Stark Beauty Quotes

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.

He is Jason and Hercules and Perseus---a figure so strong and beautiful and heroic that the blood of the gods must flow through him, because how else could a being so fine exist in this world?

I wonder if the world’s fascination has less to do with the flower itself, and more with the muck that it flourishes in. The Lotus flower is of an unparalleled beauty in its elegance and grace, yet its’ origins are of an environment that is a stark contrast. We cannot help but ponder such strange juxtaposition. However, there is something telling in this natural contrast between the flower and its environment: we are meant to grow, like the Lotus, and not dirty our hands in the mud that surrounds us.

..., It'd taken her several seconds to react to the sight of them together. She'd been almost hypnotized by the scene as Lothaire drank. Chase's masculine face had been tense, his gray eyes focused on the ground. Lothaire's face had been starkly beautiful, his pale blond hair brushing Chase's shoulder. Light and dark. One terrible, one tragic. And Lothaire had been... hard. "Oh, gods!" She cried as she ran back along the trail. Hot poker for my eyes! Hot poker!

BEAUTIFUL is stark, disquieting and, quite simply, riveting. Amy Reed is an author to keep on your radar.

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

There was a moment of silence. Something velvety brushed along the walls of his mind. A caress. The beauty of it was in such stark contrast to the ugliness of the torment he suffered. He felt her there with him.

Ultron: Stark asked for a savior, and settled for a slave. The Vision: I suppose we're both disappointments. Ultron: [laughs] I suppose we are. The Vision: Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites and try to control what won't be. But there is grace in their failings. I think you missed that. Ultron: They're doomed! The Vision: Yes... but a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts. It is a privilege to be among them. Ultron: You're unbelievably naïve. The Vision: Well, I was born yesterday.

He is power and poetry, grace and perfection, and I feel my body tighten in response to the beauty that is Damien.

If you have been afraid that your love of beautiful flowers and the flickering flame of the candle is somehow less spiritual than living in starkness and ugliness, remember that He who created you to be creative gave you the things with which to make beauty and the sensitivity to appreciate and respond to His creation.

This person had arrived, he had illuminated her, he had ensorcelled her with notions of miracle and beauty, he had both understood and misunderstood her, he had married her, he had broken her heart, he had looked upon her with those sad and hopeless eyes, he had accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life- that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!

The mountains were so wild and so stark and so very beautiful that I wanted to cry. I breathed in another wonderful moment to keep safe in my heart.

When I moved, the broker had told me there was something good for the brain about living near the sea, something about ions. But I often felt like the water was insulting me, like, "I'm beautiful and endless—what are you doing with your life?

I love seasons... But, I must admit-- at the risk of offending the others-- autumn is my very favorite one, as all masks and fancy costumes turn fire and then are shorn, when all illusions fall away, and the beauty of stark reality is fully revealed.

Quietly, Miss Alice was demonstrating this God of love and beauty too — in small ways and in large. For a few, the concept that life did not have to be all starkness and misery was slowly taking root. Tentatively, timidly – -constantly encouraged by Miss Alice — some of the women were at last reaching out for light and beauty and joy.

Autumn, when, ultimately, all illusions fall away and are cast aside, leaving the trees and hills and roadways--the very earth itself--laid bare and open, stark realities fully revealed. You cannot move forward in the real world if you cannot see the real world. You cannot find the beauty in the world if all you see is its adornment.

He was so stark and male and beautiful that she hungered for him. Physically, to be sure. But also from someplace even more intimate, someplace where heart and soul melded into a yearning so strong, that she wanted to weep from it.

Quietly, Miss Alice was demonstrating this God of love and beauty too—in small ways and in large. For a few, the concept that life did not have to be all starkness and misery was slowly taking root. Tentatively, timidly—constantly encouraged by Miss Alice—some of the women were at last reaching out for light and beauty and joy.

I have a perfectly romantic and no doubt untrue vision of you in my mind – stamping out the hops in a great vat in Kent – stark naked, brown as a satyr, and very beautiful. Don't tell me this is all illusion [...]

You’re beautiful.” His words warmed her skin and tugged at her heart, and this time she believed he meant what he said. He rested his forehead against her, his dark hair in stark contrast to her white flesh. “I knew you would be. I’ve always known. Always.

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY. Jealousy, that most demeaning and debilitating of emotions. Jealousy, which can double the strength of the love upon which it is based, but whilst doubling it, warp and pervert it, untill it is no longer recognizable as the thing of beauty it once was. Jealous love is no more like true love than Mr Hyde was like Dr Jekyll or a stagnant swamp is like a freshwater lake.

How could a woman who was that beautiful, who smelled that good, who had such perfectly lovely teeth and bright eyes, be so thoroughly, completely, entirely, stark raving mad?" ~ Robert Cameron

I am sorry," I whispered to Reyes. He wrapped his long fingers around my neck and buried his face in my hair. He smelled like a lightening storm. His emotions electricity. His body the desert after a rain. Fresh. Starkly beautiful. Dangerous. "Are you okay?" he asked, his breath on my neck. "I am now.

The night following the reading, Gansey woke up to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn’t certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved. Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. “Make it stop,” he said. Ronan’s room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same weak, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he’d seen a scythe. The ragged sound cut through the apartment again. “What fresh hell is this?” Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air. Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted back, beak agape. “I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant,” Ronan said. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand. “I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping.” Ronan shrugged. “Perhaps for you.” “Not tonight. Your pterodactyl woke me. Why is it making that sound?” In response, Ronan dipped the tweezers into a plastic baggy on the blanket in front of him. Gansey wasn’t certain he wanted to know what the gray substance was in the tweezers’ grasp. As soon as the raven heard the rustle of the bag, it made the ghastly sound again—a rasping squeal that became a gurgle as it slurped down the offering. At once, it inspired both Gansey’s compassion and his gag reflex. “Well, this is not going to do,” he said. “You’re going to have to make it stop.” “She has to be fed,” Ronan replied. The ravel gargled down another bite. This time it sounded a lot like vacuuming potato salad. “It’s only every two hours for the first six weeks.” “Can’t you keep her downstairs?” In reply, Ronan half-lifted the little bird toward him. “You tell me.

The palace was beautiful and cold. Each room was different, displaying one rich color after another. Wide pillars and reliefs decorated each room, quartz giving way to marble, marble giving way to onyx, malachite, and granite. While the memory of Mount Olympus from her one childhood visit was hazy, she most clearly remembered the stark white walls and absence of color. The Palace of Hades was its opposite and spoke to its master's dominion over everything that lay within the earth.

Of one thing, though, she was sure: "I want to travel," she confessed. Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her, the pages going by so fast, her heart in her chest - she couldn't stop... And pictures of the chocolaty Amazon, of stark Patagonia in the National Geographics, a transparent butterfly snail in the sea, even of an old Japanese house slumbering in the snow... - She found they affected her so much she could often hardly read the accompanying words - the feeling they created was so exquisite, the desire so painful.

So there is magic beyond the Wall after all. He found himself thinking of his sisters, perhaps because he’d dreamed of them last night. Sansa would call this an enchantment, and tears would fill her eyes at the wonder of it...

But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered – by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life.

You don’t have to be a seer to know life is kind to no woman, even those who are blessed with beauty.

His stark beauty was the least of his eminence. His stature, that self-assuredness, that ability to handle anything or anyone was what made him so enigmatic.

He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face. She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, what's his name, the one with the underwear glued on. She said, Better to get it over with when she's young. He said, All right but don't let me see it. She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and she'd been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell. He said, I guess we're safe.

I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.' I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills. "Come on," said Stephen. "It's beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas." We crammed into Burns's small car, and went back to our hotel. ("The Chamois")

The histories and tragedies of Shakespeare that Lincoln loved most dealt with themes that would resonate to a president in the midst of civil war: political intrigue, the burdens of power, the nature of ambition, the relationship of leaders to those they governed. The plays illuminated with stark beauty the dire consequences of civil strife, the evils wrought by jealousy and disloyalty, the emotions evoked by the death of a child, the sundering of family ties or love of country.

and we walked out into the sun. She was just as I had remembered her from seventy years earlier, when, aged five, I was dropped into an open cockpit at Hawkinge field and became mesmerized by the power and beauty of the Supermarine Spitfire. The long, lean lines, only slightly degraded by the bubble Perspex dome behind the pilot’s cockpit; the recognizable-anywhere elliptical wings, the genius of designer R. J. Mitchell. The four-bladed propeller, stark against the Kentish late-summer sky the same cerulean blue it had been in the summer of 1944. That was when I swore my little boy’s oath; that one day I, too, would fly a Spitfire.

Just four or five hours later we begin to see a country whose beauty penetrates our bones. I say beauty I mean beauty. Oftentimes in America you could go stark mad from the ugliness of things. Grass that goes for a thousand miles and never a hill to break it. I ain't saying there ain't beauty on the plains when well there is. But you ain't long travelling on the plains when you begin to feel clear loco. You can rise up out of your saddle and sort of look down on yourself riding, it's as if the stern and relentless monotony makes you die, come back to life, and die again. Your brain is molten in its bowl of bones and you just seeing atrocious wonders everywhere. The mosquitoes have your hide for supper and you are one hallucinating lunatic then. But now in the far distance we see a land begin to be suggested as if maybe a man was out there painting with a huge brush.

I have always loved simplicity. With you, everything’s black and white, Richie had said, like an accusation; but the truth is that almost every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one. In these rooms, the world’s vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil. To me, these rooms are beautiful. I go into them the way a boxer goes into the ring: intent, invincible, home.

The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos. Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end. In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the other in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular. Their reason, their very eyes and ears were fixed irrevocably in the confines of those stern and ancient rhythms – the world, in fact, was not their home, at least the world as I knew it – and far from being occasional visitors to this land which I myself knew only as an admiring tourist, they were pretty much its permanent residents, as permanent as I suppose it was possible for them to be. Ancient Greek is a difficult language, a very difficult language indeed, and it is eminently possible to study it all one's life and never be able to speak a word; but it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry's calculated, formal English, the English of a well-educated foreigner, as compared with the marvelous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek – quick, eloquent, remarkably witty. It was always a wonder to me when I happened to hear him and Julian conversing in Greek, arguing and joking, as I never once heard either of them do in English; many times, I've seen Henry pick up the telephone with an irritable, cautious 'Hello,' and may I never forget the harsh and irresistible delight of his 'Khairei!' when Julian happened to be at the other end.

I had never felt more alive, more happy to be living in the moment. My suffering stood on the horizon, like the mountain, contrasting comfort. It stood starkly against familiarity, above old limitations, and towered over complacency. The mountains added the beauty and depth to the landscape around me. I was pushing into a totally new realm and pushing towards my dream of testing my limits. It did not feel pleasant, not in this hour, but I forced myself to run the last mile.

ON A DAY LATE THAT JANUARY, I READ AGAIN “EAST Coker” by the poet T. S. Eliot, and saw something that I had forgotten: the stark but beautiful metaphor by which he described God as a wounded surgeon whose bleeding hands apply a scalpel to his patients so that “Beneath the bleeding hands we feel / The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.

The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such. But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few... Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived! Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity. Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time. Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one.

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words. This

Louise Glück’s Ararat dissects family relationships in starkly beautiful poems.

it was the ugliness of character, which is as attractive as beauty. His

I slowly brushed one finger along the edge of the closest feather as he silently watched me. “You’re beautiful,” I admitted. He nodded. “I know.” I burst out laughing,

I was talking out of my arse at this point. My explanation sounded artsy-fartsy at best and delusional mumbo jumbo at worst, but that was the beauty of being a musician. No one could dispute your process, even if it essentially involved sitting on a Chinese takeout joint’s rooftop, stark naked, balancing a fruit bowl on your head while singing “We Are the World”—

In Antartica, The Wright and half a dozen other valleys in the Central Transantarctic Mountains are collectively referred to as the dry valleys. It has not rained here in two million years. No animal abides, no plant grows. A persistent, sometimes ferocious wind has stripped the country to stone and gravel, to streamers of sand. The huge valleys stand stark as empty fjords. You look in vain for any conventional sign of human history- the vestige of a protective wall, a bit of charcoal, a discarded arrowhead. Nothing. There is no history, until you bore into the layers of rock or until the balls of your fingertips run the rim of a partially exposed fossil. At the height of the austral summer, in December, you smell nothing but the sunbeaten stone. In a silence dense as water, your eye picks up no movement but the sloughing of sand, seeking its angle of repose. On the flight in from New Zealand it had occurred to me, from what I had read and heard, that Antarctica retained Earth’s primitive link, however tenuous, with space, with the void that stretched out to Jupiter and Uranus. At the seabird rookeries of the Canadian Arctic or on the grasslands of the Serengeti, you can feel the vitality of the original creation; in the dry valleys you sense sharply what came before. The Archeozoic is like fresh spoor here.

The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores; of tense negotiations with an ocean that gives much but demands more. Every year the raw rim that is this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. This place roils with power and a sometimes terrible beauty. The coast remains youthful, daring, uncertain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk; in a way, we're all thrill seekers here.

But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered – by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.

When I got to Crude Sciences at the end of the day, Dante was waiting for me at our table. This time, with no Latin book, no journal. “Hello,” he said, pulling my chair out for me. Surprised, I sat down next to him, trying not to stare at his perfectly formed arms. “Hi,” I said, with an attempt at nonchalance. “How are you?” I could feel his eyes on me. “Fine,” I said carefully, as Professor Starking handed out our lab assignments. Dante frowned. “Not very talkative today, I see.” I thrust a thermometer into the muddy water of the fish tank in front of us, which was supposed to represent an enclosed ecosystem. “So now you want to talk? Now that you’ve finished your Latin homework?” After a prolonged period of silence, he spoke. “It was research.” “Research on what?” “It doesn’t matter anymore.” I threw him a suspicious look. “Why’s that?” “Because I realized I wasn’t paying attention to the right thing.” “Which is?” I asked, looking back at the board as I smoothed out the hem of my skirt. “You.” My lips trembled as the word left his mouth. “I’m not a specimen.” “I just want to know you.” I turned to him, wanting to ask him a million questions. I settled for one. “But I can’t know anything about you?” Dante leaned back in his chair. “My favorite author is Dante, obviously,” he said, his tone mocking me. “Though I’m partial to the Russians. I’m very fond of music. All kinds, really, though I especially enjoy Mussorgsky and Stravinsky or anything involving a violin. They’re a bit dark, no? I used to like opera, but I’ve mostly grown out of it. I have a low tolerance for hot climates. I’ve never enjoyed dessert, though I once loved cherries. My favorite color is red. I often take long walks in the woods to clear my head. As a result, I have a unique knowledge of the flora and fauna of North American. And,” he said, his eyes burning through me as I pretended to focus on our lab, “I remember everything everyone has ever told me. I consider it a special talent.” Overwhelmed by the sudden influx of information, I sat there gaping, unsure of how to respond. Dante frowned. “Did I leave something out?

way for new, winter taking away the remnants of the old to clear room for the young growth. Life, in other words, in all its fierce beauty and stark routine. All things went to the soil eventually. It was the way of life.

The sun appeared between the twin spires of the cathedral as its light reflected off the crescent and star that rose out of the dome on top of the mosque. It was beautiful, and surreal. In one instant, the bells rang out from the cathedral and if I closed my eyes then I could easily imagine that I was back home in Europe, but in the next, the call to morning prayer sounded from the mosque, and it was a stark reminder of how far away I actually was from my true home.

It is a remarkable fact that the people who do things by hand still find time to add to their work some elaboration of mere beauty which makes it a joy to look on, while our machine-made tools, which could do so at much less cost, are too utilitarian to afford any ornament. It used to give me daily pleasure in Teheran to see the sacks in which refuse is carried off the streets woven with a blue and red decorative pattern: but can one imagine a borough council in Leeds or Birmingham expressing a delicate fancy of this kind? Beauty, according to these, is what one buys for the museum: pots and pans, taps and door-handles, though one has to look at them twenty times a day, have no call to be beautiful. So we impoverish our souls and keep our lovely things for rare occasions, even as our lovely thoughts - wasting the most of life in pondering domestic molehills or the Stock Exchange, among objects as ugly as the less attractive forms of sin.

I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profilgate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot-tittle in any conceivably definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) … (g). Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous? Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not. But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that’s the child’s view of himself? ...I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not right, is the only way to put it. Something creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface.

...(in the past I would listen to a record three, five, ten times running, waiting for something that never happened). A book offers more deliverance, more escape, more fulfilment of desire. In songs one remains locked in desire. (The lyrics are not that important, only the melody matters; so I understood nothing of what the Platters or the Beatles were saying.) There are no places, no scenes, no characters, only oneself and one’s longing. Yet the very starkness and paucity of music allow me to recall a whole episode of my life and the girl I used to be when I listen to I’m Just a Dancing Partner thirty years later. Whereas the beauty and fullness of The Beautiful Summer and In Search of Lost Time, which I have reread two or three times, can never give me back my life.

There was colour everywhere you looked. Colour and beauty and she understood how desperately Lockie would have missed his home. Under the table in that cold stark kitchen he would have held on to what he had known all his life and it would have helped him hold on to himself. That was what you did when you couldn’t see a way out; you held on to the past, hoping it would become the future. You grabbed on to the good stuff and tried to believe that everything would be okay again. It was stupid but it was human nature.

I want to hold you close, to cherish and protect you, to draw you in until we are so close that I am lost within you, I want to take you to bed to watch the way your skin tightens benneth my fingers the way your body awakens under my touch. I want to trail kisses over you until you are lost in so much pleasure that way you don't know where you end and I begin.I want to tie you up and f__k you until there is no doubt that you are mine. I want to dress you up and take you out and show you off this beautiful, vibrant, brilliant woman. Everything I have built, all my companies, all my billions, they have no value compared to you. So no Nikki I will not take chances with your safety. I will not fight. I will not be defied. You do not want to move in with me thats fine. I will move in with you!

It seemed for a moment as if something was there, loitering between the knurled and towering cherry trees, a flash of a presence as stark as the sight of the snow against their bare branches and cracked, piceous bark. Unblinking, I watched the edge of the lake, waiting for it to reappear, but whatever it had been was gone, vanished under cover of a willow tree, lofty and dense, rearing over the lake, its branches dripping all the way to the ground. The tree’s lament had been transformed into a thing of such beauty I was tempted to go and hide within it.

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope -- not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feathers? Why? You must tell me, because I've never been able to understand it.

People fear Him [Death] - wrongly. They see punishment and starkness in Death, yet there is beauty as well. People are afraid of what they do not understand, and since they have abandoned the old ways, they no longer understand Death and His true place - His true purpose - in the world.

Hell...” His voice was thick, rough. “Mallory, you’re...” “What?” I whispered, feeling my body burn for two very different reasons. “You’re beautiful.” His gaze dipped, tracking the lacy edges of the bra. “Never thought I’d see you like this. So freaking glad I have. You’re so beautiful, Mallory.

I ate lunch with Keira today. Second day in a row,” I told him, then winced at how stupid that sounded. Rider’s grin turned into a full smile, transforming his handsome face into the kind of masculine beauty that was like a punch to the chest. “That’s really good, Mallory.” His voice dropped as he reached over, curving his hand over my arm. There was a near electric rush from his touch. “I’m proud of you. For real.” Giddiness surrounded my heart as I stared at his large hand, darker than my own. He knew how big that was, and I didn’t feel so idiotic. He got it. He got me. And that meant the entire universe to me.

So what happened?" "I don't know." Another glance to ensure his continued state of Not Looking, and then I rip off my clothes in one fast swoop. I am now officially stark naked in the room with the most beautiful boy I know. Funny,but this isn't how I imagined this moment. No.Not funny.One hundred percent the exact opposite of funny. "I think I maybe,possibly, vaguely remember hitting the snooze button." I jabber to cover my mortification. "Only I guess it was the off button.But I had the alarm on my phone set,too, so I don't know what happened." Underwear,on. "Did you turn the ringer back on last night?" "What?" I hop into my jeans, a noise he seems to determinedly ignore.His ears are apple red. "You went to see a film,right? Don't you set your mobile to silent at the theater?" He's right.I'm so stupid. If I hadn't taken Meredith to A Hard Day's Night, a Beatles movie I know she loves, I would have never turned it off. We'd already be in a taxi to the airport. "The taxi!" I tug my sweater over my head and look up to find myself standing across from a mirror. A mirror St. Clair is facing. "It's all right," he says. "I told the driver to wait when I came up here. We'll just have to tip him a little extra." His head is still down. I don't think he saw anything.I clear my throat, and he glances up. Our eyes meet in the mirror,and he jumps. "God! I didn't...I mean,not until just now..." "Cool.Yeah,fine." I try to shake it off by looking away,and he does the same. His cheeks are blazing.I edge past him and rinse the white crust off my face while he throws my toothbrush and deodorant and makeup into my luggage, and then we tear downstairs and into the lobby.

If you needed to see someone’s true colors before you could love them, you could never love anyone. For love to exist, people must be able to love lies and masks, veneers and artifice. How many people are loved for who they are? Most people are loved for who they are not! People hide their true colors. They are afraid to show them. They don’t find their true colors beautiful. They find them ugly. They are afraid of them. If your true colors are the colors of the rainbow, what are your false colors? They are the colors of the anti-rainbow. People are broken. Who will fix them? Where is the Cosmic Repair Shop? Don’t worry, mathematics is designed to cure every single problem you have.

There was once a beautiful boy Who cried 'Wolf', every night. He would tell everyone he saw Of the animals azure eyes, The throat-gripping terror and fright. His friends and lovers came in droves With sticks & words, threats and stoves. They loved his beauty and wanted him safe Of the menacing claws, he said lived inside a cave. Every night with will anew, They waited and plotted beatings Black and blue. Nights turned to dusk Lovers to strangers, Days to years, The wolf never came His stories they couldn't bear to hear. So lived the gorgeous boy, Icy winter nights alone, Still muttering about the wolf So beastly and regal, it needed a throne. He spoke about its glistening fur, Razor sharp claws, yellowed breath And treacherous purr. How the wolf would howl every night, At a monstrous moon Far away and stark bright. He heard its padded steps From miles away Horrified by the wildness, Its softly heaving chest would betray. Alone the boy, with the beautiful smile Died In time to realise The wolf only ever howled inside.

I am not a lady I live in an elevator in a big department store America. “Your floor, lady?” “I don't have a floor, I live in the elevator.” “You can't just live in an elevator.” They all say that except for the man from Time magazine who acted very cool. We stop and let people into dresses, better dresses, beauty, and on the top floor, home furnishings and then the credit office, suddenly stark and no nonsense this is it. At each floor I look out at the ladies quietly becoming ladies and I say “huh” reflectively. My hair is long and wild full of little twigs and cockleburrs. I visit the floors only for water. I make my own food from the berries and frightened rabbits— I pray forgive me brother as I eat— that grow wild in the elevator. Once every three months, solstice and equinox, a cop comes and clubs me a little. The man from Time says I articulate my generation something wobble squeegy squiggle pop pop Yesterday pausing at childrens I saw another lady take off all her clothes and go to live in #7. We are waiting to fill all thirteen.

For two years he had lain beside Irene feeling her disease growing like a child of theirs. He had stayed awake in the shadow of her silence, marvelling at the stark untouchable beauty of her stoicism. In the dark her pain had seemed an incandescence. Toward the end, in the intervals when the haze of painkillers lifted, she spoke to him as she never had, lightly, as to another child whom she did not know well but with whom she had been fated to spend a long afternoon. “I think they might have been just kidding us,” she confided one time. “Suppose you don’t get to take a trip up to Heaven?” Or again, “I knew I was boring to you, but I didn’t know how else to be.” In her puzzlement at his tears she would touch his hair, not quite daring to touch his face.

Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with the question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom—commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present—all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness?” To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

The room hushed as Alim introduced the first course, and everyone cooed over their plates---fresh oysters in a pool of black squid ink bouillon, served on stark-white china with a sliver of pickled onion and a bright strip of shaved Scotch bonnet on top. There was a dash of black bouillon inside the oyster shell and a rocket flower on the side, delicate and white. Feyi sipped at the accompanying drink, an expensive champagne with pomegranate seeds in it.

On harsh, frigid January days, when the winds are relentless and the snow piles up around us, I often think of our small feathered friends back on the Third Line. I wonder if the old feeder is still standing in the orchard and if anyone thinks to put out a few crumbs and some bacon drippings for our beautiful, hungry, winter birds. In the stark, white landscape they provided a welcome splash of colour and their songs gave us hope through the long, silent winter.

Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? Heading into my sophomore summer, I applied for two jobs: as an intern at the highly scientific Yerkes Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, and as a prep chef at Sierra Camp, a family vacation spot for Stanford alumni on the pristine shores of Fallen Leaf Lake, abutting the stark beauty of Desolation Wilderness in Eldorado National Forest. The camp’s literature promised, simply, the best summer of your life. I was surprised and flattered to be accepted. Yet I had just learned that macaques had a rudimentary form of culture, and I was eager to go to Yerkes and see what could be the natural origin of meaning itself. In other words, I could either study meaning or I could experience it.

There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about--Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?--we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.

When she opened her eyes, she returned her attention to the candle, still and unmoving even as it burned unbearably bright. And then it did move, dancing and flickering in an unexpected draft. A draft followed by a great woof and a thud as Trotula left the bed, tail wagging madly, and threw herself at the doors that led out to the narrow balcony just off Pippa's bedchamber. Doors once closed, now open, now framing the man Pippa loved, frozen just inside the room, tall and serious and beautifully disheveled. As she watched, he took a deep breath and ran both hands through thick red hair, pushing it off his face, his high cheekbones and long straight nose stark and angled in the candlelight. He was unbearably handsome. She'd never in her life longed for anything the way she longed for him. He'd promised to teach her about temptation and desire and he'd done powerfully well; her heart raced at the sight of him, at the sound of his heavy breath. And yet... she did not know what came next. "You are beautiful," he said. What came next was anything he wished.

Devotees of these two spiritual paths of experience—oneness and goodness—have been at odds for centuries. Proponents of the oneness path have insisted that the goal of spirituality is to reconnect with everlasting eternity. They yearn to taste the quintessence of their being, to transcend time and space, to be unified with the one. In the other camp, advocates of the goodness path have traditionally seen stark choices in the world. They believe we should choose love, compassion, beauty, truth, and altruism over hatred, fear, anger, judgment, and other opposites of goodness. To them, there are constructive forces in the world that are being challenged by destructive ones. Their goal has been to stand their ground and choose to be good above all else. Even with those apparent differences, both paths have found homes within each of the world’s religions. As noted earlier, Hinduism offers the oneness path of Yoga, Judaism offers Kabbalah, Islam offers Sufism, Christianity offers Mysticism, and so on. Whatever the arrangement, the two paths have historically found ways to co-exist.

Do you want me, Shea?” This time his voice was hesitant, as if for all his strength, for all his power, one word from her would bring him crashing down. He was kneeling at her feet, his beloved face— so ravaged by torment, so beautifully male, so sensually Carpathian— staring up at her. He was lost without her; it was there for her to see. Raw. Stark. His total vulnerability. For just one moment the wind seemed to cease, and the storm held itself still as if the very skies were awaiting her answer. “You can’t possibly know how much I want you, Jacques, even if you’re reading my mind.

Pedaling down the maple lined drive, quicksilver temper ebbed, her resilient spirits were lifted with the beauty of the day. The valley was stirring with life. Small clusters of fragile violets and red clover dotted the rolling meadows. Lines of fresh laundry waved in the early breeze. The boundary of mountains was tooped by a winter's coat, not yet the soft, lush green it would be in a month's time, but patched with stark black trees and the intermittent color of pines. Clouds scudded thin and white across the sky, chased by the teasing wind which whispered of spring and fresh blossoms.

Then I saw the figure standing outside my car door: it was Marlboro Man, who’d come outside to greet me. His jeans were clean, his shirt tucked in and starched. I couldn’t yet see his face, though, which was what I wanted most. Getting out of the car, I smiled and looked up, squinting. The western sunset was a backdrop behind his sculpted frame. It was such a beautiful sight, a stark contrast to all the ugliness that had surrounded me that day. He shut the car door behind me and moved in for a hug, which provided all the emotional fuel I needed to continue breathing. Finally, in that instant, I felt like things would be okay.

It was then that the central figure of the gospels, a historical figure whom she deeply revered and sought to imitate, began at rare intervals to flash out at her like live lightning from their pages, frightening her, turning the grave blueprint into a dazzle of reflected fire. Gradually she learned to see that her fear was not of the lightning itself but what it showed her of the nature of love, for it dazzled behind the stark horror of Calvary. At this point, where so many vowed lovers faint and fail, Mary Montague went doggedly on over a period of years that seemed if possible longer and harder than the former period. At some point along the way, she did not know where because the change came so slowly and gradually, she realized that he had got her and got everything. His love held and illumined every human being for whom she was concerned, and whom she served with the profound compassion which was their need and right, held the Cathedral, the city, every flower and leaf and creature, giving it reality and beauty. She could not take her eyes from the incredible glory of his love. As far as it was possible for a human being in this world she had turned from herself. She could say, 'I have been turned,' and did not know how very few can speak these words with truth.

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace. As he stood there, silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Orlando looked at himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discompose, and went presumably, to his bath. We many take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change in sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory - but in the future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’ - her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark spots had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change in sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando has always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

The things that kept them awake in the middle of the night, the things they did underneath the cover of darkness, both dreadful and beautiful, both attractive and repulsive, were revealed in stark clarity to their minds. A harsh reality that intensified sensations with each gust of wind. They shrank from it with frightened whimpers. The setting in each house would have fit perfectly into a post-apocalyptic tale of nuclear holocausts. Shell-shocked expressions gazed into the nothingness. Blankets over faces, silent prayers to the heavens. No curious eyes at the windows, or storm watchers dared to partake. The mere thought of looking out was too much to be borne.

But none of them compared to the dangerous stranger in her room. While the men she was used to were hotter than hell, what they lacked was the fierce aura of power that emanated from this man and his stern, steely features. It was as if he were the deadliest of predators. Feral. That was the only word to do him justice. Surely there wasn’t another soldier in the entire universe who could match him in terms of raw beauty or lethal demeanor. His blond hair was snow white and his features sharp and icy. He wore a pair of black shades that annoyed her since she couldn’t see the upper part of his face or the color of his eyes. Not that it mattered. She saw enough to know that in the land of gorgeous men, he had no competition. As a stark contrast to his white hair, his clothes were a black so deep they seemed to absorb all light, and they were trimmed in silver … No, not silver. Those were weapons tucked into the sleeves and lapels of his ankle-length coat. The left side of it was pulled back, exposing a holstered blaster that was strapped to his left hip. The tall flight boots had silver buckles going up the sides that were fashioned into the image of skulls. At least that’s what she saw at first glance, but as he moved closer she realized those could come off and double as weapons, too. Wow, he was either extremely paranoid or more lethal than a team of League assassins. And that said something.

window of his home on the Missouri River, and Patrick commented that his father’s writing could be compared with nature—a starkly beautiful and complex world that is richly patterned. At that moment two young whitetail bucks ambled up to a willow tree not more than fifteen feet away—a bucolic scene. Patrick moved closer to the window and suggested we watch to see what the two bucks did next. He explained that the annual whitetail rut was just beginning—a time when young males like the two before us typically sparred, instinctual behavior that was a kind of training for when they would compete for a mate. No sooner had he finished his explanation when the two deer squared off and began locking their antlers in playful combat.

As far as socialism, I used to think I was fundamentally opposed to it, but eventually came to realize that wasn't really true, and that what I actually oppose is aggression. Voluntary socialism can be a wonderful way of living for small groups, and most people practice some form of it in their families. Only when imposed on people by force does socialism become evil. One of the beautiful things about a libertarian society is that people could still create socialist communes and be left alone to redistribute resources within them to their hearts' content, so long as no one is forced to join or prevented from leaving. This stands in stark contrast to a state-socialist society, which cannot similarly tolerate peaceful acts of capitalism among consenting participants.

Please,' she says, her head bent. 'Please. You must try to break the curse. I know that you are the queen by right and that you may not want him back, but-' If anything could have increased my astonishment, it was that. 'You think that I'd-' 'I didn't know you, before,' she says, the anguish clear in her voice. There is a hitch in her breath that comes with weeping. 'I thought you were just some mortal.' I have to bite my tongue at that, but I don't interrupt her. 'When you became his seneschal, I told myself that he wanted you for your lying tongue. Or because you'd become biddable, although you never were before. I should have believed you when you told him he didn't know the least of what you could do. 'While you were in exile, I got more of the story out of him. I know you don't believe this, but Cardan and I were friends before we were lovers, before Locke. He was my first friend when I came here from the Undersea. And we were friends, even after everything. I hate that he loves you.' 'He hated it, too,' I say with a laugh that sounds more brittle than I'd like. Nicasia fixes me with a long look. 'No, he didn't.' To that, I can only be silent. 'He frightens the Folk, but he's not what you think he is,' Nicasia says. 'Do you remember the servants that Balekin had? The human servants?' I nod mutely. Of course I remember. I will never forget Sophie and her pockets full of stones. 'They'd go missing sometimes, and there were rumours that Cardan hurt them, but it wasn't true. He'd return them to the mortal world.' I admit, I'm surprised. 'Why?' She throws up a hand. 'I don't know! Perhaps to annoy his brother. But you're human, so I thought you'd like that he did it. And he sent you a gown. For the coronation.' I remember it- the ball gown in the colours of the night, with the stark outlines of trees stitched on it and the crystals for stars. A thousand times more beautiful than the dress I commissioned. I had thought perhaps it came from Prince Dain, since it was his coronation and I'd sworn to be his creature when I'd joined the Court of Shadows. 'He never told you, did he?' Nicasia says. 'So see? Those are two nice things about him you didn't know. And I saw the way you used to look at him when you didn't think anyone was watching you.' I bite the inside of my cheek, embarrassed despite the fact that we were lovers, and wed, and it should hardly be a secret that we like each other. 'So promise me,' she says. 'Promise me you'll help him.' I think of the golden bridle, about the future the stars predicted. 'I don't know how to break the curse,' I say, all the tears I haven't shed welling up in my eyes. 'If I could, do you think i would be at this stupid banquet? Tell me what I must slay, what I must steal, tell me the riddle I must solve or the hag I must trick. Only tell me the way, and I will do it, no matter the danger, no matter the hardship, no matter the cost.' My voice breaks. She gives me a steady look. Whatever else I might think of her, she really does care for Cardan. And as tears roll down my cheeks, to her astonishment, I think she realises I do, too. Much good it does him.

A little drop of Native American blood was exciting and unique. But a full-blooded Native American…she was horrified.” Cecily’s opinion of the legendary Maureen dropped eighty points. She ground her teeth together. She couldn’t imagine anyone being ashamed of such a proud heritage. He looked down at her and laughed despite himself. “I can hear you boiling over. No, you wouldn’t be ashamed of me. But you’re unique. You help, however you can. You see the poverty around you, and you don’t stick your nose up at it. You roll up your sleeves and do what you can to help alleviate it. You’ve made me ashamed, Cecily.” “Ashamed? But, why?” “Because you see beauty and hope where I see hopelessness.” He rubbed his artificial arm, as if it hurt him. “I’ve got about half as much as Tate has in foreign banks. I’m going to start using some of it for something besides exotic liquor. One person can make a difference. I didn’t know that, until you came along.” She smiled and touched his arm gently. “I’m glad.” “You could marry me,” he ventured, looking down at her with a smile. “I’m no bargain, but I’d be good to you. I’d never even drink a beer again.” “You need someone to love you, Colby. I can’t.” He grimaced. “I could say the same thing to you. But I could love you, I think, given time.” “You’d never be Tate.” He drew in a long breath. “Life is never simple. It’s like a puzzle. Just when we think we’ve got it solved, pieces of it fly in all directions.” “When you get philosophical, it’s time to go in. Tomorrow, we have to talk about what’s going on around here. There’s something very shady. Leta and I need you to help us find out what it is.” “What are friends for?” he asked affectionately. “I’ll do the same for you one day.” He didn’t answer her. Cecily had no idea at all how strongly her pert remark about being intimate with Colby had affected Tate. The black-eyed, almost homicidal man who’d come to his door last night had hardly been recognizable as his friend and colleague of many years. Tate had barely been coherent, and both men were exhausted and bloody by the time the fight ended in a draw. Maybe Tate didn’t want to marry Cecily, but Colby knew stark jealousy when he saw it. That hadn’t been any outdated attempt to avenge Cecily’s chastity. It had been revenge, because he thought Colby had slept with her and he wanted to make him pay. It had been jealousy, not protectiveness, the jealousy of a man who was passionately in love; and didn’t even know it.

Our destination or goal is not to arrive at a static, linear version of friendship where we get all of our relationships lined up just so and keep them that way for a lifetime. No, the goal of friendship is to secure ourselves to the sure, steadfast anchor of Christ and, while holding to that anchor, give and receive the gift of friendship as we have opportunity. The goal is to enjoy God together with others and, as we move through life, to sharpen and allow ourselves to be sharpened by friends. We imitate Jesus with one another, willing to face the stark realities and consequences of sin, all the while persevering in our efforts to offer love, grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, comfort, and care to one another. In doing so, we display to one another and the world how God loves and, through this, bring him glory. This is our destination, the point on the map we move toward: bringing God glory.

I lift the lid of the chest. Inside, the air is musty and stale, held hostage for years in its three-foot-by-four-foot tomb. I lean in to survey the contents cautiously, then pull out a stack of old photos tied with twine. On top is a photo of a couple on their wedding day. She's a young bride, wearing one of those 1950's netted veils. He looks older, distinguished- sort of like Cary Grant or Gregory Peck in the old black-and-white movies I used to watch with my grandmother. I set the stack down and turn back to the chest, where I find a notebook, filled with handwritten recipes. The page for Cinnamon Rolls is labeled "Dex's Favorite." 'Dex.' I wonder if he's the man in the photo. There are two ticket stubs from 1959, one to a Frank Sinatra concert, another to the movie 'An Affair to Remember.' A single shriveled rosebud rests on a white handkerchief. A corsage? When I lift it into my hand, it disintegrates; the petals crinkle into tiny pieces that fall onto the living room carpet. At the bottom of the chest is what looks like a wedding dress. It's yellowed and moth-eaten, but I imagine it was once stark white and beautiful. As I lift it, I can hear the lace swishing as if to say, "Ahh." Whoever wore it was very petite. The waist circumference is tiny. A pair of long white gloves falls to the floor. They must have been tucked inside the dress. I refold the finery and set the ensemble back inside. Whose things are these? And why have they been left here? I thumb through the recipe book. All cookies, cakes, desserts. She must have loved to bake. I tuck the book back inside the chest, along with the photographs after I've retied the twine, which is when I notice a book tucked into the corner. It's an old paperback copy of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises.' I've read a little of Hemingway over the years- 'A Moveable Feast' and some of his later work- but not this one. I flip through the book and notice that one page is dog-eared. I open to it and see a line that has been underscored. "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." I look out to the lake, letting the words sink in. 'Is that what I'm trying to do? Get away from myself?' I stare at the line in the book again and wonder if it resonated with the woman who underlined it so many years ago. Did she have her own secret pain? 'Was she trying to escape it just like me?

But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with the question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom—commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present—all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness?” To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger

But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with the question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom—commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present—all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness?” To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food. This, of course, was in stark contrast to what was considered womanly or desirable in the West, especially when I started modeling. To look good in Western clothes you had to be extremely thin. Prior to this, I never thought about my weight except to think it wasn’t ever enough. Then, with modeling, I started depending on my looks to feed myself (though my profession didn’t allow me to actually eat very much). When I started hosting food shows, my career went from fashion to food, from not eating to really eating a lot, to put it mildly. Only this time the opposing demands of having to eat all this food and still look good by Western standards of beauty were off the charts. This tug-of-war was something I would struggle with for most of a decade.

She lifted her lantern high, and he allowed her to free him from the shadows, casting his face in warm, golden light. He had aged marvelously, grown into his long limbs and angled face. Penelope had always imagined that he'd become handsome, but he was more than handsome now... he was nearly beautiful. If not for the darkness that lingered despite the glow of the lantern- something dangerous in the set of his jaw, in the tightness of his brow, in eyes that seemed to have forgotten joy, in lips that seemed to have lost their ability to smile. He'd had a dimple as a child, one that showed itself often and was almost always the precursor to adventure. She searched his left cheek, looking for that telltale indentation. Did not find it. Indeed, as much as Penelope searched this new, hard face, she could not seem to find the boy she'd once known. If not for the eyes, she would not have believed it was him at all. "How sad," she whispered to herself. He heard it. "What?" She shook her head, meeting his gaze, the only thing familiar about him. "He's gone." "Who?" "My friend." She hadn't thought it possible, but his features hardened even more, growing more stark, more dangerous, in the shadows. For one fleeting moment, she thought perhaps she had pushed him too far. He remained still, watching her with that dark gaze that seemed to see everything.

I turned the shower off and, instead of toweling and dressing before the steam on the door mirror cleared, like I normally would, I waited. It was an accident, my beauty revealed to me. I was daydreaming, thinking about the day before, of Trevor and me behind the Chevy, and had stood in the tub with the water off for too long. By the time I stepped out, the boy before the mirror stunned me. Who was he? I touched the face, its sallow cheeks. I felt my neck, the braid of muscles sloped to collarbones that jutted into stark ridges. The scraped-out ribs sunken as the skin tried to fill its irregular gaps, the sad little heart rippling underneath like a trapped fish. The eyes that wouldn’t match, one too open, the other dazed, slightly lidded, cautious of whatever light was given it. It was everything I hid from, everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow. And yet, I stayed. I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself. Seen through a mirror, I viewed my body as another, a boy a few feet away, his expression unmoved, daring the skin to remain as it was, as if the sun, setting, was not already elsewhere, was not in Ohio.

HEXAGON Snowflakes descend purposefully or wistfully but, surrounded by their tiny peers, each is confident they together will soon hide the meadows, driveways, roofs, fences, the stripped gardens. A speck of dust or pollen lofted to the top of the sky encountered a water drop that in the celestial cold adhered and froze, forming an ice crystal which, now weightier than the air it floated on, began to waft downwards, adding water particles as it traveled, six spikes or arms creating a filigree all its own as it passed through differing temperatures and amounts of dampness. Its delicate white intricacy, though, contains an inner space also unique. One offers a forest of snowy evergreens where, as afternoon light dims, a man wearing a homespun hooded garment and bent under a sack thrown over a shoulder plods along a footpath winding uphill between firs and pines. With each step, his breath appears like smoke until he and his burden are lost from view, and a chill wind sways the thin twigs of bushes emerging from drifts beside the track. In that flake is preserved an era in which the body endures and welcomes the simple opposites: icy cold against face skin and eventually a fire’s warmth, sodden feet and, at last, these dried once more, while the eye registers an omnipresent starkness —white fields, white roads, white trees— which, like a minor key, can please the mind. Here is the past returned to Earth by the water that changes form but does not die. In this vision, each frozen tuft among the millions that lower to the ground is a memento mori that affirms: No life is useless or pointless, since each in its turn advances the future. Yet all are swiftly forgotten in the beauty of the falling snow.

Then I saw the figure standing outside my car door: it was Marlboro Man, who’d come outside to greet me. His jeans were clean, his shirt tucked in and starched. I couldn’t yet see his face, though, which was what I wanted most. Getting out of the car, I smiled and looked up, squinting. The western sunset was a backdrop behind his sculpted frame. It was such a beautiful sight, a stark contrast to all the ugliness that had surrounded me that day. He shut the car door behind me and moved in for a hug, which provided all the emotional fuel I needed to continue breathing. Finally, in that instant, I felt like things would be okay. I smiled and acted cheerful, following him into the kitchen and not at all letting on that my day had sucked about as badly as a day could have sucked. I’d never been one to wear my feelings on my sleeve, and I sure wasn’t going to let them splay out on what was merely my sixth date with the sexiest, most masculine man I’d ever met. But I knew I was a goner when Marlboro Man looked at me and asked, “You okay?” You know when you’re not okay, but then someone asks you if you’re okay, and you say you’re okay and act like you’re okay, but then you start realizing you’re not okay? Then you feel your nose start to tingle and your throat start to swell and your chin start to quiver and you tell yourself, In the name of all that is good and holy, do not do this. Do not do this…but you’re powerless to stop it? And you try to blink it away and you finally think you’ve just about got it under control? But then the cowboy standing in front of you smiles gently and says, “You sure?” Those two simple words opened up the Floodgates of Hell. I smiled and laughed, embarrassed, even as two big, thick tears rolled down both my cheeks. Then I laughed again and blew a nice, clear explosion of snot from my nose. Of all the things that had happened that day, that single moment might have been the worst.

Rider made this sound in the back of his throat. It was deep and masculine, part groan and growl, and it made me shiver. He folded one hand along my cheek and lowered his head to mine, but he didn’t kiss me. No. His warm breath glided over my forehead as his hand slid across my cheek, his fingers spreading into my hair at the base. His other hand landed low on my back, and the weight did insane things to my insides. He drew it up my back, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. My eyes fluttered shut as his lips brushed over the curve of my cheek. It was the craziest torture. My entire body tensed, prepared for the moment when his lips met mine. And it was the sweetest pressure, a feather-light brush of his lips over mine. Once. Then twice. I felt the touch everywhere, a jolt to the system that zipped through my veins, and then the pressure increased. Rider kissed me then. It was a real one, soft and beautiful, and when the kiss deepened, it wasn’t a shy one. He knew what he was doing, and even though I didn’t, an innate knowledge told me it didn’t matter. His lips mapped out mine, and my insides were in tight coils. Kissing was awesome. Amazing. Astonishing. I could probably think of a couple of more words to describe it. Kissing blew me away, and when he lifted his mouth, both of us were breathing hard. He rested his forehead against mine. Neither of us spoke for several moments. I still wasn’t thinking. I had no idea how my hands had gotten to Rider’s chest, but his heart pounded under my palm as fast as mine did. My mind was blissfully blank as I breathed in his scent, a mix of his citrusy cologne and the faint trace of paint. “Did you like that?” he asked, dragging his fingers out of my hair and over the line of my jaw. Screaming yes, oh, God, yes, would’ve probably been a little too excessive, so I managed a somewhat subdued, “Yes.” As Rider grinned, his lips brushed mine. “Good. Because I really liked it.

The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers’ shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the green-grocers’! the awful hats in the milliners’! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements, “A Woman’s Love!”, and the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school buildings, expensive pink brick, and graveled playground inside iron railings, all very imposing, and mixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison. Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-do-la exercises and beginning a “sweet children’s song.” Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing... What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will power remained?

Weston, having been born in Chicago, was raised with typical, well-grounded, mid-western values. On his 16th birthday, his father gave him a Kodak camera with which he started what would become his lifetime vocation. During the summer of 1908, Weston met Flora May Chandler, a schoolteacher who was seven years older than he was. The following year the couple married and in time they had four sons. Weston and his family moved to Southern California and opened a portrait studio on Brand Boulevard, in the artsy section of Glendale, California, called Tropico. His artistic skills soon became apparent and he became well known for his portraits of famous people, such as Carl Sandburg and Max Eastman. In the autumn of 1913, hearing of his work, Margrethe Mather, a photographer from Los Angeles, came to his studio, where Weston asked her to be his studio assistant. It didn’t take long before the two developed a passionate, intimate relationship. Both Weston and Mather became active in the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was extremely outgoing and artistic in a most flamboyant way. Her bohemian sexual values were new to Weston’s conventional thinking, but Mather excited him and presented him with a new outlook that he found enticing. Mather was beautiful, and being bisexual and having been a high-class prostitute, was delightfully worldly. Mather's uninhibited lifestyle became irresistible to Weston and her photography took him into a new and exciting art form. As Mather worked and overtly played with him, she presented a lifestyle that was in stark contrast to Weston’s conventional home life, and he soon came to see his wife Flora as a person with whom he had little in common. Weston expanded his horizons but tried to keep his affairs with other women a secret. As he immersed himself further into nude photography, it became more difficult to hide his new lifestyle from his wife. Flora became suspicious about this secret life, but apparently suffered in silence. One of the first of many women who agreed to model nude for Weston was Tina Modotti. Although Mather remained with Weston, Tina soon became his primary model and remained so for the next several years. There was an instant attraction between Tina Modotti, Mather and Edward Weston, and although he remained married, Tina became his student, model and lover. Richey soon became aware of the affair, but it didn’t seem to bother him, as they all continued to remain good friends. The relationship Tina had with Weston could definitely be considered “cheating,” since knowledge of the affair was withheld as much as possible from his wife Flora May. Perhaps his wife knew and condoned this new promiscuous relationship, since she had also endured the intense liaison with Margrethe Mather. Tina, Mather and Weston continued working together until Tina and Weston suddenly left for Mexico in 1923. As a group, they were all a part of the cozy, artsy, bohemian society of Los Angeles, which was where they were introduced to the then-fashionable, communistic philosophy.

That was when it dawned on her--Dom wanted to unearth her secrets. Nancy’s secrets. Just as Jane had feared, he really had deduced that she hid some. A shiver ran down her spine, and she jerked her gaze from him, fighting to hide her consternation. “Merely the same reason I gave you before. Nancy could be in trouble. And it’s your duty as her brother-in-law to keep her safe.” “From what?” he demanded. “From whom? Is there more to this than you’re saying?” Ooh, the fact that he was so determined to unveil the truth about Nancy while hiding his former collusion with her scraped Jane raw. “I could ask the same of you,” she said primly. “You’re obviously holding something back. You have some reason for your determination to believe ill of Nancy. I wonder what that might be.” Two can play your game, Almighty Dom. Hah! He was silent so long that she ventured a glance at him to find him looking rather discomfited. Good! It was about time. “I am merely keeping an open mind about your cousin, which is more than I can say for you,” Dom finally answered. “She isn’t the woman you think she is.” “Because she wouldn’t give in to your advances twelve years ago, you mean?” She would make him admit the truth about that night if it was the last thing she did! “Perhaps that’s why you’re determined to blacken her character. You’re angry that she resisted you and married your brother instead.” “That’s a lie!” When several people on the street turned to look in his direction, Dom lowered his voice. “It wasn’t like that.” She stifled a smile of satisfaction. At last she was getting a reaction from him that was something other than levelheaded logic. “Wasn’t it? If you’d convinced Nancy to marry you, you might not have had to go off to be a Bow Street runner. You could have had an easier life, a better life in high society than you could have had with me if you’d married me. Without being able to access my fortune, I could only have dragged you down.” “You don’t really believe that I wanted to marry her for her money,” he gritted out. “It’s either that or assume that you fell madly in love with her in the few weeks we were apart.” They were nearly to the inn now, so she added a plaintive note to her voice. “Or perhaps it was her you wanted all along. You knew my uncle would never accept a second son as a husband for his rich heiress of a daughter, so you courted me to get close to her. Nancy was always so beautiful, so--” “Enough!” Without warning, he dragged her into one of the many alleyways that crisscrossed York. This one was deeply shadowed, the houses leaning into each other overhead, and as he pulled her around to face him, the brilliance of his eyes shone starkly in the dim light. “I never cared one whit about Nancy.” She tamped down her triumph--he hadn’t admitted the whole truth yet. “It certainly didn’t look that way to me. It looked like you had already forgotten me, forgotten what we meant to each--” “The hell I had.” He shoved his face close to hers. “I never forgot you for one day, one hour, one moment. It was you--always you. Everything I did was for you, damn it. No one else.” The passionate profession threw her off course. Dom had never been the sort to say such sweet things. But the fervent look in his eyes roused memories of how he used to look at her. And his hands gripping her arms, his body angling in closer, were so painfully familiar... “I don’t…believe you,” she lied, her blood running wild through her veins. His gleaming gaze impaled her. “Then believe this.” And suddenly his mouth was on hers.

If you’d convinced Nancy to marry you, you might not have had to go off to be a Bow Street runner. You could have had an easier life, a better life in high society than you could have had with me if you’d married me. Without being able to access my fortune, I could only have dragged you down.” “You don’t really believe that I wanted to marry her for her money,” he gritted out. “It’s either that or assume that you fell madly in love with her in the few weeks we were apart.” They were nearly to the inn now, so she added a plaintive note to her voice. “Or perhaps it was her you wanted all along. You knew my uncle would never accept a second son as a husband for his rich heiress of a daughter, so you courted me to get close to her. Nancy was always so beautiful, so--” “Enough!” Without warning, he dragged her into one of the many alleyways that crisscrossed York. This one was deeply shadowed, the houses leaning into each other overhead, and as he pulled her around to face him, the brilliance of his eyes shone starkly in the dim light. “I never cared one whit about Nancy.” She tamped down her triumph--he hadn’t admitted the whole truth yet. “It certainly didn’t look that way to me. It looked like you had already forgotten me, forgotten what we meant to each--” “The hell I had.” He shoved his face close to hers. “I never forgot you for one day, one hour, one moment. It was you--always you. Everything I did was for you, damn it. No one else.” The passionate profession threw her off course. Dom had never been the sort to say such sweet things. But the fervent look in his eyes roused memories of how he used to look at her. And his hands gripping her arms, his body angling in closer, were so painfully familiar... “I don’t…believe you,” she lied, her blood running wild through her veins. His gleaming gaze impaled her. “Then believe this.” And suddenly his mouth was on hers. This was not what she’d set out to get from him. But oh, the joy of it. The heat of it. His mouth covered hers, seeking, coaxing. Without breaking the kiss, he pushed her back against the wall, and she grabbed for his shoulders, his surprisingly broad and muscular shoulders. As he sent her plummeting into unfamiliar territory, she held on for dear life. Time rewound to when they were in her uncle’s garden, sneaking a moment alone. But this time there was no hesitation, no fear of being caught. Glorying in that, she slid her hands about his neck to bring him closer. He groaned, and his kiss turned intimate. He used lips and tongue, delving inside her mouth in a tender exploration that stunned her. Enchanted her. Confused her. Something both sweet and alien pooled in her belly, a kind of yearning she’d never felt with Edwin. With any man but Dom. As if he sensed it, he pulled back to look at her, his eyes searching hers, full of surprise. “My God, Jane,” he said hoarsely, turning her name into a prayer. Or a curse? She had no time to figure out which before he clasped her head to hold her for another darkly ravishing kiss. Only this one was greedier, needier. His mouth consumed hers with all the boldness of Viking raiders of yore. His tongue drove repeatedly inside in a rhythm that made her feel all trembly and hot, and his thumbs caressed her throat, rousing the pulse there. Thank heaven there was a wall to hold her up, or she was quite sure she would dissolve into a puddle at his feet. Because after all these years apart, he was riding roughshod over her life again. And she was letting him. How could she not? His scent of leather and bergamot engulfed her, made her dizzy with the pleasure of it. He roused urges she’d never known she had, sparked fires in places she’d thought were frozen. Then his hands swept down her possessively as if to memorize her body…or mark it as belonging to him. Belonging to him.