Temple Bar Quotes

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

In a split second of eternity, everything is changed, transfigured. A few bars of music, rising from an unfamiliar place, a touch of perfection in the flow of human dealings--I lean my head slowly to one side, reflect on the camellia on the moss on the temple, reflect on a cup of tea, while outside the wind is rustling foliage, the forward rush of life is crystalized in a brilliant jewel of a moment that knows neither projects nor future, human destiny is rescued from the pale succession of days, glows with light at last and, surpassing time, warms my tranquil heart.

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Temple Bar was hundreds of miles away,

And an old priest said, Speak to us of Religion. And he said: Have I spoken this day of aught else? Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom? Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations? Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul and this other for my body"? All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self. He who wears his mortality but as his best garment were better naked. The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin. And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage. The freest song comes not through bars and wires. And he to whom worshiping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn. Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all. Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute, The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight. For in reverie you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures. And take with you all men: For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair. And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain. You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

Come back." It was a demand. "No." "You want to be there. You love it." "How would you know? You never look at me." I picked up my not-Shirley Temple and took a sip. It was strong, but it also tasted like bravery. "I see you, Anna." His voice lowered an octave, as though he were endeavoring to control his temper; his hand on the bar inched closer. "It's impossible not to see you.

After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth. On

We are all, of course, wayfaring strangers on this earth. But coming out of the rainbow tunnel, the liminal portal between Marin and San Francisco, myth and reality, I catch sight of a beautiful, sparkling city that might as well be on the moon. I can name the sights, the streets, the eateries, but in my heart it feels as unfamiliar as Cape Town or Cuzco. I've lived here for fourteen years. This is the arena of my adult life, with its large defeats and small victories. Maybe, like all transplants (converts?), I've asked too much of the city. I would never have moved to Pittsburh or Houston or L.A. expecting it to save my soul. Only here in the great temple by the bay. It's a mistake we've been making for decades, and probably a necessary one. The city's flaws, of course, are numerous. Our politics can suffer from humourless stridency, and life here is menacingly expensive. But if you're insulated from these concerns, sufficiently employed and housed, if you are -in other words- like most people, you are in view of the unbridgeable ideal. Here, with our plentiful harvest, our natural beauty, our bars, our bookstores, our cliffs and ocean, out free to be you and me; here, where pure mountain water flows right out of the tap. It's here that the real questions become inescapable. In fact the proximity of the ideal makes us more acutely aware of the real questions. Not the run-of-the-mill insolubles-Why am I here? Who am I?- but the pressing questions of adult life: Really? and Are you sure? And Now what?

For Christopher, the Cosy Corner was now no longer the mysterious temple of initiation in which he had met Bubi; Berlin was no longer the fantasy city in which their affair had taken place. Their affair had been essentially a private performance which could only continue as long as Wystan was present to be its audience. Now the performance was over. Berlin had become a real city and the Cosy Corner a real bar. He didn’t for one moment regret this. For now his adventures here were real, too; less magical but far more interesting. The

I am a shadow. I walk the wet roads under the dim light of the pale lamps, in the darkest hour of the cold dull nights. I walk past the silent graveyard of the dead memories, towards the city of chaos plagued with gloom. I do not exist, but in the eyes of the shattered souls. In the chapter of an old book. In the poem. In the smile of a wrecked and in the tear of a broken spirit. Listen me in the songs told in the times long forgotten. Search for me in the churchs and temples, bars and brothels,pitch black nights and the colorless days. Dive down in your deepest part of your soul. And you will find my home. I have many faces but I have no face of my own. I am a shadow.

After all, one of the great things about books is that they don’t disappear after the first year of their publication—barring floods and thieves, they can loiter forever on your shelves, waiting to be picked up and rediscovered, manic publicity cycle be damned. They can be revisited, loaned out, traded, forgotten and found. They can have strange, long lives.

Something entirely unexpected happened to Bert. Yesterday he had seen her as a child grown up, today it was different. There was a pain in his chest and a hammering, the skin on his temples felt oddly tight, his hand trembled so that he almost dropped the bar he was holding. He leaned back against the wheel, staring at her but unable to speak. A long time seemed to pass before he could say anything, and the words sounded clumsy in his own ears. What

tightly and a vein throbbed at his temple. The two guards led Rogers down a long hallway. On each side were barred cell doors. The men behind them had been talking, but when Rogers came into view they abruptly stopped. The prisoners

It is said that the Hindus must have been upset at seeing Turkish and Mongol soldiers in their heavy boots trampling the floors of the temples. The question is, which Hindus? For, the same temple if it was now entered by mleccha soldiers was open only to upper-caste Hindus and its sanctum was in any case barred to the majority of the population who were regarded as the indigenous mleccha. The trauma was therefore more in the notion of the temple being polluted rather than the confrontation of one religion with another.

It [the charcuterie] was almost on the corner of the Rue Pirouette and was a joy to behold. It was bright and inviting, with touches of brilliant colour standing out amidst white marble. The signboard, on which the name QUENU-GRADELLE glittered in fat gilt letter encircled by leaves and branches painted on a soft-hued background, was protected by a sheet of glass. On the two side panels of the shop front, similarly painted and under glass, were chubby little Cupids playing in the midst of boars' heads, pork chops, and strings of sausages; and these still lifes, adorned with scrolls and rosettes, had been designed in so pretty and tender a style that the raw meat lying there assumed the reddish tint of raspberry jam. Within this delightful frame, the window display was arranged. It was set out on a bed of fine shavings of blue paper; a few cleverly positioned fern leaves transformed some of the plates into bouquets of flowers fringed with foliage. There were vast quantities of rich, succulent things, things that melted in the mouth. Down below, quite close to the window, jars of rillettes were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these were some boned hams, nicely rounded, golden with breadcrumbs, and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Then came the larger dishes--stuffed Strasbourg tongues, with their red, varnished look, the colour of blood next to the pallor of the sausages and pigs' trotters; strings of black pudding coiled like harmless snakes; andouilles piled up in twos and bursting with health; saucissons in little silver copes that made them look like choristers; pies, hot from the oven, with little banner-like tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great cuts of veal and pork, whose jelly was as limpid as crystallized sugar. Towards the back were large tureens in which the meats and minces lay asleep in lakes of solidified fat. Strewn between the various plates and sishes, on the bed of blue shavings, were bottles of relish, sauce, and preserved truffles, pots of foie gras, and tins of sardines and tuna fish. A box of creamy cheeses and one full of snails stuffed with butter and parsley had been dropped in each corner. Finally, at the very top of the display, falling from a bar with sharp prongs, strings of sausages and saveloys hung down symmetrically like the cords and tassels of some opulent tapestry, while behind, threads of caul were stretched out like white lacework. There, on the highest tier of this temple of gluttony, amid the caul and between two bunches of purple gladioli, the alter display was crowned by a small, square fish tank with a little ornamental rockery, in which two goldfish swam in endless circles.

We can take the life apart. We do it all the time.” The veins on Alan Saturn’s temples were pressing forward with their new influx of blood. “Picasso put his cigarettes out on his girlfriends and we don’t love the paintings any less for it. Wagner was a fascist and I can hum you every bar in the opening of Die Walküre.

We were looking for opportunities to share the message with people who wouldn’t be caught in a church— unless they were wheeled in via a casket! Matthew 11: 19 says this of Jesus: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners.”’  ” Jesus didn’t get that kind of reputation from hanging out only in temples and church buildings. Going to a bar or pool hall doesn’t mean you’re a drunk, just like sitting in a henhouse doesn’t make you a chicken. It’s the same in the opposite setting. Sitting in a church building doesn’t make you a follower of Christ. In fact, Acts 17: 24 says: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.” God lives in heaven and in the hearts of men and women on earth. Misunderstanding this principle is one of the reasons so many people act one way in a church building and the total opposite everywhere else.

Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight 1 You scream, waking from a nightmare. When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you. 2 I have heard you tell the sun, don't go down, I have stood by as you told the flower, don't grow old, don't die. Little Maud, I would blow the flame out of your silver cup, I would suck the rot from your fingernail, I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light, I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones, I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body, I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood, I would let nothing of you go, ever, until washerwomen feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands, and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades, and rats walk away from the culture of the plague, and iron twists weapons toward truth north, and grease refuse to slide in the machinery of progress, and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men, and the widow still whispers to the presence no longer beside her in the dark. And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry, this the nightmare you wake screaming from: being forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls. 3 In a restaurant once, everyone quietly eating, you clambered up on my lap: to all the mouthfuls rising toward all the mouths, at the top of your voice you cried your one word, caca! caca! caca! and each spoonful stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering steam. Yes, you cling because I, like you, only sooner than you, will go down the path of vanished alphabets, the roadlessness to the other side of the darkness, your arms like the shoes left behind, like the adjectives in the halting speech of old folk, which once could call up the lost nouns. 4 And you yourself, some impossible Tuesday in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out among the black stones of the field, in the rain, and the stones saying over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît, and the raindrops hitting you on the fontanel over and over, and you standing there unable to let them in. 5 If one day it happens you find yourself with someone you love in a café at one end of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses, and if you commit then, as we did, the error of thinking, one day all this will only be memory, learn to reach deeper into the sorrows to come—to touch the almost imaginary bones under the face, to hear under the laughter the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss the mouth that tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones. The still undanced cadence of vanishing. 6 In the light the moon sends back, I can see in your eyes the hand that waved once in my father's eyes, a tiny kite wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look: and the angel of all mortal things lets go the string. 7 Back you go, into your crib. The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell. Your eyes close inside your head, in sleep. Already in your dreams the hours begin to sing. Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among the ten thousand things, each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair- the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish- to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself- an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us- the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts' shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?

God is not the possession of any religion. If anything, religion can be a path away from God. God cannot be bound up inside churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Those are just community centers where people gather to hang out with their friends. God is no more to be found in those places than he is in rock clubs or back-alley bars. God is in the wilderness, and God is in the city. Everywhere you go God is there. God walks with you. God is you, and God is the very act of walking.

By now the window of the bar is visible, glowing ahead of them, but there is no sound, not a single word to be heard, as if the place were deserted, not a soul … but now, someone is playing the harmonica … Irimias scrapes the mud off his lead-heavy shoes, clears his throat, cautiously opens the door, and the rain begins again, while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to this spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees from one another, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army.

There is some concern among the Brethren that some of you who are still single may not be moving in the direction of preparing yourselves to seek out and commit to an eternal companion. This applies both to young men and to young women. The greater burden, however, rests upon the young men because in our society it is a responsibility of young men to initiate activities that lead to courtship and to marriage. The doctrine of the Church is very clear and it anticipates that individuals will be married in the temple and rear a righteous family as guided by the inspired document we call "The Proclamation on the Family." . . . Speaking of the obligation of men to marry, President Joseph Fielding Smith taught as follows: "Any young man who carelessly neglects this great commandment to marry, or who does not marry because of a selfish desire to avoid the responsibilities which married life will bring, is taking a course which is displeasing in the sight of God. Exaltation means responsibility. There can be no exaltation without it. "If a man refuses to take upon himself the responsibilities of married life, because he desires to avoid the cares and troubles which naturally will follow, he is taking a course which may bar him forever from the responsibilities which are held in reserve for those who are willing to keep in full the commandments of the Lord. . . . "According to modern custom, it is the place of the man to take the initiative in the matter of a marriage contract. Women are, by force of such custom, kept in reserve. . . . The responsibility . . . rests upon the man." President Smith continued with the following advice to young women: "If in her heart the young woman accepts fully the word of the Lord, and under proper conditions would abide by the law, but refuses an offer when she fully believes that the conditions would not justify her in entering a marriage contract, which would bind her forever to one she does not love, she shall not lose her reward. The Lord will judge her by the desires of the heart, and the day will come when the blessings withheld shall be given, though it be postponed until the life to come.

It’s easy to see that “money” in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments. Temple bureaucrats used the system to calculate debts (rents, fees, loans, etc.) in silver. Silver was, effectively, money. And it did indeed circulate in the form of unworked chunks, “rude bars” as Smith had put it.33 In this he was right. But it was almost the only part of his account that was right. For one thing, silver did not circulate very much. Most of it just sat around in Temple and Palace treasuries, some of which remained, carefully guarded, in the same place for literally thousands of years. It would have been easy enough to standardize the ingots, stamp them, create some authoritative system to guarantee their purity. The technology existed. Yet no one saw any particular need to do so. One reason was that while debts were calculated in silver, they did not have to be paid in silver—in fact, they could be paid in more or less anything one had around.

But people are curious about the result, as they are about the result in a book — they want to know nothing about dread, distress, the paradox. They flirt aesthetically with the result, it comes just as unexpectedly but also just as easily as a prize in the lottery; and when they have heard the result they are edified. And yet no robber of temples condemned to hard labor behind iron bars, is so base a criminal as the man who pillages the holy, and even Judas who sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver is not more despicable than the man who sells greatness.

Diana can read power levels,” Astrid said. “Did she ever…” Sam nodded. “She said the baby is a three bar. As a fetus. Who knows what it will be when it’s born. Or as it grows. Diana’s only, like, four or five months along. I should know exactly, but I forget. When she would talk about it I would kind of, you know.” He made a shivering move, like it all gave him the creeps. Astrid shook her head in disbelief. “Really. That’s the part of all this that makes you squirm: pregnancy.” “She made me touch her, you know, stomach. And she talked about her, um, her things.” He pointed at his chest and whispered, “Nipples.” “Yeah,” Astrid said dryly. “I could see where that would be devastating.

Every day the words that Keep-on-Dancin’ and the Gypsy imparted to me - theories, observations, advice and warnings - are substantiated and acquire deeper meaning. ‘It’s not for nothing there are so many bistrots in Paris,’ Keep-on-Dancin’ asserted. ‘The reason so many people are always crowded into them isn’t so much they go there to drink but to meet up, congregate, come together, comfort each other. Yes, comfort each other: people are bored the whole time, and they’re scared, scared of loneliness and boredom. And they all carry around in their heart of hearts their own pet little arch-fear: fear of death, no matter how devil-may-care they might appear to be. They’d do anything to avoid thinking about it. Don’t forget, it’s with that fear all temples and churches were built. So in cities like this, where forty different races mingle together, everyone can always find something to say to each other.

I have had so many Dwellings, Nat, that I know these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar: I was born in this Nest of Death and Contagion and now, as they say, I have learned to feather it. When first I was with Sir Chris. I found lodgings in Phenix Street off Hogg Lane, close by St Giles and Tottenham Fields, and then in later times I was lodged at the corner of Queen Street and Thames Street, next to the Blew Posts in Cheapside. (It is still there, said Nat stirring up from his Seat, I have passed it!) In the time before the Fire, Nat, most of the buildings in London were made of timber and plaister, and stones were so cheap that a man might have a cart-load of them for six-pence or seven-pence; but now, like the Aegyptians, we are all for Stone. (And Nat broke in, I am for Stone!) The common sort of People gawp at the prodigious Rate of Building and exclaim to each other London is now another City or that House was not there Yesterday or the Situacion of the Streets is quite Changd (I contemn them when they say such things! Nat adds). But this Capital City of the World of Affliction is still the Capitol of Darknesse, or the Dungeon of Man's Desires: still in the Centre are no proper Streets nor Houses but a Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch. (I have heard of that Gentleman, says Nat all a quiver). It is true that in what we call the Out-parts there are numberless ranges of new Buildings: in my old Black-Eagle Street, Nat, tenements have been rais'd and where my Mother and Father stared without understanding at their Destroyer (Death! he cryed) new-built Chambers swarm with life. But what a Chaos and Confusion is there: meer fields of Grass give way to crooked Passages and quiet Lanes to smoking Factors, and these new Houses, commonly built by the London workmen, are often burning and frequently tumbling down (I saw one, says he, I saw one tumbling!). Thus London grows more Monstrous, Straggling and out of all Shape: in this Hive of Noise and Ignorance, Nat, we are tyed to the World as to a sensible Carcasse and as we cross the stinking Body we call out What News? or What's a clock? And thus do I pass my Days a stranger to mankind. I'll not be a Stander-by, but you will not see me pass among them in the World. (You will disquiet your self, Master, says Nat coming towards me). And what a World is it, of Tricking and Bartering, Buying and Selling, Borrowing and Lending, Paying and Receiving; when I walk among the Piss and Sir-reverence of the Streets I hear, Money makes the old Wife trot, Money makes the Mare to go (and Nat adds, What Words won't do, Gold will). What is their God but shineing Dirt and to sing its Devotions come the Westminster-Hall-whores, the Charing-cross whores, the Whitehall whores, the Channel-row whores, the Strand whores, the Fleet Street whores, the Temple-bar whores; and they are followed in the same Catch by the Riband weavers, the Silver-lace makers, the Upholsterers, the Cabinet-makers, Watermen, Carmen, Porters, Plaisterers, Lightemen, Footmen, Shopkeepers, Journey-men... and my Voice grew faint through the Curtain of my Pain.

My mouth kept dropping open, and I would choke on road dust as the city loomed ever closer. When I glanced over at Elka, she was in the same state—wide-eyed and torn between fear and wonderment. Everything seemed like something out of legend. In the shadow of the soaring walls, the city became less of an imposing majestic place and more a heaped, jumbled gathering of wealth and squalor existing side by side. Heady perfumes and the stink of offal wrapped around each other, woven into an overwhelming tapestry by the ocean breeze. Wicker cages full of fowl and small game swung from carts, squawking and chittering excitedly, filling the air with a haze of fur and feathers. Tens and tens of incomprehensible languages rang in my ears. Houses and temples and other buildings made of stone—structures that made my father’s great hall seem like a sheepherder’s hut—rose above the street, level upon level. All of it—the sights and sounds and smells—tangled together into an assault on my senses that made me want to clap my hands over my ears and hide my head. But there was no escaping the chaos as our cart plunged on, heading right toward the very heart of Massilia. With only the bars of my cage between me and the pushing, shoving, singing, shouting crowd, I’d never felt so vulnerable.

The Invitational Church In the invitational church, the focus is on growth. The goal of the church is to reach out and gather people into the church. Therefore, the church is designed as a consumer-oriented place that takes special care to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for visitors and guests. A highly trained staff puts forth great effort to ensure the very best experience for everyone who comes to the church, with special attention paid to visitors. Invitational churches are often successful at growth because this is a large part of their goal and focus. There are many wonderful aspects of the invitational church. I believe God sovereignly birthed the church growth and seeker movements to help the institutional church get beyond itself and start caring about the millions of people trying to find God who were unable to fit into the institutional church. I deeply appreciate and value invitational churches, because they have come up with a way to re-create a modern day “Court Of The Gentiles” aspect of the temple, a place where God-seekers can come and find God. They have unselfishly set aside their desire for church to be about themselves, and they have designed church services for lost people and seekers. What a refreshing change when invitational churches hit the scene! They have really harvested many people for Jesus and helped thousands of churches become outward-focused. This is a good thing! The difficulty with the invitational church is that the individual is essentially irrelevant. What I mean is, when most people walk into an invitational church, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they show up. Why is this true? Because the invitational church has, by default, set the bar very low to make sure that whosoever will may come. However, the inadvertent message is that the individual is not really needed. Little is asked or required of people, and it is very clear that if they aren’t part of the overall goal to facilitate growth, their gifts may not be needed. To prove the point: where do many of the people who have left institutional churches go? They often sit in the back of invitational churches where they can go unnoticed and where they can have very little asked of them. The invitational church is a great place to recover from the institutional church. Some go on and become involved in meaningful ways. But often over time, two negative things happen to believers who have been in invitational churches. One, they become sedentary, consumer-oriented Christians. Those who joined the institutional church and who wanted to make a difference have all but lost their initial fire. Often they no longer burn with zeal for God and His purposes. Instead, they unwittingly adopt the culture of the invitational church into their Christianity, and they, too, lower the bar to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they are now just showing up at a weekend service. Or two, they begin to feel the need for a more personal, relational church, and they move on to something more personal and meaningful to them.

…[O]ne of the earliest genuine references to billiards in America reveals that the Colonial statesman William Byrd of Westover—who was educated in England and called to the bar at the Middle Temple—had a billiard table: in his diary entry for 30 July 1710, Byrd writes, apropos of having laid his wife, "It is to be observed that the flourish was performed on the billiard table.

The official declaration of war came on October 19, 1739, with the ringing of bells and the Prince of Wales toasting the London populace outside the Rose Tavern near Temple Bar. “This is your war,” Walpole told his rival the Duke of Newcastle, “and I wish you joy of it.

Later, he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it. He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while. “Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.” He agreed that the table was clean. “Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien — no offense — alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality . . . like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But . . . the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled . . . but” — he slapped the table — “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.” “But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.” “And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.” “But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” — the man laughed — “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway?

I am the lioness. I speak with her voice. I look out through her eyes. I am she. I doze in the hot bars of sunlight that come down through the temple roof. I breathe in the scent of flowers. Priests come to me and ask questions so I will talk. It doesn’t matter what I say, because all the words of the goddess have meaning. They sing to me to improve my humour.

It all began when a roaring drunk wizard,” I pointed a thumb at my chest, “An Angel, and a Horseman of the Apocalypse walked into a bar…

One of the things that helped my relationships with those we were reaching out to was that I was not afraid to go to rough places or hang out with people who were cutting up. We were looking for opportunities to share the message with people who wouldn’t be caught in a church—unless they were wheeled in via a casket! Matthew 11:19 says this of Jesus: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners.”’ ” Jesus didn’t get that kind of reputation from hanging out only in temples and church buildings. Going to a bar or pool hall doesn’t mean you’re a drunk, just like sitting in a henhouse doesn’t make you a chicken. It’s the same in the opposite setting. Sitting in a church building doesn’t make you a follower of Christ. In fact, Acts 17:24 says: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.” God lives in heaven and in the hearts of men and women on earth. Misunderstanding this principle is one of the reasons so many people act one way in a church building and the total opposite everywhere else.

Before sending the letter, David showed it to George—who protested. “His dad helped him concoct the letter—and it was concocted in that it said things like that famous quote ‘Brian Epstein’s got the Beatles and you should have us.’ ” Undeterred, David assured him, “Don’t worry. It will be all right.” His instincts were on the money. Bloom, amused by the youngster’s chutzpah, passed the letter on to Les Conn, a friend from the Jewish scene in Stamford Hill. Within a couple of days, a telegram arrived at David’s house instructing him to call Conn’s Temple Bar number.

THE DESTROYERS CAME FROM out of the desert. Palmyra must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots, armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness, had been terrorizing the east of the Roman Empire. Their attacks were primitive, thuggish and very effective. These men moved in packs—later in swarms of as many as five hundred—and when they descended utter destruction followed. Their targets were the temples and the attacks could be astonishingly swift. Great stone columns that had

Dear Diary, THERE WAS STILL ANOTHER DAY of the conference, so we stayed in DC. While Dad attended panels and lectures, George, Bess, and I finally took in the sights. It was hard to keep up with George at the National Air and Space Museum. She raced from one exhibit to the next. Bess led us more calmly through the National Portrait Gallery, giving us time to appreciate the paintings. When it was my turn, I picked visiting the Supreme Court. With all our talk about justice the night before, I wanted to see the highest court in the land—the place where nine people get to decide exactly what the law means. Walking up the marble steps gave me goose bumps. I’d heard the building referred to as the Temple of Justice before, and now I understand why. But then I remembered Walker was still behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, and the goose bumps faded.

in contrast to what the Sages claim, the Sanhedrin was established only in the Second Temple Period, and not before.

it was natural for the priests to engage in implementing judgment.[234] Thus, there is no reason to assume that it refers to the rabbis/ Pharisees, which are first mentioned towards the end of the Second Temple era.[235]

We enter crack houses and foster houses, group homes and strip clubs, trailers, mansions, split levels, ramblers, ramshackles, bungalows, old houses, new houses, brick, vinyl, aluminum, wood. We enter bars, temples, bowling alleys, churches, skating rinks, doctor’s offices, jails, barges, fields, factories, stores, gas stations, laundromats, cars, woods, bushes, Walmart, Target, Dillard’s. Buses, apartments, malls, schools, studios. Tonight, we enter the country

Leo glanced around the hall without interest. "Barring any structural repairs, we would need about twenty-five to thirty thousand pounds, at least." The figure caused Amelia to blanch. She lowered her gaze to the pockmarked floor at her feet and rubbed her temples. "Well, one thing is obvious. We need the advantage of wealthy in-laws. Which means you should start looking for available heiresses, Leo." She flicked a playful glance at her sister. "And you, Poppy—you'll have to catch a viscount, or at the very least a baron." Her brother rolled his eyes. "Why not you? I don't see why you should be exempt from having to marry for the family's benefit." Poppy gave her sister a sly glance. "At Amelia's age, women are far beyond thoughts of Romance and passion." "One never knows," Leo told Poppy. "She may catch an elderly gentleman who needs a nurse." Amelia was tempted to skewer them both with the tart observation that she had already been in love once, and she would not care to repeat the experience.

alliance of five military governors of Canaanite citadels attempted to bar the Israelites from turning south from Gibeon and the other cities of the Hivites in the central hill country, which had submitted to them as subject allies. But the alliance was completely defeated, and the road to the south lay open to the invaders.

I COULD HAVE reminded the Arab Knesset member of other historical facts once known to many schoolchildren but which have since been forgotten—or distorted by anti-Israel propaganda. The history of the Jewish people spans almost four millennia. The first thousand years or so are covered in the Bible, and are attested to by archaeology and the historical records of other, contemporaneous peoples. As the centuries progress, the mists of time and the myths gradually evaporate and the unfolding events come into sharp historical focus. Reading the Bible from second grade on, I could easily imagine Abraham and Sarah on their long trek from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan almost four thousand years ago. Abraham envisions one God, unseen but present everywhere. He buys a burial cave in Hebron and bequeaths the new land to his progeny. The descendants of Abraham’s grandson Jacob are enslaved in Egypt for centuries, until Moses takes them out of bondage. He leads them for forty years in the wilderness to the Promised Land, giving the Children of Israel the Ten Commandments and a moral code that would change the world. The indomitable Joshua conquers the land, wily David establishes his kingdom in Jerusalem, and wise Solomon builds his Temple there, only to have his sons split the realm into two. The northern kingdom, Israel, is destroyed, its ten tribes lost to history. The southern kingdom, Judea, is conquered and Solomon’s Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians, by whose rivers the exiled Judeans weep as they remember Zion. They rejoice when in 537 BCE they are reinstated in their homeland by Cyrus of Persia, who lets them rebuild their destroyed Temple. The Persian rulers are replaced by Alexander the Great, one of whose heirs seeks to eradicate the Jewish religion. This sparks a rebellion led by the brave Maccabees, and the independent Jewish state they establish lasts for eighty years. It is overtaken by the rising power Rome which initially rules through proxies, the most notable of whom is Herod the Great. Herod refurbishes the Jerusalem Temple as one of the great wonders of the ancient world. In its bustling courtyard a Jewish rabbi from the Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, overturns the tables of the money changers, setting off a chain of events culminating in his eventual crucifixion and the beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition. When the Jews rebel against Roman rule, Rome destroys Jerusalem and Herod’s Temple in 70 CE. Masada, the last rebel stronghold, falls three years later. Despite the devastation, sixty-two years later the Jews rebel again under the fearless Bar Kokhba, only to be crushed even more brutally. The Roman emperor Hadrian bars the Jews from Jerusalem and renames the country Palestina, after the Grecian Philistines, who have long disappeared.

The curtain of the temple was torn in two,” Luke tells us. This was the very curtain that hung in the temple to symbolically bar the way into God’s presence. It was the great sign that imperfect people could not be in the same space as the holy God. All through the Old Testament, anyone who had presumed to come into God’s presence without observing the ceremonial cleansing rituals and making the necessary sacrifices had died (for instance, Numbers 3:2-4). But now, suddenly, as Jesus was on the very verge of death, this symbol of restrictive exclusivity was destroyed. By destroying it, God declared that the old priestly ritual for entrance into His presence had been abolished and the barrier of sin dividing humanity from their Maker had been obliterated.

You should’ve noticed that it was the Royal Crest branded on my skin,” he said, and I gasped. It had looked like the Royal Crest. “Do you want to know how I have such intimate knowledge of what happens during your fucking Ascension, Poppy? How I know what you don’t? Because I was held in one of those Temples for five decades, and I was sliced and cut and fed upon. My blood was poured into golden chalices that the second sons and daughters drank after being drained by the Queen or the King or another Ascended. I was the godsdamn cattle.” No. I couldn’t believe this. “And I wasn’t just used for food. I provided all sorts of entertainment. I know exactly what it’s like to not have a choice,” he continued, and horror followed his words. “It was your Queen who branded me, and if it hadn’t been for the foolish bravery of another, I would still be there. That is how I got that scar.” Without any warning, his hands slipped off mine, and he pulled away. Trembling, I didn’t move. Not for several long moments. When I turned around, he was already outside the cell. If what he said was true… No. It couldn’t be. Gods, it could not be. Suddenly unbearably cold, I folded my arms around myself, crossing the chains. Hawke stared at me through the bars. “Neither the prince nor I want to see you harmed. As I’ve said, we need you alive.” “Why?” I whispered. “Why am I so important?” “Because they have the true heir to the kingdom. They captured him when he freed me.” I thought that the Dark One was the only heir to the Atlantian throne. If what Hawke said was true, it could only mean...“The Dark One has a brother?” He nodded. “You are the Queen’s favorite. You’re important to her and to the kingdom. I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with your gift. Perhaps it doesn’t. But we will release you back to them if they release Prince Malik.

The roads to the temple remained barred to the lower castes. The satyagrahis responded by sitting outside the barricade and refusing to eat or drink. This part of India is always hot and humid—and the men were unaccustomed to fasting anyway. Several fainted, and were rushed to hospital. When Gandhi heard of these new developments, he sent a wire to the satyagrahis asking them to ‘QUIT FASTING BUT STAND OR SQUAT IN RELAYS WITH QUIET SUBMISSION TILL ARRESTED’. The next day, a letter followed, where Gandhi elaborated on his advice. ‘You cannot fast against a tyrant,’ said Gandhi. ‘Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover [by which Gandhi meant ‘one you love’], not to extort rights but to reform him, as when a son fasts for a parent who drinks. My fast at Bombay, and then at Bardoli, was of that character. I fasted to reform those who loved me. But I will not fast to reform, say, General Dyer, who not only does not love me, but who regards himself as my enemy'.

You let her get away?” Caine demanded, forgetting Sam for the moment. “I didn’t let her get away. They were in the room with me. The girl was pissing me off so I smacked her. Then they disappeared. Gone.” Caine shot a murderous look at Diana. Diana said, “No. She was months away from turning fifteen. And, anyway, her little brother is four.” “Then how?” Caine furrowed his brow. “Can it be the power?” Diana shook her head. “I read Astrid again on the way here. She’s barely at two bars. No way. Two people teleporting?” The color drained from Caine’s face. “The retard?” “He’s autistic, he’s like in his own world,” Diana protested. “Did you read him?” “He’s a little autistic kid, why would I read him?” Caine turned to Sam. “What do you know about this?” He raised his hand, a threat. His face inches from Sam’s, he screamed, “What do you know?” “Well. I know that I enjoy seeing you scared, Caine.” The invisible fist sent Sam sprawling on his back. Diana, for the first time, looked worried. Her usual smirk was gone. “The only time we saw teleporting was Taylor up at Coates. And she could only go across a room. She was a three. If this kid can teleport himself and his sister through walls…” “He could be a four,” Caine said softly. “Yes,” Diana said. “He could be a four.” When she said the word “four,” she looked straight at Sam. “He could be even more.” Caine said, “Orc, Howard: lock Sam up, tie him down so he can’t get that Mylar off his hands, then get Freddie to help you. He’s done plastering before, he knows what to do. Get whatever you need from the hardware store.” He grabbed Drake by the shoulder. “Find Astrid and that kid.” “How am I going to catch them if they can just zap out whenever they want?” “I didn’t say catch them,” Caine said. “Take a gun, Drake. Shoot them both before they see you.” Sam charged at Caine and plowed into him before he could react. The momentum carried them both to the floor. Sam headbutted Caine in the nose. Caine was slow to recover, but Drake and Orc swarmed over Sam and kicked him off Caine. Sam groaned in pain. “You can’t kill people, Caine. Are you crazy?” “You hurt my nose,” Caine said. “You’re screwed up, Caine. You need help. You’re insane.” “Yeah,” Caine said, touching his nose and wincing at the pain. “That’s what they keep telling me. It’s what Nurse Temple…Mom…told me. Just be glad I need to keep you around, Sam. I need to see you blink out, figure out how to keep it from happening to me. Orc, take this hero away. Drake: go.” “If you hurt them, Drake, I’ll hunt you down and kill you,” Sam shouted. “Don’t waste your breath,” Diana said to him. “You don’t know Drake. Your girlfriend’s as good as dead.

Cutting through Temple Bar toward the river, they pass the cinema outside which Howard met Halley for the first time: this nugget of history he does not pass on to the boys. He remembers walking with her down to the riverside, but it’s only as they are crossing Ha’penny Bridge – the elderly construction seeming to sway beneath their impatient feet, the quays of the city stretching away on either side – that he remembers the museum was where she had been headed that day too, was where he had promised to take her, but never did, instead falling in love with her, leading her away into the backstreets of his life. Now he’s finally on his way there, but with twenty-six hormonal teenage boys instead of her. Nice job, Howard.

He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while. “Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.” He agreed that the table was clean. “Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien — no offense — alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality . . . like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But . . . the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled . . . but” — he slapped the table — “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.” “But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.” “And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.” “But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” — the man laughed — “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway?

Tokyo is so vast, and can be so cruelly impersonal, that the succor provided by its occasional oasis is sweeter than that of any other place I’ve known. There is the quiet of shrines like Hikawa, inducing a somber sort of reflection that for me has always been the same pitch as the reverberation of a temple chime; the solace of tiny nomiya, neighborhood watering holes, with only two or perhaps four seats facing a bar less than half the length of a door, presided over by an ageless mama-san, who can be soothing or stern, depending on the needs of her customer, an arrangement that dispenses more comfort and understanding than any psychiatrist’s couch; the strangely anonymous camaraderie of yatai and tachinomi, the outdoor eating stalls that serve beer in large mugs and grilled food on skewers, stalls that sprout like wild mushrooms on dark corners and in the shadows of elevated train tracks, the laughter of their patrons diffusing into the night air like little pockets of light against the darkness without.

No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one; time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one-the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy or available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby cafe, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it-fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a sate of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world- this hollow, disenchanted world.

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Club" replies the seal. ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦ A bartender walks into a church, a temple and a mosque. He has no idea how jokes work. ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦ A baseball walks into a bar, and the bartender throws it out. ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦ "A bear walks into a bar and says, "Bartender, I'd like a gin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and tonic." And the bartender says, "Sure, but what's with the big pause?" ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦ A cable TV installer walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender says, "You'll

Shimon turned sixteen on February 5, 1944. Three years earlier he had stood beneath the golden hands - the hands of the Kohanim - that adorned the ark of the Torah at Temple Taharat Hakodesh and chanted his Bible portion in Hebrew. A bar mitzvah boy. His mother and grandmother wept with pride. Did Shimon remember it was his birthday? Did he still believe in God? Occasionally the slaves sang Hebrew songs - songs 'filled with nostalgia, hope, and desire for life.' Did Shimon join in?

seal. ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦ A bartender walks into a church, a temple and a mosque. He has no idea how jokes work. ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦ A baseball walks into a bar, and the bartender throws it out. ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦

my boys, with only moderate incomes, when placed in the church, at the bar, or in the field, may exert their talents, make themselves friends, and raise their fortunes on the basis of merit.

resumed walking. The visitors unloaded fresh meat, beer, and mead; and cooking fires were started inside and outside the fort. The banquet hall proved ideal for the jarls, except that the throne-like chair used by Olaf was set aside. The banquet ran its course, first the toasts, then the eating and more drinking intermingled with conversation and more toasts until all were satiated and relaxed, for this was a business banquet. Gunnar, with the most longships, stood to speak of their proposal. “We came here first to congratulate you for getting rid of Olaf. He was a threat to all of us. And to know more about Alfonso, the Christian warrior we have heard so much about. We heard that your God gives you great strength and protection, as you killed seven berserkers single-handed.” Alfonso was about to say, “Only one,” but Harald jabbed him on the ribs with his elbow. “We heard that you bent the steel bars in the freezing water of the creek to get inside the fort.” Alfonso’s eyes shifted for a moment from Gunnar to Harald and saw him with a serious look and nodding at the statement. “We heard that you killed the guards by the gates, opened them, then fought off Olaf’s men until Harald and his warriors arrived. “We heard that you can do all this because your God seeks a vestal virgin that was kidnapped from His temple. Is all this true?” Alfonso was about to stand up, when Harald stood up and looked all around. “Yes, it is all true. We saw him kill the berserker.” The visitors looked around and saw Harald’s men nodding. “And he had to get through the bars underwater. Soon after, he killed the gate guards and opened the gates, defending them until we arrived.” He looked around, “Ask my men.” Words of “Yes, true, I saw it,” were heard. Harald sat down and looked at Alfonso. “Your turn.” They had become quiet as he stood and looked all around. He realized that the jarls were there because of him. They had some purpose in mind. They wanted his help but how? “Yes, I killed the berserker sent by Olaf. I was in the freezing water and got through the bars. I killed everyone guarding the gate, I opened it and

By the time Theophilus attacked Serapis the laws were on his side. But many other Christians were so keen to attack the demonic temples that they didn’t wait for legal approval. Decades before the laws of the land permitted them to, zealous Christians began to indulge in acts of violent vandalism against their ‘pagan’ neighbours. The destruction in Syria was particularly savage. Syrian monks – fearless, rootless, fanatical – became infamous both for their intensity and for the violence with which they attacked temples, statues and monuments – and even, it was said, any priests who opposed them. Libanius, the Greek orator from Antioch, was revolted by the destruction that he witnessed. ‘These people,’ he wrote, ‘hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues, and the overthrow of altars, and the priests must either keep quiet or die . . . So they sweep across the countryside like rivers in spate.’ Libanius spoke elegiacally of a huge temple on the frontier with Persia, a magnificent building with a beautiful ceiling, in whose cool shadows had stood numerous statues. Now, he said, ‘it is vanished and gone, to the grief of those who had seen it’ – and the grief of those who now never would. This temple had been so striking, he said, that there were even those who argued that it was as great as the temple of Serapis – which, he added with an irony not lost on later historians, ‘I pray may never suffer the same fate.

When of a sudden Old Japan intervenes: from on of the apartments wafts a melody, clearly, joyfully distinct. Someone is playing a classical piece on the piano. Ah, sweet, impromptu moment, lifting the veil of melancholy... In a split second of eternity, everything is changed, transfigured. A few bars of music, rising from an unfamiliar piece, a touch of perfection in the flow of human dealings-- I lean my head slowly to one side, reflect on the camellia on the moss of the temple, reflect on a cup of tea, while outside the wind is rustling the foliage, the forward rush of life is crystallized in a brilliant jewel of a moment that knows neither projects nor future, human destiny is rescued from the pale succession of days, glows with light at last and, surpassing time, warms my tranquil heart.