Sun Sets In The West Quotes

When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east," she said sadly. "When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When my womb quickens again, and I bear a living child. Then you will return, my sun-and-stars, and not before." -Daenerys Targaryen

The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!

Bilbo’s Last Song Day is ended, dim my eyes, But journey long before me lies. Farewell, friends! I hear the call. The ship's beside the stony wall. Foam is white and waves are grey; Beyond the sunset leads my way. Foam is salt, the wind is free; I hear the rising of the Sea. Farewell, friends! The sails are set, The wind is east, the moorings fret. Shadows long before me lie, Beneath the ever-bending sky, But islands lie behind the Sun That I shall raise ere all is done; Lands there are to west of West, Where night is quiet and sleep is rest. Guided by the Lonely Star, Beyond the utmost harbour-bar, I’ll find the heavens fair and free, And beaches of the Starlit Sea. Ship, my ship! I seek the West, And fields and mountains ever blest. Farewell to Middle-earth at last. I see the Star above my mast!

How clear, how lovely bright, How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play; How heaven laughs out with glee Where, like a bird set free, Up from the eastern sea Soars the delightful day. To-day I shall be strong, No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more; Days lost, I know not how, I shall retrieve them now; Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before. Ensanguining the skies How heavily it dies Into the west away; Past touch and sight and sound Not further to be found, How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day.

The quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise.

The Sword of Elendil was forged anew by Elvish smiths, and on its blade was traced a device of seven stars set between the crescent Moon and rayed Sun, and about them was written many runes; for Aragorn son of Arathorn was going to war upon the marches of Mordor. Very bright was that sword when it was made whole again; the light of the sun shone redly in it, and the light of the moon shone cold, its edge was hard and keen. And Aragorn gave it a new name and called it Andúril, Flame of the West.

We are the third world not because the sun rises on the West and sets in the East but because we have engaged the reverse gear and we are moving with jet like speed in the wrong direction -we must change this by rolling up our sleeves and working for the growth of our country.

Were they ready? Did the sun rise in the east and set in the fucking west?

There are only two indisputable facts in this world: One, that the sun will set in the west. And two, that I'll come for you. Always.

When will he be as he was?' Dany demanded. 'When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east' said Mirri Maz Duur. 'When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before.

... But I'm annoying you to no purpose with my arguments. A person whose house is only open on the west can't see the sun rise at dawn; it's only seen when the sun sets at dusk. If one tries to compare the color and appearance of the two, one will go on arguing forever... ...The fault lies not with the vision but with the closed windows. If you look out of only one opening till the day you die, you'll ever see anything new.

Cold air rises from the ground as the sun goes down.  The eye-burning clarity of the light intensifies. The southern rim of the sky glows to a deeper blue, to pale violet, to purple, then thins to grey.  Slowly the wind falls, and the still air begins to freeze.  The solid eastern ridge is black; it has a bloom on it like the dust on the skin of a grape.  The west flares briefly.  The long, cold amber of the afterglow casts clear black lunar shadows.  There is an animal mystery in the light that sets upon the fields like a frozen muscle that will flex and wake at sunrise.

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

As I sailed into Shadow, a white bird of my desire came and sat upon my right shoulder, and I wrote a note and tied it to its leg and set it on its way. The note said "I am coming," and it was signed by me. A black bird of my desire came and sat upon my left shoulder, and I wrote a note and tied it to its leg and sent it off into the west. It said, "Eric- I'll be back," and it was signed: Corwin, Lord of Amber. A demon wind propelled me east of the sun.

Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets. The moon sets. But they are not gone. ~Rumi

Count the day lost at which the setting sun sees at its close no worthy action done.

The light was leaving in the west it was blue The children's laughter sang and skipping just like the stones they threw the voices echoed across the way its getting late It was just another night with the sun set and the moon rise not so far behind to give us just enough light to lay down underneath the stars listen to papas translations of the stories across the sky we drew our own constellations

Hidden amongst the cluck and hiss, the croak and chatter outside the window, are songs of the extinct. The epic of evolution, told by bards long gone. Oh, to abandon the labyrinthine shell and shed old skin. To be naked and vulnerable. Free to swim, sprint and fly without inhibition. To vanish without a trace only to reappear as a mating call, the way the sun sets in the west and rises in the east … Can their stories and songs be heard by the living, they wonder. Do they acknowledge their legacy in the fossils?

I headed straight into the setting sun, and rode west at an easy pace. It was going to be a long ride, and there was no reason to hurry.

When you come fact to face with love, and before the sun sets, you become someone you didn't used to be. It makes the old things new. Makes dead things live. Love makes you into something better.

You come face to face with love, and before the sun sets, you've become someone you didn't used to be. It makes the old new. Makes dead things live. Love makes you into something better. It's the reason a wolf would chase a crow, even knowing he can't fly... And she don't ever need to touch the ground. Love sends a man half way around the world... Just for the hope of catching it.

Yu come face to face with love, and before the sun sets you've become someone you didn't used to be... It's the reason a wolf would chase a crow, even knowing he can't fly and she don't ever need to touch the ground.

As sure as shadow follows substance and the sun rises on the east and sets on the west, a person who exercises professional excellence will be followed by success.

Once I started sleeping full time, I didn't look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn't changed, and it never would.

I don’t know about heaven, but I know hell exists. I’ve spent most of my life there.” He ignored her soft sound of distress. “But through all that. Through everything that’s been done to me, I’ve only ever believed in one thing.” “What’s that?” she whispered. “That the sun would set in the west, and that I would come for you.

Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.

son for Loraq, no heir to unite dragon and harpy. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow in the

The sun does not rise from East, nor set to West; it is all inside our minds and within the limits of our planet Earth.

The sun was a fiery furnace of gold, but finally it set in the west and the cosmos glittered like a million burning embers, briefly reminding Awa of poetry readings under starry skies in Timbuktu

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He's left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

Half asleep and half awake, I became lost in a deep span of my version of a perfect world. A place I wanted so desperately to reach, but would never find except from within the catacombs of my mind. A place where the sun rose in the west and set in the east, where the mountains bowed to the wind like trees, and the rain sprinkled up from the ground below and onto the clouds above. A place where no one hurt or lost, or felt any tinge of desperation. A place where heartbeats were the only words needed, and music floated on the wind like dust. A place where no place was home. Where a single person could be the only sustenance needed to survive. A place where there were no yesterdays or todays, only tomorrows. A place for me to find solace, an escape from the real world I was forced to live in.

Seven...eight...nine... Some in the crowd shuffled for positions where they could have a better view. By now it was close to four o'clock, and the sun was setting slightly in the west. What that morning had been close to zero weather was now in the mid-forties. The dueling field, which had been sparkling with the morning frost was now dry.

If it was the last sunset i will ever see, I will keep running in the West, i won't let that sun to set

The sun had long set, but one blood-red gash like an open wound lay low in the distant west.

The sun rises. And the sun sets. And the sun rises and sets... When the red sun rises in the east and sets in the west, then I will... Will you wait for me?

The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.

The Janus Guard will also be out that night,” he said, one hand reaching out to squeeze her shoulder. “Just as we have been and will be for every night of the Nine.” “Good.” “Speaking of which—Kelley…” Sonny seemed suddenly exhausted. He turned his face to the west, and she could see the fatigue etched into the lines and planes of his face. “It’s getting late. You need to leave the park. Please. Don’t argue with me this time. Just go. The sun will set soon, and I have to go to work.” He squared his shoulders as though he expected her to put up a fight. She did—a little—but only out of actual concern for him. “Shouldn’t you be taking it easy? I mean, you try to hide it with the whole tough-guy-swagger thing and all, but I saw the bandages. You’re really hurt. Aren’t you?” “It’s not so bad.” “Wow. You are a terrible liar.” He frowned fiercely at her. “You also look like you haven’t slept in a week.” She took a tentative step toward him and put a hand on his chest, looking up into his silver-gray eyes. He put his hand over the top of hers, and she could feel the rhythm of his heart beating under her palm, through his shirt and the bandages. “I’m fine.” “Are you sure?” With his other hand, Sonny reached up and brushed a stray auburn curl out of her eyes. “I’m sure.” He smiled down at her, and she felt her insides melt a little. His whole face changed when he smiled. It was like the sun coming out. “But,” he continued, “I’ll be even better if you are safe at home and I don’t have to worry about you for tonight.” “I can take care of myself, Sonny Flannery,” she bristled, halfheartedly. “Please?” He turned up the wattage on his smile. “I…okay.” She felt her own lips turn up in a shy, answering smile. “I’ll be good. This once.” “That’s my girl.” Kelley was silent. Those three words of Sonny’s had managed to render her utterly speechless.

As he left the hotel, Henry looked west to where the sun was setting, burnt sienna flooding the horizon. It reminded him that time was short, but that beautiful endings could still be found at the end of cold, dreary days.

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in Pity the Nation: They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.

There is no greater example in apologetics than the apostle Paul speaking at Mars Hill. The irony of the talk Paul gave is in the difference in reaction the Easterner has when reading Paul’s address to that of a Westerner. The Easterner is thrilled at how the apostle wove the message starting from where the listeners were to bring them to where he was in his thinking. The average Westerner is quick to point out that few of his hearers responded. Such an attitude says volumes about why the church in the West has been so intellectually weak. To those in the West, the bigger the number of respondents, the more replicated the technique. The bigger the statistic, the greater the success. Westerners are enamored by size, largesse, number of hands raised, and so on. When the sun has set on these reports, we seem rather dismayed when statistics show the quality of the life of the believer is no different from that of the unbeliever.

Which road leads to the Wicked Witch of the West?" asked Dorothy. "There is no road," answered the Guardian of the Gates. "No one ever wishes to go that way." "How, then, are we to find her?" inquired the girl. "That will be easy," replied the man, "for when she knows you are in the country of the Winkies she will find you, and make you all her slaves." "Perhaps not," said the Scarecrow, "for we mean to destroy her." "Oh, that is different," said the Guardian of the Gates. "No one has ever destroyed her before, so I naturally thought she would make slaves of you, as she has of the rest. But take care; for she is wicked and fierce, and may not allow you to destroy her. Keep to the West, where the sun sets, and you cannot fail to find her.

Some said their wingtips were glossy blue-black, shimmering like the bellies of spiders; others said the white bodies and black markings were a myth, and that the only thing to interrupt their black plumage, dark as the moment after lightning, were their gilded breast feathers that gleamed like coins at last light. For all said that the birds took wing only at sunset. The setting sun was said to call them into the dark. They said the birds never stopped moving. It was agreed that the band of thirty flew west following the night, farther and farther with each day until they circled the planet without ever craning their necks to the east. Few had ever seen them, these birds that were the last of their kind, these birds that encircled the world like an unbroken ribbon.

I love you. You can tell me it's too fast, too much, but that won't change anything. It's a fact. A scientific truth. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the tides come and go, we'll eventually grown old and die, and Lucas Karlsson loves Tess Dunn.

In the last analysis the great patriots were those who identified personal ambition with the welfare of their country. The traitor, as often as not, was one who, failing to recognize where the true interests of his country lay, identified his personal ambition with the less noble aspirations of his people.

Evenings were peaceful, smoke settling in the quiet air to soften the dusk, lights twinkling on the ridge we would camp on tomorrow, clouds dimming the outline of our pass for the day after. Growing excitement lured my thoughts again and again to the West Ridge…. There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find what I really sought was something I had left behind.

Before I opened my computer in the parking lot today, I relived one of my favorite memories. It's the one with Woody and me sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum after it's closed. We're watching people parade out of the museum in summer shorts and sandals. The trees to the south are planted in parallel lines. The water in the fountain shoots up with a mist that almost reaches the steps we sit on. We look at silver-haired ladies in red-and-white-print dresses. We separate the mice from the men, the tourists from the New Yorkers, the Upper East Siders from the West Siders. The hot-pretzel vendor sells us a wad of dough in knots with clumps of salt stuck on top. We make our usual remarks about the crazies and wonder what it would be like to live in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met. We laugh and say the same things we always say. We hold hands and keep sitting, just sitting, as the sun beings to set. It's a perfect afternoon.

and your enemies will melt away like snow.” He shall be the stallion that mounts the world. Dany knew how it went with prophecies. They were made of words, and words were wind. There would be no son for Loraq, no heir to unite dragon and harpy. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. Only then would her womb quicken

he's going to marry Ellen West after wanting her all his life. If I was Ellen—but then, I'm not, and if she is satisfied I can very well be. I heard her say years ago when she was a schoolgirl that she didn't want a tame puppy for a husband. There's nothing tame about Norman, believe ME." The sun was setting over Rainbow Valley. The pond was wearing a wonderful tissue of purple and gold and green and crimson. A faint blue haze rested on the eastern hill, over which a great, pale, round moon was just floating up like a silver bubble. They were all there, squatted in the little open glade—Faith and Una, Jerry and Carl, Jem and Walter, Nan and Di, and Mary Vance. They had been having a special celebration, for it would be Jem's last evening in Rainbow Valley. On the morrow he would leave for Charlottetown to attend Queen's Academy. Their charmed circle would be broken; and, in spite of the jollity of their little festival, there was a hint of sorrow in every gay young heart. "See—there is a great golden palace over there in the sunset," said Walter, pointing. "Look at the shining tower—and the crimson banners streaming from them. Perhaps a conqueror is riding home from battle—and

Sometimes I like driving east when the sun is setting in the west. That way I can see all the signs as they’re lit up in flames along the road, their words unreadable, all the buildings glowing in the evening sun. The sky is neither blue nor black; rather, it’s a mix of in-between purples and pinks and oranges, and for just a few minutes the world shines like a bright star before it’s plunged into darkness.

Time doesn't pass, Hans Thomas, and time doesn't tick. We are the ones who pass, and our watches tick. Time eats its way through history as silently and relentlessly as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It topples great civilizations, gnaws at ancient monuments, and wolfs down generation after generation. That's why we speak of the 'ravages of time'. Time chews and chomps–and we are the ones between its jaws.

Again, ancient Zenists did not claim that there was any mysterious element in their spiritual attainment, as Do-gen says[FN#259] unequivocally respecting his Enlightenment: "I recognized only that my eyes are placed crosswise above the nose that stands lengthwise, and that I was not deceived by others. I came home from China with nothing in my hand. There is nothing mysterious in Buddhism. Time passes as it is natural, the sun rising in the east, and the moon setting into the west." [FN#259]

Life has come to a silent pause, The fear of Virus, the slowdown, Disconnecting me from moments, Heart has taken over the mind, Light now shines upon my eyes, Dreams blocked, the roads traversed, The break has broken the barrier, Me pondering, was I living my life? The days are same and so is night, The Sun, the Moon, and the stars, still rise in the east and set in the west, Trees, plants, flowers there as before, The sky, clouds rivers and oceans, Earth's precious treasures, no different, Change is in my perspective n priorities, Is it that I am learning to live my life. Monotonous tedium chores, Unpleasant hunger for wealth, Most of us are living dead, Body just awaits the soul to leave, To be buried or cremated, Waste of life and for what price, All material things cherished, Useless in our last flight. Time to fall in love with my life, Stop living for others, their expectations, I am again the owner of my choices, Not bothered to please others, Nor what they think about me, My dreams are alive and back, My treasurers are now my deeds, I have finally learnt to live!!!

I said that it was a beautiful sunset, and Alina said no, it was a sunrise. We argued about it, actually. I told her that the sun in the picture was setting because it was obviously a view from our camp near Gelendzhik, overlooking the Black Sea. That would mean the painting was looking to the west. “Alina said that it didn’t matter. Even if the sun is setting on Gelendzhik, that only means that it is rising in Bucharest. Or Vienna. Or Paris. The sun is always rising somewhere. From then on, whenever I felt low, whenever I lost hope and the world felt darkest, Alina would remind me: the sun is rising.

Everybody’s got their own way of saying goodbye. Maybe it ends with a tearful expression of bittersweet sorrow followed by a proclamation equal parts romantic and tragic: ‘You were the best friend I ever had,’ or ‘So long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, I’ll never feel about another the way I feel about you.’ Rebellious denials work for some. ‘I refuse to say goodbye. Mark my words, we’ll be together again sooner than you think!’ Disappearing in the middle of the night is always a classic. It’s too hard to say goodbye, they’re telling you, as if their silence were a mark of how much you meant to them.

Because it wasn’t enough to be accompanied by the beast who scared the crap out of every god in Heaven, Xuanzang was assigned a few more traveling companions. The gluttonous pig-man Zhu Baijie. Sha Wujing, the repentant sand demon. And the Dragon Prince of the West Sea, who took the form of a horse for Xuanzang to ride. The five adventurers, thusly gathered, set off on their— “Holy ballsacks!” I yelped. I dropped the book like I’d been bitten. “How far did you get?” Quentin said. He was leaning against the end of the nearest shelf, as casually as if he’d been there the whole time, waiting for this moment. I ignored that he’d snuck up on me again, just this once. There was a bigger issue at play. In the book was an illustration of the group done up in bold lines and bright colors. There was Sun Wukong at the front, dressed in a beggar’s cassock, holding his Ruyi Jingu Bang in one hand and the reins of the Dragon Horse in the other. A scary-looking pig-faced man and a wide-eyed demon monk followed, carrying the luggage. And perched on top of the horse was . . . me. The artist had tried to give Xuanzang delicate, beatific features and ended up with a rather girly face. By whatever coincidence, the drawing of Sun Wukong’s old master could have been a rough caricature of sixteen-year-old Eugenia Lo from Santa Firenza, California. “That’s who you think I am?” I said to Quentin. “That’s who I know you are,” he answered. “My dearest friend. My boon companion. You’ve reincarnated into such a different form, but I’d recognize you anywhere. Your spiritual energies are unmistakable.” “Are you sure? If you’re from a long time ago, maybe your memory’s a little fuzzy.” “The realms beyond Earth exist on a different time scale,” Quentin said. “Only one day among the gods passes for every human year. To me, you haven’t been gone long. Months, not centuries.” “This is just . . . I don’t know.” I took a moment to assemble my words. “You can’t walk up to me and expect me to believe right away that I’m the reincarnation of some legendary monk from a folk tale.” “Wait, what?” Quentin squinted at me in confusion. “I said you can’t expect me to go, ‘okay, I’m Xuanzang,’ just because you tell me so.” Quentin’s mouth opened slowly like the dawning of the sun. His face went from confusion to understanding to horror and then finally to laughter. “mmmmphhhhghAHAHAHAHA!” he roared. He nearly toppled over, trying to hold his sides in. “HAHAHAHA!” “What the hell is so funny?” “You,” Quentin said through his giggles. “You’re not Xuanzang. Xuanzang was meek and mild. A friend to all living things. You think that sounds like you?” It did not. But then again I wasn’t the one trying to make a case here. “Xuanzang was delicate like a chrysanthemum.” Quentin was getting a kick out of this. “You are so tough you snapped the battleaxe of the Mighty Miracle God like a twig. Xuanzang cried over squashing a mosquito. You, on the other hand, have killed more demons than the Catholic Church.” I was starting to get annoyed. “Okay, then who the hell am I supposed to be?” If he thought I was the pig, then this whole deal was off. “You’re my weapon,” he said. “You’re the Ruyi Jingu Bang.” I punched Quentin as hard as I could in the face.

Mass madness, if it’s going to last more than a week or two, requires mass media or mass government or the synergistic efforts of both. It isn’t just that the pretense that a man can marry a man will put religious believers at a disadvantage. It’s that it must set that ordinary tribeswoman in its sights, regardless of her religion. It’s not just her faith she must renounce. She must renounce her common sense. She must not be allowed even to think that the pretense is insane. She must be re-educated to believe that two fingers are three fingers, or that the sun rises in the west, or that the child in her womb is really a rock, or that excrement is nutritious, or anything else that no sensible person would ever come to discover on her own.

In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe’s gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.’ The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian’s statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself. ‘Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.’ This is poor stuff, Georgios thinks. You would not insult undergraduates’ intelligence with this.

In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!

As Garrett looked up from the transfuser, she blinked at the sight of a shirtless West Ravenel hoisting himself easily onto the table. Despite his earlier crack about Ethan's athletic form, he was certainly no physical lightweight himself. He had the hard, rippling musculature of a man accustomed to lifting and carrying heavy weight. But what had surprised Garrett was the discovery that his torso was tanned the same shade of golden brown as his face. All over. What kind of gentleman went outside in the sun for that long with no shirt?" Ravenel's lips quirked as he saw her expression. A twinkle of arrogant amusement appeared in his eyes. "Farmwork," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. "And I do some quarrying." "Half naked?" Garrett asked tartly, setting the transfuser on an expanse of clean linen. "I've been loading rocks into horse carts," he said. "Which suits my intellectual capacity perfectly. But it's too hot for a shirt.

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. He keeps from off the king’s road for fear of citizenry. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in a grassy draw where he’d gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the color of steel. His mounted shadow falls for miles before him. He wears on his head a hat he’s made from leaves and they have dried and cracked in the sun and he looks like a raggedyman wandered from some garden where he’d used to frighten birds.

When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” GENESIS 28 : 11 – 16

Dawn and a high film; the sun burned it; But noon had a thick sheet, and the clouds coming, The low rain-bringers, trooping in from the north, From the far cold fog-breeding seas, the womb of storms. Dusk brought a wind and the sky opened: All down the west the broken strips lay snared in the light, Bellied and humped and heaped on the hills. The set sun threw the blaze up; The sky lived redly, banner on banner of far-burning flame, From south to north the furnace door wide and the smoke rolling. We in the fields, the watchers from the burnt slope, Facing the west, facing the bright sky, hopelessly longing to know the red beauty-- But the unable eyes, the too-small intelligence, The insufficient organs of reception Not a thousandth part enough to take and retain. We stared, and no speaking. and felt the deep loneness of incomprehension. The flesh must turn cloud, the spirit, air, Transformation to sky and the burning, Absolute oneness with the west and the down sun. But we, being earth-stuck, watched from the fields, Till the rising rim shut out the light; Till the sky changed, the long wounds healed; Till the rain fell.

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

(from Lady of the Lake) The western waves of ebbing day Rolled o’er the glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below, Where twined the path in shadow hid, Round many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Round many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar’s plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o’er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dewdrop sheen, The brier-rose fell in streamers green, And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes, Waved in the west-wind’s summer sighs. Boon nature scattered, free and wild, Each plant or flower, the mountain’s child. Here eglantine embalmed the air, Hawthorn and hazel mingled there; The primrose pale, and violet flower, Found in each cliff a narrow bower; Fox-glove and night-shade, side by side, Emblems of punishment and pride, Grouped their dark hues with every stain The weather-beaten crags retain. With boughs that quaked at every breath, Gray birch and aspen wept beneath; Aloft, the ash and warrior oak Cast anchor in the rifted rock; And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung His shattered trunk, and frequent flung, Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high, His boughs athwart the narrowed sky. Highest of all, where white peaks glanced, Where glist’ning streamers waved and danced, The wanderer’s eye could barely view The summer heaven’s delicious blue; So wondrous wild, the whole might seem The scenery of a fairy dream. Onward, amid the copse ’gan peep A narrow inlet, still and deep, Affording scarce such breadth of brim As served the wild duck’s brood to swim. Lost for a space, through thickets veering, But broader when again appearing, Tall rocks and tufted knolls their face Could on the dark-blue mirror trace; And farther as the hunter strayed, Still broader sweep its channels made. The shaggy mounds no longer stood, Emerging from entangled wood, But, wave-encircled, seemed to float, Like castle girdled with its moat; Yet broader floods extending still Divide them from their parent hill, Till each, retiring, claims to be An islet in an inland sea. And now, to issue from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer’s ken, Unless he climb, with footing nice A far projecting precipice. The broom’s tough roots his ladder made, The hazel saplings lent their aid; And thus an airy point he won, Where, gleaming with the setting sun, One burnished sheet of living gold, Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled, In all her length far winding lay, With promontory, creek, and bay, And islands that, empurpled bright, Floated amid the livelier light, And mountains, that like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land. High on the south, huge Benvenue Down to the lake in masses threw Crags, knolls, and mountains, confusedly hurled, The fragments of an earlier world; A wildering forest feathered o’er His ruined sides and summit hoar, While on the north, through middle air, Ben-an heaved high his forehead bare.

As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.

Suppose Chaos was king and the order we thought we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos—by Mind! The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub-size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest mountains. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A Mind-created animism dominated the world then. More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them. Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost then-confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty—and thereby let magic loose in the world.

You know,” I said, “you don’t owe New Fiddleham anything. You don’t need to help them.” “Look,” Charlie said as we clipped past Market Street. He was pointing at a man delicately painting enormous letters onto a broad window as we passed. NONNA SANTORO’S, it read, although the RO’S was still just an outline. “That Italian restaurant?” “Yes,” he smiled. “They will be opening their doors for the first time very soon. Sweet family. I bought my first meal in New Fiddleham from that man. A couple of meatballs from a street cart were about all I could afford at the time. He’s an immigrant, too. He’s going to do well. His red sauce is amazing.” “That’s grand for him, then,” I said. “I like it when doors open,” said Charlie. “Doors are opening in New Fiddleham every day. It is a remarkable time to be alive anywhere, really. Do you think our parents could ever have imagined having machines that could wash dishes, machines that could sew, machines that do laundry? Pretty soon we’ll be taking this trolley ride without any horses. I’ve heard that Glanville has electric streetcars already. Who knows what will be possible fifty years from now, or a hundred. Change isn’t always so bad.” “Your optimism is both baffling and inspiring,” I said. “The sun is rising,” he replied with a little chuckle. I glanced at the sky. It was well past noon. “It’s just something my sister and I used to say,” he clarified. “I think you would like Alina. You often remind me of her. She has a way of refusing to let the world keep her down.” He smiled and his gaze drifted away, following the memory. “Alina found a rolled-up canvas once,” he said, “a year or so after our mother passed away. It was an oil painting—a picture of the sun hanging low over a rippling ocean. She was a beautiful painter, our mother. I could tell that it was one of hers, but I had never seen it before. It felt like a message, like she had sent it, just for us to find. “I said that it was a beautiful sunset, and Alina said no, it was a sunrise. We argued about it, actually. I told her that the sun in the picture was setting because it was obviously a view from our camp near Gelendzhik, overlooking the Black Sea. That would mean the painting was looking to the west. “Alina said that it didn’t matter. Even if the sun is setting on Gelendzhik, that only means that it is rising in Bucharest. Or Vienna. Or Paris. The sun is always rising somewhere. From then on, whenever I felt low, whenever I lost hope and the world felt darkest, Alina would remind me: the sun is rising.” “I think I like Alina already. It’s a heartening philosophy. I only worry that it’s wasted on this city.” “A city is just people,” Charlie said. “A hundred years from now, even if the roads and buildings are still here, this will still be a whole new city. New Fiddleham is dying, every day, but it is also being constantly reborn. Every day, there is new hope. Every day, the sun rises. Every day, there are doors opening.” I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “When we’re through saving the world,” I said, “you can take me out to Nonna Santoro’s. I have it on good authority that the red sauce is amazing.” He blushed pink and a bashful smile spread over his face. “When we’re through saving the world, Miss Rook, I will hold you to that.

Mr Casaubon’s behaviour about settlements was highly satisfactory to Mr Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along, shortening the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. On a grey but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company with her uncle and Celia. Mr Casaubon’s home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put him in possession of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the south-west front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun. This was the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten yards from the windows. The building, of greenish stone, was in the old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background. ‘Oh dear!’ Celia said to herself, ‘I am sure Freshitt Hall would have been pleasanter than this.’ She thought of the white freestone, the pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rosebush, with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately-odorous petals—Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things which had common-sense in them, and not about learning! Celia had those light young feminine tastes which grave and weather-worn gentlemen sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr Casaubon’s bias had been different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.

... it was so reminiscent of the Old West towns in the Cowboy movies him and his dad loved watching together, with it old, false-front Victorian buildings and wide porches. With the sun just setting in the west and the street all but deserted of townspeople, he could just imagine a desperado throwing down on a lawman in the main street.

In the evenings we sat wondering how the end of the world would come. Perhaps the sun will set yellow but green skirted, and the next morning it will rise in the west emerald green.

Do you have a frying pan? Not Teflon, I hate that stuff. Cast iron? Or stainless steel?" I found River an old cast iron pan in the cabinet by the sink. I put it on the stove, and I imagined, for a second, Freddie, young, wearing a pearl necklace and a hat that slouched off to one side, standing over that very pan and making an omelet after a late night spent dancing those crazy, cool dances they did back in her day. "Brilliant," River said. He lit the gas stove and threw some butter in the pan. Then he cut four pieces of the baguette, rubbed them with a clove of garlic, and tore a hole out in each. He set the bread in the butter and cracked an egg onto the bread so it filled up the hole. The yolks of the eggs were a bright orange, which, according to Sunshine's dad, meant the chickens were as happy as a blue sky when they laid them. "Eggs in a frame," River smiled at me. When the eggs were done, but still runny, he put them on two plates, diced a tomato into little juicy squares, and piled them on top of the bread. The tomato had been grown a few miles outside of Echo, in some peaceful person's greenhouse, and it was red as sin and ripe as the noon sun. River sprinkled some sea salt over the tomatoes, and a little olive oil, and handed me a plate. "It's so good, River. So very, very good. Where the hell did you learn to cook?" Olive oil and tomato juice were running down my chin and I couldn't have cared less. "Honestly? My mother was a chef." River had the half smile on his crooked mouth, sly, sly, sly. "This is sort of a bruschetta, but with a fried egg. American, by way of Italy.

The sun lost its heat and wore down to the western horizon, where it changed from white to gold and rested like a huge ball about to roll on its golden shadows down the

For a few moments he indulged his old joy in range and mountain, stretching, rising on his right, away into the purple distance. Something had heightened its beauty. How softly gray the rolling range land—how black the timbered slopes! The town before him sat like a hideous blotch on a fair landscape. It forced his gaze over and beyond toward the west, where the late afternoon sun had begun to mellow and redden, edging the clouds with exquisite light. To the southward lay Arizona, land of painted mesas and storied canyon walls, of thundering streams and wild pine forests, of purple-saged valleys and grassy parks, set like mosaics between the stark desert mountains.

We take it for granted that the sun rises in the east every morning and sets in the west at night. The next day, the sun does the same thing again. But what if I told you that the sun isn’t moving at all? It’s us who are spinning and moving around the sun! I trust you already knew that, but the takeaway from the analogy is that we tend to get mentally wedded to ideas that are no longer valid. After

You have never seen the sun set at this height. Come, look.’ The puller went to the edge and sat down, his legs hanging over the side. He saw that they hesitated. ‘Come. You can lie down and peer over the edge, if you like.’ Hillalum did not wish to seem like a fearful child, but he could not bring himself to sit at a cliff face that stretched for thousands of cubits below his feet. He lay down on his belly, with only his head at the edge. Nanni joined him. ‘When the sun is about to set, look down the side of the tower.’ Hillalum glanced downward, and then quickly looked to the horizon. ‘What is different about the way the sun sets here?’ ‘Consider, when the sun sinks behind the peaks of the mountains to the west, it grows dark down on the plain of Shinar. Yet here, we are higher than the mountaintops, so we can still see the sun. The sun must descend further for us to see night.’ Hillalum’s jaw dropped as he understood. ‘The shadows of the mountains mark the beginning of night. Night falls on the earth before it does here.’ Kudda nodded. ‘You can watch night travel up the tower, from the ground up to the sky. It moves quickly, but you should be able to see it.’ He watched the red globe of the sun for a minute, and then looked down and pointed. ‘Now!’ Hillalum and Nanni looked down. At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight. Hillalum rolled over and looked up, in time to see darkness rapidly ascend the rest of the tower. Gradually, the sky grew dimmer as the sun sank beneath the edge of the world, far away. ‘Quite a sight, is it not?’ said Kudda. Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

The Scripture of Zen is written with facts simple and familiar, so simple and familiar with everyday life that they escape observation on that very account. The sun rises in the east. The moon sets in the west. High is the mountain. Deep is the sea. Spring comes with flowers; summer with the cool breeze; autumn with the bright moon; winter with the fakes of snow. These things, perhaps too simple and too familiar for ordinary observers to pay attention to, have had profound significance for Zen.

He has watched every dream he has ever had of Iraq becoming a peaceful, prosperous country dashed, both by the hatred of the Islamists and by the West’s neglect.”  He took another drag on the cigarette.  “But he still believes that a man’s honor must be tied to his word.  That is a uniquely Western viewpoint, you know?  Here, a man’s honor is tied to how much esteem he is held in, in the perception of his wealth and his family.”  He blew the smoke skyward.  The sun was dipping toward the perpetual haze that stole its strength about an hour before it actually set.  “I don’t know where he got the idea; he has never traveled to England or America that I know.  He has been to several foreign military academies, back before the embargo after the war in the ‘90s.”  He turned to look at me, his face serious.  “He has given his word that he wants to be a Praetorian.  He means it.  He will honor it.  Which means these men, his tribesmen, will honor it as well.

Lorelai. There are only two indisputable facts in this world: The sun will set in the west, and I'll come for you. Always."-Ash

there is a very significant correspon- dence between the domination of the West and the end of a cycle, for the West is the place where the sun sets, that is to say where it arrives at the end of its daily journey, and where, according to Chi- nese symbolism, ‘the ripe fruit falls to the foot of the tree’. As to the means whereby the West has come to establish that domination, of which the ‘modernization of a more or less considerable number of Easterners is only the latest and most vexing consequence, it has been made sufficiently clear in the author’s other works that these means are based on material strength alone, which amounts to say- ing that Western domination is itself no more than an expression of the ‘reign of quantity’.

The Sword of Elendil was forged anew by Elvish smiths, and on its blade was traced a device of seven stars set between the crescent Moon and the rayed Sun, and about them was written many runes; for Aragorn son of Arathorn was going to war upon the marches of Mordor. Very bright was that sword when it was made whole again; the light of the sun shone redly in it, and the light of the moon shone cold, and its edge was hard and keen. And Aragorn gave it a new name and called it Andúril, Flame of the West.

His words explained, but they did not convince. Was this sudden-bursting glory only the sun rising behind storm clouds? She could see the clouds moving while they were being colored. The universal gray surrendered under some magic paint brush. The rifts widened, and the gloom of the pale-gray world seemed to vanish. Beyond the billowy, rolling, creamy edges of clouds, white and pink, shone the soft exquisite fresh blue sky. And a blaze of fire, a burst of molten gold, sheered up from behind the rim of cloud and suddenly poured a sea of sunlight from east to west. It trans-figured the round foothills. They seemed bathed in ethereal light, and the silver mists that overhung them faded while Carley gazed, and a rosy flush crowned the symmetrical domes. Southward along the horizon line, down-dropping veils of rain, just touched with the sunrise tint, streamed in drifting slow movement from cloud to earth. To the north the range of foothills lifted toward the majestic dome of Sunset Peak, a volcanic upheaval of red and purple cinders, bare as rock, round as the lower hills, and wonderful in its color. Full in the blaze of the rising sun it flaunted an unchangeable front. Carley understood now what had been told her about this peak. Volcanic fires had thrown up a colossal mound of cinders burned forever to the hues of the setting sun. In every light and shade of day it held true to its name. Farther north rose the bold bulk of the San Francisco Peaks, that, half lost in the clouds, still dominated the desert scene. Then as Carley gazed the rifts began to close. Another transformation began, the reverse of what she watched. The golden radiance of sunrise vanished, and under a gray, lowering) coalescing pall of cloud the round hills returned to their bleak somberness, and the green desert took again its cold sheen.

By the time we were watching the moon set on one side of us and the sun rise on the other, we’d all fallen into a moving bit of peace. I’d felt a sliver of that peaceful feeling after we’d made it through the mountains. This time, through, it was longer and lingering and soul-soothing deep. It seems now like the closest thing to praying I’d ever done. When I’d lived a little longer and heard people talking about such things, calling it by spiritual names I’d wanted to scoff but couldn’t. In the years ahead, through the War and beyond, it was this quiet day moving through the unmoving land with Boy and Girl and the Old man and Red that I returned to when I needed it most. Like the jolting joys of giraffes amid the traveling bird wave, tis peace passed any understanding, any attempt at words. You only get a few of those in your whole life if you’re lucky, and some only get one. If that be true, this was my one. When I remember it, I’m not eighteen in the memory. I am whatever age its comfort came to me, be it 33, or 103, and I am driving us all, through the timeless red desert, headed to nowhere in particular, just someplace good. Together.

I look to the west. The sun is about to set and the whole sky is swirls of pink and orange and red. I’ve seen the sunset countless times, but I’ve never seen the sun when it’s separated from me by nothing more than ocean and a small sliver of land. It looks like it’s dangling above the earth like a floating flame. It’s the first sunset I’ve ever felt this deep in my chest. I feel my eyes begin to tear up at the sheer beauty of it.

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

It was that time of day, or night, that happens only a few weeks a year at a certain hour in certain parts of the American West. The sun sets behind mountains but the cloudless sky that is more than cloudless, it is lens clear – clear as the clearest water - holds the light entirely, holds it in a bowl of pale blue as if reluctant to let it go. The light refines the edges of the ridges to something honed and the muted colors of the pines on the slopes, the sage-roughened fields, the houses in the valley – the colors pulse with the pleasure of release, as if they know that within the hour they too will rest.

Standing in the mouth of the cave, he watched sea and sky cleave in graded blue harmony, enjoying a brief connection before the sky bruised and cast a wine-dark stain on the sea. Seconds later the sun launched a spectacular volley of vermilion spears over the horizon just before it sank. The rising tide shattered breakers against the boot of the cliff and the seventh wave, always the largest in a set, exploded against the rocks, sending a jet of spume over him. He leapt back, shaking the water from his robes and hair, and moved deeper into the cave. The bats were stirring, squealing and stretching leathery wings, waking up for the night’s foraging and soon a dark silent stream would head west to raid suburban bowers. The sky rapidly deepened from purple to indigo and a bright display of stars, planets, asteroids, comets – the flotsam and jetsam of past galaxies – popped to light.

I move the sun to the west, and as the angle of the light shifts, the dewdrops on the seedlings in the field glisten like countless eyes suddenly popping open. I dim the sun so that dusk arrives earlier; then I stare at the silhouette of myself on the distant horizon, in front of the setting sun. I wave at the silhouette; the silhouette waves back. Looking at the shadow of myself, I feel young again. This is a lovely time, just right for remembering.

Below the clouds once reflected bodies of ocean teeming with all sorts of adventure. This was too long ago for anyone to recount stories. The world is no longer separated by the blue, nor made up of inhabited landmasses. This is a sky-faring world now. Any region is a piece of the puzzle. Seven to be exact. Soaring through clouds—and at varying altitudes, Skymen traverse the Seven Skies. Privateers, merchants, organized criminals, government-sanctioned entities, pirates, and simple sky-farers. The Skies belong to all. However, as sure as the East-risen Sun every morning, some have entitled themselves to ownership of all things. This is why the people of this world yearn for independence. However, as sure as the West-setting Sun every evening, Freedom demands her price.

As we watched on that evening, imagining Brutus gazing eagerly west, the setting sun sank and described a glittering path of reddened gold, dancing out westwards across the gentle waves. It was a path, and a destiny, that grew ever brighter, ever bloodier, as the precious moments passed. Then the sun sank out of sight and the afterglow began; first intense gold, then deep crimson. It was easy to visualise – even actually to glimpse – the last of Brutus’s ships clearing the promontory, the sails filling with the evening breeze, billowing out with their first precious taste of freedom.

On the beach in the center of Provincetown, just off the long strip of Commercial Street, there is a comically large wooden blue chair that faces the ocean. It must be eight feet tall, as if it is waiting for a giant. I would often sit on that chair, looking tiny as darkness fell, talking with people I had befriended around the town. Sometimes we would be silent, and simply watch the light change. The light in Provincetown is unlike the light anywhere else I have ever been. You are on a thin, narrow sandbar in the middle of the ocean, and as you sit on that beach, you are facing east. The sun is setting behind you in the west—but its light is flowing forward, onto the water in front of you, and reflecting back into your face. You seem to be flooded with the waning light of two sunsets. I watched it with the people I met, and I felt radically open, to them, and to the sun, and to the ocean.

On the way back to Canefield House we passed through the more hilly district of Scotland, and observed, working in the fields or sitting in the doorways of miserable wooden shacks, not the Negro figures to which the eye is accustomed in such settings in the West Indies, but ragged white men with blue eyes and tow-coloured hair bleached by the sun. This little population of Redlegs, as they are called, are descendants of the followers of the Duke of Monmouth, who, after their defeat at Sedgemoor, were deported to Barbados by order of Judge Jeffreys at the Bloody Assizes. They have remained here ever since, in the same humble plight as when they were first herded ashore. Labat and many other writers talk of the presence in the islands of Irish deportees shipped here by Cromwell after Wexford and Drogheda, and it is perhaps due to them that the closest affinity of the Barbadian way of speaking is with the Irish accent.

Sun aimed the rod at its head, and one stroke caused its brain to burst out like ten thousand red petals of peach blossoms, and the teeth to fly out like so many pieces of white jade.

Wendor shook his head. “No, friend Kagen, the Witch-king wants them there as guests and witnesses. Or, perhaps, accomplices. If they salute him as he dons the crown, then the Hakkian Empire becomes legal. Such a thing would turn the Witch-king from invading usurper to the true emperor in the west.” The doctor paused and sighed. “The world as we have always known it, my friend, is ending. The sun is setting, and we are likely to live the rest of our lives under the shadow of the eclipse.

To the west, beyond the buildings and walls of the Lower Hold, the sun licked the treetops. It would soon set and bring night with it. By then, Vic would have cleaned up, eaten, and be lying in his bunk. They followed the gravel path toward the bunkhouse. As they rounded a building, a pair of dwarf guards came into view. With them was a taller, thinner figure in tan robes. Vic forgot his hunger and exhaustion. “Ian!” Ian nodded as he approached. “Hi, Vic. Hi, Brady. I was hoping I might run into you guys.” Vic said, “Where have you been? It has been weeks since I last saw you.” “I have been busy. Summer has come to an end, and with the new season, Devigar has given me additional duties.” The statement was a shock to Vic. “We have been here an entire season?” “I am afraid so.” Brady asked, “What are you doing down here today?” “Investigating.” Vic frowned. “Investigating what?” A sadness softened Ian’s gaze and a hint of desperation sank into his tone. “I am looking for Rina.

southern star or constellation which once temporarily gained prominence in the sky, or may stand for some recurrent phenomenon, he most likely represented different ‘things’ on different occasions. Bali was guided by Venus, the guru of the asuras who, as we saw in “The Greatness of Saturn,” possesses the Sanjivani Vidya, which can revive the dead. Indeed, Venus is always dying (disappearing from view when it goes too close to the sun) and being reborn (reappearing after a predictable period of residence in the ‘underworld’). Asuras are known to be stronger at night, which they rule, but each dawn the potential chaos that night represents is dispelled by the sun, who reappears to separate the earth from the sky and to measure the world by rising in the east, appearing overhead at noon, and setting in the west. These may be the three great strides that the dwarf Vamana uses in The Begging of the Universe incident from the “The Greatness of Saturn” to subdue Bali and return him to the celestial underworld. Or perhaps the three steps are measured at the vernal equinox, when Vamana’s left foot reaches to the North (celestial)

State Road 60 is one of those great old Florida drives. From Tampa on the west coast to Vero Beach on the east, rolling through Mulberry and Bartow and Yeehaw Junction. Phosphate mines and orange groves and cows loitering near water holes in vast open flats dotted with sabal palms, stretching for miles, making the sky big. Here and there were the kind of occasional, isolated farmhouses that made people subconsciously think: Do they get Internet? In the middle of one overgrown field stood a single concrete wall, several stories high, covered with grime and mildew, the ancient ruins of a drive-in theater. The top of the wall was the last thing to catch a warm glow from the setting sun.

Natalie Greer is as spoiled as a pan of milk set out in the sun.

What caused Noah the most consternation was the change in the heavens. The earthquakes shook the pillars of the earth and went wide enough to even rattle the pillars of the firmament. The sky changed colors. Even the sun would turn blood red as it set in the gates of the West. Noah noticed an increase of storm clouds on the horizon, distant thunder portending a coming apocalypse. But this was not a time to brood. They finally finished the construction of the box and filled it with the animals. It was a time to celebrate.

It's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more than anything" Tariq nodded knowingly. It wasn't so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds between the start of it and impact. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict. Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in mid-air, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black window, their shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild. But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't. After every rocket blast, Laila raced to the street, stammering a prayer, certain that, this time, surely this time, it was Tariq they would find buried beneath the rubble and smoke. At night, Laila lay in bed and watched the sudden white flashes reflected in her window. She listened to the rattling of automatic gunfire and counted the rockets whining overhead as the house shook and flakes of plaster rained down on her from the ceiling. Some nights, when the light of rocket fire was so bright a person could read a book by it, sleep never came. And, if it did, Laila's dreams were suffused with fire and detached limbs and the moaning of the wounded. Morning brought no relief. The muezzin's call for namaz rang out, and the Mujahideen set down their guns, faced west, and prayed. Then the rugs were folded, the guns loaded, and the mountains fired on Kabul, and Kabul fired back at the mountains, as Laila and the rest of the city watched as helpless as old Santiago watching the sharks take bites out of his prize fish.

A man can be richer than Solomon, the richest man that ever lived on our planet earth, or he may be greater than Alexander the Great, the greatest man in history. His name may be felt from the east where the sun rises to the west where it sets. He may travel around the world just like Dhul-Qarnain. Yet, he can still be a loser if he exempts God from his life.