges my return To rural peace and humble happiness, As my ambition beggars all her babes. Crusty. When first I listed in the desp'rate cause, And blindly swore obedience to his will, So wise, so just, so good I thought Rapatio, That if salvation rested on his word I'd pin my faith, and risk my hopes thereon. Hazlerod. Any why not now?—What staggers thy belief? Crusty. Himself—his perfidy appears— It is too plain he has betray'd his country; And we're the wretched tools by him mark'd out To seal its ruins—tear up the ancient forms, And every vestige treacherously destroy, Nor leave a trait of freedom in the land. Nor did I think hard fate wou'd call me up From drudging o'er my acres, Treading the glade, and sweating at the plough, To dangle at the tables of the great; At bowls and cards to spend my frozen years; To sell my friends, my country, and my conscience; Profane the sacred sabbaths of my God; Scorn'd by the very men who want my aid To spread distress o'er this devoted people. Hazlerod. Pho—what misgivings—why these idle qualms, This shrinking backwards at the bugbear conscience; In early life I heard the phantom nam'd, And the grave sages prate of moral sense Presiding in the bosom of the just; Or planting thongs about the guilty heart. Bound by these shackles, long my lab'ring mind, Obscurely trod the lower walks of life, In hopes by honesty my bread to gain; But neither commerce, or my conjuring rods, Nor yet mechanics, or new fangled drills, Or all the iron-monger's curious arts, Gave me a competence of shining ore, Or gratify'd my itching palm for more; Till I dismiss'd the bold intruding guest, And banish'd conscience from my wounded breast. Crusty. Happy expedient!—Could I gain the art, Then balmy sleep might sooth my waking lids, And rest once more refresh my weary soul.

Reading while listening to the sounds of birds and the rush of water. This is the way of life that has come to be idealized. Don't think of unpleasant things right before bed. A five minute "bed zazen" before going to sleep. People who do their best to enjoy what is before them have the greatest chance to discover inner peace. Often, whatever it is they are enjoying - the thing before them - has the potential to turn into an opportunity. Stop dismissing whatever it is that you are doing and start living. Seek not what you lack. Be content with the here and now. When you are uncertain, simplicity is the best way to go. Conscientious living begins with early to bed, early to rise. This is the secret to a life of ease and contentment. Don't be bound by a single perspective. There is more than just "the proper way". Possibility springs from confidence. When someone criticizes us, we immediately feel wounded. When something unpleasant happens, we cannot get it out of our head. What can we do to bounce back? One way to strengthen the mind is though cleaning. When we clean, we use both our head and our body. Recognize the luxury of not having things. Desire feeds upon itself and the mind becomes dominated by boundless greed. This is not happiness. The three poisons are greed, anger and ignorance. Be grateful for every day, even the most ordinary. The happiness to be found in the unremarkable. Your mind has the power to decide whether or not you are happy. There is not just one answer. The meaning behind Zen koans. When there are things we want to do, we must do them as if our lives depend on it. Time spent out of character is empty time.

It kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was… “Ready for-?” He broke off, and then frowned as if it had all become clear. “Wait.” He dropped his arms from around my waist and took a step away from me. “You think I spent the night wit you?” “Didn’t you?” I blinked back at him. “There’s only the one bed. And…well, you were in it when I woke up.” Thunder boomed overhead. It wasn’t as loud as the violent cracks that had occurred in my dream. Although the rumbles were long enough-and intense enough-that the silverware on the table began to make an eerie tinkling sound. And my bird, who’d been calmly cleaning herself on the back of my chair, suddenly took off, seeing shelter on the highest bookshelf against the far wall. I realized I’d just insulted my host, and no joke was going to get me out of it this time. “For your information, Pierce,” John said, his tone almost disturbingly calm-but his eyes flashed the same shade as the stone around my neck, which had gone the color of the metal studs at his wrists-“I spent most of last night on the couch. Until one point early this morning, when I heard you call my name. You were crying in your sleep.” The salt water I’d tasted on my lips. Not due to rain from a violent hurricane, but from the tears I’d shed, watching him die in front of me. “Oh,” I said uncomfortably. “John, I’m so-“ It turned out he wasn’t finished. “I put my arms around you to try to comfort you, because I know what this place can be like, at least at first. It’s not exactly hell, but it’s the next closest place to it. You wouldn’t let go of me. You held on to me like you were drowning, and I was your only lifeline.” I swallowed, astonished at how close he’d come to describing my dream…except it had been the other way around. I’d been his lifeline; only he’d let go of me, sacrificing himself so that I could live. “Right,” I said. “Of course. I’m sorry.” I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, especially since my mother had always worried so much about my talking in my sleep. On the other hand, I had been upfront with him about my lack of experience when it came to men. “But this is good, see?” I reached out to take his hand. “I told you I could never hate you-“ He pulled his hand away, exactly like in my dream. Well, not exactly, because he wasn’t being sucked from my grasp by a giant ocean swell. Instead, he’d dropped my fingers because he was leaving to go sort the souls of the dead. “You will,” he assured me, bitterly. “You’re already regretting your decision to-what was it you called it? Oh, right-cohabitate with me.” “No,” I insisted. “I’m not. All I said was that I want to take things more slowly-“ That had nothing to do with him-it had to do with me and my fear of not being able to control myself when he was kissing me. It was too humiliating to admit that out loud, however.

It seemed as if nothing were to break that tie — as if the years were merely to compact and cement it; and as if those years were to be all the years of their natural lives. Eighteen-forty-two turned into eighteen-forty-three; eighteen-forty-three into eighteen- forty-four; eighteen-forty-four into eighteen-forty-five. Flush was no longer a puppy; he was a dog of four or five; he was a dog in the full prime of life — and still Miss Barrett lay on her sofa in Wimpole Street and still Flush lay on the sofa at her feet. Miss Barrett’s life was the life of “a bird in its cage.” She sometimes kept the house for weeks at a time, and when she left it, it was only for an hour or two, to drive to a shop in a carriage, or to be wheeled to Regent’s Park in a bath-chair. The Barretts never left London. Mr. Barrett, the seven brothers, the two sisters, the butler, Wilson and the maids, Catiline, Folly, Miss Barrett and Flush all went on living at 50 Wimpole Street, eating in the dining-room, sleeping in the bedrooms, smoking in the study, cooking in the kitchen, carrying hot-water cans and emptying the slops from January to December. The chair-covers became slightly soiled; the carpets slightly worn; coal dust, mud, soot, fog, vapours of cigar smoke and wine and meat accumulated in crevices, in cracks, in fabrics, on the tops of picture-frames, in the scrolls of carvings. And the ivy that hung over Miss Barrett’s bedroom window flourished; its green curtain became thicker and thicker, and in summer the nasturtiums and the scarlet runners rioted together in the window-box. But one night early in January 1845 the postman knocked. Letters fell into the box as usual. Wilson went downstairs to fetch the letters as usual. Everything was as usual — every night the postman knocked, every night Wilson fetched the letters, every night there was a letter for Miss Barrett. But tonight the letter was not the same letter; it was a different letter. Flush saw that, even before the envelope was broken. He knew it from the way that Miss Barrett took it; turned it; looked at the vigorous, jagged writing of her name.

[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.

Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved—absolutely and purely—that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It’s a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses. God knows I’ve tried. Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning. Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation? I prowl and smoke cigarettes. I review my notes. The truth is at once simple and baffling: John Wade was a pro. He did his magic, then walked away. Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on.

The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back. They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, "How is it with you, my child?" but always, lest a strange face should frighten him, they whisper it so low that he may not hear. They bend over him to see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet arm beneath the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many little vests he has. They love to do these things. What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses, and foolish wild stories are invented to explain what is all so pathetic and simple. I know of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early home to pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face appear. She always looked at him very vindictively, and then vanished. Strange things happened in this house. Windows were opened in the night. The curtains of his bed were set fire to. A step on the stair was loosened. The covering of an old well in a corridor where he walked was cunningly removed. And when he fell ill the wrong potion was put in the glass by his bedside, and he died. How could the pretty young mother know that this grizzled interloper was the child of whom she was in search? All our notions about ghosts are wrong. It is nothing so petty as lost wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we are not nearly so afraid of them as they are of us.

Isn't that a beautiful tale, grandfather," said Heidi, as the latter continued to sit without speaking, for she had expected him to express pleasure and astonishment. "You are right, Heidi; it is a beautiful tale," he replied, but he looked so grave as he said it that Heidi grew silent herself and sat looking quietly at her pictures. Presently she pushed her book gently in front of him and said, "See how happy he is there," and she pointed with her finger to the figure of the returned prodigal, who was standing by his father clad in fresh raiment as one of his own sons again. A few hours later, as Heidi lay fast asleep in her bed, the grandfather went up the ladder and put his lamp down near her bed so that the light fell on the sleeping child. Her hands were still folded as if she had fallen asleep saying her prayers, an expression of peace and trust lay on the little face, and something in it seemed to appeal to the grandfather, for he stood a long time gazing down at her without speaking. At last he too folded his hands, and with bowed head said in a low voice, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee and am not worthy to be called thy son." And two large tears rolled down the old man's cheeks. Early the next morning he stood in front of his hut and gazed quietly around him. The fresh bright morning sun lay on mountain and valley. The sound of a few early bells rang up from the valley, and the birds were singing their morning song in the fir trees. He stepped back into the hut and called up, "Come along, Heidi! the sun is up! Put on your best frock, for we are going to church together!" Heidi was not long getting ready; it was such an unusual summons from her grandfather that she must make haste. She put on her smart Frankfurt dress and soon went down, but when she saw her grandfather she stood still, gazing at him in astonishment. "Why, grandfather!" she exclaimed, "I never saw you look like that before! and the coat with the silver buttons! Oh, you do look nice in your Sunday coat!" The old man smiled and replied, "And you too; now come along!" He took Heidi's hand in his and together they walked down the mountain side. The bells were ringing in every direction now, sounding louder and fuller as they neared the valley, and Heidi listened to them with delight. "Hark at them, grandfather! it's like a great festival!" The congregation had already assembled and the singing had begun when Heidi and her grandfather entered the church at Dorfli and sat down at the back. But before the hymn was over every one was nudging his neighbor and whispering, "Do you see? Alm-Uncle is in church!" Soon everybody in the church knew of Alm-Uncle's presence, and the women kept on turning round to look and quite lost their place in the singing. But everybody became more attentive when the sermon began, for the preacher spoke with such warmth and thankfulness that those present felt the effect of his words, as if some great joy had come to them all.

And all this time I was keeping my eyes open, or trying to, only they kept closing, because I wanted to go on watching the stars, where the most extraordinary things were happening. A bright satellite, a man-made star, very slowly and somehow carefully crossed the sky in a great arc, from one side to the other, a close arc, one knew it was not far away, a friendly satellite slowly going about its business round and round the globe. And then, much much farther away, stars were quietly shooting and tumbling and disappearing, silently falling and being extinguished, lost utterly silent falling stars, falling from nowhere to nowhere into an unimaginable extinction. How many of them there were, as if the heavens were crumbling at last and being dismantled. And I wanted to show all these things to my father. Later I knew that I had been asleep and I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars. The moon was gone. The water lapped higher, nearer, touching the rock so lightly it was audible only as a kind of vibration. The sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars. And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable. And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold. Later still I awoke and it had all gone; and for a few moments I thought that I had seen all those stars only in a dream. There was a weird shocking sudden quiet, as at the cessation of a great symphony or of some immense prolonged indescribable din. Had the stars then been audible as well as visible and had I indeed heard the music of the spheres? The early dawn light hung over the rocks and over the sea, with an awful intent gripping silence, as if it had seized these faintly visible shapes and were very slowly drawing tgem out of a darkness in which they wanted to remain. Even the water was now totally silent, not a tap, not a vibration. The sky was a faintly lucid grey and the sea was a lightless grey, and the rocks were a dark fuzzy greyish brown. The sense of loneliness was far more intense than it had been under the stars. Then I had felt no fear. Now I felt fear. I discovered that I was feeling very stiff and rather cold. The rock beneath me was very hard and I felt bruised and aching. I was surprised to find my rugs and cushions were wet with dew. I got up stiffly and shook them. I looked around me. Mountainous piled-up rocks hid the house. And I saw myself as a dark figure in the midst of this empty awfully silent dawn, where light was scarcely yet light, and I was afraid of myself and quickly lay down again and settled my rug and closed my eyes, lying there stiffly and not imagining that I would sleep again.

She dropped her coat on the back of a chair and crept quietly up to Jay’s room. She did her best not to wake him as she pulled the door closed behind her. She watched him sleep, stretched out on his back, feeling herself coming back to life in his presence. “What are you doing?” he mumbled without opening his eyes. Violet startled, feeling like she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t have been. Like when they were little and they were busted for looking at a dirty magazine one of the other kids brought to school. Jay rolled onto his side and squinted one eye open at Violet, grinning. “Come over here,” he growled, lifting the corner of his sheet up, inviting her in. He looked rumpled and messy and alluring. Violet slipped off her shoes and climbed in beside him. He wrapped his arm around her back, pulling her close. His breath was warm, his body warmer, and she felt herself thawing for the first time since she’d stepped out into the shipyard that morning. Even the heat blasting inside her car on the way home hadn’t helped. She tucked her feet between his legs. “What are you doing here so early?” His voice was rough from sleep but it sounded like soft velvet. He stroked her back lazily. “Are you feeling better today?” Neither question really needed an answer; they were just Jay’s way of letting her know he’d been worried about her. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she whispered as she let herself get comfortable against him. She’d been cold and tired, and now that she was warm again she thought she might actually be able to fall asleep, right there in his arms. He rested his chin against the top of her head. “You didn’t,” he assured her. “I was already awake.” Violet sighed. It felt so good to be here. It was the first time she’d felt comfortable since she’d gone to Seattle yesterday with Chelsea. Jay made her feel safe—among other things—and she needed that right now. She closed her eyes; they were gritty and raw from lack of sleep. She breathed deeply, inhaling him, and relaxing as she sank further into him . . . and into the pillow beneath her head. She fell asleep like that, wrapped in warmth. Wrapped in Jay.

The Romans, by that means, made pagans out of indigenous people. The moral syntax of the Roman word pagan means having the quality of village life and village mindedness. It means living at a distance from the seat of power and the arbiters of orthodox belief and observance, and living at the shadowy edge of a ploughed field. It designated undomesticated, unbroken bush dwellers, those for whom the light of culture of the eastern Mediterranean kind had not yet dawned. It is a powerful distinction to make, with powerful, enforceable criteria. The Romans didn’t invent pagan, but they did make pagans out of the country people they conquered. Though the word at this time meant something like “those on land unbroken,” the change in meaning to the modern European sense of pagan as “enemy of the true religion” tracks the arc from agricultural practice to systematic ethnic cleansing. Through a programme of shame and systematic desecration, they marginalized traditionalists, drove wedges of privilege between families, rewarded collaborators, confounded and demeaned the local languages, compromised indigenous lifeways. They made another kind of war on the indigenous aptitude for living alongside ancestors. Though certainly not the history many of us were taught to emulate or admire, it is there, stones in the sediment of the Europe that founded America. As the Romans went their civil, ruinous way, they made a point of learning from the newly conquered something of the traditional histories, alliances, and enmities of the area. They learned these enmities not to conclude them but to collude with them and deepen them, to further them, prey upon them, employ them, turning the conquered against the not-yet conquered, holding themselves out as the new, powerful ally who would right ancestral wrongs, securing and obliging and forcing the newly conquered to raise the foreign conqueror to the status of a mysteriously benevolent foreign God. Sleeping with the enemy began in earnest. This is a lesson and example relied upon heavily by Hernando Cortes as he made his ruinous way across Mexico early in the sixteenth century, and it made Cortes a dark legend in the old and new worlds.

The Dawning Ah! what time wilt Thou come? when shall that cry, The Bridegroom’s coming! fill the sky; Shall it in the evening run When our words and works are done? Or will Thy all-surprising light Break at midnight, When either sleep or some dark pleasure Possesseth mad man without measure? Or shall these early, fragrant hours Unlock Thy bow’rs, And with their blush of light descry Thy locks crown’d with eternity? Indeed, it is the only time That with Thy glory doth best chime; All now are stirring, ev’ry field Full hymns doth yield; The whole Creation shakes off night, And for Thy shadow looks the light; Stars now vanish without number, Sleepy Planets set and slumber, The pursy Clouds disband and scatter, All expect some sudden matter; Not one beam triumphs but from far That morning-star; O at what time soever thou (Unknown to us,) the heavens wilt bow, And, with Thy angels in the van, Descend to judge poor careless man, Grant, I may not like puddle lie In a corrupt security, Where if a traveller water crave, He finds it dead, and in a grave. But as this restless, vocal spring All day and night doth run, and sing, And though here born, yet is acquainted Elsewhere, and flowing keeps untainted; So let me all my busy age In Thy free services engage; And though (while here) of force I must Have commerce sometimes with poor dust, And in my flesh, though vile and low, As this doth in her channel flow, Yet let my course, my aim, my love, And chief acquaintance be above; So when that day and hour shall come, In which Thyself will be the sun, Thou’lt find me drest and on my way, Watching the break of Thy great day.

The day came: a Monday at the end of September. The night before he had realized that it was almost exactly a year since the beating, although he hadn’t planned it that way. He left work early that evening. He had spent the weekend organizing his projects; he had written Lucien a memo detailing the status of everything he had been working on. At home, he lined up his letters on the dining room table, and a copy of his will. He had left a message with Richard’s studio manager that the toilet in the master bathroom kept running and asked if Richard could let in the plumber the following day at nine – both Richard and Willem had a set of keys to his apartment – because he would be away on business. He took off his suit jacket and tie and shoes and watch and went to the bathroom. He sat in the shower area with his sleeves pushed up. He had a glass of scotch, which he sipped at to steady himself, and a box cutter, which he knew would be easier to hold than a razor. He knew what he needed to do: three straight vertical lines, as deep and long as he could make them, following the veins up both arms. And then he would lie down and wait. He waited for a while, crying a bit, because he was tired and frightened and because he was ready to go, he was ready to leave. Finally he rubbed his eyes and began. He started with his left arm. He made the first cut, which was more painful than he had thought it would be, and he cried out. Then he made the second. He took another drink of the scotch. The blood was viscous, more gelatinous than liquid, and a brilliant, shimmering oil-black. Already his pants were soaked with it, already his grip was loosening. He made the third. When he was done with both arms, he slumped against the back of the shower wall. He wished, absurdly, for a pillow. He was warm from the scotch, and from his own blood, which lapped at him as it pooled against his legs – his insides meeting his outsides, the inner bathing the outer. He closed his eyes. Behind him, the hyenas howled, furious at him. Before him stood the house with its open door. He wasn’t close yet, but he was closer than he’d been: close enough to see that inside, there was a bed where he could rest, where he could lie down and sleep after his long run, where he would, for the first time in his life, be safe.

Stop staring at Kevin so much. You're making me fear for your life over here." "What do you mean?" "Andrew is scary territorial of him. He punched me the first time I said I'd like to get Kevin too wasted to be straight." Nicky pointed at his face, presumably where Andrew had decked him. "So yeah, I'm going to crush on safer targets until Andrew gets bored of him. That means you, since Matt's taken and I don't hate myself enough to try Seth. Congrats." "Can you take the creepy down a level?" Aaron asked. "What?" Nikcy asked. "He said he doesn't swing, so obviously he needs a push." "I don't need a push," Neil said. "I'm fine on my own." "Seriously, how are you not bored of your hand by now?" "I'm done with this conversation," Neil said. "This and every future variation of it. [...]" The stadium door slammed open as Andrew showed up at last. He swept them with a wide-eyed look as if surprised to see them all there. "Kevin wants to know what's taking you so long. Did you get lost?" "Nicky's scheming to rape Neil," Aaron said. "There are a couple flaws in his plan he needs to work out first, but he'll get there sooner or later." [...] "Wow, Nicky," Andrew said. "You start early." "Can you really blame me?" Nicky glanced back at Neil as he said it. He only took his eyes off Andrew for a second, but that was long enough for Andrew to lunge at him. Andrew caught Nicky's jersey in one hand and threw him hard up against the wall. [...] "Hey, Nicky," Andrew said in stage-whisper German. "Don't touch him, you understand?" "You know I'd never hurt him. If he says yes-" "I said no." "Jesus, you're greedy," Nicky said. "You already have Kevin. Why does it-" He went silent, but it took Neil a moment to realize why. Andrew had a short knife pressed to Nicky's Jersey. [...] Neil was no stranger to violence. He'd heard every threat in the book, but never from a man who smiled as bright as Andrew did. Apathy, anger, madness, boredom: these motivators Neil knew and understood. But Andrew was grinning like he didn't have a knife point where it'd sleep perfectly between Nicky's ribs, and it wasn't because he was joking. Neil knew Andrew meant it. If Nicky so much as breathed wrong right now, Andrew would cut his lungs to ribbons, any and all consequences be damned. Neil wondered if Andrew's medicine would let him grieve, or if he'd laugh at Nicky's funeral too. Then he wondered if a sober Andrew would act any different. Was this Andrew psychosis or his medicine? Was he flying too high to understand what he was doing, or did his medicine only add a smile to Andrew's ingrained violence? [...] Andrew let go of Nicky and spun away. [...] Aaron squized Nicky's shoulder on his way out. Nicky looked shaken as he stared after the twins, but when he realized Neil was watching him he rallied with a smile Neil didn't believe at all. "On second thought, you're not my type after all,” Nicky said [...]. "Don't let him get away with things like that." Nicky considered him for a moment, his smile fading into something small and tired. "Oh, Neil. You're going to make this so hard on yourself. Look, [...] Andrew is a little crazy. Your lines are not his lines, so you can get all huff and puff when he tramps across yours but you'll never make him understand what he did wrong. Moreover, you'll never make him care. So just stay out of his way." "He's like this because you let him get away with it," Neil said. [...] "That was my fault. [...] I said something I shouldn't have, and got what I deserved.

A dark man with a burning torch ran down the street on a dull night in late fall. The little girl saw him from the window of her house, having awoken from a dull dream. Then she heard a sharp rifle shot and a pitiful despondent scream — they must have killed the man running with the torch. Soon she was hearing other shots, many and distant, and the clamor of people in a nearby prison… The girl fell asleep and forgot everything that she would see later, on subsequent days: she was too young, and the memory and reason of early childhood were overgrown forever by her future life. But well into her old age the nameless man rose up sadly and unexpectedly and ran within her — in the dim light of her memory — and died once more in the darkness of the past, in the heart of the grown up child. Amidst hunger and sleep, in a moment of love or of some youthful joy — suddenly in the distance, in the depth of her body there rose again the despondent scream of the dead man, and the young woman instantly altered her life — stopped her dance, if she was dancing, grew more focused, more reliable in her work, if she was laboring, hid her face in her hands, if she was alone. That stormy night of late fall saw the start of the October revolution — in that town where Moskva Ivanovna Chestnova had lived at that time.

After All This" After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of an arm. The tides inside your heart still pull me towards you. After all this, what are these words but mollusk shells a child plays with? What could say more than the eloquence of last night’s constellations? or the storm anchored by its own flashes behind the far mountains? I remember the way your body wavers under my touch like the northern lights. After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can hear the footsteps of the stars. How can these words ever reveal the secret that waits in their sleeping light? The words that walk through my mind say only what has already passed. Beyond, the swallows are still knitting the wind. After a while, the smokebush will turn to fire. After a while, the thin moon will grow like a tear in a curtain. Under it, a small boy kicks a ball against the wall of a burned out house. He is too young to remember the war. He hardly knows the emptiness that kindles around him. He can speak the language of early birds outside our window. Someday he will know this kind of love that changes the color of the sky, and frees the earth from its moorings. Sometimes I kiss your eyes to see beyond what I can imagine. Sometimes I think I can speak the language of unborn stars. I think the whole earth breathes with you. After all this, these words are all I have to say what is impossible to think, what shy dreams hide in the rafters of my heart, because these words are only a form of touch, only tell you I have no life that isn’t yours, and no death you couldn’t turn into a life.

Thus Epicurus also, when he designs to destroy the natural fellowship of mankind, at the same time makes use of that which he destroys. For what does he say? ‘Be not deceived, men, nor be led astray, nor be mistaken: there is no natural fellowship among rational animals; believe me. But those who say otherwise, deceive you and seduce you by false reasons.’—What is this to you? Permit us to be deceived. Will you fare worse, if all the rest of us are persuaded that there is a natural fellowship among us, and that it ought by all means to be preserved? Nay, it will be much better and safer for you. Man, why do you trouble yourself about us? Why do you keep awake for us? Why do you light your lamp? Why do you rise early? Why do you write so many books, that no one of us may be deceived about the gods and believe that they take care of men; or that no one may suppose the nature of good to be other than pleasure? For if this is so, lie down and sleep, and lead the life of a worm, of which you judged yourself worthy: eat and drink, and enjoy women, and ease yourself, and snore. And what is it to you, how the rest shall think about these things, whether right or wrong? For what have we to do with you? You take care of sheep because they supply us with wool and milk, and last of all with their flesh. Would it not be a desirable thing if men could be lulled and enchanted by the Stoics, and sleep and present themselves to you and to those like you to be shorn and milked? For this you ought to say to your brother Epicureans: but ought you not to conceal it from others, and particularly before every thing to persuade them, that we are by nature adapted for fellowship, that temperance is a good thing; in order that all things may be secured for you? Or ought we to maintain this fellowship with some and not with others? With whom then ought we to maintain it? With such as on their part also maintain it, or with such as violate this fellowship? And who violate it more than you who establish such doctrines? What then was it that waked Epicurus from his sleepiness, and compelled him to write what he did write?

After two weeks came the first letter from Alexander. Tatiasha, Can there be anything harder than this? Missing you is a physical aching that grips me early in the morning and does not leave me, not even as I draw my last waking breath. My solace in these waning empty summer days is the knowledge that you’re safe, and alive, and healthy, and that the worst that you have to go through is serfdom for four well-meaning old women. The wood piles I’ve left are the lightest in the front. The heaviest ones are for the winter. Use them last, and if you need help carrying them, God help me, ask Vova. Don’t hurt yourself. And don’t fill the water pails all the way to the top. They’re too heavy. Getting back was rough, and as soon as I came back, I was sent right out to the Neva, where for six days we planned our attack and then made a move in boats across the river and were completely crushed in two hours. We didn’t stand a chance. The Germans bombed the boats with the Vanyushas, their version of my rocket launcher, the boats all sank. We were left with a thousand fewer men and were no closer to crossing the river. We’re now looking at other places we can cross. I’m fine, except for the fact that it’s rained here for ten days straight and I’ve been hip deep in mud for all that time. There is nowhere to sleep, except in the mud. We put our trench coats down and hope it stops raining soon. All black and wet, I almost felt sorry for myself until I thought of you during the blockade. I’ve decided to do that from now on. Every time I think I have it so tough, I’m going to think of you burying your sister in Lake Ladoga. I wish you had been given a lighter cross than Leningrad to carry through your life. Things are going to be relatively quiet here for the next few weeks, until we regroup. Yesterday a bomb fell in the commandant’s bunker. The commandant wasn’t there at the time. Yet the anxiety doesn’t go away. When is it going to come again? I play cards and soccer. And I smoke. And I think of you. I sent you money. Go to Molotov at the end of August. Don’t forget to eat well, my warm bun, my midnight sun, and kiss your hand for me, right in the palm and then press it against your heart. Alexander Tatiana read Alexander’s letter a hundred times, memorizing every word. She slept with her face on the letter, which renewed her strength.

In the deep woods of the far North, under feathery leaves of fern, was a great fairyland of merry elves, sometimes called forest brownies. These elves lived joyfully. They had everything at hand and did not need to worry much about living. Berries and nuts grew plentiful in the forest. Rivers and springs provided the elves with crystal water. Flowers prepared them drink from their flavorful juices, which the munchkins loved greatly. At midnight the elves climbed into flower cups and drank drops of their sweet water with much delight. Every elf would tell a wonderful fairy tale to the flower to thank it for the treat. Despite this abundance, the pixies did not sit back and do nothing. They tinkered with their tasks all day long. They cleaned their houses. They swung on tree branches and swam in forested streams. Together with the early birds, they welcomed the sunrise, listened to the thunder growling, the whispering of leaves and blades of grass, and the conversations of the animals. The birds told them about warm countries, sunbeams whispered of distant seas, and the moon spoke of treasures hidden deeply in the earth. In winter, the elves lived in abandoned nests and hollows. Every sunny day they came out of their burrows and made the forest ring with their happy shouts, throwing tiny snowballs in all directions and building snowmen as small as the pinky finger of a little girl. The munchkins thought they were giants five times as large as them. With the first breath of spring, the elves left their winter residences and moved to the cups of the snowdrop flowers. Looking around, they watched the snow as it turned black and melted. They kept an eye on the blossoming of hazel trees while the leaves were still sleeping in their warm buds. They observed squirrels moving their last winter supplies from storage back to their homes. Gnomes welcomed the birds coming back to their old nests, where the elves lived during winters. Little by little, the forest once more grew green. One moonlight night, elves were sitting at an old willow tree and listening to mermaids singing about their underwater kingdom. “Brothers! Where is Murzilka? He has not been around for a long time!” said one of the elves, Father Beardie, who had a long white beard. He was older than others and well respected in his striped stocking cap. “I’m here,” a snotty voice arose, and Murzilka himself, nicknamed Feather Head, jumped from the top of the tree. All the brothers loved Murzilka, but thought he was lazy, as he actually was. Also, he loved to dress in a tailcoat, tall black hat, boots with narrow toes, a cane and a single eyeglass, being very proud of that look. “Do you know where I’m coming from? The very Arctic Ocean!” roared he. Usually, his words were hard to believe. That time, though, his announcement sounded so marvelous that all elves around him were agape with wonder. “You were there, really? Were you? How did you get there?” asked the sprites. “As easy as ABC! I came by the fox one day and caught her packing her things to visit her cousin, a silver fox who lives by the Arctic Ocean. “Take me with you,” I said to the fox. “Oh, no, you’ll freeze there! You know, it’s cold there!” she said. “Come on.” I said. “What are you talking about? What cold? Summer is here.” “Here we have summer, but there they have winter,” she answered. “No,” I thought. “She must be lying because she does not want to give me a ride.” Without telling her a word, I jumped upon her back and hid in her bushy fur, so even Father Frost could not find me. Like it or not, she had to take me with her. We ran for a long time. Another forest followed our woods, and then a boundless plain opened, a swamp covered with lichen and moss. Despite the intense heat, it had not entirely thawed. “This is tundra,” said my fellow traveler. “Tundra? What is tundra?” asked I. “Tundra is a huge, forever frozen wetland covering the entire coast of the Arctic Ocean.

One should wait, and gather meaning and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, at the very end, one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For verses are not feelings, as people imagine – those one has early enough; they are experiences. In order to write a single line, one must see a great many cities, people and things, have an understanding of animals, sense how it is to be a bird in flight, and know the manner in which the little flowers open every morning. In one's mind there must be regions unknown, meetings unexpected and long-anticipated partings, to which one can cast back one's thoughts – childhood days that still retain their mystery, parents inevitably hurt when one failed to grasp the pleasure they offered (and which another would have taken pleasure in), childhood illnesses beginning so strangely with so many profound and intractable transformations, days in peacefully secluded rooms and mornings beside the sea, and the sea itself, seas, nights on journeys that swept by on high and flew past filled with stars – and still it is not enough to be able to bring all this to mind. One must have memories of many nights of love, no two alike; of the screams of women in labour; and of pale, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been with the dying, have sat in a room with the dead with the window open and noises coming in at random. And it is not yet enough to have memories. One has to be able to forget them, if there are a great many, and one must have great patience, to wait for their return. For it is not the memories in themselves that are of consequence. Only when they are become the very blood within us, our every look and gesture, nameless and no longer distinguishable from our inmost self, only then, in the rarest of hours, can the first word of a poem arise in their midst and go out from among them. 

With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

Wilderness by Carl Sandburg There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross. There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis. There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so. There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

DECEMBER 30 Joy Is Your Next Lesson Learning compassion, understanding love, and experiencing joy. That’s our purpose, our reason for being here. That’s our true mission on this planet. Learning compassion may have been difficult, because in order to feel compassion for others without judging, we had to go through difficult times ourselves. Times when despite our best efforts we couldn’t help ourselves, times when despite our searching we couldn’t find the answers. As many say, it is usually our own pain and problems that makes us compassionate. Understanding love may have taken many years, many heartbreaks, and much searching and grasping until we discovered that the key to love was our own heart. Until we discovered that love wasn’t exactly what we thought or hoped it would be. Now it’s different. And better. Don’t give up. Don’t stop now. Don’t let the residue, the pain from the early parts of your journey, stop you from going forward. We first had to learn about compassion and love in order to learn joy. The hard work is done. Now you have reached your reward. Now it is time to learn joy. DECEMBER 31 Honor the Ending “How was your trip?” a friend asked, as my trip drew to a close. I thought for a moment, then the answer came easily. “It had its ups and downs,” I said. “There were times I felt exhilarated and sure I was on track. Other days I felt lost. Confused. I’d fall into bed at night certain that this whole trip was a mistake and a waste. But I’d wake up in the morning, something would happen, and I’d see how I’d been guided all along.” The journey of a year is drawing to a close. Cherish the moments, all of them, even the ups and downs. Cherish the places you’ve visited, the people you’ve seen. Say good-bye to those whose journeys have called them someplace else. Know you can always call them back by thinking loving thoughts. Know all those you love will be there for you when you need them most. Honor the lessons you’ve learned, and the people who helped you learn them. Honor the journey your soul mapped out for you. Trust all the places you’ve been. Make a scrapbook in your heart to help you remember. Look back for a moment. Reflect in peace. Then let this year draw to a close. All parts of the journey are sacred and holy. You’ve learned that by now. Take time to honor this ending—though it’s never really the end. Go to sleep tonight. When you wake up tomorrow a new adventure will begin. Remember the words you were told when this last adventure began, the words whispered quietly to your heart: Let the journey unfold. Let it be magical. The way has been prepared. People will be expecting you. Yes, you are being led.

Marlboro Man’s call woke me up the next morning. It was almost eleven. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?” I hopped out of bed, blinking and stumbling around my room. “Who me? Oh, nothing.” I felt like I’d been drugged. “Were you asleep?” he said. “Who, me?” I said again, trying to snap out of my stupor. I was stalling, trying my darnedest to get my bearings. “Yes. You,” he said, chuckling. “I can’t believe you were asleep!” “I wasn’t asleep! I was…I just…” I was a loser. A pathetic, late-sleeping loser. “You’re a real go-getter in the mornings, aren’t you?” I loved it when he played along with me. I rubbed my eyes and pinched my own cheek, trying to wake up. “Yep. Kinda,” I answered. Then, changing the subject: “So…what are you up to today?” “Oh, I had to run to the city early this morning,” he said. “Really?” I interrupted. The city was over two hours from his house. “You got an early start!” I would never understand these early mornings. When does anyone ever sleep out there? Marlboro Man continued, undaunted. “Oh, and by the way…I’m pulling into your driveway right now.” Huh? I ran to my bathroom mirror and looked at myself. I shuddered at the sight: puffy eyes, matted hair, pillow mark on my left cheek. Loose, faded pajamas. Bag lady material. Sleeping till eleven had not been good for my appearance. “No. No you’re not,” I begged. “Yep. I am,” he answered. “No you’re not,” I repeated. “Yes. I am,” he said. I slammed my bathroom door and hit the lock. Please, Lord, please, I prayed, grabbing my toothbrush. Please let him be joking. I brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn’t I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn’t fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots. The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. “Hey,” I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn’t he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn’t he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic. “Oh, hello,” I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn’t I have any respect for myself? I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. “What’re you doing in there?” I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans. “Hiding,” I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist. “Well, c’mere,” he said softly.

Syn pulled his boxers on and quietly left the bedroom, walking angrily to the kitchen. He turned the corner and wanted to throw a shit-fit at the sight before him. Day was standing at his stove loading some type of egg dish onto a plate before turning and setting it in front of God. God folded down one side of his newspaper, peering at Syn from behind it. “Well good morning, sunshine,” Day said way too cheerily for five-fucking-a.m. “We brought breakfast.” Syn clenched his jaw, trying not to yell at his superior officers. “Have you two lost your fuckin’ minds? Come on. It’s, it’s ... early.” Syn turned his wrist, forgetting he didn’t have his watch on yet. “Damn, you guys are always at the office, or at a crime scene, or over fucking here at god-awful hours.” “Oh, it’s early?” Day said disbelievingly. God shrugged like he hadn’t realized either. “Seriously. When the fuck do you guys sleep?” “Never,” God said nonchalantly. “When do you fuck?” Syn snapped. “Always,” Day quipped. “Just did thirty minutes ago. Nice couch by the way, real comfy, sorry for the stain.” Syn tiredly flipped Day off. “Don’t be pissed,” Day sing-songed. “A dab of Shout will get that right out.” Syn rubbed angrily at his tired eyes, growling, “Day.” “He’s not in a joking mood, sweetheart,” God said from behind his paper. “You know we didn’t fuck on your couch so calm the hell down. Damn you’re moody in the morning. Unless ... We weren’t interrupting anything, were we? So, how’s porn boy?” God’s gruff voice filled the kitchen, making Syn cringe. “First of all. Don’t fucking call him that, ever, and damnit God. Lower your voice. Shit. He’s still asleep,” Syn berated his Lieutenant, who didn’t look the slightest bit fazed by Syn’s irritation. “You guys could let him sleep, he’s had a rough night, ya know.” Day leaned his chest against God’s large back, draping his arms over his shoulders. “Oh damn, what kind of friends are we? It was rough, huh?” Day looked apologetic. “Yes, it was, Day. He just–” “Try water-based lube next time,” Day interrupted, causing God to choke on his eggs. “Day, fuck.” Syn tried not to grin, but when he thought about it, it really was funny. “I knew I’d get you to smile. Have some breakfast Sarge, we gotta go question the crazy chicks. You know how much people feel like sharing when they’ve spent a night in jail.” “Damn. Alright, just let me–” “Wow. Something smells great.” Furi’s deep voice reached them from down the hall as he made his way to the kitchen. “You cook babe? Who knew? I’ll have the Gladiator portion.” Furi used his best Roman accent as he sauntered into the kitchen with his hands on hips and his head high. Syn turned just as Furi noticed God and Day. “Oh, fuck, shit, Jesus Christ!” Furi stumbled, his eyes darting wildly between all of them. “Damn, I’m so sorry.” Furi looked at Syn trying to gauge exactly how much he’d fucked up just now. Syn smiled at him and Furi immediately lost the horrified expression. Syn held his hand out and mouthed to him 'it's okay.