Suggested Song Quotes

The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.

The Day is Done The day is done, and the darkness Falls from the wings of Night, As a feather is wafted downward From an eagle in his flight. I see the lights of the village Gleam through the rain and the mist, And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me That my soul cannot resist: A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain. Come, read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day. Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time. For, like strains of martial music, Their mighty thoughts suggest Life's endless toil and endeavor; And to-night I long for rest. Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start; Who, through long days of labor, And nights devoid of ease, Still heard in his soul the music Of wonderful melodies. Such songs have power to quiet The restless pulse of care, And come like the benediction That follows after prayer. Then read from the treasured volume The poem of thy choice, And lend to the rhyme of the poet The beauty of thy voice. And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.

Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

Dreams are like songs. Their task is not to offer an exact image of the world, but a suggestion of it.

Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.

Words matter, in fact. They're not pointless, as you've suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history. If they were just words, we wouldn't write songs or listen to them. We wouldn't beg to be read to as kids. If they were just words, then stories wouldn't have been around since before we could write. We wouldn't have learned to write. If they were just words, people wouldn't fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, and stop aching because of them." (p. 210) (Henry Jones)

Jack," I said, "why don't you go check on Sam?" Maybe you can advise her on getting through those doors. OR you could sing to her. I know she'd love that." "Yeah? Cool!" Jack zoomed off to serenade Sam, which meant Sam would want to hit me later, except it was Ramadan so she had to be nice to me. Wow, I was a bad person. At the doors, Jack was trying to help by suggesting songs he could sing to inspire new ideas for getting inside: 'Knockin'on Heaven's Door', 'I Got the Keys' or 'Break on Through (to the Other Side)'. "How about none of the above?" Sam said. "'None of the Above' ..." Jack mused. "Is that by Stevie Wonder?" "How's it going guys?" I asked. I didn't know if it was physically possible to strangle a magic sword, but I didn't want to see Sam try.

If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.

There is something quite amazing and monstrous about the education of upper-class women. What could be more paradoxical? All the world is agreed that they are to be brought up as ignorant as possible of erotic matters, and that one has to imbue their souls with a profound sense of shame in such matters until the merest suggestion of such things triggers the most extreme impatience and flight. The "honor" of women really comes into play only here: what else would one not forgive them? But here they are supposed to remain ignorant even in their hearts: they are supposed to have neither eyes nor ears, nor words, nor thoughts for this -- their "evil;" and mere knowledge is considered evil. And then to be hurled as by a gruesome lightning bolt, into reality and knowledge, by marriage -- precisely by the man they love and esteem most! To catch love and shame in a contradiction and to be forced to experience at the same time delight, surrender, duty, pity, terror, and who knows what else, in the face of the unexpected neighborliness of god and beast! Thus a psychic knot has been tied that may have no equal. Even the compassionate curiosity of the wisest student of humanity is inadequate for guessing how this or that woman manages to accommodate herself to this solution of the riddle, and to the riddle of a solution, and what dreadful, far-reaching suspicions must stir in her poor, unhinged soul -- and how the ultimate philosophy and skepsis of woman casts anchor at this point! Afterward, the same deep silence as before. Often a silence directed at herself, too. She closes her eyes to herself. Young women try hard to appear superficial and thoughtless. The most refined simulate a kind of impertinence. Women easily experience their husbands as a question mark concerning their honor, and their children as an apology or atonement. They need children and wish for them in a way that is altogether different from that in which a man may wish for children. In sum, one cannot be too kind about women.

Thank all the gods,” said Sphene. “I was afraid you were going to suggest we sing that song about the thousand eggs.” “A thousand eggs all nice and warm,” I sang. “Crack, crack, crack, a little chick is born. Peep peep peep peep! Peep peep peep peep!” “Why, Fleet Captain,” Translator Zeiat exclaimed, “that’s a charming song! Why haven’t I heard you sing it before now?” I took a breath. “Nine hundred ninety-nine eggs all nice and warm…” “Crack, crack, crack,” Translator Zeiat joined me, her voice a bit breathy but otherwise quite pleasant, “a little chick is born. Peep peep peep peep! What fun! Are there more verses?” “Nine hundred and ninety-eight of them, Translator,” I said. “We’re not cousins anymore,” said Sphene.

Rather than trying to make me happy, as cheap songs and misguided greeting cards suggest is the promise of true love, Edward was doing the one thing that would keep us together: taking care of himself. As with my parents, sometimes the art of relationship is declaring your limits, protecting your boundaries, saying no.

The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me” played over the montage, not that the lyrics had anything to do with the images the song was played over but it was “haunting”, it was “moody”, it was “summing things up”, it gave the footage an “emotional resonance” that I guess we were incapable of capturing ourselves. At first my feelings were basically so what? But then I suggested other music: “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, but I was told that the rights were sky-high and that the song was “too ominous” for this sequence; Nada Surf’s “Popular” had “too many minor chords”, it didn’t fit the “mood of the piece,” it was – again – “too ominous.” When I told them I seriously did not think things could get any more fucking ominous than they already were, I was told, “Things get very much more ominous, Victor,” and then I was left alone.

Lord Baelish, what you suggest is treason.” “Only if we lose.

There,” he said, pointing. “We’ll camp on the westward slope. No fires, and it would be greatly appreciated, Baron, if your men refrained from excessive noise.” “I’ll do what I can, my lord. But they’re not peasants, y’know. Can’t just flog them like your lot.” “Maybe you should, milord,” Dentos suggested. “Remind ‘em they bleed the same colour as us peasants.

You turned on?" He asked. "Yes." "If I do anything that changes that, you let me know." I nodded. "I didn't hear that." "Yes." "Yes what?" At once, I rebelled against the suggestion that I call him by an honorary, but at the same time, I wanted desperately to complete the act of surrender. "Yes, sir." "You just gave me a little palpitation." "I am at your service.

I liked him, but since his particular field of interest was Remote Suggestion--the skill of projecting thoughts into people's heads from a distance--I didn't know whether I actually liked him or he was just suggesting I like him, which was both creepy and unethical. In fact, the whole Remote Suggestion or "seeding" idea had been banned once it was discovered to be the key ingredient in promoting talent less boy bands, which had until then been something of a mystery.

When a court officer suggested quarantine for Nerissa, she grabbed the man's pen and jammed it into the back of his hand, screaming that he was a Crimson Guard witch come to remove her memories and replace them with bird-song. They decided to skip quarantine after that.

It has often been suggested to me that the Constitution of the United States is a sufficient safeguard for the freedom of its citizens. It is obvious that even the freedom it pretends to guarantee is very limited. I have not been impressed with the adequacy of the safeguard. The nations of the world, with centuries of international law behind them, have never hesitated to engage in mass destruction when solemnly pledged to keep the peace; and the legal documents in America have not prevented the United States from doing the same. Those in authority have and always will abuse their power. And the instances when they do not do so are as rare as roses growing on icebergs. Far from the Constitution playing any liberating part in the lives of the American people, it has robbed them of the capacity to rely on their own resources or do their own thinking. Americans are so easily hoodwinked by the sanctity of law and authority. In fact, the pattern of life has become standardized, routinized, and mechanized like canned food and Sunday sermons. The hundred-percenter easily swallows syndicated information and factory-made ideas and beliefs. He thrives on the wisdom given him over the radio and cheap magazines by corporations whose philanthropic aim is selling America out. He accepts the standards of conduct and art in the same breath with the advertising of chewing gum, toothpaste, and shoe polish. Even songs are turned out like buttons or automobile tires--all cast from the same mold.

That Luther's Reformation succeeded in the North suggests that the north of Europe was retarded compared to the south...

The next day, William Lanney's much abused remains were carried in a coffin to the cemetery. The crowd of mourners was large. It included many of Lanney's shipmates, suggesting that the whaling profession in late-nineteenth-century Hobart was graced with a higher level of humanistic sensibility than the surgical profession.

god is love, and music is the language of love; therefore, music is the language of god. music is a language more profound than words. how often have you heard a great piece of music and felt that? great music does not just make you feel good; great music suggests some profound truth or mysterious meaning that objectively true but not translatable into words. attempts to translate music's meaning into words always fail. it is like trying to allegorize a symbol, trying to reduce to one literal, verbal meaning something that has many nonliteral, nonverbal meanings.

Van Eck keeps the seal in a safe?” said Jesper with a laugh. “It’s almost like hewants us to take it. Kaz is better at making friends with combination locks than with people.” “You’ve never seen a safe like this,” Wylan said. “He had it installed after the DeKappel was stolen. It has a seven-digit combination that he resets every day, and the locks are built with false tumblers to confuse safecrackers.” Kaz shrugged. “Then we go around it. I’ll take expediency over finesse.” Wylan shook his head. “The safe walls are made of a unique alloy reinforced with Grisha steel.” “An explosion?” suggested Jesper. Kaz raised a brow. “I suspect Van Eck will notice that.” “A very small explosion?” Nina snorted. “You just want to blow something up.” “Actually…” said Wylan. He cocked his head to one side, as if he were listening to a distant song. “Come morning, there would be no hiding we’d been there, but if we can get the refugees out of the harbor before my father discovers the theft … I’m not exactly sure where I can get the materials, but it just might work.…” “Inej,” Jesper whispered. She leaned forward, peering at Wylan. “Is that scheming face?” “Possibly.” Wylan seemed to snap back to reality. “It is not. But … but I do think I have an idea.

Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read—Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children’s books taken fro her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte’s Web and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents’ Buick, oblivious to her brother punching her knee, oblivious to her parents’ squabbling, oblivious to the traffic and landscapes pressing upon her from outside the window. She had, in addition to her books, a modest shelf of tapes and CDs that served a similar, though narrower, function…she was aware that her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected—whether popular or classical—not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, DC, who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her familiar songs. Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watch trained in reading body language would have been prepared to bet that, after the click, someone was going to suggest that they might as well go somewhere and have a few drinks, and then someone else would fancy a meal, and then there was always room for a few more drinks, and then it would be 5 a.m. and the city guards would be respectfully knocking on the University gates and asking if the Archchancellor would care to step down to the cells to identify some alleged wizards who were singing an obscene song in six-part harmony, and perhaps he would also care to bring some money to pay for all the damage. Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

So the women would not forgive. Their passion remained intact, carefully guarded and nurtured by the bitter knowledge of all they had lost, of all that had been stolen from them. For generations they vilified the Yankee race so the thief would have a face, a name, a mysterious country into which he had withdrawn and from which he might venture again. They banded together into a militant freemasonry of remembering, and from that citadel held out against any suggestion that what they had suffered and lost might have been in vain. They created the Lost Cause, and consecrated that proud fiction with the blood of real men. To the Lost Cause they dedicated their own blood, their own lives, and to it they offered books, monographs, songs, acres and acres of bad poetry. They fashioned out of grief and loss an imaginary world in which every Southern church had stabled Yankee horses, every nick in Mama's furniture was made by Yankee spurs, every torn painting was the victim of Yankee sabre - a world in which paint did not stick to plaster walls because of the precious salt once hidden there; in which bloodstains could not be washed away and every other house had been a hospital.

I attempted to make a more academic argument about how the Limp Bizkit song “Nookie” was misogynist for suggesting that the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend should inject a cookie into her vagina (or maybe that she should somehow fold her vagina into her rectum — the specific lyrics have never been clear).

Summer Beach … Thunder that is still too far away for us to hear presses down on Ben’s ears and he wakes us and leans hot and chesty first against M., then against me, and listens to our slow, warm words that mean we love him. But when the storm has passed, he is brave again and wants to go out. We open the door and he glides away without a backward glance. It is early, in the blue and grainy air we can just see him running along the edge of the water, into the first pink suggestion of sunrise. And we are caught by the old affinity, a joyfulness - his great and seemly pleasure in the physical world. Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift…

read the poets. Hear their song. Feel the cadence. See how words convey meaning beyond their definitions. May I suggest Whitman, Sandburg and Yeats? That’s a start.

Mercilessness would be at home there. And yet the faintest lines around her mouth suggest she had laughed once.

Night Song” suggests that the oblivion we ultimately achieve is an outpost of solitude from which the other is exiled—your oblivion is not mine, as your dream is not. This last line makes a mockery of placation; it damns the wish it grants. Against the relentless pronoun, the verbs are drumbeats, infantile, primitive. If what we want is oblivion, we are all lucky.

When one begins to appreciate the roles of unconscious suggestibility and self-fulfilling prophecies in human life, this song seems as funny as the latest radioactive fall-out figures.

But though the stars were spread across a great reaching blackness, the streets below were bathed in a stale gray dimness which suggested neither night nor day nor any natural phase between them.

War, I will suggest, has not been a friend to the undertaker. War is mass murder, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer. War is hell, but—again, over the long run—the alternatives would have been worse.

Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand), the first single from Eat Me, Drink Me, features a video filmed by Titanic director James Cameron. In it, Manson croons to Wood, who – with bobbed hair, gloves and a demure frock – blankly masturbates in an audience of writhing lesbians, Manson’s image reflected in her heart-shaped glasses. I wanted to like the song, but found Manson’s threadbare voice and overdubbed music annoying, and the chorus - 'Don’t break my heart/and I won’t break your heart-shaped glasses' – suggested a pugilistic retribution ('Dump me, and I’ll punch your lights out!') more in keeping with Norman Mailer than Nabokov.

Cicadas," Poppy said. "This is the only place you'll see them in England. They're usually found only in the tropics. Only a male cicada makes that noise- it's said to be a mating song." "How do you know he's not commenting on the weather?" Sending him a provocative sideways glance, Poppy murmured, "Well, mating is rather a male preoccupation, isn't it?" Harry smiled. "If there's a more interesting subject," he said, "I have yet to discover it.

Four very strange and truly poetic human beings in this century have attained mastery in prose, for which this century was not made otherwise—for lack of poetry, as I have suggested. Not including Goethe, who may fairly be claimed by the century that produced him, I regard only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy of being called masters of prose.35 93

from HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson: There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number and all the same.

The king of Argos made a noise of disgust. “I’m sick to death of this tale about your marriage bed.” “Then perhaps you shouldn’t have suggested I tell it.” “And perhaps you should get some new stories, so I don’t fucking kill myself of boredom.

This is the core challenge of speaking up with an original idea. When you present a new suggestion, you’re not only hearing the tune in your head. You wrote the song. You’ve spent hours, days, weeks, months, or maybe even years thinking about the idea. You’ve contemplated the problem, formulated the solution, and rehearsed the vision. You know the lyrics and the melody of your idea by heart. By that point, it’s no longer possible to imagine what it sounds like to an audience that’s listening to it for the first time.

The assholes took their toll.” “Assholes often do.” “That’s a Billboard Top Forty song waiting to happen.” “Sung to the tune of ‘There’ll Be Sad Songs,’” I suggested, then offered up a lyric. “‘There’ll be assholes, to make you cry.’” “‘Assholes often dooo,’” Mallory sang.

Would you like to dance?" I knew I had frosting on my nose. Alex leaned over and wuped it off with his thumb. "Well?" I could only nod. I had a full mouth, too. I stood up, swallowed, and accepted the napkin he was holding. "You're here." "I'm here," he agreed, like it hadn't been a ridiculous thing to say. "I am crashing your sister's wedding. Hope she won't mind." "She won't mind." He was wearing a tux. A real tux, complete with bow tie and silk lapels. I stroked one. "I'm guessing this isn't a rental." He squirmed a little. "No, it's mine. Nice dress." I looked down at the snug purple monstrosity my sister had chosen. At least it had a mandarin collar and some sleeves. "It's a cheongsam," she'd announced proudly. "It's Eggplant Ho Lee Mess" was Frankie's take. My pear-shaped cousin Vanessa got strapless. Now she looked like an eggplant. "You look beautiful," Alex said, but the corner of his mouth was twitching. "Well,you look like...like..." I sighed. "Okay, you look really really good." Then, again, "You're here." "I'm here." "Why?" "I missed you," he said simply. "It's only been four days." "A very,very long four days. But your e-mail helped." He reached for my hand. "Now,are we dancing or not?" We did, and it wasn't as complicated as I'd thought it might be. I stood on my toes, he bent down a little, and we fit together pretty well. The song ended way too soon. "So," Alex said. "So." "We can stay here if you want to...or if you have to. But I have another suggestion. Let's go watch the sun rise." It sounded like a good idea to me. Except... "It's ten o'clock. And it's freezing out there." "Trust me," he said. "okay.

She asked me what wedding present I would make to my bride. A wedding bed, I said, rather gallantly, of finest holm-oak. But this answer did not please her. ‘A wedding bed should not be made of dead, dry wood, but something green and living,’ she told me. ‘And what if I can make such a bed?’ I said. ‘Will you have me?’ And she said—” The king of Argos made a noise of disgust. “I’m sick to death of this tale about your marriage bed.” “Then perhaps you shouldn’t have suggested I tell it.” “And perhaps you should get some new stories, so I don’t fucking kill myself of boredom.

The beauty song of women is a love song. This is my truth. I love women. I don’t give a damn what others think of me. Let analysts analyze. Let psychologists murmur and suggest. Let moralists tut-tut and wring their hands. Let man-haters roar. I move through life without apology, without defense, without regret. I am wondrously in love with women, in love with the very idea of women, and if your heart is sincere, you will understand exactly what that means. This is what I live. This is what I love. This is what I believe. This is my religion, my saving grace. This is the air I breathe. When

Could you please unfasten my dress before you leave?" A lopsided grin appeared at the corner of his mouth. "You know, of coure, where this may lead?" "You'd still have to wade through at least three layers of clothes before you found skin." She chuckled. "Ah,but the buttons being the most difficult obstacle, the rest would be a simple matter of-" "Just the buttons, please." "You're no fun." "Later," she promised, her voice low and suggestive, "when I'm fresh from a scented bath, all warm and soft and-" "Enough," he growled. "Turn around before I rip that thing off you." Willow giggled as she turned away from him.

He paused for an answer: and what was I to say? Oh, for some good spirit to suggest a judicious and satisfactory response! Vain aspiration! The west wind whispered in the ivy round me; but no gentle Ariel borrowed its breath as a medium of speech: the birds sang in the tree-tops; but their song, however sweet, was inarticulate.

perhaps the most astonishing feature of multicellularity is that it evolved independently, and in multiple different species, not just once, but many, many times. It is as if the drive to become multicellular was so forceful and pervasive that evolution leapt over the fence again and again. Genetic evidence suggests this incontrovertibly. Collective existence—above isolation—was so selectively advantageous that the forces of natural selection gravitated repeatedly toward the collective. The transformation from single cells into multicellularity was, as the evolutionary biologists Richard Grosberg and Richard Strathmann wrote, a “minor major transition.

The ring-tone on one of my phones is the song: "Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing Blood, are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb..." One day, I was sitting somewhere and the phone rang; before I could answer the call, a woman had started to manifest and a strange voice spoke from her mouth, screaming: "Stop that music, stop that music!" The demon in her was affected by the song, because of the power in the Blood of Jesus. 19. Virtue-restoring power. 20. Burden-removingpower. 21. Bondage-destroying power: When you plead the Blood of Jesus into any situation, it will eventually bow. Many people do not understand the overcoming weapons that they have in the word of God. The Bible says: "And they overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony." Today, you will watch that Blood in display, if you will pray the prayers I am suggesting below, from your heart. That Blood was not shed in vain; it was shed for forgiveness, deliverances, protection, etc. You would be cheating yourself, if you do not use that facility. A 26 year old sister, who was looking like an old woman, heard a message like this and decided to use it. She locked herself up for three days, pleading the Blood of Jesus into her situation. By the time she came out, her correct body, shape, face, had been restored to her. She now looked

Are many court jesters also bards?” Linetta questioned. “Any true jaemythe is,” Cornelius said, as if to suggest that the best of each must be his kind. He bowed low, his large eyes meeting hers. “‘We are masters of mirth and ancient song,’ so sayeth an age-old verse. For, there are always riddles to be had in the mind and heart of a jaemythe.

She sighed, staring down at the foothills of Cobalt Mountain. “I have been summoned to the Paeolinas’ court to attend the coronation after-ball.” “I was unaware the Queen was ill.” “The Queen was not aware of it either,” replied Paytim. “Her brother poisoned her and seized control of the Crimson Messuage. He has impertinently invited me to attend his coronation as Paeolina the Twenty-Ninth.” “An occasion for celebration. The charm is then a gift for him?” “Only insofar as death is that benefaction offered by envious gods to humankind. My intent is to destroy the entire lineage of Paeolina, so that I will never again be subjected to their abhorrent notions of festivity.” “It seems excessive,” suggested Saloona. “You have never eaten with them.

She sometimes takes her little brother for a walk round this way," explained Bingo. "I thought we would meet her and bow, and you could see her, you know, and then we would walk on." "Of course," I said, "that's enough excitement for anyone, and undoubtedly a corking reward for tramping three miles out of one's way over ploughed fields with tight boots, but don't we do anything else? Don't we tack on to the girl and buzz along with her?" "Good Lord!" said Bingo, honestly amazed. "You don't suppose I've got nerve enough for that, do you? I just look at her from afar off and all that sort of thing. Quick! Here she comes! No, I'm wrong!" It was like that song of Harry Lauder's where he's waiting for the girl and says, "This is her-r-r. No, it's a rabbut." Young Bingo made me stand there in the teeth of a nor'-east half-gale for ten minutes, keeping me on my toes with a series of false alarms, and I was just thinking of suggesting that we should lay off and give the rest of the proceedings a miss, when round the corner there came a fox-terrier, and Bingo quivered like an aspen. Then there hove in sight a small boy, and he shook like a jelly. Finally, like a star whose entrance has been worked up by the personnel of the ensemble, a girl appeared, and his emotion was painful to witness. His face got so red that, what with his white collar and the fact that the wind had turned his nose blue, he looked more like a French flag than anything else. He sagged from the waist upwards, as if he had been filleted. He was just raising his fingers limply to his cap when he suddenly saw that the girl wasn't alone. A chappie in clerical costume was also among those present, and the sight of him didn't seem to do Bingo a bit of good. His face got redder and his nose bluer, and it wasn't till they had nearly passed that he managed to get hold of his cap. The girl bowed, the curate said, "Ah, Little. Rough weather," the dog barked, and then they toddled on and the entertainment was over.

Vitamin C is the world’s best natural antibiotic, antiviral, antitoxin and antihistamine. This book’s recurring emphasis on vitamin C might suggest that I am offering a song with only one verse. Not so. As English literature concentrates on Shakespeare, so orthomolecular (megavitamin) therapy concentrates on vitamin C. Let the greats be given their due. The importance of vitamin C cannot be overemphasised.

Prum believes that animals may come to adopt certain aesthetic characteristics not because those traits are adaptive but simply because they are beautiful. This may be because of a sensory bias in the brain—a neurological feature that just prefers shiny things over nonshiny things—or a preference for novelty. But these attributes don’t necessarily signal that there is something better about the peacock with the extravagant tail. The peahen doesn’t like his tail more than others because it suggests he’s a strong and fit potential mate, but just because she likes how it’s shiny, and blue, and large. Prum bases this theory on a lifetime of studying birds like those in the drawers at his lab, many of which have plumage, skeletons, or songs that make it difficult for them to fly or easy to be spotted by predators.

Grateful Dead performances were by design not consciously planned, often reaching their artistic peak when the collective stumbled upon something stunning, when "the music played the band," as it were. Instead of using set lists, the Grateful Dead chose songs by experimenting together until a pulse, rhythm, phrase, or riff emerged from the group, suggesting a song. Their collective, improvisatory musical works communicate felling like any other artwork.

How about whatever song comes on next, that’s our song. It’ll be fate.” “We can’t just make our own fate.” “Sure we can.” Peter reaches over to turn on the radio. “Wait! Just any radio station? What if it’s not a slow song?” “Okay so we’ll put on Lite 101.” Peter hits the button. “Winnie the Pooh doesn’t know what to do, got a honey jar stuck on his nose,” a woman croons. Peter says, “What the hell?” as I say, “This can’t be our song.” “Best out of three?” he suggests.

Guess what song they picked for their first dance.” “What song?” “‘From This Moment On’ by Shania Twain.” He frowns. “I never heard of that before.” “It’s really cheesy, but they love it, apparently. Do you realize that we don’t have a song? Like, a song that’s ours.” “Okay, then let’s pick one.” “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t just pick your song. The song picks you. Like the Sorting Hat.” Peter nods sagely. He finally finished reading all seven Harry Potter books and he’s always eager to prove that he gets my references. “Got it.” “It has to just…happen. A moment. And the song transcends the moment, you know? My mom and dad’s song was ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton. They danced to it at their wedding.” “So how did it become their song, then?” “It was the first song they ever slow danced to in college. It was at a dance, not long after they first started dating. I’ve seen pictures from that night. Daddy’s wearing a suit that was too big on him and my mom’s hair is in a French twist.” “How about whatever song comes on next, that’s our song. It’ll be fate.” “We can’t just make our own fate.” “Sure we can.” Peter reaches over to turn on the radio. “Wait! Just any radio station? What if it’s not a slow song?” “Okay so we’ll put on Lite 101.” Peter hits the button. “Winnie the Pooh doesn’t know what to do, got a honey jar stuck on his nose,” a woman croons. Peter says, “What the hell?” as I say, “This can’t be our song.” “Best out of three?” he suggests.

The twenty-seventh was Blackstar, or simply (the symbol of blackstar) - a suggestion that the A-Z was over, but there was more to come, beyond the known alphabet, beyond ordinary language; a second set of letters, communications, a rebirth. Inside the A to Z, and all the possible combinations of songs, styles, secrets, themes, discoveries, redirections, emotional climaxes, sheer drama, tension, relief, beauty, there was all you needed to know in order to construct and understand the language of Bowie (re morley's alphabet of bowie albums)

How about whatever song comes on next, that’s our song. It’ll be fate.” “We can’t just make our own fate.” “Sure we can.” Peter reaches over to turn on the radio. “Wait! Just any radio station? What if it’s not a slow song?” “Okay so we’ll put on Lite 101.” Peter hits the button. “Winnie the Pooh doesn’t know what to do, got a honey jar stuck on his nose,” a woman croons. Peter says, “What the hell?” as I say, “This can’t be our song.” “Best out of three?” he suggests. “Let’s not force it. We’ll know it when we hear it, I think.” “Maybe we’ll hear it at the prom,” Peter offers. “Oh, that reminds me. What color is your dress? My mom’s going to ask her florist friend to make your corsage.” “It’s dusty pink.” It came in the mail yesterday, and when I tried it on for everybody, Trina said it was “the most Lara Jean” dress she’d ever seen. I texted a picture to Stormy, who wrote back, “Ooh-la-la,” with a dancing woman emoji. “What the heck is dusty pink?” Peter wants to know. “It’s like a rose gold color.” Peter still looks confused, so I sigh and say, “Just tell your mom. She’ll know.

At this time of life one has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished hearts. We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest. Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains—filled with the admiration which beauty inspires—for us to remember what follows.

But at the age, already a little disillusioned, which Swann was approaching, at which one knows how to content oneself with being in love for the pleasure of it without requiring too much reciprocity, this closeness of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one’s earliest youth, the goal toward which love necessarily tends, still remains linked to it by an association of ideas so strong that it may become the cause of love, if it occurs first. At an earlier time one dreamed of possessing the heart of the woman with whom one was in love; later, to feel that one possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make one fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would seem, since what one seeks most of all in love is subjective pleasure, that the enjoyment of a woman’s beauty should play the largest part in it, love may come into being—love of the most physical kind—without there having been, underlying it, any previous desire. At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall and revive the others. Since we know its song, engraved in us in its entirety, we do not need a woman to repeat the beginning of it—filled with the admiration that beauty inspires—in order to find out what comes after. And if she begins in the middle—where the two hearts come together, where it sings of living only for each other—we are accustomed enough to this music to join our partner right away in the passage where she is waiting for us.

they suggest I publish under the name Juniper Song instead of June Hayward (“Your debut didn’t reach quite the same market we’re hoping for, and it’s better to have a clean start. And Juniper is so, so unique. What kind of name is that? It sounds Native, almost.”). Nobody talks about the difference in how “Song” might be perceived versus “Hayward.” No one says explicitly that “Song” might be mistaken for a Chinese name, when really it’s the middle name my mother came up with during her hippie phase in the eighties and I was very nearly named Juniper Serenity Hayward.

Detecting a note of inordinate concern for the young woman, Fred quizzed, "Could it be that our pretty little rabbit has caught the hunter's heart?" Rider felt distinctly uncomfortable under Fred's all-too-knowing eyes. "Don't be ridiculous. This is a job, not a honeymoon!" "Why,you're in love with her, aren't you?" "Hell,no! What gave you that half-cocked idea?" "You objected too fast." Fred smiled. "How could I love a woman like her? For God's sake, Fred, she acts more like a man than a woman. It's just that..." Rider rubbed at the back of his neck. "Damn, the woman walks around naked under that shirt of hers, jiggling and bouncing. Naturally, I'm attracted. You would be, too! But believe me, Fred, lust is all I feel for her." "You got it bad, my friend." Fred chuckled. "When we get done talking here, I suggest you take Annie over there"-he jerked his head toward a brunette-"upstairs for a good romp in the sack." "Maybe I should.I've tried to avoid Willow but just thinking about her gets me randy." Even as he mouthed the words, Rider knew he would not do as Fred suggested. There was only one woman who could cure his ache and, unfortunately for him, no other would do.

A lot of her songs were to do with Blake, which did not escape Mark’s attention. She told Mark that writing songs about him was cathartic and that ‘Back to Black’ summed up what had happened when their relationship had ended: Blake had gone back to his ex and Amy to black, or drinking and hard times. It was some of her most inspired writing because, for better or worse, she’d lived it. Mark and Amy inspired each other musically, each bringing out fresh ideas in the other. One day they decided to take a quick stroll around the neighbourhood because Amy wanted to buy Alex Clare a present. On the way back Amy began telling Mark about being with Blake, then not being with Blake and being with Alex instead. She told him about the time at my house after she’d been in hospital when everyone had been going on at her about her drinking. ‘You know they tried to make me go to rehab, and I told them, no, no, no.’ ‘That’s quite gimmicky,’ Mark replied. ‘It sounds hooky. You should go back to the studio and we should turn that into a song.’ Of course, Amy had written that line in one of her books ages ago. She’d told me before she was planning to write a song about what had happened that day, but that was the moment ‘Rehab’ came to life. Amy had also been working on a tune for the ‘hook’, but when she played it to Mark later that day it started out as a slow blues shuffle – it was like a twelve-bar blues progression. Mark suggested that she should think about doing a sixties girl-group sound, as she liked them so much. He also thought it would be fun to put in the Beatles-style E minor and A minor chords, which would give it a jangly feel. Amy was unaccustomed to this style – most of the songs she was writing were based around jazz chords – but it worked and that day she wrote ‘Rehab’ in just three hours. If you had sat Amy down with a pen and paper every day, she wouldn’t have written a song. But every now and then, something or someone turned the light on in her head and she wrote something brilliant. During that time it happened over and over again. The sessions in the studio became very intense and tiring, especially for Mark, who would sometimes work a double shift and then fall asleep. He would wake up with his head in Amy’s lap and she would be stroking his hair, as if he was a four-year-old. Mark was a few years older than Amy, but he told me he found her very motherly and kind.

Books are special, Rachel. Books are important. Words are important. Words matter, in fact. They’re not pointless, as you’ve suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn’t start revolutions and they wouldn’t change history. If they were just words, we wouldn’t write songs or listen to them. We wouldn’t beg to be read to as kids. If they were just words, then stories wouldn’t have been around since before we could write. We wouldn’t have learned to write. If they were just words, people wouldn’t fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, and stop aching because of them.

Why don’t you make a set of oracle cards for Tamsy to use?” Gwyneth suggested, steering our family ship out of troubled waters. “You can put your special pictures on one side, and write their meaning on the other.” She set a pile of index cards on the table, along with a pot of colored pencils and crayons. “Like what?” Becca said, clambering onto a nearby stool. “Things that hold meaning,” Gwyneth said. “Colors, books, food, songs. Anything you like. There’s no right or wrong.” I wondered if all the Proctor decks had started this way, with a child drawing out their inner hopes and fears and refining them over a lifetime until they sang with power and insight.

and confused if someone does not appreciate their niceness. Others often sense this and avoid giving them feedback not only, effectively blocking the nice person’s emotional growth, but preventing risks from being taken. You never know with a nice person if the relationship would survive a conflict or angry confrontation. This greatly limits the depths of intimacy. And would you really trust a nice person to back you up if confrontation were needed? 3. With nice people you never know where you really stand. The nice person allows others to accidentally oppress him. The “nice” person might be resenting you just for talking to him, because really he is needing to pee. But instead of saying so he stands there nodding and smiling, with legs tightly crossed, pretending to listen. 4. Often people in relationship with nice people turn their irritation toward themselves, because they are puzzled as to how they could be so upset with someone so nice. In intimate relationships this leads to guilt, self-hate and depression. 5. Nice people frequently keep all their anger inside until they find a safe place to dump it. This might be by screaming at a child, blowing up a federal building, or hitting a helpless, dependent mate. (Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, was described by acquaintances as a very, very nice guy, one who would give you the shirt off his back.) Success in keeping the anger in will often manifest as psychosomatic illnesses, including arthritis, ulcers, back problems, and heart disease. Proper Peachy Parents In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that those who had peachy keen “Nice Parents” or proper “Rigidly Religious Parents” (as opposed to spiritual parents), are often the most stuck in chronic, lowgrade depression. They have a difficult time accessing or expressing any negative feelings towards their parents. They sometimes say to me “After all my parents did for me, seldom saying a harsh word to me, I would feel terribly guilty complaining. Besides, it would break their hearts.” Psychologist Rollo May suggested that it is less crazy-making to a child to cope with overt withdrawal or harshness than to try to understand the facade of the always-nice parent. When everyone agrees that your parents are so nice and giving, and you still feel dissatisfied, then a child may conclude that there must be something wrong with his or her ability to receive love. -§ Emotionally starving children are easier to control, well fed children don’t need to be. -§ I remember a family of fundamentalists who came to my office to help little Matthew with his anger problem. The parents wanted me to teach little Matthew how to “express his anger nicely.” Now if that is not a formula making someone crazy I do not know what would be. Another woman told me that after her stinking drunk husband tore the house up after a Christmas party, breaking most of the dishes in the kitchen, she meekly told him, “Dear, I think you need a breath mint.” Many families I work with go through great anxiety around the holidays because they are going to be forced to be with each other and are scared of resuming their covert war. They are scared that they might not keep the nice garbage can lid on, and all the rotting resentments and hopeless hurts will be exposed. In the words to the following song, artist David Wilcox explains to his parents why he will not be coming home this Thanksgiving: Covert War by David Wilcox

Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle suggestion is fairer. Rare is the rose-burst of dawn, but the secret that clasps it is rarer; Sweet is the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes it is sweeter; And never was poem yet writ, but the meaning outmaster'd the metre. Never a daisy that grows, but a mystery guideth the growing; Never a river that flows, but a majesty sceptres the flowing; Never a Shakespeare that soar'd, but a stronger than he did enfold him, Nor ever a prophet foretells, but a mightier seer hath foretold him. Back of the canvas that throbs, the painter is hinted and hidden; Into the statue that breathes, the soul of the sculptor is bidden; Under the joy that is felt, lie the infinite issues of feeling; Crowning the glory reveal'd. is the glory that crowns the revealing. Great are the symbols of being, but that which is symboll'd is greater; Vast the create and beheld, but vaster the inward Creator; Back of the sound broods the silence, back of the gift stands the giving; Back of the hand that receives, thrill the sensitive nerves of receiving. Space is as nothing to Spirit, the deed is outdone by the doing; The heart of the wooer is warm, but warmer the heart of the wooing; And up from the pits where these shiver, and up from the heights where those shine, Twin voices and shadows swim starward, and the essence of life is Divine. RICHARD REALF

Let me tell you youngins something. See yawl are half-baked like your fathers. The first mistake yawl made was coming to my place of business without hesitation. You don’t come in your enemy's territory because obviously I have shit set up to defend myself. Second, I’ll give yawl credit for doing something halfway smart. I know you two would have some of your own people in here posing as club goers, but I have people checked at the door. So, your men have been disarmed. Third you can’t make business moves with me, so I suggest you two drop this shit. Yawl quest for revenge is admirable but it’s over. I’ll let the other shit yawl have done to us slide as a fair pay for what we did to your fathers.” - Cyrus

It seems to me that there should be only allusions. The contemplation of objects, the volatile image of the dreams they evoke, these make the song: the Parnassians [the classicist movement of Leconte de Lisle, Heredia, etc.] who make a complete demonstration of the object thereby lack mystery; they deprive the [reader's] mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates. To name the thing means forsaking three quarters of a poem's enjoyment-which is derived from unraveling it gradually, by happy guesswork: to suggest the thing creates the dream. Symbols are formed when this secret is used to perfection: to evoke little by little, the image of an object in order to demonstrate a mood; or, conversely, to choose an object and to extract from it a mood, by a series of decipherings.)

You’ve always called it a store, ever since we were kids. It’s a bookshop. It’s not like some other retail store. It might be the same in a whole lot of ways, but this bookshop is special. Books are special. Books are important. Words are important. Words matter, in fact. They’re not pointless, as you’ve suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn’t start revolutions and they wouldn’t change history. If they were just words, we wouldn’t write songs or listen to them. We wouldn’t beg to be read to as kids. If they were just words, then stories wouldn’t have been around since before we could write. We wouldn’t have learned to write. If they were just words, people wouldn’t fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, and stop aching because of them.

I just helped with a birthing." Amber flames lit his angry dark eyes. "Women have no business doing that kind of work. It's not decent!" Thoroughly provoked by his unreasonable attitude, Willow completely forgot Miriam's presence. "Well, that's a lamebrain thing to say, considering it's us females who do the birthing. All men do is prime their-" "Willow!" Miriam interjected. "That is quite enough!" Seemingly disgusted with both of them, Miriam waved Rider off dismissively. "Mr. Sinclair, you've seen for yourself she's quite all right so I suggest you take yourself elsewear." "Fine! It's a little too whiffy around here for me anyway." He jerked Sultan around and rode off in a monstrous huff. Willow was pricked by his disdain more than she cared to admit. "Did you hear what he said? He said I stink! You'd think I'd just climbed out of a pig sty! Hell, how would he know if I stink? He wasn't even close enough to sniff me." Miriam exhaled a deep sigh and wrinkled her nose. "Well, believe me, I'm close enough!" Miriam bristled but then recognized the teasing twinkle in Miriam's soft hazel eyes and broke into a grin. "It'll never do to stick you in a tub," the landlady observed. "I'd kill myself, filling and dumping it before we got you clean. Stay here and don't move. I'll be right back." Miriam returned, loaded down with towels, soap, and clean clothes. "Lead the way to that swimming hole you were telling me about." The two women silently traipsed down the narrow path to the river, Willow brooding over Rider's sarcasm and Miriam wondering if Willow's clothes could be laundered or if she should just burn them.

The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano and beside her stood a tall red haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in a song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne and during the course of her song she had decided ineptly that everything was very very sad--she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping broken sobs and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep.

Around that time, when the band was in Australia, I had a recurring voice problem and was advised to visit a doctor with a reputation for helping singers. The doctor had a sense that anxiety explained this constant sore throat rather than, as several of my nearest and dearest had suggested, the cheroots, the alcohol, and the talking into the small hours. It was in my interest to trust the good doctor, and because he also had such good references, I agreed to something I’d never previously agreed to. I allowed him to put me under hypnosis. Well, almost … “Imagine,” said the doctor, “a room with all your best memories around you. Be in the room. Now open the drawer. Find those memories. The best things that have ever happened to you. The affirmations. Your partner, your children, your best friends. A moment that changed your life’s direction. All the best things. Be in that room.

Put yourself in the way of grace,' says a friend of ours, who is a monk, and a bishop; and he smiles his floating and shining smile. And truly, can there be a subject of more interest to each of us than whether or not grace exists, and the soul? And, consequent upon the existence of the soul, a whole landscape of incorruptible forces, perhaps even a source, an almost palpably suggested second universe? A world that is incomprehensible through reason? To believe in the soul---to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view---imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world! How easily I travel, about halfway, through such a scenario. I believe in the soul---in mine, and yours, and the blue-jay's, and the pilot whale's. I believe each goldfinch flying away over the coarse ragweed has a soul, and the ragweed too, plant by plant, and the tiny stones in the earth below, and the grains of earth as well. Not romantically do I believe this, nor poetically, nor emotionally, nor metaphorically except as all reality is metaphor, but steadily, lumpishly, and absolutely. The wild waste spaces of the sea, and the pale dunes with one hawk hanging in the wind, they are for me the formal spaces that, in a liturgy, are taken up by prayer, song, sermon, silence, homily, scripture, the architecture of the church itself. And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable. Now winter, the winter I am writing about, begins to ease. And what, if anything, has been determined, selected, nailed down? This is the lesson of age---events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever. I have not been twenty for a long time! The sun rolls toward the north and I feel, gratefully, its brightness flaming up once more. Somewhere in the world the misery we can do nothing about yet goes on. Somewhere the words I will write down next year, and the next, are drifting into the wind, out of the ornate pods of the weeds of the Provincelands. Once I went into the woods to find an almost unfindable bird, a blue grosbeak. And I found it: a rough, deep blue, almost black, with heavy beak; it was plucking one by one the humped, pale green caterpillars from the leaves of a thick green tree. Then it vanished into the shadows of the leaves and, in the same moment, from the crown of the tree flew a western bluebird---little aqua thrush of the mountains, hundreds of miles from its home. It is a moment hard to top---but, I can. Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?

As we mixed down the song “Rocket Queen,” Axl felt that the bridge needed something; some other element to elevate the drama. He suggested that Adrianna Smith, who was with us in the studio that day, fuck him in the live room so that we could record her vocals and layer them over the breakdown. We’d been drinking Jack pretty heavily all day, so it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I was all for it; I knew too well what she was capable of vocally—she had kept me up for the past three nights. So we lit up some candles for atmosphere, then she and Axl went out into the live room, got down on the floor by the drum riser, and we recorded Smith’s performance in all of its honest moaning and groaning. Enjoy it—it’s right there in the final mix. That breakdown said it all; I couldn’t think of a better song to close the album and I couldn’t think of a more telling slice of our lives at the time to hand to our fans.

How can I tell of the rest of creation, with all its beauty and utility, which the divine goodness has given to man to please his eye and serve his purposes, condemned though he is, and hurled into these labors and miseries?  Shall I speak of the manifold and various loveliness of sky, and earth, and sea; of the plentiful supply and wonderful qualities of the light; of sun, moon, and stars; of the shade of trees; of the colors and perfume of flowers; of the multitude of birds, all differing in plumage and in song; of the variety of animals, of which the smallest in size are often the most wonderful,--the works of ants and bees astonishing us more than the huge bodies of whales?  Shall I speak of the sea, which itself is so grand a spectacle, when it arrays itself as it were in vestures of various colors, now running through every shade of green, and again becoming purple or blue?  Is it not delightful to look at it in storm, and experience the soothing complacency which it inspires, by suggesting that we ourselves are not tossed and shipwrecked?  [1664]What shall I say of the numberless kinds of food to alleviate hunger, and the variety of seasonings to stimulate appetite which are scattered everywhere by nature, and for which we are not indebted to the art of cookery?  How many natural appliances are there for preserving and restoring health!  How grateful is the alternation of day and night!  how pleasant the breezes that cool the air!  how abundant the supply of clothing furnished us by trees and animals!  Who can enumerate all the blessings we enjoy?  If I were to attempt to detail and unfold only these few which I have indicated in the mass, such an enumeration would fill a volume.  And all these are but the solace of the wretched and condemned, not the rewards of the blessed.  What then shall these rewards be, if such be the blessings of a condemned state?

From other shelters, there were stories of singing “Deutschland über Alles” or of people arguing amid the staleness of their own breath. No such things happened in the Fiedler shelter. In that place, there was only fear and apprehension, and the dead song at Rosa Hubermann’s cardboard lips. Not long before the sirens signaled the end, Alex Steiner—the man with the immovable, wooden face—coaxed the kids from his wife’s legs. He was able to reach out and grapple for his son’s free hand. Kurt, still stoic and full of stare, took it up and tightened his grip gently on the hand of his sister. Soon, everyone in the cellar was holding the hand of another, and the group of Germans stood in a lumpy circle. The cold hands melted into the warm ones, and in some cases, the feeling of another human pulse was transported. It came through the layers of pale, stiffened skin. Some of them closed their eyes, waiting for their final demise, or hoping for a sign that the raid was finally over. Did they deserve any better, these people? How many had actively persecuted others, high on the scent of Hitler’s gaze, repeating his sentences, his paragraphs, his opus? Was Rosa Hubermann responsible? The hider of a Jew? Or Hans? Did they all deserve to die? The children? The answer to each of these questions interests me very much, though I cannot allow them to seduce me. I only know that all of those people would have sensed me that night, excluding the youngest of the children. I was the suggestion. I was the advice, my imagined feet walking into the kitchen and down the corridor. As is often the case with humans, when I read about them in the book thief’s words, I pitied them, though not as much as I felt for the ones I scooped up from various camps in that time. The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance. That basement was not a washroom. They were not sent there for a shower. For those people, life was still achievable.

It came as a gift. A large gray bird flew up with a loud alarm call as he approached. As it gained height and wheeled away over the valley, it gave out a piping sound on three notes, which he recognized as the inversion of a line he had already scored for a piccolo. How elegant, how simple. Turning the sequence round opened up the idea of a plain and beautiful song in common time, which he could almost hear. But not quite. An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending-from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, and then it was gone. There was a glow of a tantalizing afterimage and the fading call of a sad little tune....These notes were perfectly interdependent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc. He could almost hear it again as he reached the top of the angled rock slab and paused to reach into his pocket for notebook and pencil.

Pa, you don't have to give up your room," Willow protested. "I know, I know, but there ain't nuff space in your room for the two of you together. 'Sides, my bed is bigger and . . . Well, you know." Willow silently nodded her head, and Rider shook his father-in-law's hand. "Thanks, Mr. Vaughn. It won't be for long. We hope to be in our place before winter sets in." "Gee, Pa, what we gonna do without Willie here to do for us?" Andy asked. "Don't rightly know, son, but I reckon we'll get along somehow." A mischievous glow came to Willow's eyes. "One of you could always get married," she suggested innocently. A collective round of groans and protests circled the table. Rider draped his arm around her shoulders, a prideful, male grin on his face. "Being married isn't so bad, boys," he said. "It's kind of convenient having your woman handy, whenever you get ra--" Willow slugged his arm. The brothers broke into wild laughter. Owen guffawed at his son-in-law. "You just might fit into this here family after all, son!

Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor: “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.” Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. “Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.” When the snow is freshest, the mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge—whether from a song or an intention or a therapist’s suggestion—can powerfully influence its future course. Robin Carhart-Harris’s theory of

It soon became apparent to me that deniers were a new type of neo-Nazi. Unlike previous generations of neo-Nazis—people who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, sported SS-like uniforms, and hung swastikas at meetings where they would give the Sieg Heil salute—this group eschewed all that.5 They were wolves in sheep’s clothing. They didn’t bother with the physical trappings of Nazism—salutes, songs, and banners—but proclaimed themselves “revisionists”—serious scholars who simply wished to revise “mistakes” in the historical record, to which end they established an impressive-sounding organization—the Institute for Historical Review—and created a benign-sounding publication—the Journal for Historical Review.6 Nothing in these names suggested the revisionists’ real agenda. They held conferences that, at first blush, seemed to be the most mundane academic confabs. But a close inspection of their publications and conference programs revealed the same extremism, adulation of the Third Reich, antisemitism, and racism as the swastika-waving neo-Nazis. This was extremism posing as rational discourse.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

In Mrs. Dimble’s hands the task of airing the little house and making the bed for Ivy Maggs and her jailbird husband became something between a game and a ritual. It woke in Jane vague memories of helping at Christmas or Easter decorations in church when she had been a small child. But it also suggested to her literary memory all sorts of things out of sixteenth-century epithalamiums: age-old superstitions, jokes, and sentimentalities about bridal beds and marriage bowers, with omens at the threshold and fairies upon the hearth. It was an atmosphere extraordinarily alien to that in which she had grown up. A few weeks ago she would have disliked it. Was there not something absurd about that stiff, twinkling archaic world—the mixture of prudery and sensuality, the stylised ardours of the groom and the conventional bashfulness of the bride, the religious sanction, the permitted salacities of Fescennine song, and the suggestion that everyone except the principals might be expected to be rather tipsy? How had the human race ever come to imprison in such a ceremony the most unceremonious thing in the world? But she was no longer sure of her reaction.

Encircled by the social thoughts of Christmas-time, still let the benignant figure of my childhood stand unchanged! In every cheerful image and suggestion that the season brings, may the bright star that rested above the poor roof, be the star of all the Christian World! A moment’s pause, O vanishing tree, of which the lower boughs are dark to me as yet, and let me look once more! I know there are blank spaces on thy branches, where eyes that I have loved have shone and smiled; from which they are departed. But, far above, I see the raiser of the dead girl, and the Widow’s Son; and God is good! If Age be hiding for me in the unseen portion of thy downward growth, O may I, with a grey head, turn a child’s heart to that figure yet, and a child’s trustfulness and confidence! Now, the tree is decorated with bright merriment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness. And they are welcome. Innocent and welcome be they ever held, beneath the branches of the Christmas Tree, which cast no gloomy shadow! But, as it sinks into the ground, I hear a whisper going through the leaves. “This, in commemoration of the law of love and kindness, mercy and compassion. This, in remembrance of Me!

When the song was ended, he struck the rail he leaned upon a sharp blow with his open hand. There swept over him a feeling that he had stood precisely where he stood now, on such a night, a thousand years ago, had heard that voice and that song, had listened and been moved by the song, and the night, just as he was moved now. He had long known himself for a sentimentalist; he had almost given up trying to cure himself. And he knew himself for a born lover; he had always been in love with some one. In his earlier youth his affections had been so constantly inconstant that he finally came to settle with his self-respect by recognizing in himself a fine constancy that worshipped one woman always — it was only the shifting image of her that changed! Somewhere (he dreamed, whimsically indulgent of the fancy; yet mocking himself for it) there was a girl whom he had never seen, who waited till he should come. She was Everything. Until he found her, he could not help adoring others who possessed little pieces and suggestions of her — her brilliancy, her courage, her short upper lip, “like a curled roseleaf,” or her dear voice, or her pure profile. He had no recollection of any lady who had quite her eyes.

Gray waited a full verse before approaching her, prowling around her periphery and coming to rest behind her right shoulder. A few of the men gave him friendly nods, but most were too absorbed in their spirits and song to pay him any mind. “What are you doing?” she asked, flicking him a glance through the swaying lamplight. “Who, me?” he murmured. “I’m simply leaning against the foremast. You know, this tall bit of timber you weren’t to go past.” She sipped her drink. Gray pushed off the mast and crouched at her side. If she’d turn and look at him, they would be eye-to-eye. But she didn’t. “The better question is, what the hell are you doing?” “I’m enjoying myself,” she said lightly, taking another drink. “I suggest you do the same.” She passed the tankard to him and applauded with wild enthusiasm as the song came to its tuneless end. Gray peered at the half-empty tankard, then lifted it to his nose and sniffed. Straight, unadulterated rum, the girl was drinking. That would explain the enthusiasm. Her applause concluded, she snatched the tankard back and downed a swallow to do a sailor proud. Bloody hell. Gray suspected the only thing worse than watching over a prim governess would be watching over a soused one.

8 ETHIOPIA Lucy Welcomes You Home —National Museum of Ethiopia poster Many things come from Ethiopia—for example, humans. A long time ago, in the Awash Valley, a humanlike ape hominin lived. She could walk on two legs but also hung out in trees; indeed, a fall from one may have caused her demise. Some 3.2 million years later, in 1974, one of her descendants, the paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, came across her skeleton, and subsequent research suggested that this may be the region from where we all originated. Our ancestor was named Lucy due to the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which played at Johanson’s campsite that night. It certainly catches our imagination better than her scientific name: AL 288-1. The National Museum of Ethiopia’s poster “Lucy Welcomes You Home” is a clever piece of marketing, as is the national tourism slogan “Land of Origins,” which has helped boost visitor numbers in a country putting itself on the map in many ways. Tourism accounts for almost 10 percent of Ethiopia’s GDP, with close to 1 million people a year venturing into an epic landscape of high mountains, tropical forests, burning deserts, nine World Heritage sites, including thousand-year-old churches hewn out of solid rock, and breathtaking waterfalls.

Do you think she's going to hang out your dirty laundry for all to see?" "How can you say she has sense after what she pulled today? Bah! You don't know what you're talking about." "What Willow did today was nothing more than an act of rebellion, a way to let off steam and let you know, in the only way she knew how, that your treatment of her is entirely unacceptable." "Woman, what you need is a man, then maybe you wouldn't be putting your nose in everybody's business." "Why,Mr. Vaughn, are you applying for the job?" Miriam asked, with an ill-humored smile. "Hell,no!" "Then I suggest you leave my personal life out of this. My life is in perfect order, which is more than can be said for yours!" Owen grunted and took a pull on his pipe. Well aware of his bold perusal, Miriam attacked her darning as if it were infinitely more engaging than any conversation with the man across the room from her. Owen wasn't a handsome man by any standards with his bearlike build and ruddy complexion. And heaven knew he wasn't very likeable either. Thus, Miriam was at a complete loss to explain her powerful attraction to him. Good heavens, she thought, I haven't felt so giddy since that time on my eighteenth birthday when Hiriam pulled me behind Aunt Harriet's coachhouse and we... The landlady's face reddened.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel “T hey shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23 ESV). This is perhaps our oldest Christmas carol. Historians say its roots go back to the 8th century. In its earliest form, it was a “plain song” or a chant and the monks sang it a cappella. It was sung or chanted in Latin during the seven days leading up to Christmas. Translated into English by John Mason Neale in 1851, we sing it to the tune “Veni, Emmanuel,” a 15th-century melody. Many churches sing it early in the Advent season because of its plaintive tone of expectant waiting. Traditionally Advent centers on the Old Testament preparation for the coming of the Messiah who will establish his kingdom on the earth. When the words form a prayer that Christ will come and “ransom captive Israel,” we ought to remember the long years of Babylonian captivity. Each verse of this carol features a different Old Testament name or title of the coming Messiah: “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” “O come, Thou Wisdom from on high.” “O come, Thou Rod of Jesse.” “O come, Thou Day-spring.” “O come, Thou Key of David.” “O come, Thou Lord of Might.” “O come, Desire of Nations.” This carol assumes a high level of biblical literacy. That fact might argue against singing it today because so many churchgoers don’t have any idea what “Day-spring” means or they think Jesse refers to a wrestler or maybe to a reality TV star. But that argument works both ways. We ought to sing this carol and we ought to use it as a teaching tool. Sing it—and explain it! We can see the Jewish roots of this carol in the refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. But Israel’s Messiah is also our Savior and Lord. What Israel was waiting for turns out to be the long-expected Jesus. So this carol rightly belongs to us as well. The first verse suggests the longing of the Jewish people waiting for Messiah to come: O come, O come, Emmanuel And ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of God appears The second verse pictures Christ redeeming us from hell and death: O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free Thine own from Satan’s tyranny From depths of Hell Thy people save And give them victory o’er the grave This verse reminds us only Christ can take us home to heaven: O come, Thou Key of David, come, And open wide our heavenly home; Make safe the way that leads on high, And close the path to misery. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. Let’s listen as Selah captures the Jewish flavor of this carol. Lord, we pray today for all those lost in the darkness of sin. We pray for those who feel there is no hope. May the light of Jesus shine in their hearts today. Amen.

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end. Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam: How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the race of Time, Till time stands fix'd. But it will be a related comfort. In our world the material for an eschatology is more elusive, harder to handle. It may not be true, as the modern poet argues, that we must build it out of 'our loneliness and regret'; the past has left us stronger materials than these for our artifice of eternity. But the artifice of eternity exists only for the dying generations; and since they choose, alter the shape of time, and die, the eternal artifice must change. The golden bird will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes. In my next talk I shall be trying to explain some of the ways in which that song changes, and talking about the relationship between apocalypse and the changing fictions of men born and dead in the middest. It is a large subject, because the instrument of change is the human imagination. It changes not only the consoling plot, but the structure of time and the world. One of the most striking things about it was said by Stevens in one of his adages; and it is with this suggestive saying that I shall mark the transition from the first to the second part of my own pattern. 'The imagination,' said this student of changing fictions, 'the imagination is always at the end of an era.' Next time we shall try to see what this means in relation to our problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.

I have an antipathy to dogs, not because they are faithful, but because they are shameless. Because they carry on their love affairs on the street.” Again that crimson flush overspread her features. “Cats are more cultured about such things—if I may use that much misused word. There are insects that mate only in the darkest nights, in the most forsaken corners, so that no forester has ever succeeded in observing them. I've always held that there will come a time when we will speak of the barbarous practices of this century, or the last ten centuries, as if they were a fairy-tale. Just think how tremendously funny it must strike any sensitive person when two people, having conceived a certain desire to go to bed with one another, set a special date for the event. They inform certain public institutions, the State, the Church. They tell their friends and relations, their own parents, their own brothers and sisters. On the day which is to end in that night, they gather everybody they know about them, let themselves be observed by persons who stuff themselves and drink until they are sick, listen to suggestive songs and suggestive speeches—and yet do not get sick themselves. I've always had a feeling that marriage as it is practiced today would be fit punishment for a hardened criminal. It is such a cruel, such an exquisite torture. Metta, my child, oblige me and if you ever decide to marry, do it when you desire and not on some appointed day. Do it in utter secrecy so that no living soul can suspect the possibility of such a thing....

Hi, Bruce,’ said Uzma. ‘Hello,’ Bruce replied. ‘Would it be possible to have a photo taken?’ she asked. ‘Sure, we can do that!’ he replied, smiling broadly. I took the photograph. Then it was my turn. He signed my book and bandanna and posed for another photograph. Just as I was about to let the next fan have their moment in the sun I turned to Springsteen and said, ‘Bruce. Three words: “Point Blank”, acoustic’ The following night I was sitting in the Sheffield Arena with Amolak and my sister. It was 16 April 1993 and we were in the front block ten or fifteen rows from the stage. Uzma was having the time of her life. It was her first Springsteen concert and it was so wonderful to see her having so much fun. Springsteen had just finished singing ‘Badlands’ when he requested an acoustic guitar and told the audience: ‘A fella came up to me and asked for this song. I don't know if he's out there tonight, but if he is, this is for you.’ He began slowly strumming the acoustic guitar before singing, ‘Do you still say your prayers darling, before you go to bed at night? Praying that tomorrow everything will be all right?’ He was singing ‘Point Blank’. I doubled up, buried my face in my hands and wept. Amolak hugged me. ‘Point Blank’ was one of my favourite songs. I never imagined I would hear it sung acoustically. The fact that Springsteen had remembered my request and then decided to actually listen to my suggestion was overwhelming. As I continued to cry uncontrollably and as Bruce Springsteen continued to sing ‘Point Blank’, Amolak said to me: ‘You see, buddy, dreams do come true.’ *

Lloyd moved to the blackboard and wrote ‘Maneater, Hall and Oates’ at the bottom of a long list of songs and artists. The blackboard in the kitchen had once been installed as a way of communication for the house. It had turned into a list of Songs That You Would Never See In The Same Light Again. This was basically a list of songs that our serial killing landlord had blared at one time or another at top volume to cover the sound of his heavy electric power tools. It was a litany of 70’s and 80’s music. Blondie, Heart of Glass was on the list. So was Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry like the Wolf’. Sam had jokingly given him an Einstürzende Neubauten CD on the premise that his tools would blend right in to the music, and he’d returned it the next day, saying it was too suspicious-sounding and made him very nervous for some reason. The next weekend, we had gone right back to the 80’s with the Missing Persons and Dead or Alive. I tried not to think about why he was playing the music, but it was a little hard not to think about. The strange thumps sometimes suggested that he’d gotten a live one downstairs and was merrily bashing in their skull in the name of his psoriasis to the tune of ‘It’s My Life’ by Talk Talk. Other times I listened in horror as my favorite Thomas Dolby songs were accompanied by an annoying high-pitched buzzsaw whine that altered as if it had entered some sort of solid tissue. He never borrowed music from us again – he claimed our music was too disturbing and dark, and shunned our offerings of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails in favor of some­thing nice and happy by Abba. You’ve never had a restless night from imagining someone deboning a human body while blaring ‘Waterloo’ or ‘Fernando’. It’s not fun.

I could use a nice bath down at the river tonight. Guess I'll just have to settle for a spit bath." She smiled good-naturedly and picked up the bucket. "Come on up to the house when you're finished and I'll show you to a room." As she turned to leave, Rider nonchalantly stretched out his arm and grabbed her belt, pulling her up short. "I could walk you to the swimming hole and stand guard if you like." His grin was devilish. Willow smiled and pried loose the long fingers on her waist. "I thank you for the offer, but I like my privacy." "Are you suggesting that I would be like the fox guarding the henhouse?" he teased, wiggling his brows up and down. "Don't forget, we are supposed to be lovers." "We're only playacting that we're lovers." She laughed and headed torward the door. His chair tipped over as Rider beat her there and stretched an arm across the doorway to block her passage. "All good plays are well-rehearsed,Willow." His deep baritone was tantalizing in its implication. Her cheeks pinked and she uttered a nervous little laugh. "Let me through, you big galoot." Instead,he leaned closer. He smelled of leather,outdoors, and a familiar male scent she now realized was his alone. The heady combination aroused her desire to be closer, to be touched. Warning bells went off. Willow tried stepping back, but his other arm came up behind her and cut off her retreat. Her hammering heart skipped a beat as his desire-laden eyes touched where his hands dared not. "Let's rehearse, sweetheart." "Rehearse," she repeated in a dreamy whisper. She dropped the bucket, all thoughts of escape gone. Her body leaned into his of its own volition. What do I know of lovers? she asked herself. Practice, yes. I need practice. Hicks must be convinced. She tilted her head back for Rider's kiss. Rehearsal, that's all it is. Her lips met his.

On her second screen, there were the number of messages sent by other staffers that day, 1,192, and the number of those messages that she’d read, 239, and the number to which she’d responded, 88. There was the number of recent invitations to Circle company events, 41, and the number she’d responded to, 28. There was the number of overall visitors to the Circle’s sites that day, 3.2 billion, and the number of pageviews, 88.7 billion. There was the number of friends in Mae’s OuterCircle, 762, and outstanding requests by those wanting to be her friend, 27. There were the number of zingers she was following, 10,343, and the number following her, 18,198. There was the number of unread zings, 887. There was the number of zingers suggested to her, 12,862. There was the number of songs in her digital library, 6,877, number of artists represented, 921, and based on her tastes, the number of artists recommended to her: 3,408. There was the number of images in her library, 33,002, and number of images recommended to her, 100,038. There was the temperature inside the building, 70, and the temperature outside, 71. There was the number of staffers on campus that day, 10,981, and number of visitors to campus that day, 248. Mae had news alerts set for 45 names and subjects, and each time any one of them was mentioned by any of the news feeds she favored, she received a notice. That day there were 187. She could see how many people had viewed her profile that day, 210, and how much time on average they spent: 1.3 minutes. If she wanted, of course, she could go deeper, and see precisely what each person had viewed. Her health stats added a few dozen more numbers, each of them giving her a sense of great calm and control. She knew her heart rate and knew it was right. She knew her step count, almost 8,200 that day, and knew that she could get to 10,000 with ease.

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?

In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuais and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries German philologists began to study German medieval poetry, which had long since fallen into oblivion. Most of the epics they edited from old manuscripts were imitations of French works. The names of their authors—most of them knightly warriors in the service of dukes or counts—were known. These epics were not much to boast of. But there were two epics of a quite different character, genuinely original works of high literary value, far surpassing the conventional products of the courtiers: the Nibelungenlied and the Gudrun. The former is one of the great books of world literature and undoubtedly the outstanding poem Germany produced before the days of Goethe and Schiller. The names of the authors of these masterpieces were not handed down to posterity. Perhaps the poets belonged to the class of professional entertainers (Spielleute), who not only were snubbed by the nobility but had to endure mortifying legal disabilities. Perhaps they were heretical or Jewish, and the clergy was eager to make people forget them. At any rate the philologists called these two works "people's epics" (Volksepen). This term suggested to naive minds the idea that they were written not by individual authors but by the "people." The same mythical authorship was attributed to popular songs (Volkslieder) whose authors were unknown. Again in Germany, in the years following the Napoleonic wars, the problem of comprehensive legislative codification was brought up for discussion. In this controversy the historical school of jurisprudence, led by Savigny, denied the competence of any age and any persons to write legislation. Like the Volksepen and the Volkslieder, a nation s laws, they declared, are a spontaneous emanation of the Volksgeist, the nations spirit and peculiar character. Genuine laws are not arbitrarily written by legislators; they spring up and thrive organically from the Volksgeist. This Volksgeist doctrine was devised in Germany as a conscious reaction against the ideas of natural law and the "unGerman" spirit of the French Revolution. But it was further developed and elevated to the dignity of a comprehensive social doctrine by the French positivists, many of whom not only were committed to the principies of the most radical among the revolutionary leaders but aimed at completing the "unfinished revolution" by a violent overthrow of the capitalistic mode of production. Émile Durkheim and his school deal with the group mind as if it were a real phenomenon, a distinct agency, thinking and acting. As they see it, not individuais but the group is the subject of history. As a corrective of these fancies the truism must be stressed that only individuais think and act. In dealing with the thoughts and actions of individuais the historian establishes the fact that some individuais influence one another in their thinking and acting more strongly than they influence and are influenced by other individuais. He observes that cooperation and division of labor exist among some, while existing to a lesser extent or not at ali among others. He employs the term "group" to signify an aggregation of individuais who cooperate together more closely.

The lust of property, and love: what different associations each of these ideas evoke! and yet it might be the same impulse twice named: on the one occasion disparaged from the standpoint of those already possessing (in whom the impulse has attained something of repose, who are now apprehensive for the safety of their "possession"); on the other occasion viewed from the standpoint of the unsatisfied and thirsty, and therefore glorified as "good." Our love of our neighbor, is it not a striving after new property? And similarly our love of knowledge, of truth; and in general all the striving after novelties? We gradually become satiated with the old and securely possessed, and again stretch out our hands; even the finest landscape in which we live for three months is no longer certain of our love, and any kind of more distant coast excites our covetousness: the possession for the most part becomes smaller through possessing. Our pleasure in ourselves seeks to maintain itself by always transforming something new into ourselves, that is just possessing. To become satiated with a possession, that is to become satiated with ourselves. (One can also suffer from excess, even the desire to cast away, to share out, may assume the honorable name of "love.") When we see any one suffering, we willingly utilize the opportunity then afforded to take possession of him; the beneficent and sympathetic man, for example, does this; he also calls the desire for new possession awakened in him, by the name of "love," and has enjoyment in it, as in a new acquisition suggesting itself to him. The love of the sexes, however, betrays itself most plainly as the striving after possession: the lover wants the unconditioned, sole possession of the person longed for by him; he wants just as absolute power over her soul as over the body; he wants to be loved solely, and to dwell and rule in the other soul as what is highest and most to be desired. When one considers that this means precisely to exclude all the world from a precious possession, a happiness, and an enjoyment; when one considers that the lover has in view the impoverishment and privation of all other rivals, and would like to become the dragon of his golden hoard, as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all "conquerors "and exploiters; when one considers finally that to the lover himself, the whole world besides appears indifferent, colorless, and worthless, and that he is ready to make every sacrifice, disturb every arrangement, and put every other interest behind his own, one is verily surprised that this ferocious lust of property and injustice of sexual love should have been glorified and deified to such an extent at all times; yea, that out of this love the conception of love as the antithesis of egoism should have been derived, when it is perhaps precisely the most unqualified expression of egoism. Here, evidently, the non-possessors and desirers have determined the usage of language, there were, of course, always too many of them. Those who have been favored with much possession and satiety, have, to be sure, dropped a word now and then about the "raging demon," as, for instance, the most lovable and most beloved of all the Athenians Sophocles; but Eros always laughed at such revilers, they were always his greatest favorites. There is, of course, here and there on this terrestrial sphere a kind of sequel to love, in which that covetous longing of two persons for one another has yielded to a new desire and covetousness, to a common, higher thirst for a superior ideal standing above them: but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name — friendship.

What is called Love. The lust of property, and love: what different associations each of these ideas evoke! - and yet it might be the same impulse twice named: on the one occasion disparaged from the standpoint of those already possessing (in whom the impulse has attained something of repose, who are now apprehensive for the safety of their "possession"); on the other occasion viewed from the standpoint of the unsatisfied and thirsty, and therefore glorified as "good." Our love of our neighbour, is it not a striving after new property? And similarly our love of knowledge, of truth; and in general all the striving after novelties? We gradually become satiated with the old and securely possessed, and again stretch out our hands; even the finest landscape in which we live for three months is no longer certain of our love, and any kind of more distant coast excites our covetousness: the possession for the most part becomes smaller through possessing. Our pleasure in ourselves seeks to maintain itself by always transforming something new into ourselves, - that is just possessing. To become satiated with a possession, that is to become satiated with ourselves. (One can also suffer from excess, even the desire to cast away, to share out, may assume the honourable name of "love." ) When we see any one suffering, we willingly utilise the opportunity then afforded to take possession of him; the beneficent and sympathetic man, for example, does this; he also calls the desire for new possession awakened in him, by the name of "love," and has enjoyment in it, as in a new acquisition suggesting itself to him. The love of the sexes, however, betrays itself most plainly as the striving after possession: the lover wants the unconditioned, sole possession of the person longed for by him; he wants just as absolute power over her soul as over her body; he wants to be loved solely, and to dwell and rule in the other soul as what is highest and most to be desired. When one considers that this means precisely to exclude all the world from a precious possession, a happiness, and an enjoyment; when one considers that the lover has in view the impoverishment and privation of all other rivals, and would like to become the dragon of his golden hoard, as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all "conquerors " and exploiters; when one considers finally that to the lover himself, the whole world besides appears indifferent, colourless, and worthless, and that he is ready to make every sacrifice, disturb every arrangement, and put every other interest behind his own, one is verily surprised that this ferocious lust of property and injustice of sexual love should have been glorified and deified to such an extent at all times; yea, that out of this love the conception of love as the antithesis of egoism should have been derived, when it is perhaps precisely the most unqualified expression of egoism. Here, evidently, the non-possessors and desirers have determined the usage of language, there were, of course, always too many of them. Those who have been favoured with much possession and satiety, have, to be sure, dropped a word now and then about the "raging demon," as, for instance, the most lovable and most beloved of all the Athenians Sophocles; but Eros always laughed at such revilers, they were always his greatest favourites. There is, of course, here and there on this terrestrial sphere a kind of sequel to love, in which that covetous longing of two persons for one another has yielded to a new desire and covetousness, to a common, higher thirst for a superior ideal standing above them: but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.

In that song, someone suggests to the narrator (ostensibly Joni) that she should settle down and have children or do charity work, and Joni responds that the cure for her melancholy is actually to find herself “another lover.

The last game we played was another suggestion of Millie’s called...Truth or Dare Balloons. Millie and I had so much fun thinking up Truth or Dare options which we wrote on small pieces of paper and then slipped inside a heap of balloons before inflating them. To play the game, we needed some fun music so Jack took care of that by selecting some upbeat songs from the playlist on his phone. Everyone had to be dancing while one balloon was passed around the group by bumping it towards each other. If someone allowed the balloon to hit the floor, that person had to pop the balloon and then complete the truth or dare inside it. To

I’m totally gonna fall on my face,” he announced. I looked over at Aylin and smiled. “She said the same. Just blame Matt and say he tripped you. Everyone’ll believe it. He’s a dick.” “Fuck you, Gateon,” Matt fired back in his best approximation of good-naturedly. “See?” I grinned. Eric laughed, and some of the tension eased out of his body. “Alright, fine. I’m blaming Matt. No hard feelings, Barbur.” “Again,” Matt retorted in an almost sing-song cadence, “fuck you both.” Kara poked me in the side. “But what if Matt falls?” “Then we blame air pockets,” I suggested. “That works.

The Reagan administration took away federal funds for the arts, suggesting that the performing arts seek help from private donors. In New York, two historic Broadway theaters were razed to make way for a luxury fifty-story hotel, after two hundred theater people demonstrated, picketing, reading plays and singing songs, refusing to disperse when ordered by police. Some of the nation’s best-known theater personalities were arrested, including producer Joseph Papp, actresses Tammy Grimes, Estelle Parsons, and Celeste Holm, actors Richard Gere and Michael Moriarty.

She says she loves me,” he told me. “Of course she says that,” I said. He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had brightened, as though he had been encouraged by my words. “And I must be nineteen by now, lord! Maybe even twenty?” “Eighteen?” I suggested. “I could have been married four years ago, lord!” “But why marry a whore?” I asked him harshly. “She’s . . .” Sihtric began. “She’s old,” I snarled, “maybe thirty? And she’s addled. Ealhswith only has to see a man and her thighs fly apart! If you lined up every man who’d tupped that whore you’d have an army big enough to conquer all Britain.” Beside me Ralla sniggered. “You’d be in that army, Ralla?” I asked. “Twenty times over, lord,” the shipmaster said. “She loves me,” Sihtric spoke sullenly. “She loves your silver,” I said, “and besides, why put a new sword in an old scabbard?

Pekes and the Pollicles” was the sole survivor of his original scheme. Eliot’s letter to Geoffrey Faber suggested another building block, an event that brought the cats together. “The Song of the Jellicles” is about a Jellicle Ball. Could this have been the event that Eliot was proposing? If so “Practical Cats” would have dance at its centre. Dance was now sweeping Britain, albeit about six decades behind America. Brian Brolly reluctantly accepted that Cameron would co-produce with the Really Useful Company. “Practical Cats,” the musical, was born.

I know the secret Jon Arryn was murdered to protect. Robert will leave no trueborn son behind him. Joffrey and Tommen are Jaime Lannister’s bastards, (...) .” Littlefinger lifted an eyebrow. “Shocking,” he said in a tone that suggested he was not shocked at all.

Extended kinship groups - sometimes located on one plantation, more commonly extended over several - became the central units of slave life, ordering society, articulating values, and delineating identity by defining the boundaries of trust. They also became the nexus for incorporating the never-ending stream of arrivals from the seaboard states into the new society, cushioning the horror of the Second Middle Passage, and socializing the deportees to the realities of life on the plantation frontier. Playing the role of midwives, the earlier arrivals transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, melding the polyglot immigrants into one. In defining obligations and responsibilities, the family became the centerpole of slave life. The arrival of the first child provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, pioneer slaves restored the generational linkages for themselves and connected their children with grandparents they would never know. Some pioneer slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation, suggesting how slavery's long history on mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act. Along the same mental pathways that joined the charter and migration generations flowed other knowledge. Rituals carried from Africa might be as simple as the way a mother held a child to her breast or as complex as a cure for warts. Songs for celebrating marriage, ceremonies for breaking bread, and last rites for an honored elder survived in the minds of those forced from their seaboard homes, along with the unfulfilled promise of the Age of Revolution and evangelical awakenings. Still, the new order never quite duplicated the old. Even as transplanted slaves strained their memories to reconstruct what they had once known, slavery itself was being recast. The lush thicket of kin that deportees like Hawkins Wilson remembered had been obliterated by the Second Middle Passage. Although pioneer slaves worked assiduously to knit together a new family fabric, elevating elderly slaves into parents and deputizing friends as kin, of necessity they had to look beyond blood and marriage. Kin emerged as well from a new religious sensibility, as young men and women whose families had been ravaged by the Second Middle Passage embraced one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. A cadre of black evangelicals, many of who had been converted in the revivals of the late eighteenth century, became chief agents of the expansion of African-American Christianity. James Williams, a black driver who had been transferred from Virginia to the Alabama blackbelt, was just one of many believers who was 'torn away from the care and discipline of their respective churches.' Swept westward by the tide of the domestic slave trade, they 'retained their love for the exercises of religion.

As the Chinese translation of the name Sukhāvatī suggests, it is a land of supreme joy. The Sanskrit is of similar meaning: “that which possesses ease and comfort.” Sukhāvatī is not subject to the sufferings that plague this world and, furthermore, it is a land of surpassed beauty. It is described as having seven tiers of balustrades, seven rows of nets, and seven rows of trees, all adorned with four jewels (gold, silver, lapsis lazuli, and crystal). There is a lake of the seven jewels (gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, a kind of big shell [tridacna gigas], coral, and agate), filled with water having the eight virtues. The bottom of the lake is gold sand. On the four sides of the lake are stairs (galleries) made of the four jewels. Above are towers and palaces also adorned with the seven jewels. Above are towers and palaces also adorned with the seven jewels. In the lake bloom lotus flowers as large as chariot wheels. The blue lotus flowers emit a blue light, and the yellow, red, and white lotus flowers emit light of corresponding colors. They all give forth a sweet fragrance. The delightful sound of heavenly music can be hard, and in the morning, at noon, and in the evening mandārava flowers fall from the sky and gently pile up on the golden ground. Every morning the inhabitants of the Pure Land gather these flowers with the hems of their robes and make offerings of them to myriads of buddhas in other lands. At mealtime they return to their own land, where they take their meal and stroll around. There are many kinds of birds—swans, peacocks, parrots, sharikas, kalaviṅkas, and jīvaṃjīvakas, which sing with beautiful voices, proclaiming the teachings of the Buddha. When living beings hear this song, they think about the Buddha, Dharma (“law,” or his teachings), and Saṅgha (“community of believers”). When the gentle breezes blow, the rows of four-jeweled trees and jeweled nets give forth a gentle music, like a beautiful symphony. In this land dwell Amitābha Buddha and his two attendants, the bodhisattvas Avalokitśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta. At their feet are those virtuous beings who have been reborn in that land because of their ardent faith. All, however, are male; women of deep faith are reborn here with male bodies. The female sex, considered inferior and unfortunate, has no place in Sukhāvatī. All people, says Śākyamuni, should ardently wish for rebirth in that land and become the companions of the most virtuous of all beings. People cannot hope for rebirth there just by performing a few good deeds, however. If living beings meditate eagerly upon the name of Amitābha for even one day with an undisturbed mind, Amitābha and his holy retinue will appear before them to receive them at the end of Life. They will enter the Pure Land with unperturbed hearts.

Scotland's contribution to American balladry is a subject which was either glossed over or neglected entirely by Cecil Sharp, the English folklorist and ballad collector, when he came over to the United States in search of traditional song poetry. Over here we are indebted to Sharp and to Miss Maud Karpeles for exploring the back country and helping us find what we had. Their visits were fruitful and their English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is an exemplary work. But it is regrettable that a Scottish folklorist, familiar and in tune with Lowland traditions, was not close at hand to make a few claims of his own. Somebody needed to suggest that Scotland had as good a claim to half the British ballads Sharp collected in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina as England has. Somebody might have suggested that English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is a misleading title - that British Folk Songs would have been more accurate. For, after all, the most authoritative editor in the business, Francis J. Child, had clearly recognised two national traditions in his monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which is the keystone work on which all subsequent studies have been based.

Kemper astutely explains how the highly integrated music industry created, developed, and eventually abandoned the Monkees." -- Library Journal "A keenly incisive---and, at times, refreshingly objective and even-handed---analysis of the entertainment machinery of the era, and the manner in which radio, television, and other areas worked together to manufacture The Monkees seemingly out of thin air." -- Musoscribe "I spent the entire summer of 1987 on the road opening up for The Monkees, and I didn't learn 1% as much about them as I learned from this thorough and remarkable book by Tom Kemper." -- "Weird Al" Yankovic "The Monkees gets into the vast machinery that goes on behind the scenes of producing perfect pop - still relevant today even if the names and corporations have changed - and does it with a lot of fun." -- Chris Shiflett, Foo Fighters "Kemper's book clarifies so much that is misunderstood in the Monkees story." -- Susanna Hoffs, The Bangles "A knowledgeable and incisive portrait of the popular music industry." -- Paul Hirsch, Northwestern University "Fascinating and witty . . .The book is full of interesting insights . . . [and] Kemper is impressive in unpacking particular songs . . . a fresh and engaging take on an oft-told story." ― Shindig! " Valuable, interesting, well-argued, and built on a pile of documented evidence. " - Psychobabble "Belittled at the time of their creation in the mid-Sixties, as made-for-TV Help-era Beatles clones, The Monkees' music has stood the test of time, and then some. Tom Kemper suggests, in his excellent book, that the initial snobbery surrounding the group, at least in elevated critical circles, came about because of the rise of a new rock culture based on authenticity, individual expression and idealism." - Pick of the Week, Choice "Kemper helps us understand what it is that continues to make the Monkees phenomenon 'compelling, fascinating and divisive." - The Spectator

Hooke, however, argued that he had formulated the laws of gravitation earlier, and that Newton had plagiarized his observations. It was a preposterous claim. Indeed, Hooke, and several other physicists, had suggested that planetary bodies were attracted to the sun through invisible “forces,” but none of the prior analysis had anywhere near the mathematical rigor or scientific depth that Newton brought to the puzzle in Principia.

Cassilda: (speaking to herself) We strain our ears for the sound of love, but must all mothers bear the horror of seeing their Children grow from wonderful possibility to grim reality? Stranger: (Stands mutely in the shadows, his hands folding across his chest) Cassilda: If only we could stay a moment behind the veil of time, and live in that moment of indecision. Stranger: (Whispers so Cassilda cannot hear) Existence is decision. (...) [Te Child appears before the closed curtain] 1 Te Child: I am not the Prologue, nor the Afterword; call me the Prototaph. My role is this: to tell you it is now too late to close the book or quit the theatre. You already thought you should have done so earlier, but you stayed. How harmless it all is! No definite principles are involved, no doctrines promulgated in these pristine pages, no convictions outraged…but the blow has fallen, and now it is too late. And shall I tell you where the sin lies? It is yours. You listened to us; and all the say you stay to see the Sign. Now you are ours, or, since the runes also run backwards, we are yours…forever. (...) Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink behind the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa. Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is Lost Carcosa. Songs that the Hyades shall sing, Where flap the tatters of the King, Must die unheard in Dim Carcosa. Song of my soul, my voice is dead; Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa. (...) [As the gong continues to strike, everyone begins to unmask. There are murmurs and gestures of surprise, real or polite, as identities are recognized or revealed. Ten there is a wave of laugher. The music becomes louder and increases in tempo.] Camilla: You, sir, should unmask. Stranger: Indeed? Camilla: Indeed, it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you. Stranger: I wear no mask. Camilla: No mask? No mask! Stranger: I, I am the Pallid Mask itself. I, I am the Phantom of Truth. I came from Alar. My star is Aldebaran. Truth is our invention; it is our weapon of war. And see–by this sign we have conquered, and the siege of good and evil is ended… § [On the horizon, the towers of Carcosa begin to glow] Noatalba: (Pointing) Look, look! Carcosa, Carcosa is on fire! (...) The King: Te Phantom of ruth shall be laid. Te scalloped tattersof Te King must hide Haita forever. As for thee, Yhtill– All: No! No, no! Te King: And as for thee, we tell you this; it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living god. (...) Te Stranger falls, and everyone else sinks slowly to the ground after him. Te King can now be seen, although only faintly. He stands in state upon the balcony. He has no face, and is twice as tall as a man. He wears painted shows under his tattered, fantastically colored robes, and a streamer of silk appears to fall from the pointed tip of his hood. Behind his back he holds inverted a torch with a turned and jeweled shaft, which emits smoke, but no light. At times he appears to be winged; at others, haloed. These details are for the costumier; at no point should Te King be sufficiently visible to make themall out. Behind him, Carcosa and the Lake of Hali have vanished. Instead, there appears at his back a huge sculptured shield, in shape suggesting a labrys of onyx, upon which the Yellow Sign is chased in gold. Te rest of the stage darkens gradually, until, at the end, it is lit only by the decomposed body of the Stranger, phosphorescing bluely.]

The myth of romantic love is pervasive in popular culture; countless shows, movies, plays, books, and songs are centered around the theme of a lost and lonely individual who finds the perfect romantic match, and thereafter experiences a life of happiness and fulfillment. The psychologist James Hollis called this perfect romantic match the Magical Other. And he suggested that as traditional sources of meaning such as religion, family, and community have eroded, the pursuit of the Magical Other has intensified – as many people today deify romantic love and view it as the central source of life’s meaning.

a universe expanding in all directions. A universe expanding in all directions will stretch out all the waves of light coming from the galaxies. Hubble was experiencing this directly. He had found himself in the midst of these stretched-out waves as would be the case in an ever-widening universe. In one silent, thunderous instant, the developing universe surfaced in Hubble’s mind. He had knitted together observations and calculations. The songs of galaxies the farthest away were singing in the lowest octaves. He, and he alone, was experiencing this. Because the universe is expanding. He must have repeated that phrase over and over. He repeated it over and over because he was torn in two different directions. Out of habit, he perceived change as something that happened to objects in the universe. But the data were whispering a truth radically different. They were suggesting that the universe as a whole was changing. Light from the more distant galaxies was stretched to lower frequencies because galaxies were rapidly expanding away. The experience was breaking apart structures of his mind, transforming his understanding of his placement in the universe. In my imagined reconstruction of the event, Hubble next positioned the Hooker Telescope so that he could view, at the same time, two different galaxies. One of them ten times as far away as the other. Checking his data, he found that the distant one was expanding away from him ten times as fast.

This book is simply amazing. Reading it makes you feel so calm and easy. I would also suggest listening to Aretha Franklin songs while reading this book :)

Why were so many songs collected in the north-east, for example? In part, no doubt, the answer has to do with the activities of collectors; but the richness of the north-east in songs compared with the barren song terrain of the Lothians strongly suggests that differences in rural social organisation have explanatory value. We need to get away from simply counterposing 'lowland' to 'highland'. We need to see the enormous diversity in social arrangements within Lowland Scotland, even in recent times; and to analyse that diversity case by case without trying to smash it into a spurious shape with the intellectual cudgel of 'improvement'.

Children’s penchant for music seems to begin in infancy. By seven months, infants can remember music for as long as two weeks and can distinguish particular strains of Mozart they’ve heard versus very similar ones they haven’t, suggesting an innate—and evolutionary—basis for music perception and memory.

In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, narrative and other more-or-less literary forms are dominant, which seems to call for a strategy of reading for understanding similar to what one might use in an encounter with, say, Homer; but these books’ status as sacred text suggests, to many modern readers anyway, that their purpose is to provide information about God and God’s relation to human beings. “Strip-mining” the Psalms, or the Song of Solomon, or even the more elevated discourses of the Gospel of John, “for relevant content” might not seem like a promising strategy, but many generations of pastors have pushed it pretty hard, as though the Bible were no more than an awkwardly coded advice manual.)

Jinnah had, among other things, criticized the singing in government schools of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Mataram’. Composed by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the poem invoked Hindu temples, praised the Hindu goddess Durga, and spoke of seventy million Indians, each carrying a sword, ready to defend their motherland against invaders, who could be interpreted as being the British, or Muslims, or both. ‘Vande Mataram’ first became popular during the swadeshi movement of1905–07. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose named his political journal after it. Rabindranath Tagore was among the first to set it to music. His version was sung by his niece Saraladevi Chaudhurani at the Banaras Congress of 1905. The same year, the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati rendered it into his language. In Bengali and Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati, the song had long been sung at nationalist meetings and processions. After the Congress governments took power in 1937, the song was sometimes sung at official functions. The Muslim League objected vigorously. One of its legislators called it ‘anti-Muslim’, another, ‘an insult to Islam’. Jinnah himself claimed the song was ‘not only idolatrous but in its origins and substance [was] a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans’. Nationalists in Bengal were adamant that the song was not aimed at Muslims.The prominent Calcutta Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Gandhi that ‘the province (or at least the Hindu portion of it) is greatly perturbed over the controversy raised in certain Muslim circles over the song “Bande Mataram”. As far as I can judge, all shades of Hindu opinion are unanimous in opposing any attempts to ban the song in Congress meetings and conferences.’ Bose himself thought that ‘we should think a hundred times before we take any steps in the direction of banning the song’. The social worker Satis Dasgupta told Gandhi that ‘Vande Mataram’ was ‘out and out a patriotic song—a song in which all the children of the mother[land] can participate, be they Hindu or Mussalman’. It did use Hindu images, but such imagery was common in Bengal, where even Muslim poets like Nazrul Islam often referred to Hindu gods and legends. ‘Vande Mataram’, argued Dasgupta, was ‘never a provincial cry and never surely a communal cry’. Faced with Jinnah’s complaints on the one side and this defence by Bengali patriots on the other, Gandhi suggested a compromise: that Congress governments should have only the first two verses sung. These evoked the motherland without specifying any religious identity. But this concession made many Bengalis ‘sore at heart’; they wanted the whole song sung. On the other side, Muslims were not satisfied either; for, the ascription of a mother-like status to India was dangerously close to idol worship.

It could be as straightforward as the notion of a "mental reboot"- Matt Johnson's biological control-alt-delete key- that jolts the brain out of destructive patterns (such as Kessler's "capture"), affording an opportunity for new patterns to take root. It could be that, as Franz Vollenweider has hypothesized, psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity. The myriad new connections that spring up in the brain during the psychedelic experience, as mapped by the neuroimaging done at Imperial College, and the disintegration of well traveled old connections, may serve simply to "shake the snow globe," in Robin Carhart-Harris's phrase, a predicate for establishing new pathways. Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor: "Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet." Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. "In time, it become more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. "Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways." When the snow is freshest, the mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge-whether from a song or an intention or a therapists's suggestion- can powerfully influence its future course. p384

Self-proclaimed feminist thinkers have colluded with the patriarchal pornographic imagination's use of mass media to represent the sexual resubordination of women by men as cute, playful, and harmless ... we are bombarded with images suggesting that male sexual domination of women in no way threatens female autonomy or independence. In actuality, male domination of females in the sexual arena ... is a constant reminder that females are not free, that we have not attained full equal rights or equity.

[...] certainly explains why the woman feels that she needs to be careful and not to excite love prematurely. The great enthusiasm of the woman, in contrast o her feeling that the man is not sending her signals on the same wavelength as she is sending them to him. [...] It odes not express intimacy; on the contrary, it suggests the woman's apprehension that the man is not as interested as she is [...] which reflects her feelings towards the man's attitude. Therefore it is only natural that after the woman has expressed her desire in such strong terms she feels that this desire is likely to intimidate her beloved and cause him to withdraw.

On its face, the Song of Songs is a beautiful and striking statement about human love. It suggests that all life, including human sexuality, is holy because God has created it. There is in the song a celebration of life simply for its own beauty and experience.

MILF Token: What Is It and What Are the Prospects? Why MILF symbols? Whoever had actually the intense suggestion of producing a MILF token has actually located a cutting-edge means of touching into 2 distinctive yet similarly eye-catching streams. On the one hand, here's a fresh cryptocurrency including distinctively collectible characters, with evidence of possession saved in a blockchain. On the various other hand, when it concerns those characters, it likewise ventures a fixation among several songs in the very early 21st-century: fully grown, sexually knowledgeable ladies looking for daring times with their suitors. Any kind of speculator wanting to explore the idea behind these extravagant as well as attractive characters can conveniently acquaint themselves with a few of the very best sites concentrating on dating MILFs. These systems provide an algorithm-based solution, where brand-new consumers can surely join, as well as the details offered throughout this enrollment procedure - inspirations, kind of MILF they are brought in to, and so on. - can surely be as compared to the information they currently carry submit. This way, the liaison can surely be easily organized without the individual enquiring also needing to make up a candid message. The computer system software application will certainly give a shortlist of ideal dating prospects. Comparable character-driven symbols MILF symbols are top on from formerly prominent characters that have actually gripped the focus of crypto investors, such as CryptoPunks. These were a collection of 10,000 characters, each distinct, that exposed evidence of possession on the Ethereum blockchain. MILF symbols operate similarly. Due to the fact that no 2 characters are alike, each token can surely ended up being the authorities residential building of a solitary proprietor on this blockchain. Those 10,000 CryptoPunk symbols were quickly purchased, immediately providing the specific characters boosted worth. The presumption is that the MILF symbols will certainly go similarly, so any individual wanting to obtain their practical a certain MILF personality will certainly need to buy this through the market-place that's likewise installed in the Ethereum blockchain. Presently, the most affordable offered rate for MILF symbols is $0.00004078, standing for a 0.61% increase over the previous 24-hour. Shade coding Generally, these characters will certainly have actually a condition when they show up in the crypto markets. Where the CrytoPunks are worried, a blue history suggested that punk was except sale, neither exist energetic quotes. Punks that were offered offer for sale would certainly have actually a red history. Those with an energetic quote would certainly have actually a purple history. MILFs have actually built such a solid track record for desirability, their incorporation as

The Lusty Month of May” continues to develop Guenevere as a heroine of operetta in a lighthearted song, which is both naïve and highly suggestive. With the abundance of “tra-las” and an up-tempo chorus joining in the fun, Knapp’s parallels to operetta are more than apt. The clarity, wide range, and versatility of Andrews’s voice only enhance the effect. Andrews never sacrifices vocal precision or tone despite the focus on clever wordplay and a bouncy, allegretto tune. This tune is more virtuosic than “Simple Joys” with additional melodic leaps and the possibility for displays in a higher range. Loewe uses a C♯ diminished chord to denote Guenevere’s lustful feelings, often punctuating lyrics such as “lusty” or “libelous,” in the otherwise carefree milieu of C major. The generally light orchestration favors the string section, similar to “Simple Joys,” and also features a harp. When woodwinds enter, clarinets tend to dominate. At this point, this instrumentation characterizes Guenevere’s musical self and augments her connection to operetta as it reinforces the sense of frivolity. The call-and-response with the chorus further heightens the sense of abandon, which increases throughout the song. Guenevere has not lost her youthful taste for ribaldry during her marriage with Arthur.

Girls at Shoreline said Rich looked like L.L. Cool J. They called him Richie D., and around that time, Warren began to call himself Warren G. Erik wore his baseball cap just tilted perfectly to the side and also knew every song by Too $hort and was impressed that Warren knew the lyrics so well. Rich and Erik and D’Arcy beat him into the Crips and, after this initiation by pummeling, they said, “You’re part of the family now.” Though older boys in View Royal may have scoffed at Warren G. and “his whole gangster act,” older boys were unaware of the care and attention he brought to his outfits, which were, perhaps, both costume and disguise. He favored white. The color was distinctly his own, and it set him apart from his fellow gangsters, the members of the CMC (Crip Mafia Cartel). For the members of the CMC, blue was mandatory, red forbidden. White was Warren’s personal choice, and an unlikely one, for black may have better created the look of a badass he aspired to. At 5’4 and 115 pounds, Warren was far from a thug, and in fact could not have been cuter and, despite his knowledge of lewd song lyrics and his tempestuous domestic situation, innocent. Never has a boy looked more as if he wandered out of a fairy tale. His eyes were immense, and his eyelashes were long, and his expression was earnest and longing and always, always hopeful. He was possessed of the certain androgynous beauty that appeals so strongly to girls who have not yet turned sixteen. Like heartthrobs of past and present (that year it was Leonardo DiCaprio), Warren G. appeared neither manly nor mean, and in fact, his soft beauty suggested he might really need to be saved.

etc." I have been searching for my self everywhere, but I can’t find it! I can’t even remember when exactly I lost it… I search for it in everything I love and hate in foreign and familiar cities in all the kind, exhausted, and mean faces… I search for my self near water springs and along river shores On mountaintops and in the scent of wildflowers… Between the branches of olive and fig trees, but without any trace or hope… I search in teacups, in the corners of old cafés In songs and interludes… In books In the memories of everyone who ever knew me Everyone I betrayed or was betrayed by… I search in lines and sentences, But all in vain… I even search unsuccessfully in the sentences that list options, including the examples and each “etc.” after each list of options… I keep wondering how did I so quietly lose it? And each time I ask the loved ones about my strong desire to reunite with my lost self, I realize they have no leads other than long and wide lists of places, things, activities, individuals, and hobbies where I may possibly “find” my self… In each list they suggest, I find countless options and countless lines ending with “etc.” They don’t understand that I have turned every rock and searched behind every “etc.” And today I finally realized That my self wasn’t from here, and thus, it was never here… That, all along, I have been searching for an illusion that never existed… [Original poem published in Arabic on March 11, 2024 at ahewar.org]

Our sacred text describes the state before creation as tohu wa-bohu, without form and void, a sea of waste and chaos, infinitely perplexed. And, as it turns out, that’s not a bad way to think about emptiness. Certain physicists suggest that the empty space actually roils and tosses about as quantum particles appear and disappear, tiny bits of light creating ripples as they arrive and go out.

Businesses also aggregate multiple publics by exploiting their spatial diversity, where different areas can be sectioned off to serve different groups of customers. Advertisements for San Francisco’s DNA Lounge invite patrons to listen to guest DJs mixing songs in one portion of the venue, and also promote the club’s resident DJs who spin for the crowd in another area of the bar. Similarly, the city’s Cat Club often advertises attractions in different spaces in the venue: “back room” DJs and “front room” DJs. The club aggregates different forms of entertainment in a single space, suggesting to customers that there are a bevy of attractions available there. By doing that, the advertisement suggests at least some variety in the publics that form there. Similarly, the Chicago bar Sidetrack uses its architecture to aggregate multiple publics.

Jack Logan,” he said, with a wistful air that suggested he was either going to burst into tears or burst into song. Or, if they were very lucky, just burst in general.

As with The Doors’ ‘The End’, ‘Extra Loveable’ also has an Oedipal theme, albeit reversed, with Prince suggesting that the object of his desire is so sexy and skilled that she will turn his mother lesbian and make his dead father (another clue that the song is fictional) return from the grave to have sex with her. The lyric also includes lines about bathing together which recall ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’, but while the shared bath in that song sounded like the most fun date ever, here he’s threatening to drag an unwilling partner into the tub to violate her.4

Among the hidden and irregular communities of madmen, paranoids, sorcerers, those who had Broken Through to the city behind and above the city of their births, there was a certain community or anticommunity, there was a guarded and untrustworthy exchange of information. They were the wanderers of the City Beyond, the Via Obscura, the Thousand-Fold Path, the Metacontext, die Träumenstadt, the Gears, the Slew, Time Itself, whatever you wanted to call it. (From time to time he’d suggested the Song, or the Chorus—neither caught on.) They bartered maps and keys and rumors of the Mountain.

Diane Louise Jordan Diane Louise Jordan is a British television presenter best known for her role in the long-running children’s program Blue Peter, which she hosted from 1990 until 1996. She is currently hosting BBC1’s religious show, Songs of Praise. Also noted for her charity work, Diane Louise Jordan is vice president of the National Children’s Home in England. When in late 1997 I was invited by the Right Honorable Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to sit on the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Committee, I was clueless as to why I’d been chosen. I was in the middle of a filming assignment in the United States when the call came through. Sitting on the bed in my New York hotel room, still with the receiver in my hand after agreeing to the chancellor’s request, I kept asking myself, “Why me?” The rest of the committee seemed to me to be high fliers of great influence or closely related to her. I was neither. I didn’t fit. But, perhaps, that’s the point. A lot of us think we don’t fit, don’t believe we’re up to much. Yet the truth is we’re all part of something big, and we’re all capable of inspiring others to be the best that they can be. This is what Princess Diana believed. The Princess influenced and inspired many through her life, and now I had an opportunity to be part of something that ensured her influence would continue. It was out responsibility as the Memorial Committee to sift through more than ten thousand suggestions by the British public to find an appropriate memorial to the life and work of the Princess. It was unanimously felt that the memorial should have lasting impact and reflect the many facets of Diana, so we came up with four commemorative projects: the Diana Nurses, a commemorative 5 pound coin, projects in the Royal Parks, and the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Award, for young people between the ages of eleven and eighteen. The Diana Award, as it is now known, was set up to acknowledge and support the achievements of young people throughout Britain. Each year the award is given to individuals or groups who have made an outstanding contribution to their community by improving the lives of others, especially the more vulnerable, or by enhancing the communities in which they live. The Diana Award is also given to those who’ve shown exemplary progress in personal development, particularly if it involves overcoming adversity. I’ve been associated with the Diana Award since it was established in 1999. And now, as a trustee, I’m extremely honored to be further involved, as I believe that the award holders are a living part of the late Princess’s legacy. They represent the kind of brave, caring, idealistic values Diana admired and championed. Like the late Princess, this award simply shines a light on what is already there, already being achieved. It’s as if Diana herself is telling the recipients how fantastic they are. The Princess said her job was to love people, and through this award she is still doing that. Recently, I was at an award holders ceremony. I was overwhelmed to be in an environment surrounded by beautiful young people committed to wanting the best. Like Princess Diana, they all demonstrate, in their individual ways, that when we strive to do our best, whether by overcoming personal adversity or contributing to the well-being of others, it changes us for the better. We see a glimpse of how we could all be if, like Diana, we have the courage to expose our hearts.

Before we move on to discussing specific ways description can modulate the pace of a story, let’s clarify what we mean by action. Action in a story is not the same as activity. Action is motion that is going somewhere, that pushes the story along. It’s a forward movement, an outward sign of an inward motive. Motion serves, as the lyrics of a popular song suggests, to “second that emotion.” Activity, on the other hand, is mere random movement. Made-for-TV movies often include lots of activity— cars crashing, buildings exploding, bullets flying—with little or no motivated action. When a viewer or a reader turns off the TV or closes the book, complaining that “nothing’s happening,” he’s usually referring not to the lack of activity on the screen or page, but to the lack of forward movement. The difference between activity and action is the difference between running on a treadmill and running in a race. So

Shouldn’t he admit his feelings?” Maude called out to him. “What?” Matt asked. “The song,” she reminded him. “If he’s feeling so confused, I guess the best thing to do is admit them to the object of his affection,” Maude suggested innocently. “What if he’s afraid of rejection?” Matt asked gazing fondly at Maude who was presently making a brave attempt at skating backwards. He was surprised to feel the smallest hint of self-doubt. Maude was nothing like the other girls he’d dated, and she was completely immune to his charm. It probably didn’t help that he preferred teasing her than actually admitting his feelings for her. “I

You’ve been punished.” Simus’s dark eyes twinkled as he changed the subject. “Speaking of that, have you started to work on the song?” Joden nodded. “Tell us the chorus at least, Joden.” Simus gestured with a hand, almost spilling my kavage. “Are we to wait until you perform it to hear it?” “No.” Joden chewed on a chicken leg. “Yes.” “No fair.” Simus turned to Keir. “You’re the Warlord. Order him to give us a hint.” Keir snorted. “Order a singer?” Simus leaned toward me, a wicked gleam in those dark eyes. “You’re the Warprize. You could…” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “If she does,” Joden spoke calmly, “the verses will talk about a certain wounded warrior who got fat and lazy as he healed.” Simus looked down at his third plate-full. “I need food to mend. Isn’t that right, little healer?” I looked at him, keeping my face serious. “Simus, the entire army could heal on what you eat.” Keir and Joden roared. Simus tried not to laugh as he objected to my statement.

Your eyes say I lie when I call you my woman. This is not good. It is our bargain, eh?” He plucked a wisp of grass and ran it slowly between his fingers, watching her in a way that suggested he would soon touch her--just as slowly. “It was a promise you made for me, and now you make a lie of it? This is the way of your people, to say empty words. Penende taquoip, honey talk, eh? But it is not the way of the Comanche. If you make a lie, I will carve out your tongue and feed it to the crows.” The breeze caught his hair, draping strands of it across his chiseled features. For an instant, the knife slash that marred his cheek was hidden, and he seemed less formidable. Her attention was drawn to his lips, full and sharply defined, yet somehow hard, perhaps because of the rigid expression he always wore. Deep crevices bracketed his mouth--laugh lines, surely. Ah, yes, she could imagine him cutting out her tongue and smiling while he did it. “You do not like me too good. This is a sad thing, eh?” With a sweep of his hand, he indicated the world around them. “The sky is up, the earth is down. The sun shows its face, only to be chased away by Mother Moon. These things are for always, eh? Just as you are my woman. The song was sung long ago, and the song must come to pass. You must accept, Blue Eyes.” Loretta yearned to break eye contact but found she couldn’t. The silken threads of his deep voice wove a spell around her. She must accept? Already he was planning to give her away to his horrible cousin. She sank lower in the water, keeping her arms crossed to hide her breasts. Could he see through the ripples? Still studying her with the same unnerving intensity, he said, “When the wind blows, the sapling bends, the flowers lie low against the earth, the grass is flattened.” He thumped his chest with his fist. “I am your wind, Blue Eyes. Bend or break.

High animal protein in take was positively associated with mortality and high plant protein intake was inversely associated with mortality, especially among individuals with at least 1 lifestyle risk factor. Substitution of plant protein for animal protein, especially that from processed red meat, was associated with lower mortality, suggesting the importance of protein source.

Every flower that gives its fragrance to the wandering air leaves its influence on the soul of man. The wheel and swoop of the winged creatures of the air suggest the flowing lines of subtle art. The roar and murmur of the restless sea, the cataract's solemn chant, the thunder's voice, the happy babble of the brook, the whispering leaves, the thrilling notes of mating birds, the sighing winds, taught man to pour his heart in song and gave a voice to grief and hope, to love and death.

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

Green Grows the Laurel’ recalls the Irish contribution to the Mexican-American War of 1845-47. (It has been suggested that the Mexican term gringo derives from the title of this song, such was its popularity along the front line.)

Birds— and Territory My dad and I designed a house for a wren family when I was ten years old. It looked like a Conestoga wagon, and had a front entrance about the size of a quarter. This made it a good house for wrens, who are tiny, and not so good for other, larger birds, who couldn’t get in. My elderly neighbour had a birdhouse, too, which we built for her at the same time, from an old rubber boot. It had an opening large enough for a bird the size of a robin. She was looking forward to the day it was occupied. A wren soon discovered our birdhouse, and made himself at home there. We could hear his lengthy, trilling song, repeated over and over, during the early spring. Once he’d built his nest in the covered wagon, however, our new avian tenant started carrying small sticks to our neighbour’s nearby boot. He packed it so full that no other bird, large or small, could possibly get in. Our neighbour was not pleased by this pre- emptive strike, but there was nothing to be done about it. “If we take it down,” said my dad, “clean it up, and put it back in the tree, the wren will just pack it full of sticks again.” Wrens are small, and they’re cute, but they’re merciless. I had broken my leg skiing the previous winter— first time down the hill— and had received some money from a school insurance policy designed to reward unfortunate, clumsy children. I purchased a cassette recorder (a high- tech novelty at the time) with the proceeds. My dad suggested that I sit on the back lawn, record the wren’s song, play it back, and watch what happened. So,

Birds— and Territory My dad and I designed a house for a wren family when I was ten years old. It looked like a Conestoga wagon, and had a front entrance about the size of a quarter. This made it a good house for wrens, who are tiny, and not so good for other, larger birds, who couldn’t get in. My elderly neighbour had a birdhouse, too, which we built for her at the same time, from an old rubber boot. It had an opening large enough for a bird the size of a robin. She was looking forward to the day it was occupied. A wren soon discovered our birdhouse, and made himself at home there. We could hear his lengthy, trilling song, repeated over and over, during the early spring. Once he’d built his nest in the covered wagon, however, our new avian tenant started carrying small sticks to our neighbour’s nearby boot. He packed it so full that no other bird, large or small, could possibly get in. Our neighbour was not pleased by this pre- emptive strike, but there was nothing to be done about it. “If we take it down,” said my dad, “clean it up, and put it back in the tree, the wren will just pack it full of sticks again.” Wrens are small, and they’re cute, but they’re merciless. I had broken my leg skiing the previous winter— first time down the hill— and had received some money from a school insurance policy designed to reward unfortunate, clumsy children. I purchased a cassette recorder (a high- tech novelty at the time) with the proceeds. My dad suggested that I sit on the back lawn, record the wren’s song, play it back, and watch what happened. So, I went out into the bright spring sunlight and taped a few minutes of the wren laying furious claim to his territory with song. Then I let him hear his own voice. That little bird, one- third the size of a sparrow, began to dive- bomb me and my cassette recorder, swooping back and forth, inches from the speaker. We saw a lot of that sort of behaviour, even in the absence of the tape recorder. If a larger bird ever dared to sit and rest in any of the trees near our birdhouse there was a good chance he would get knocked off his perch by a kamikaze wren.

She looks surprised, and then suspicious. “What do you mean?” “I mean that smells and scents have strong evocations for people, and usually, when you cannot place what is making you comfortable with someone or some place, it is often the smell of them.” It is the longest sentence he has spoken to her, and she likes the sound and timbre of his voice. It is reassuring and gentle. “Are you trying to get me to smell you?” “No,” he laughs. “Only if you want to.” “No, thank you. Some things should be kept for the future.” She cannot think why she has said that. About the future. Without any thought, it just flew out of her mouth, and now he is smiling, he looks happy, as though he is hoping to see her again. She smiles too, suddenly. After all, something has drawn her to this man; perhaps his eyes, which are open and honest and intelligent. “How old are you?” she asks. “Do you want to guess?” “No,” she replies, rolling her eyes. “I just want to know. I can’t tell from the look of you, whether you are eighteen or thirty.” “I am twenty five” “Like me.” She smiles, as though this satisfies her in some way, and then she closes her eyes. Etched into the skin between those eyes is a furrow of concentration. Alexander watches her, pausing only to ask the girl to pour two more drinks. When Katya opens her eyes, she sees the young man standing before her with his own eyes tightly shut, and a look of absorption on his face. She laughs. “What are you doing?” “I’m trying to see what you were concentrating on so suddenly.” “And? What was it?” “The music?” he ventures, and she smiles her affirmation. The musicians are playing more quietly now, and are almost drowned out under the rising of voices made freer by alcohol and laughter, but the music is there, behind everything, and it is soft and emotive. An older man has joined them, and with his balalaika is wafting a mournful tune that twines out over the heads of the crowd like a long curl of blue-tinged smoke. “I love this song,” Katya says, so quietly that Alexander can barely hear her. “So do I. Doesn’t it remind you of your childhood?” “Yes. That’s exactly it.” She looks away from him. “My grandmother used to sing it. She’d make my father play the piano to accompany her, and she’d sing it to my brother and me before we went to sleep.” “Is she still alive?” Katya shakes her head, but offers nothing more and Alexander looks around, at the deaf crowd, and then back at the liquid eyes of the girl before him. “Nobody can hear it except for us, I think.” “Perhaps he is only playing it for us,” she suggests. Alexander smiles at the idea. “Yes,” he says, and he quickly asks her to dance again, for she seems to be on the verge of tears, as she stands there, alone, listening. His question wakes her from some faraway reverie, from unbid

Amateur musical performances were extremely important for all of us during the war, and my experience of them started at the age of ten or eleven, when my friends and I took part in a custom that was very popular back then but now seems to have died out altogether. It was carried out at Halloween, but instead of going round asking for trick or treats we did something called ‘Guising’. A group of us lads would go to the front door of a house we thought might be welcoming and politely ask if we could come in and perform. Our particular playlet was suggested by my father; it was one he had performed when he was a lad, although whether there was any deeper tradition behind the verses we recited I cannot say. We were all dressed up in costumes, with one boy dressed as a king with a cardboard crown on his head. Once all were in the house most of us would cluster behind the sitting-room door, then the first boy would enter the room on his own and say, ‘Red up sticks and red up stools here comes in a pack of fools, a pack of fools behind that door. Step in King George and clear the floor.’ The boy with the crown on his head would enter and recite, ‘King George is my name, sword and pistol by my side, I hope to win the game.’ The first boy would answer, ‘The game, sir, the game, sir, is not within your power. I will slash you and slay you within half an hour.’ These two boys would then have a duel with toy swords and the first boy would drop down as though dead, at which the king would kneel down and say, ‘Is there a doctor in the town?’ A small boy with a little attaché case would then pop out from behind the door saying, ‘My name is Doctor Brown, the best little doctor in the town. A little to his nose and a little to his bum, now rise up, jock, and sing a song.’ It was an absurd little sketch, but we used to get showered with pieces of cake and home-made toffees and fudge, and we would pass from house to house performing the same sketch. Even now I can recall the words perfectly.

And I must be nineteen by now, lord! Maybe even twenty?” “Eighteen?” I suggested. “I could have been married four years ago, lord!” We

Biblical desire refuses to be limited to marriage: the lovers of the Song consummate their longing before any marriage ceremony takes place, Ruth “uncovers Boaz’s feet” before Boaz has established his “right to redeem,” and David fathers a child with Bathsheba while she is still married to Uriah. In other words, when all the biblical books are taken into account, no simple message regarding the meaning and limits of desire can be found. In fact, the passages considered in this chapter suggest that nonmarital desire can be both limitless and productive. If Ruth, Naomi, Boaz, Jonathan, David, or Bathsheba had listened to Christian educator Bonnie Park, Obed and Solomon would never have been born. As

apocalyptic notions,” she once said, thinking of earthquakes, floods, and fires. “However, mixed up with this tolerance for notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is the belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much part of being in California.” More deeply, the paradoxes in her writing suggest her real interest is language, its inaccuracies and illusions, the way words imply their opposites, and the ways stories, particularly stories that tell us how to live, get told or don’t. For

She just sometimes forgets that she has some…special challenges to face that her friends don’t. Things she needs to remember to do, and things not to do.” “Like not downing a couple of beers and flashing her real teeth at a panhandler,” Emma said, in a tone that suggested it wasn’t a hypothetical situation. “Or necking with her boyfriend, getting excited, and clawing his back so badly he needs stitches. Hushing that up was the highlight of my week, let me tell you.

Things were going so well that Rubin began suggesting a few songs for Cash, notably “Thirteen,” a tale of bad luck and hard times written for Cash by heavy-metal rocker Glenn Danzig, and “Down There by the Train,” a story of sin and salvation by Tom Waits.

Bob Kauflin Kauflin argues that Christians tend to fall into one of three categories when it comes to the relationship between music and words: (1) music supersedes the word; (2) music undermines the word; (3) music serves the word. Arguing for this third paradigm, Kauflin suggests three implications: (1) Singing can help us remember words, which means that we should use melodies that are effective, sing words that God wants us to remember, and seek to memorize songs. (2) Singing can help us engage emotionally with words, which means that we need a broader emotional range in the songs we sing, and that singing them should be an emotional event. (3) Singing can help us use words to demonstrate and express our unity, which means singing songs that unite us instead of divide us, recognizing that musical creativity in the church has functional limits and that it is ultimately the gospel, not music, that unites us in Christ.

April 13 MORNING “A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me.” — Song of Solomon 1:13 MYRRH may well be chosen as the type of Jesus on account of its preciousness, its perfume, its pleasantness, its healing, preserving, disinfecting qualities, and its connection with sacrifice. But why is He compared to “a bundle of myrrh”? First, for plenty. He is not a drop of it, He is a casket full. He is not a sprig or flower of it, but a whole bundle. There is enough in Christ for all my necessities; let me not be slow to avail myself of Him. Our well-beloved is compared to a “bundle” again, for variety: for there is in Christ not only the one thing needful, but in “Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” everything needful is in Him. Take Jesus in His different characters, and you will see a marvellous variety — Prophet, Priest, King, Husband, Friend, Shepherd. Consider Him in His life, death, resurrection, ascension, second advent; view Him in His virtue, gentleness, courage, self-denial, love, faithfulness, truth, righteousness — everywhere He is a bundle of preciousness. He is a “bundle of myrrh” for preservation — not loose myrrh tied up, myrrh to be stored in a casket. We must value Him as our best treasure; we must prize His words and His ordinances; and we must keep our thoughts of Him and knowledge of Him as under lock and key, lest the devil should steal anything from us. Moreover, Jesus is a “bundle of myrrh” for speciality. The emblem suggests the idea of distinguishing, discriminating grace. From before the foundation of the world, He was set apart for His people; and He gives forth His perfume only to those who understand how to enter into communion with Him, to have close dealings with Him. Oh! blessed people whom the Lord hath admitted into His secrets, and for whom He sets Himself apart. Oh! choice and happy who are thus made to say, “A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me.

Like most pain that we withhold from God’s touch, my paper pregnancy (apparently now also barren) had fostered a fermentation within my heart. My hurt was expanding beyond “just” the issues of childbearing and was touching the broader vision for my life. I was looking at life through the lens of being overlooked by God. I kept my eyes closed to keep the others around me from view — those whom, I naively assumed, could more easily proclaim the truths of God in song because they had what I wanted. Then I saw a vision on the back of my eyelids: the word family scribbled across a piece of paper. The paper had a nail through its center, affixing it to a cross. The Lord whispered inside my spirit as I saw it: If you never have a family, will you still love Me? I walked out of church that day, hardened. Had it really come to this? The very idea that what I most feared — becoming stamped with the word barren — was now not only a possibility but a suggestion . . . and from God?

She would have to be more careful from now on how she behaved around him. What would be considered innocent behavior in her time could definitely be taken as forward and suggestive in this day and age.

My mother’s view on love appalled me. It suggested love had more in common with the boiling of an egg than the discovery of another person from whom one couldn’t bear to live apart

We remember England’s “terms of venery”— the jargon of hunting— for giving us specific words for groups of animals, such as a school of fish or a pride of lions , and also for such quaintly forgotten phrases as “a tiding of magpies” and “a kindle of cats.” Experts suggest that many of the terms that amuse us today—“ an unkindness of ravens,” “a shrewdness of apes,” “a disworship of Scots”— were fanciful even in their own time and never in common use. The true language of venery, however, did more than describe beasts by the bunch; it richly evoked their behavior. The lark’s habit of flying into the air to sing was known as “exalting.” The nocturnal song of nightingales was called “watching,” from the idea of keeping a watch through the darkness. Venery’s description of animal sounds was poetic, but also accurate: weasels really do “squeak,” mice really do “cheep.” Goldfinches chirm, boars girn, starlings murmur, geese creak. The seemingly slow, ambling walk of bears was referred to as “slothing.” Ordinary life in the past had an intimacy with other species that today we mainly associate with trained biologists and dedicated naturalists.

A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story – Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me – the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title. Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly. The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title! Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house. … After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.

Redeeming the voices that weary us requires that the volume be turned down on lies that suggest God resents us, he is ambivalent toward our sorrows, and he will not come through for us in the end. Turning the volume down on such lies requires turning the volume up on the truths that put regret, hurt, and fear in proper perspective. To help us with this, God has provided the gift of song.

The spatter on the carpet suggested somebody had knifed a Muppet and let it crawl away to die.

As the sounds of foraging birds tumble from the highest part of the trees, clinks and jangles emerge from the ground. A ruffed grouse struts out of a thicket of balsam fir and spruce seedlings. The bird’s steps are fox silent on the needles, and then crackle as its feet pass over the trail. My own footfall is like the grind and punch of walking on a sidewalk strewn with shattered glass. Even tree roots evoke sound. The swell of growing roots causes shards of rocks to click, a sound so quiet and soil-muffled that I detected it only with a probe nestled into the rocky ground. The brush of a fingertip on the probe is a roar compared with the tick of rocks nudged by roots. Some botanists suggest that the quiet sounds made by roots stimulate plant growth, but these claims are controversial. Too few human ears have attended to the soil’s chatter, and experimental evidence is ambiguous

Changing sea levels have refined the palm’s understanding of the coast, an understanding coded in its genes and its relationship with both its physical and biological companions. For the few seeds that successfully germinate and become trunked palm trees, the plants life span often spreads beyond the century mark. Exactly how long sabal palms can live is unknown. Their trunks leave no tree rings of accumulating dead tissues. Our best estimates, though, suggest that about one hundred generations separate the sabal palm on the St. Catherines dune from the palms that grew at the end of the Ice Age, along shorelines one hundred kilometers east of the modern coast.

What kind of Earth do we think we belong to? If the world is a dance of atoms, regulated by physical laws and no more, then one answer to the question of an ethic of belonging must be ethical nihilism. Our two trees, living in such different climates, suggest a similar path. If we’re a species made merely of atoms like all other species, no more and no less, evolution brought us here. Yet I seek something less fractured, an ethic that is fully biological yet does not walk us into a starry, cold universe, empty except for self constructed miasma. A hint at such an ethic might be found with the little girl who heard the “huge” sound in the ponderosa, she and her family were attending to Florissant with delight and unaffected east. The girl heard the tree. The boy examined fallen ponderosa cones, peering between their open scales, then poking at immature cones on the tree. The parents noticed and pointed out the wavelike motions of wind on meadow grasses. They stood and admired the giant stone, remarking on its variegated colors. They remained at the stump far longer than the minute or two allotted in the walks of most visitors. This family was present, a start of a sensory, intellectual, and bodily opening to the place. The people formerly indigenous here- the Ute Indians and their ancestors- were forcibly removed in the 19th century, an act of violence that broke humanity’s millennia long relationship within this part of life’s community. The girl and her family were taking the first small steps in relearning part of what has been forgotten. The family’s attention to the particularities of Florissant seems at first to have little to do with understanding the ethical import of mud slides in the Eocene and in the present day. The family’s behavior gives no direct answers to the questions about the ethics of climate change. Instead they may show how to move toward answers by engaging the community of life. From this engagement, or reengagement after cultural fracture and amnesia, comes a more mature ability to understand what is deeply beautiful in the world.

My brother’s getting married in a few weeks and asked for help picking a song for his first dance. I suggested Kiss’s ‘Love’s a Slap in the Face’. It didn’t go down well.

When had my brother discussed music with Simon? Pete's taste ranged from Bruce Springsteen to the Village People, with a dash of prog rock for good measure. If Si was about to suggest we go on a group jolly to see Rush, I was going to scream louder than Geddy Lee.

Then we went into “Nobody’s Fault.” This was one of the highlights of my creative career. If you listen really close to the front of “Nobody’s Fault,” there isn’t an intro to the song. I suggested to Joe that he turn his amp volume to 12 and the volume on his guitar off. Since the key of the song was an E, I suggested he start by fingering a D chord, and then turn the volume knob all the way up slowly. I told Brad to play an A chord, same dealio as Joe. Then Joe played a C, did the same thing—Brad played a G, Joe played a B-flat, Brad played an F, Joe played an A-flat, Brad played an E-flat, and then Joe and Brad both played a D chord. And when they played that D together, rolling the volume knob up with their pinkies—and holding it for a second—then the band came in on a crashing E chord like Hitler was at the door. I looked over and Jack Douglas was internally hemorrhaging with bliss. I was in the middle of the room with my headphones on (which we called “cans”) and a live mic in front of me, because I loved singing live vocals as the band tracked. It always seemed to incite a little riot inside of everyone. Right before the band came in on the downbeat, the union engineer from Columbia marked his presence for all time by opening the door right in the middle of that sweet silence. He had a clarinet in his hand that wound up on the front of “Pandora’s Box,” but that’s another story. You can actually hear the door opening in “Nobody’s Fault” to this day and it somehow seems to get louder and louder with each play, only ’cause you know it’s there now.

Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch post-doc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor. “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow”, he told me, “and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down it will be drawn into the pre-existing trails, almost like a magnet. Those main trails represent the most traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network.” “In time,” he says, “it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and literally creating new pathways. When the snow is freshest the mind is most impressionable and the slightest nudge, whether from a song or an intention or a therapist’s suggestion can powerfully influence its future course.

She could be a faun or a satyr. Or a witch or a shifter. Or an Asteri, as Cormac had suggested. Maybe the fire was that of the holy star in her. She merely stood there, burning. Well? Her voice was beautiful. Like a golden song.

Someone’s going to drag me out of someplace feet-first, so it might as well be from my place of business. Besides, if I retire, what do you suggest I do, chase golf balls with the rest of the morons? Maybe I should take courses in Chinese stamp collecting or the history of Peru at Loch in Kop University downtown?

...Catherine d'Albon said, "What prayers do you suggest?" "In English?" Lymond said. "I don't know. What about one from Geneva?" She wondered for a moment whether he would break into song, as he had on the wild journey home, with her mother's chamber valet. But he merely put his hand on the doorlatch and spoke the words gently, and without the cynicism he had spoken of: From the sword (Lord) save my soule By thy myght and power; And keepe my soule, thy darling deare, From dogs that would devour. And from the Lion's mouth that would Me all in sunder shiver And from the horns of Unicornes Lord safely me deliver.

Traditions are conditioned reflexes. Throughout Part 2 of this book, you will find suggestions for establishing family traditions that will trigger happy anticipation and leave lasting, cherished memories. Traditions around major holidays and minor holidays. Bedtime, bath-time, and mealtime traditions; sports and pastime traditions; birthday and anniversary traditions; charitable and educational traditions. If your family’s traditions coincide with others’ observances, such as celebrating Thanksgiving, you will still make those traditions unique to your family because of the personal nuances you add. Volunteering at the food bank on Thanksgiving morning, measuring and marking their heights on the door frame in the basement, Grandpa’s artistic carving of the turkey, and their uncle’s famous gravy are the traditions our kids salivated about when they were younger, and still do on their long plane rides home at the end of November each year. (By the way, our dog Lizzy has confirmed Pavlov’s observations; when the carving knife turns on, cue the saliva, tail wagging, and doggy squealing.) But don’t limit your family’s traditions to the big and obvious events like Thanksgiving. Weekly taco nights, family book club and movie nights, pajama walks, ice cream sundaes on Sundays, backyard football during halftime of TV games, pancakes in Mom and Dad’s bed on weekends, leaf fights in the fall, walks to the sledding hill on the season’s first snow, Chinese food on anniversaries, Indian food for big occasions, and balloons hanging from the ceiling around the breakfast table on birthday mornings. Be creative, even silly. Make a secret family noise together when you’re the only ones in the elevator. When you share a secret that “can’t leave this room,” everybody knows to reach up in the air and grab the imaginary tidbit before it can get away. Have a family comedy night or a talent show on each birthday. Make holiday cards from scratch. Celebrate major family events by writing personalized lyrics to an old song and karaoking your new composition together. There are two keys to establishing family traditions: repetition and anticipation. When you find something that brings out excitement and smiles in your kids, keep doing it. Not so often that it becomes mundane, but on a regular and predictable enough basis that it becomes an ingrained part of the family repertoire. And begin talking about the traditional event days ahead of time so by the time it finally happens, your kids are beside themselves with excitement. Anticipation can be as much fun as the tradition itself.

Perhaps we should talk about music instead, she suggested. Did anyone want to make a request for their funeral? A lot of people die, she explained, without sharing their favorite songs or poems. “And it is your funeral,” she said. “You must say what you would like. It can take enormous pressure off friends and family if they know your favorite songs.

Alison Wood Brooks, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, had a different notion of how to handle nervousness. In a series of three studies, she subjected groups of people to experiences that most everyone would find nerve-racking: completing “a very difficult IQ test” administered “under time pressure”; delivering, on the spot, “a persuasive public speech about ‘why you are a good work partner’ ”; and most excruciating of all, belting out an 80s pop song (“Don’t Stop Believin’,” by Journey). Before beginning the activity, participants were to direct themselves to stay calm, or to tell themselves that they were excited. Reappraising nervousness as excitement yielded a noticeable difference in performance. The IQ test takers scored significantly higher. The speech givers came across as more persuasive, competent, and confident. Even the singers performed more passably (as judged by the Nintendo Wii Karaoke Revolution program they used). All reported genuinely feeling the pleasurable emotion of excitement—a remarkable shift away from the unpleasant discomfort such activities might be expected to engender. In a similar fashion, we can choose to reappraise debilitating “stress” as productive “coping.” A 2010 study carried out with Boston-area undergraduates looked at what happens when people facing a stressful experience are informed about the positive effects of stress on our thinking—that is, the way it can make us more alert and more motivated. Before taking the GRE, the admissions exam for graduate school, one group of students was given the following message to read: “People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better. This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s GRE test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.” A second group received no such message before taking the exam. Three months later, when the students’ GRE scores were released, the students who had been encouraged to reappraise their feelings of stress scored an average of 65 points higher.

More sophisticated methods exist, of course. A potentially more powerful method is collaborative filtering. It gathers data about what users have bought in the past and uses AI to predict what people are likely to buy in the future. These methods can use both explicit information, like a customer’s ratings of the options, and implicit information, like whether or not they finished a specific program on Netflix. Most famously, perhaps, collaborative filtering is used by Amazon in generating “People who bought this also bought . . .” listings. Collaborative filtering requires a large set of past user behavior to make predictions. This is the heart of suggestions made by Apple Music, “who to follow” suggestions on Twitter, and matches on Tinder. Yes, Tinder apparently changes the people it will show you based on your swipes. Swiping right will change who you see in the future. It’s important to realize that, in its pure form, collaborative filtering doesn’t use in-depth information about the options themselves. When Apple Music recommends a tune, it knows nothing about the song’s tempo, beat, lyrics, or instrumentation. It simply knows that people who are like you like that song too.

FAKE LOVE” is not, as the title would suggest, about fake, or false, love. As the opening lyrics convey, the song is about the intentions and concerns of a person hiding their pain before the one they love, trying to show them only the best of themselves. On the surface, these lyrics might appear to tell a universal story of the pain of love, but they also represent the BTS members’ minds at the time, standing before ARMY.

I was a baby in India born among dark eyes and thin limbs handled by slim fingers bounced by bangles and held high among the limbs surrounded by the light sari black knot of hair suggestion of spice wrapped up only by those songs that spiral the spirit out of the dust and lay it down again to sleep

(“Dreams” would become Fleetwood Mac’s only ever #1 single release. Stevie later said that “Dreams” was “totally related” to a song by the Spinners, but couldn’t remember which one. Observers have suggested “I’ll Be Around” as a possible model.) *

The people who ask me about the “failure of multiculturalism” mean to suggest that not only has a political ideology failed but that human beings themselves have changed and are now fundamentally incapable of living peacefully together despite their many differences. In this argument it is the writer who is meant to be the naive child, but I maintain that people who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.

The rhythms of humpbacks are similar to those of human music. Their songs last longer than our ballads but are shorter than most symphonies. Do they have an attention span like our own? Do they use similar techniques, repeating refrains that form rhymes, to remember songs? Payne and colleagues suggest that this is so. Our evolutionary path has been separated from whales for 60 million years. Perhaps we are latecomers to music, not the inventors of song.

What about ‘The Girl I Left Behind’?” Abigail suggested. “I found the music in the piano bench.” She had heard that when soldiers used to leave the post, heading for battle, the company band would play that song. Oliver shook his head. “I don’t want to leave my girl behind. I want her by my side.” He gave Abigail a look so filled with longing that a lump formed in her stomach. Oh no, Oliver. You don’t mean it. You know I’m not your girl, and I won’t ever be. Oblivious to the thoughts that set Abigail’s insides churning, Charlotte nodded vigorously. “That shouldn’t stop us from singing it,” she insisted. “It’s a pretty song.” And it was. Were it not for her concerns that Oliver wanted something she could not give, Abigail could have spent hours listening to him and her sister, for their voices blended beautifully. At the end of the evening, Abigail accompanied Oliver to the door. Though she hoped he would simply say good night as he had before, the way he cleared his throat and the uneasiness she saw on his face made Abigail fear that her hopes would not be realized. Perhaps if she kept everything casual, he would take the cue. “Thank you for coming,” she said as they walked onto the front porch. “Charlotte always enjoys your duets.” “And you?” They were only two words, but Oliver’s voice cracked with emotion as he pronounced them. Please, Oliver, go home. Don’t say something you’ll regret. Though the plea was on the tip of her tongue, Abigail chose a neutral response. “I enjoy listening to both of you.” Oliver stroked his nose in a gesture Abigail had learned was a sign of nervousness. “That’s not what I meant. I hope you enjoy my company as much as I do yours. I look forward to these visits all day.” His voice had deepened, the tone telling Abigail he was close to making a declaration. If only she could spare him the inevitable pain of rejection. “It’s good to have friends,” she said evenly. Oliver shook his head. “You know I want to be more than your friend. I want to marry you.” “I’m sorry.” And she was. Though Ethan claimed Oliver bounced back from rejection, she hated being the one to deliver it. “You know marriage is not possible. Woodrow . . .” Abigail hesitated as she tried and failed to conjure his image. “Woodrow isn’t here.” Oliver completed the sentence. “I am. I lo—” She would not allow him to continue. While it was true that Oliver’s visits helped lift Charlotte’s spirits and filled the empty space left by Jeffrey’s absence, Abigail could not let him harbor any false hopes. “Good night, Lieutenant Seton.” Perhaps the use of his title would tell him she regarded him as a friend, nothing more. What appeared to be sadness filled Oliver’s eyes as his smile faded. “Is there no hope for me?” Abigail shook her head slowly. “I’m afraid not.” He stood for a moment, his lips flattened, his breathing ragged. At last, he reached out and captured her hand in his. Raising it to his lips, Oliver pressed a kiss to the back. “Good night, Miss Harding,” he said as he released her hand and walked away.

Imagine there is a fabulously wealthy king who looks out the window of his castle one day and, in the distance, sees a beautiful Cinderella-type peasant living in the slums. His heart is ravished and he thinks, “This is the  perfect bride for my son, the prince.” Unlike other kings—wicked worldly kings—he cannot just abduct her and make her a slave-concubine of his son. He must genuinely invite her to take the hand of his son voluntarily. So, along with his entourage and his son, they make their way out of the palace into the squalor beyond the moat, searching hut to hut and through the markets until they find her. The offer is made: “Young lady,” says the king, “this is my beloved son, the prince of this kingdom and heir to all that is mine. I humbly beseech you to come out of your life of poverty and oppression and to join my son in holy matrimony, enjoying all of the benefits that come with a princess’ life.” The offer seems to be too good to be true. All she needs to do is consent to the proposal. But there’s a hitch. The king continues, “There is a deadline. If you don’t say yes by such-and-such a date, we will arrest you, put you in our dungeon, where torturers will fillet you alive for endless ages, supernaturally keeping you alive such that your torment is never-ending. Moreover, after the deadline, your decision is irrevocable. No repentance is possible. The dishonor of your rejection is too great to warrant any second chance. The consequences of refusal are without mercy and utterly irreversible.”  As the king, the prince and their cohort leave, the prince turns and says, “Oh yes, please hurry. And always know that I will love you forever and for always … but only until the deadline.” Is this our gospel? If it were, would it truly be a gospel that preserves the love of God, the freewill of humanity and the mutual consent inherent in and necessary to God’s invitation? I don’t buy it any more. Without going into great detail here, might I suggest that because God, by nature, is the eternally consenting Bridegroom, there are two things he cannot and will not do: He will not ever make you marry his Son, because an irresistible grace would violate your consent. Your part will always and forever be by consent. His consent will never end, because a violent ultimatum would violate your consent. Divine love will always and forever be by consent. Emphasis on forever. “His mercy endures forever” (Psalm 136). “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness” (Jer. 31:3). I don’t believe the divine courtship involves wearing you down with his love until you give up. It’s simply that he’ll always love you, with a love that even outlasts and overcomes death (Song of Solomon 8). The Bible at least hints (Rev. 21-22) that the prodigal Father will wait for you, invite you and keep the doors open for you until you’re ready to come home. He’ll wait for you forever. 

I still remember a few striking lines from Tagore’s poems: I read in the problem of life and the world, The twist of tears and joy. I see before myself the busy feet of the wind, Suggesting humanity and law. The wind hastens to the shadow whose passion lies; Shall we go abroad and start anew, O wind, To build again a better life and song?

Thanksgiving is a time for gratitude. It can also be a time when feeling grateful can be an acrobatic feat that you're just not up for. There's no rules that need to be followed here. Authentic living is your only option, so it's ok to turn off the tv when another ad screams for you to be a certain way just because the calendar says so. Power of suggestion can be great medicine - but don't judge yourself or a loved one who is having trouble learning the words to this song. It's a tough season from some people. Huddle and cuddle with those you trust and love. That's real medicine and it's a good place to be during the holidays. xoxo

One early example of the vexing problems of affluence lies at hand. An Egyptian story, translated by Flinders Petrie, reveals the emptiness of a Pharaoh's life, in which every desire was too easily satisfied, and time hung with unbearable heaviness on his hands. Desperate, he appealed to his counsellors for some relief from his boredom; and one of them put forth a classic suggestion: that he fill a boat with thinly veiled, almost naked girls, who would paddle over the water and sing songs for him. For the hour, the Pharaoh's dreadful tedium, to his great delight, was overcome; for, as Petrie aptly remarks, the vizier had invented the first Musical Revue: that solace of 'tired businessman' and soldiers on leave.

[The] opening invocation to Yahweh in the Song of Deborah, a variant of which appears in Ps. 68.8-9, also hails him as 'The One of Sinai', less literally 'The Lord of Sinai' (זה סיני), which suggests that Sinai is the original residence of Yahweh and is also closely associated with Seir. The connection is explicit in another poem with an ancient substratum, the Blessing of Moses: Yahweh comes from Sinai He dawns upon us from Seir. (Deut. 33.2) The rest of the verse is textually corrupt, perhaps deliberately scrambled, so that any reconstruction will be speculative. It reads as follows: הופיע מהר פארן ואתה מרבבת קדש מימינו אשדת לנו After 'he shines forth from Mount Paran' we would expect a matching place name, as in the previous stich, which provides some justification for finding, with a minor textual alteration, a reference to Meribath-Kadesh in the second line (cf. Deut. 32.51) parallel with Mt Paran. [...] it may be permissible to suggest an emendation of אשדת to אשרת with the old feminine ending, based on frequent confusion between daleth and resh. [Blenkinsopp's emendation would give us: 'He shines forth from Mount Paran, and comes forth from Meribath-Kadesh, his Asherah at his right hand.] (pp. 137-138) (from 'The Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis Revisited and the Origins of Judah', JSOT 33.2 (2008): 131-153)

The question everyone asked me before I went to Birobidzhan and after I returned was: Are there any Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region? I posed it to Valery Gurevich, the deputy governor responsible for everything Jewish in the region, from the children's song-and-dance ensemble to the statues of imaginary shtetl figures all over the city - a series of illustrations to Sholem Aleichem stories cast in bronze. I felt ridiculous asking a Jew in Birobidzhan if there were Jews in Birobidzhan, but was a master at answering this question. His answer was "Well . . ." He tried to avoid giving me any figures at all - I had to fill them in later - but the gist of his story was this: Before the Soviet Union collapsed, the census placed the percentage of Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region at a bit over four, which was about four times the percentage of Jews in the general population of the Soviet Union. In absolute figures, that was about nine thousand Jews. But these figures were based on answers people gave to the census taker, an official, in a country where if one had a choice (for example, if one of one's parents was not Jewish), one did not choose to call oneself Jewish. Just ten years before the last Soviet census, the percentage of Jews in the region's population had been three times higher - suggesting that it had been diluted by intermarriage but the number of people who had some Jewish roots was a lot higher than the official nine thousand. So it should come as no surprise that the number of people who emigrated to Israel when this became possible, at the turn of the 1990s, far exceeded the official number of Jews in Birobidzhan. And there were still some Jews left - a couple thousand, give or take as many. Of them, roughly five people - including Iosif Bekerman, Maria Rak, and Valery Gurevich - were engaged on an ongoing basis with Jewish culture. Of them, only one - Bekerman - spoke Yiddish. There were no Yiddish writers left in the Jewish Autonomous Region.

Rather than trying to make me happy, as cheap pop songs and misguided greeting cards suggest is the promise of true love, Edward was doing the one thing that would keep us together: taking care of himself. As with my parents, sometimes the art of relationship is declaring your limits, protecting your boundaries, saying no.

Someone asked him once what had inspired the studies, since you can so clearly hear that he was telling some kind of very beautiful story, and he just said, ‘I don’t believe in the artist that discloses too much of his images. Let them paint for themselves what it most suggests.’ I’ve always loved that.” Valencia loved it, too, because she’d always imagined the song was about her, and this information made her feel like she had the composer’s permission to do that. She was listening to it the way he meant her to. It was about love, after all. The complicated, possibly sort of requited to some extent but completely impossible and undeserved kind.

Gluten, a major component of wheat, barley, and rye, is a composite of two different proteins, gliadin and glutelin. Gluten is what gives bread its stretchiness and elasticity, qualities most folks enjoy. But gluten also makes some people seriously ill. It is estimated that about 1 percent of the population is gluten intolerant, though most are unaware of it. If gluten-intolerant individuals eat gluten grains, they develop what’s known as celiac disease. Celiac disease is an autoimmune condition in which the gliadin protein in gluten grains generates an antibody-mediated immune-system attack against the intestines, leading to chronic diarrhea, fatigue, stunting of growth, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, anemia, nerve damage, and osteoporosis. Furthermore, those with celiac disease have higher rates of cancer, schizophrenia, and a whole host of autoimmune illnesses (Jackson et al. 2012; Rubio-Tapia and Murray 2010), suggesting that the body’s response to gluten affects more than just the intestines. And, on the flip side, almost every chronic autoimmune disease we know of is associated with a significantly increased risk of celiac disease (Cosnes et al. 2008; Rousset 2004; Rodrigo et al. 2011; Song and Choi 2004).

The Music Lab findings suggest that many songs (or books or movies) that go on to become hits owe much of their success to the fact that the first people to review them just happened to like them.

So do others,” suggested Gerris Drinkwater. “Naharis, for one. The queen’s …” “… paramour,” Ser Barristan finished, before the Dornish knight could say anything that might besmirch the queen’s honor.

Moon River’ was written to explain that Audrey/Holly was really a yearning country girl; it becomes an anachronism, therefore, to have it sung by a male singer, although Danny Williams’s version later became a top-of-the-hit-parade best-seller. It was Audrey’s rendition of the song, in fact, which first convinced many critics that they were dealing with no ordinary talent. The cigarette-girl extra in the British quickie had reached the Olympian heights and become a Hollywood superstar; most agreed that it would have been hard to think of any other actress who could have suggested as convincingly as Audrey did the desperate frailty beneath Holly’s smart façade.

It seems to me that there should be only allusions. The contemplation of objects, the volatile image of the dreams they evoke, these make the song: the Parnassians [the classicist movement of Leconte de Lisle, Heredia, etc.] who make a complete demonstration of the object thereby lack mystery; they deprive the [reader's] mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates. To name the thing means forsaking three quarters of a poem's enjoyment-which is derived from unraveling it gradually, by happy guesswork: to suggest the thing creates the dream. Symbols are formed when this secret is used to perfection: to evoke little by little, the image of an object in order to demonstrate a mood; or, conversely, to choose an object and to extract from it a mood, by a series of decipherings.)

Rosario's declaration made me sad. For an instant I imagined the unknown Alberto, his huge cock and his huge knife and a fierce look on his face, and I thought that if Rosario met him on the street she would be attracted to him. Also: that in some way he was coming between María and me. For an instant, that is, I imagined Alberto measuring his cock with his kitchen knife and I imagined the notes of a song, evocative and suggestive, although of what I couldn't say, drifting in the window (a sinister window!) along with the night air, and all of it together made me extremely sad. "Don't be gloomy, darling," said Rosario. And I also imagined María making love with Alberto. And Alberto smacking María on the buttocks. And Angélica making love with Pancho Rodríguez (ex-visceral realist, thank God!). And María making love with Luscious Skin. And Alberto making love with Angélica and María. And Alberto making love with Catalina O'Hara. And Alberto making love with Quim Font. And in the final instance, as the poet says, I imagined Alberto advancing over a carpet of bodies splattered with semen (a semen of deceptive consistency and color, because it looked like blood and shit) toward the hill where I stood, still as a statue, although everything in me wanted to flee, go running down the other side and lose myself in the desert.

Responding ot the need to represent French Canada in the company's offerings, Franca and Ambrose researched French-Canadian folk songs and arts and crafts, commissioned a score, on George Crum's recommendation, from Hector Gratton, and put together what was intended as a light and amusing ballet on folk themes. It was well-received outside Quebec, but met strong opposition in Montreal, where it was seen as the worst kind of tokenism as well as a slight to the true nature of Quebec culture. Paul Roussel, reviewing for Le Canada, called into question the validity of its inspiration. He suggested that, suitably revised, it might make an amusing trifle, but in its present form it could not lay claim to any Quebecois cultural authenticity.

answered, pulling on his overcoat. All the loneliness of the evening seemed to descend upon her at once then and she said with the suggestion of a whine in her voice, ‘Why don’t you take me with you some Saturday?’ ‘You?’ he said. ‘Take you? D’you think you’re fit to take anywhere? Look at yersen! An’ when I think of you as you used to be!’ She looked away. The abuse had little sting now. She could think of him too, as he used to be; but she did not do that too often now, for such memories had the power of evoking a misery which was stronger than the inertia that, over the years, had become her only defence. ‘What time will you be back?’ ‘Expect me when you see me,’ he said at the door. ‘Is’ll want a bite o’ supper, I expect.’ Expect him at whatever time his tipsy legs brought him home, she thought. If he lost he would drink to console himself. If he won he would drink to celebrate. Either way there was nothing in it for her but yet more ill temper, yet further abuse. She got up a few minutes after he had gone and went to the back door to look out. It was snowing again and the clean, gentle fall softened the stark and ugly outlines of the decaying outhouses on the patch of land behind the house and gently obliterated Scurridge’s footprints where they led away from the door, down the slope to the wood, through which ran a path to the main road, a mile distant. She shivered as the cold air touched her, and returned indoors, beginning, despite herself, to remember. Once the sheds had been sound and strong and housed poultry. The garden had flourished too, supplying them with sufficient vegetables for their own needs and some left to sell. Now it was overgrown with rampant grass and dock. And the house itself – they had bought it for a song because it was old and really too big for one woman to manage; but it too had been strong and sound and it had looked well under regular coats of paint and with the walls pointed and the windows properly hung. In the early days, seeing it all begin to slip from her grasp, she had tried to keep it going herself. But it was a thankless, hopeless struggle without support from Scurridge: a struggle which had beaten her in the end, driving her first into frustration and then finally apathy. Now everything was mouldering and dilapidated and its gradual decay was like a symbol of her own decline from the hopeful young wife and mother into the tired old woman she was now. Listlessly she washed up and put away the teapots. Then she took the coal-bucket from the hearth and went down into the dripping, dungeon-like darkness of the huge cellar. There she filled the bucket and lugged it back up the steps. Mending the fire, piling it high with the wet gleaming lumps of coal, she drew some comfort from the fact that this at least, with Scurridge’s miner’s allocation, was one thing of which they were never short. This job done, she switched on the battery-fed wireless set and stretched out her feet in their torn canvas shoes to the blaze. They were broadcasting a programme of old-time dance music: the Lancers, the Barn Dance, the Veleta. You are my honey-honey-suckle, I am the bee… Both she and

In the morning, I jumped out of bed with a burst of excitement, the song “Child of Mine” playing in my head. Happy birthday to me! I’d been wanting a baby for the past several years, and finding a donor I felt so comfortable with seemed like the best birthday present ever. Heading to the computer, I smiled at my good fortune—I was really going to do this. I typed in the sperm bank’s URL, found the donor’s profile, and read it all over again. I was just as certain as I’d been the night before that he was The One—the one that would make sense to my child when he or she asked why, of all the possible donors, I chose this guy. I placed the donor in my online shopping cart—just as I might with a book on Amazon—double-checked the order, then clicked Purchase Vials. I’m having a baby! I thought. The moment felt monumental. As the order processed, I planned what I had to do next: Make an appointment for the insemination, buy prenatal vitamins, put together a baby registry, get the baby’s room set up. Between thoughts, I noticed that my order was taking a while to complete. The rotating circle on my screen, known as the “spinning wheel of death,” seemed to be spinning for an unusually long time. I waited, waited some more, and finally tried using the back button in case my computer was crashing. But nothing happened. Finally, the spinning wheel of death disappeared and a message popped up: Out of stock. Out of stock? I figured there must be some computer glitch—maybe when I pressed the back button?—so I speed-dialed the sperm bank and asked for Kathleen, but she was out and I got transferred to a customer-service rep named Barb. Barb looked into the matter and determined that this was no glitch. I’d selected a very popular donor, she said. She went on to explain that popular donors went quickly and that, while the company tried to “restock” their “inventory” often, there was a six-month hold for it so it could get quarantined and tested. Even when the inventory was made available, she said, there still might be a long wait, because some people had placed it on back order. As Barb spoke, I thought of how Kathleen had called just yesterday. Now it occurred to me that maybe she’d suggested this donor to several women. Like me, maybe many women had bonded with Kathleen over her honest appraisals of semen.

With ‘You Gave Me the Answer,’ mixed on March 21, the challenge was to evoke the spirit of Funny Face, the Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn film that inspired the song, without surrendering the benefits of modern sound techniques. They started with the piano introduction, using the fact that the keyboard had been recorded using three microphones, spread across three tracks of the master (labeled ‘left piano,’ ‘right piano,’ and ‘middle piano’) to create an echo effect that suggested a pianist playing in a large, empty hall. The echo evaporated as Paul’s piano intro kicked into the faster tempo that leads into the song. From there, it was a matter of finding the right balance between the winds, strings, and basic track—plus making Paul’s voice sound like that of a vaudeville crooner, something O’Duffy accomplished using a Pultec equalizer that thinned out the high and low frequencies. “That was designed [to sound like it was] recorded through a vaudeville microphone,” O’Duffy explained. “You’re making a great singer’s voice sound thinner and squeakier—removing the warmth of the man’s humanity. You’re screwing it up, essentially. But it’s screwed up to give you an effect reminiscent of vaudeville.”28

I think that Denny was part of the rock ’n’ roll-folk-R&B axis of the band,” Laurence suggested, “and you get it right from the get-go, even with ‘Go Now,’ which is an R&B song that Denny brought into a kind of an English consciousness. And then you add Denny’s folkiness to it; he’s like a soul-folk musician. So I think that Denny was a part of the balance of the band, you know, as much as Linda was bringing her New York rock ’n’ roll sensibility to things. And Paul could be influenced by that. Even Denny’s voice modulates Paul’s voice in a way that John Lennon would modulate Paul’s voice. You need that extra dimension sometimes just for variety, and in the context of the band. And I think that was an important factor. It wasn’t like we were just hired to be Paul’s backup musicians; we were encouraged to have a band consciousness. And I think that Denny was our kind of anchor within that.”35

have written before on ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’5 and pointed out a similarity of use of the word ‘light’ with a celebrated line from Othello. It occurs in a verse which is of particular interest as it changes in the different Dylan versions we have of the song. Dylan sings the following lines in the version from The Gaslight Tapes 1962: Well, it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your lights, babe Lights I never knowed And it ain’t no use in burnin’ your lamp, babe I’m on the dark side of the road. While on the later Freewheelin’ album version, we hear, in addition to slight improvements to the first two lines, the stanza concluding with: An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe I’m on the dark side of the road By changing the third line, Dylan makes this verse consistent with all the others in the song, where the third line repeats the first. In the first version, the “burning” image is redolent of ashes, of ‘burning out’ and interestingly, of ‘burning your bridges’ in addition to its primary meaning of ‘shining’ which puts the lamp in opposition to the dark. “Turning on your light” in the Freewheelin’ version suggests something much more forceful and active, and Dylan has changed the word from the plural in both the first and (now) third lines. The phrase “turning on your lights” simply suggests lighting up her home to make it a welcome place for the singer in contrast to the ‘dark side of the road’. “Turning on your light” is much more personal. It reminds you of the phrase ‘to hold a torch for someone’, and has an intimate appeal, though it is a forlorn one in this case. The light here is now both a physical thing, and also the woman’s inner being. The song’s line now shares the same two meanings of light that we hear in Othello’s chilling statement as he murders Desdemona: Put out the light, and then put out the light.6

the great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls. Fact and fiction meld in their minds. Songs