The Discarded Image Quotes

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.

At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems.

Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.

The fact of the matter is, if you haven’t been in an abusive relationship, you don’t really know what the experience is like. Furthermore, it’s quite hard to predict what you would do in the same situation. I find that the people most vocal about what they would’ve done in the same situation often have no clue what they are talking about – they have never been in the same situation themselves. By invalidating the survivor’s experience, these people are defending an image of themselves that they identify with strength, not realizing that abuse survivors are often the strongest individuals out there. They’ve been belittled, criticized, demeaned, devalued, and yet they’ve still survived. The judgmental ones often have little to no life experience regarding these situations, yet they feel quite comfortable silencing the voices of people who’ve actually been there.

It’s not black and white," he said. "If it were, I wouldn’t be here right now, and neither would you. We’re the gray area, angel. We’re the pieces of the puzzle they don’t know what to do with, the pieces that don’t quite fit into their perfect little picture, so they choose to discard us, to keep their image untainted,but we can only be ignored for so long.

whatever flows immediately from God, senza mezzo distilla (67), will never end.

Of course there always will be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it. Historical or not. Sometimes it seems like a cat, the panther with its moon mad gait or a tiger with stripes of ash and eyes as wild as winter oceans. Sometimes it's the curve of a wrist or what's left of romance, still hiding in the drawer of some long lost nightstand or carefully drawn in the margins of an old discarded calendar. Sometimes it's even just a vapor trail speeding west, prophetic, over clouds aglow with dangerous light. Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they're born out of something much more akin to a Voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard by even the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all.

The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt.

It is said that people pointed out Dante in the street not as the man who made the Comedy but as the man who had been in Hell. Even today there are those (some of them critics) who believe every novel and even every lyric to be autobiographical. A man who lacks invention himself does not easily attribute it to others.

Covert narcissists blind you with their saccharine sweetness: they present the perfect public image, routinely go on their knees to pray, say their mantras on their yoga mats, preach ‘peace and compassion,’ all the while plotting on how to best stab you in the back. In some ways, covert narcissists are worse than overt ones. At least overt ones are open about how awful they really are.

Though literacy was of course far rarer then than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient of the total culture.

Understand the difference between mystical art and mystical knowldge. Devotional music, life stories of mystics and gods, images, paintings etc. may temporarily transport you to mystical world but they can't give you mystical powers. Art is beautiful. Knowledge is boring. Ancient sages tried to mix art with knowledge. We discarded the knowledge but kept the art.

Thus, while every falling body for us illustrates the ‘law’ of gravitation, for them it illustrated the ‘kindly enclyning’ of terrestrial bodies to their ‘kindly stede’ the Earth, the centre of the Mundus,

The insignificance (by cosmic standards) of the Earth became as much a commonplace to the medieval, as to the modern, thinker; it was part of the moralists’ stock-in-trade, used, as Cicero uses it (xix), to mortify human ambition.

Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.

There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings to it a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness’, and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort. C.

The term POTUS used to be viewed around the world with a degree of respect. Unfortunately the current US president has junked any last remnant of that image. Instead he seems only too happy to trash the environment; to scrap age old alliances promoting peace and prosperity; to discard internationally binding treaties; to toss aside like garbage hard won civil liberties. Maybe DETRITUS is a more fitting acronym for the current occupant of the White House - 'Deranged egotistical tyrant ruining & isolating the U.S.

To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

We are now exposed to more images in a day than anyone in the 14th century would have known in a lifetime. [...] Most of it is garbage. Most of it needs excising. Even if we’re fearful that we might be missing something. We are probably not. We have to discard. We have to throw things away, cleanse the doors of our perception and work out what is worth looking at, what is worth remembering, what are the images that matter, what will we retain.

The reader will no doubt understand that this was no arbitrary fancy, but just such another ‘tool’ as the hypothesis of Copernicus; an intellectual construction devised to accommodate the phenomena observed. We have recently been reminded13 how much mathematics, and how good, went to the building of the Model.

To be always looking at the map when there is a fine prospect before you shatters the ‘wise passiveness’ in which landscape ought to be enjoyed. But to consult a map before we set out has no such ill effect. Indeed it will lead us to many prospects; including some we might never have found by following our noses.

The biggest mistake abuse survivors make after leaving their relationship is to shrink. They wallow in sadness and allow the abuser to go on social media sites and post pictures of how wonderful their life is now that you left them. They allow the abuser to win again by showing people they are so over you. This is not okay! I hope every abuse survivor has a marketing campaign of glory and triumph. Don't let the abuser paint the image of you as someone they discarded. Post your comeback story on social media. Invite the world back into your life. The victory is yours. Show the world that you overcame a monster. Show them you won!

A syndrome is small, portable, not weighed down by theory, episodic. You can explain something with it and then discard it. A disposable instrument of cognition. Mine is called Recurrent Detoxification Syndrome. Without the bells and whistles, its description boils down to the insistence of one’s consciousness on returning to certain images, or even the compulsive search for them. It is a variant of the Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics, and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away. The symptoms themselves

(Casual statements about pre-Copernican astronomy in modern scientists who are not historians are often unreliable.)

men were born under the law that they should garrison (tuerentur) the globe you see yonder in the middle of the temple, which is called Earth. . .

Between the two habitable and temperate zones spreads the torrid zone, uninhabitable through heat.

scraps of Plato—often scraps which were very marginal and unimportant in Plato’s own work—trickled down to the Middle Ages.

think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages. Boethius,

We're the gray area, angel. We're the pieces of the puzzle they don't know what to do with, the pieces that don't quite fit into their perfect little picture, so they choose to discard us, to keep their image untainted, but we can only be ignored for so long. Because eventually, whether they want to admit it or not, all of their black and white will bleed together anyway.

In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.

Africanus Major carries Africanus Minor up to a height whence he looks down on Carthage ‘from an exalted place, bright and shining, filled with stars’ (xi). They are in fact in the highest celestial sphere, the stellatum. This is the prototype of many ascents to Heaven in later literature: those of Dante, of Chaucer (in the Hous of Fame), of Troilus’ ghost, of the Lover in the King’s Quair.

Hence what we might take to be the difference between a clearly Christian and a possibly Pagan work may really be the difference between a thesis offered, so to speak, to the Faculty of Philosophy and one offered to that of Divinity. This seems to me to be the best explanation of the gulf that separates Boethius’ De Consolatione from the doctrinal pieces which are (I presume, rightly) attributed to him.

Though Christians were logically bound to admit the goodness of matter that doctrine was not heartily relished; then, and for centuries, the language of some spiritual writers was hardly to be reconciled with it.

Boethius slips in, as axiomatic, the remark that all perfect things are prior to all imperfect things.99 It was common ground to nearly all ancient and medieval thinkers except the Epicureans.100 I have already101 stressed the radical difference which this involves between their thought and the developmental or evolutionary concepts of our own period—a difference which perhaps leaves no area and no level of consciousness unaffected.

Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.112 Time, even endless time, is only an image, almost a parody, of that plenitude; a hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them. That

The Magpie Poet The magpie poet lined his poems, with a nest of shiny objects: engagement rings returned by ex-lovers, lipstick and keys found beneath his couch's cushions, even shards of his mom's silver hand mirror, too filled with images to discard. His nest of luminous memories held his yellow eye, his offspring. More importantly, it held him. Each poem he wrote was a pro tem refuge he could hide in, a safe house to rest his head after another sleepless night.

In our age I think it would be fair to say that the ease with which a scientific theory assumes the dignity and rigidity of fact varies inversely with the individual's scientific education. In discussion with wholly uneducated audiences I have sometimes found matter which real scientists would regard as highly speculative more firmly believed than many things within our real knowledge; the popular imago of the Cave Man ranked as hard fact, and the life of Caesar or Napoleon as doubtful rumor. ... The mass media which have in our time created a popular scientism, a caricature of the true sciences, did not then exist [in the middle ages]. The ignorant were more aware of their ignorance then than now.

During these centuries much that was of Pagan origin was built irremovably into the Model. It is characteristic of the age that more than one of the works I shall mention has sometimes raised a doubt whether its author was Pagan or Christian.

When Nietzsche said: 'God is dead,' he expressed a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe". To Nietzsche's statement, Jung noted: "However it would be more correct to say: 'He has discarded our image, and where will we find him again?

The last, and neo-Platonic, wave of Paganism which had gathered up into itself much from the preceding waves, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and what not, came far inland and made brackish lakes which have, perhaps, never been drained. Not all Christians at all times have detected them or admitted their existence: and among those who have done so there have always been two attitudes. There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christians’.3

It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.25

Medieval art was deficient in perspective, and poetry followed suit. Nature, for Chaucer, is all foreground; we never get a landscape. And neither poets nor artists were much interested in the strict illusionism of later periods. The relative size of objects in the visible arts is determined more by the emphasis the artist wishes to lay upon them than by their sizes in the real world or by their distance. Whatever details we are meant to see will be shown whether they would really be visible or not.

His writings are usually regarded as the main channel by which a certain kind of Theology entered the Western tradition. It is the ‘negative Theology’ of those who take in a more rigid sense, and emphasise more persistently than others, the incomprehensibility of God.

The medieval conception of reality is an old idea, one that predates Christianity. In his final book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis, who was a professional medievalist, explained that Plato believed that two things could relate to each other only through a third thing. In what Lewis called the medieval “Model,” everything that existed was related to every other thing that existed, through their shared relationship to God. Our relationship to the world is mediated through God, and our relationship to God is mediated through the world.

Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. The modern who dislikes the Christian Fathers would have disliked the Pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons.

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out--like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, 'the army of unalterable law', but rather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable.

It looks as if the Romances and such Ballads were in the Middle Ages, as they have remained ever since, truancies, refreshments, things that can live only on the margin of the mind, things whose very charm depends on their not being ‘of the centre’ (a locality which Matthew Arnold possibly overvalued).

As far as expressing the creative turmoil within my head was concerned, I took to the English language as a duck takes to water. I was therefore a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonisation . . . For a black writer the language is very racist; you have to have harrowing fights and hair-raising panga duels with the language before you can make it do all that you want it to do . . . This may mean discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance.

Once you have piled your books, take them in your hand one by one and decide whether you want to keep or discard each one. The criterion is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it. Remember, I said when you touch it. Make sure you don’t start reading it. Reading clouds your judgment. Instead of asking yourself what you feel, you’ll start asking whether you need that book or not. Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn’t that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be?

If I am right, the man of genius then found himself in a situation very different from that of his modern successor. Such a man today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance; or even a reality such that the very question whether it has a meaning is itself a meaningless question. It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning—or at least a shape—to what in itself had neither. But the Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance. And that in two senses; as having ‘significant form’ (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it. There was no question of waking it into beauty or life. Ours, most emphatically, was not the wedding garment, nor the shroud. The achieved perfection was already there. The only difficulty was to make an adequate response.

Everyone knows that the Arts are Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. And almost everyone has met the mnemonic couplet Gram loquitur, Dia verba docet, Rhet verba colorat, Mus canit, Ar numerat, Geo ponderat, Ast colit astra. The first three constitute the Trivium or threefold way; the last four, the Quadrivium.

cognitive filter in our brain that sticks to the first image we get. That’s a cognitive distortion often called the first impression bias. As soon as we have created our first impression we set it in stone and start filtering out everything that proves our impression was right. All of the evidence against our first impression is automatically discarded.   Our brains do this to save energy. Since our brains use up a ton of energy, they have a lot of shortcuts to avoid using processing power whenever it’s not necessary. When you see a car, your brain doesn’t look back at that car to second-guess whether you were right or not. If it looks like a car, it is a car. We can make misjudgments because of this.   Did

There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christians’.3 A. CHALCIDIUS

Sempre, ao longo dos séculos, item a item é transferido do lado do objeto para o lado do sujeito. E, agora, em algumas formas extremas do behaviorismo, o próprio sujeito é descartado como sendo meramente subjetivo; só o que fazemos é pensar que pensamos. Depois de ter tragado tudo, ele devora a si mesmo. E "para onde nós vamos" surge como uma questão mergulhada nas trevas.

I thought that in an age when books were few and the intellectual appetite sharp-set, any knowledge might be welcome in any context. But this does not explain why the authors so gladly present knowledge which most of their audience must have possessed. One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkien’s Hobbits, enjoyed books which told them what they already knew.

Hence we may, with proper precautions, regard a certain humility as the overall characteristic of medieval art. Of the art; not always of the artists. Self-esteem may arise within any occupation at any period. A chef, a surgeon, or a scholar, may be proud, even to arrogance, of his skill; but his skill is confessedly the means to an end beyond itself, and the status of the skill depends wholly on the dignity or necessity of that end. I think it was then like that with all the arts. Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims. Perhaps they might not all have fully agreed with the statement that poetry is infima inter omnes doctrinas.17 But it awoke no such hurricane of protest as it would awake today. In this great change something has been won and something lost. I take it to be part and parcel of the same great process of Internalisation18 which has turned genius from an attendant daemon into a quality of the mind. Always, century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to the subject’s. And now, in some extreme forms of Behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we ‘go from that’ is a dark question.

The emphasis usually falls on the past splendour rather than on the subsequent decline. Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come. The odd thing is that the first view seems to have bred on the whole a more cheerful temper. Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely. I

My account of what I call the Medieval Model ignores all this: ignores even the great change from a predominantly Platonic to a predominantly Aristotelian1 outlook and the direct conflict between Nominalists and Realists. It does so because these things, however important for the historian of thought, have hardly any effect on the literary level. The Model, as regards those elements in it which poets and artists could utilise, remained stable.

they were the age not only of her authority, but of authorities. If their culture is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour: preferably a Latin one. This is one of the things that differentiate the period almost equally from savagery and from our modern civilisation.

In popular usage Grammatica or Grammaria slid into the vague sense of learning in general; and since learning is usually an object both of respect and suspicion to the masses, grammar, in the form grammary comes to mean magic. Thus in the ballad of King Estmere, ‘My mother was a western woman learned in grammarye’. And from grammary, by a familiar sound-change, comes glamour—a word whose associations with grammar and even with magic have now been annihilated by the beauty-specialists.

Quintilian suggests literatura as the proper translation of Greek grammatike (II, i), and literatura, though it does not mean ‘literature’, included a good deal more than literacy. It included all that is required for ‘making up’ a ‘set book’: syntax, etymology, prosody, and the explanation of allusions. Isidore makes even history a department of Grammar (I, xli–xliv). He would have described the book I am now writing as a book of Grammar. Scholarship is perhaps our nearest equivalent.

The legacy of our culture’s image-smashing (a powerful part of the Puritan world) is secularization—though now replete with its own images. If we fail to give a proper account of the role that images play in Christianity, the result will not be a Christianity with no images, but simply the dominance of cultural images and a subtle conformity to the world. The only image that needs to be discarded is the one we have of ourselves as God. We are not He. Worship God. Give honor to whom honor is due. It

Common phrases narcissists use and what they actually mean: 1. I love you. Translation: I love owning you. I love controlling you. I love using you. It feels so good to love-bomb you, to sweet-talk you, to pull you in and to discard you whenever I please. When I flatter you, I can have anything I want. You trust me. You open up so easily, even after you’ve already been mistreated. Once you’re hooked and invested, I’ll pull the rug beneath your feet just to watch you fall. 2. I am sorry you feel that way. Translation: Sorry, not sorry. Let’s get this argument over with already so I can continue my abusive behavior in peace. I am not sorry that I did what I did, I am sorry I got caught. I am sorry you’re calling me out. I am sorry that I am being held accountable. I am sorry you have the emotions that you do. To me, they’re not valid because I am entitled to have everything I want – regardless of how you feel about it. 3. You’re oversensitive/overreacting. Translation: You’re having a perfectly normal reaction to an immense amount of bullshit, but all I see is that you’re catching on. Let me gaslight you some more so you second-guess yourself. Emotionally invalidating you is the key to keeping you compliant. So long as you don’t trust yourself, you’ll work that much harder to rationalize, minimize and deny my abuse. 4. You’re crazy. Translation: I am a master of creating chaos to provoke you. I love it when you react. That way, I can point the finger and say you’re the crazy one. After all, no one would listen to what you say about me if they thought you were just bitter or unstable. 5. No one would believe you. Translation: I’ve isolated you to the point where you feel you have no support. I’ve smeared your name to others ahead of time so people already suspect the lies I’ve told about you. There are still others who might believe you, though, and I can’t risk being caught. Making you feel alienated and alone is the best way for me to protect my image. It’s the best way to convince you to remain silent and never speak the truth about who I really am.

float before I could swim. Ellis never believed it was called Dead-Man’s Float, thought I’d made it up. I told him it was a survival position after a long exhausting journey. How apt. All I see below is blue light. Peaceful and eternal. I’m holding my breath until my body throbs as one pulse. I roll over and suck in a deep lungful of warm air. I look up at the starry starry night. The sound of water in and out of my ears, and beyond this human shell, the sound of cicadas fills the night. I dreamt of my mother. It was an image, that’s all, and a fleeting one, at that. She was faded with age, like a discarded offcut on the studio floor. In this dream, she didn’t speak, just stepped out of the shadows, a reminder that we are the same, her and me, cut from the same bruised cloth. I understand how she got up one day and left, how instinctively she trusted the compulsion to flee. The rightness of that action. We are the same, her and me. She walked out when I was eight. Never came back. I remember being collected from school by our neighbour Mrs Deakin, who bought me sweets on the way home and let me play with a dog for as long as I wanted. Inside the house, my father was sitting at the table, drinking. He was holding a sheet of blue writing paper covered in black words, and he said, Your mother’s gone. She said she’s sorry. A sheet of writing paper covered in words and just two for me. How was that possible? Her remnant life was put in bags and stored in the spare room at the earliest opportunity. Stuffed in, not folded – clothes brushes, cosmetics all thrown in together, awaiting collection from the Church. My mother had taken only what she could carry. One rainy afternoon, when my father had gone next door to fix a pipe, I emptied the bags on to the floor and saw my mother in every jumper and blouse and skirt I held up. I used to watch her dress and she let me. Sometimes, she asked my opinion about colours or what suited her more, this blouse or that blouse? And she’d follow my advice and tell me how right I was. I took off my clothes and put on a skirt first, then a blouse, a cardigan, and slowly I became her in miniature. She’d taken her good shoes, so I slipped on a pair of mid-height heels many sizes too big, of course, and placed a handbag on my arm. I stood in front of the mirror, and saw the infinite possibilities of play. I strutted, I

Na Idade Média, e, na realidade, até bem mais tarde, temos de acrescentar outra fonte de credulidade. Se, como ensinava o platonismo - e nem o próprio Browne iria discordar - o mundo visível é feito de acordo com um padrão invisível, se as coisas debaixo da Lua forem derivadas de outras acima dela, a expectativa de que um senso analógico ou moral está embutido na natureza e no comportamento das criaturas não seria razoável a priori. Para nós, o registro sobre o comportamento animal que sugerisse uma moral muito óbvia é que pareceria improvável. Não para eles. Suas premissas eram diferentes.

When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. The same is true of atheism. The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The

The biggest mistake abuse survivors make after leaving their relationship is to shrink. They wallow in sadness and ignore the continued abused when the abuser goes on social media sites to post pictures of how wonderful their life is now that you left them. They allow the abuser to win again by showing people they are so over you. This is not okay! I hope every abuse survivor has a marketing campaign of glory and triumph. Don't let the abuser paint the image of you as someone they discarded. Post your comeback story on social media. Invite the world back into your life. The victory is yours. Show the world that you overcame a monster. Show them you won!

O homem é um animal racional e, por isso, é um ser composto, em parte, à semelhança das feras, que são animais, mas não são racionais; e parcialmente à semelhança dos anjos, que são racionais, mas - na visão medieval tardia - ele não é animal. Eis aí um dos sentidos pelo qual o homem é um "pequeno mundo" ou microcosmo. Toda modalidade de ser, em todo o Universo, contribui para ele; ele é uma secção transversal da existência. Como disse Gregório, o Grande (540-604),35 "porque o ser humano tem uma existência (esse) em comum com as pedras; a vida, com as árvores; e o discernimento (discernere), com os anjos, ele é corretamente chamado segundo o nome do mundo".

Only a fool says in his heart There is no Creator, no King of kings, Only mules would dare to bray These lethal mutterings. Over darkened minds as these The Darkness bears full sway, Fruitless, yet, bearing fruit, In their fell, destructive way. Sterile, though proliferate, A filthy progeny sees the day, When Evil, Thought and Action mate: Breeding sin, rebels and decay. The blackest deeds and foul ideals, Multiply throughout the earth, Through deadened, lifeless, braying souls, The Darkness labours and gives birth. Taking the Lord’s abundant gifts And rotting them to the core, They dress their dish and serve it out Foul seeds to infect thousands more. ‘The Tree of Life is dead!’ they cry, ‘And that of Knowledge not enough, Let us glut on the ashen apples Of Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Have pity on Thy children, Lord, Left sorrowing on this earth, While fools and all their kindred Cast shadows with their murk, And to the dwindling wise, They toss their heads and wryly smirk. The world daily grinds to dust Virtue’s fair unicorns, Rather, it would now beget Vice’s mutant manticores. Wisdom crushed, our joy is gone, Buried under anxious fears For lost rights and freedoms, We shed many bitter tears. Death is life, Life is no more, Humanity buried in a tomb, In a fatal prenatal world Where tiny flowers Are ripped from the womb, Discarded, thrown away, Inconvenient lives That barely bloomed. Our elders fare no better, Their wisdom unwanted by and by, Boarded out to end their days, And forsaken are left to die. Only the youthful and the useful, In this capital age prosper and fly. Yet, they too are quickly strangled, Before their future plans are met, Professions legally pre-enslaved Held bound by mounting student debt. Our leaders all harangue for peace Yet perpetrate the horror, Of economic greed shored up Through manufactured war. Our armies now welter In foreign civilian gore. How many of our kin are slain For hollow martial honour? As if we could forget, ignore, The scourge of nuclear power, Alas, victors are rarely tried For their woeful crimes of war. Hope and pray we never see A repeat of Hiroshima. No more! Crimes are legion, The deeds of devil-spawn! What has happened to the souls Your Divine Image was minted on? They are now recast: Crooked coins of Caesar and The Whore of Babylon. How often mankind shuts its ears To Your music celestial, Mankind would rather march To the anthems of Hell. If humanity cannot be reclaimed By Your Mercy and great Love Deservedly we should be struck By Vengeance from above. Many dread the Final Day, And the Crack of Doom For others the Apocalypse Will never come too soon. ‘Lift up your heads, be glad’, Fools shall bray no more For at last the Master comes To thresh His threshing floor.

Actors always want to know how I come up with interesting and creative takes on characters, characters that aren’t like me as I appear in daily life and that aren’t like each other. It’s simple: I let the lines and images connect with my imagination. I don’t worry about consistency; I let myself respond moment by moment, piecemeal, to the character’s dialogue and actions. Then I let my responses take me wherever they go, making mistakes and discarding them until choices start repeating themselves on their own no matter how arbitrary they seem at first. Then I know I’m on to something. But I don’t try to put the character together. I leave it in pieces. The script and story put the character together so my moment by moment performance seems like a creative take on the whole character.

To be formed and shaped by the Incarnate: That is what it means to be truly human. All efforts to be more than human, to be superhuman, all efforts to grow beyond one's humanity, all heroism, all attempts at being demigods are discarded here, for all of it is untrue. The real human being is neither an object of contempt nor of apotheosis, but rather God's love. The multiplicity of God's creative wealth is not violated here by false uniformity, by coercion of human beings under an ideal, under a type, a particular image. Real human beings are allowed in freedom to be the creatures of their creator. Being formed in the image of the Incarnate means being permitted to be the human being one really is. There is no more pretense, hypocrisy, cramped coercion to be something other than what one is, something better, something more ideal. God loves real human beings. God became a real human being.

Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years the world’s most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles.

Duvido de que eles teriam entendido nossa demanda por originalidade ou valorizado mais aquelas obras de sua própria época que fossem originais, só por conta disso. Se você tivesse perguntado a La3amon ou Chaucer: "Por que é que vocês mesmos não inventaram uma história inédita?" Penso que eles poderiam ter respondido: "Com certeza ainda não estamos reduzidos a isso, estamos?" Que sentido teria tecer uma nova trama da própria cabeça, quando o mundo está repleto de tantas obras excelentes: exemplos proveitosos; tragédias deploráveis; aventuras estranhas e chistes divertidos que ainda nunca foram levados a efeito como mereciam? A originalidade que nós temos como sinal de prosperidade poderia parecer a eles uma confissão de pobreza. Por que fazer coisas sozinho, feito o solitário Robinson Crusoé, se há riquezas por toda a parte, para você se apropriar? O artista moderno muitas vezes não se dá conta dessas riquezas. Ele é o alquimista, que deve transformar metal básico em ouro. Isso faz uma diferença radical.

I have made several comparisons... between modern and primitive man. Such comparisons... are essential to an understanding of the symbol-making propensities of man, and of the part that dreams play in expressing them. For one finds that many dreams present images and associations that are analogous to primitive ideas, myths, and rites. These dream images were called "archaic remnants" by Freud; the phrase suggests that they were psychic elements surviving in the human mind from ages long ago. This point of view is characteristic of those who regard the unconscious as a mere appendix of consciousness (or, more picturesquely, as a trash can that collects all the refuse of the conscious mind)... Further investigation suggested to me that this attitude is untenable and should be discarded. I found that associations and images of this kind are an integral part of the unconscious, and can be observed everywhere whether the dreamer is educated or illiterate, intelligent or stupid. They are not in any sense lifeless or meaningless "remnants." They still function, and they are especially valuable.

The daemons are ‘between’ us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal: like mortal men, they are passible (xiii). Some of them, before they became daemons, lived in terrestrial bodies; were in fact men. That is why Pompey saw semidei Manes, demigod-ghosts, in the airy region. But this is not true of all daemons. Some, such as Sleep and Love, were never human. From this class an individual daemon (or genius, the standard Latin translation of daemon) is allotted to each human being as his ‘witness and guardian’ through life (xvi). It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.25

Se eu estiver certo, o homem de gênio de então se encontrava em uma situação muito diferente daquela do seu sucessor moderno. Hoje, um homem assim, muitas vezes, ou até usualmente, sente-se confrontado com uma realidade, cuja significância ele não pode conhecer; ou com uma realidade que não tenha significância alguma; ou até com uma realidade tal que a própria questão, se tiver um sentido, é, em si, uma questão sem sentido. O objetivo para ele é, por sua própria sensibilidade, descobrir o sentido; ou com base em sua própria subjetividade, atribuir sentido ou ao menos uma forma para aquilo que, por si mesmo, não possui alguma dessas características. Mas o Modelo de universo de nossos ancestrais tinha uma significância embutida. E isso em dois sentidos: como tendo uma "forma significativa" (trata-se de um projeto admirável) e como manifestação da sabedoria e bondade de quem o criou. Não havia necessidade de despertá-lo para a beleza ou a vida. Para sermos mais enfáticos, o nosso problema não era o vestido de noiva, nem a mortalha. A perfeição alcançada já estava lá. A única dificuldade era de lhe dar uma resposta adequada.

A eternidade é bem distinta da perpetuidade, da mera continuidade infinita no tempo. A perpetuidade é nada mais do que a realização de uma série infinita de momentos, cada um dos quais se perde assim que se realizam. A eternidade é a fruição real e perene de vida ilimitada. O tempo, mesmo o tempo infinito, não passa de uma imagem, quase uma paródia, daquela plenitude; uma tentativa desesperada de compensar a transitoriedade de seus "presentes", multiplicando-os infinitamente. Esse é o motivo por que a Lucrécia de Shakespeare o chama de "seu criado incessante por toda a eternidade" (Rapto, 967). E Deus é eterno, não perpétuo. Estritamente falando, Ele nunca prevê; Ele simplesmente vê. Seu "futuro" é apenas uma área, e apenas para nós uma área especial, do Seu Agora infinito. Ele vê ( em vez de lembrar) seus atos de ontem porque o ontem ainda "está aí" para Ele; Ele vê (em vez de prever) os seus atos futuros porque Ele já está no amanhã. Como um espectador humano, ao assistir aos meus atos presentes, não infringe sua liberdade, assim tampouco sou menos livre para agir como bem entendo no futuro, porque Deus, no futuro (o Seu presente) me vê agir.

As sete artes liberais Atribuir a um currículo educacional um lugar no modelo do Universo pode parecer um absurdo à primeira vista; e seria um absurdo se os medievais tivessem tido o mesmo sentimento, a esse respeito, que temos quanto às matérias dos programas de ensino de hoje. Acontece que esse programa era tido como imutável; o número sete é numinoso; as Artes Liberais, por uma prescrição longa, haviam alcançado um status semelhante ao da própria natureza. As Artes, e também as Virtudes e os Vícios, eram personificados. A Gramática, com sua palmatória, está assentada com olhar altivo nos claustros de Magdalen. Dante no Convivia faz um entalhe cuidadoso das artes na estrutura do cosmo. A Retórica, por exemplo, corresponde a Vênus, pelo único motivo de que ela é "a mais amável de todas as disciplinas", soavissima di tutte le altre scienze. A Aritmética é como o Sol, pois, na medida em que este fornece luz para todas as demais estrelas, ela também fornece luz a todas as outras ciências, e como nossa visão fica turvada pela ação de sua luz intensa, da mesma forma nossa inteligência fica perplexa com a infinidade de números. E assim ocorre com as outras [matérias] (li, xiii),

O espírito desse esquema, ainda que não em todos os detalhes, está bem presente no Modelo Medieval. E se o leitor suspender sua descrença e exercitar sua imaginação neste assunto, mesmo que só por alguns minutos, acho que tomará consciência do amplo reajuste envolvido na leitura atenta dos poetas antigos. Encontrará toda a sua atitude perante o Universo invertida. No pensamento moderno, isto é, no pensamento evolucionário, o homem está no topo de uma escada cuja base se perde na escuridão; nesse Modelo, ele está na base de uma escada cujo topo é invisível por causa da luz ofuscante. Também compreenderá que algo, além do gênio individual, ajudou a dar aos anjos de Dante aquela majestade inigualável. Milton, ao perseguir esse objetivo, errou o alvo. O classicismo entrou no meio. Seus anjos têm anatomia demais, armaduras demais, e são por demais parecidos com os deuses de Homero e Virgílio, e (por essa mesma razão) são muito pouco parecidos com os deuses do paganismo em seus desenvolvimentos religiosos mais elevados. Depois de Milton, instaurou-se a degradação completa e, por fim, chegamos aos anjos puramente consoladores - portanto, femininos e aguados - da arte do século XIX.

But even if I do look like someone who is nearly dead, there’s not much I can do about it, he told himself, as he stared at the mirror. Because I really am on the brink of death. I’ve survived, but barely—I’ve been clinging to this world like the discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind. But that fact—that he looked like someone about to die—struck him again, forcefully. He stared fixedly at the image of his naked body for the longest time, like someone unable to stop watching a TV news report of a huge earthquake or terrible flood in a faraway land. A sudden thought struck him—maybe I really did die. When the four of them rejected me, perhaps the young man named Tsukuru Tazaki really did pass away. Only his exterior remained, but just barely, and then over the course of the next half year, even that shell was replaced, as his body and face underwent a drastic change. The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed—everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast. The person here now, the one he saw in the mirror, might at first glance resemble Tsukuru Tazaki, but it wasn’t actually him. It was merely a container that, for the sake of convenience, was labeled with the same name—but its contents had been replaced. He was called by that name simply because there was, for the time being, no other name to call him.

The Japanese sense the presence of a divinity in every industrial object. For us, that sacred presence has been reduced to a tiny ironic glimmer, a nuance of play and distantiation. Though this is, none the less, a spiritual form, behind which lurks the evil genius of technology which sees to it itself that the mystery of the world is well-guarded. The Evil Spirit keeps watch beneath artefacts and, of all our artificial productions, one might say what Canetti says of animals: that behind each of them there is a hidden someone thumbing his nose at us. Irony is the only spiritual form in the modern world, which has annihilated all others. It alone is the guardian of the mystery, but it is no longer ours to exercise. For it is no longer a function of the subject; it is an objective function, that of the artificial, object world which surrounds us, in which the absence and transparency of the subject is reflected. The critical function of the subject has given way to the ironic function of the object. Once they have passed through the medium or through the image, through the spectrum of the sign and the commodity, objects, by their very existence, perform an artificial and ironic function. No longer any need for a critical consciousness to hold up the mirror of its double to the world: our modern world swallowed its double when it lost its shadow, and the irony of that incorporated double shines out at every moment in every fragment of our signs, of our objects, of our models. No longer any need to confront objects with the absurdity of their functions, in a poetic unreality, as the Surrealists did: things move to shed an ironic light on themselves all on their own; they discard their meanings effortlessly. This is all part of their visible, all too visible sequencing, which of itself creates a parody effect.

As dimensões do universo medieval não são tão facilmente percebidas, ainda hoje, quanto a sua estrutura; em meu próprio tempo de vida, um cientista distinto ajudou a disseminar um erro. 14 O leitor deste livro já deve estar sabendo que a Terra era, a julgar por padrões cósmicos, um pontinho - de nenhuma magnitude significativa. E como o Somnium Scipionis nos ensinou, as estrelas eram maiores do que ela. Isidoro já sabia no século VI que o Sol é maior, e a Lua, menor do que a Terra. (Etymologies, III, xlvii-xl- viii); Maimônides,15 no século XII, sustenta que cada estrela é noventa vezes maior; Roger Bacon, no século XIII, declara que a menor estrela é "maior" do que ela. 16 Quanto às estimativas da distância, contamos com a sorte de ter o testemunho de uma obra completamente popular, Lendas do Sul da Inglaterra, uma prova melhor do que qualquer produção pesquisada, em favor do Modelo, como ele existia no imaginário de pessoas comuns. Diz-se ali que se um homem fosse capaz de viajar para o alto, numa velocidade de quarenta milhas17 e um pouco mais por dia, ele ainda assim não conseguiria alcançar o Stellatum ("o mais alto céu que jamais se viu") em oito mil anos. 18 Esses fatos são em si curiosidades de interesse medíocre. Eles se tornam acessíveis, apenas à medida que nos permitem penetrar mais fundo na consciência dos nossos ancestrais, dando-nos conta de como um universo assim deve ter afetado aqueles que acreditavam nele. A receita para tal compreensão não é o estudo de livros. Você terá de sair numa noite estrelada e caminhar por aproximadamente meia hora, tentando examinar o céu em termos da velha cosmologia. Lembre-se de que agora você tem um "para cima" e um "para baixo" absolutos. A Terra é, de fato, o centro, o lugar mais baixo; o movimento para chegar a ela, de qualquer direção que seja, é um movimento para baixo. Como homem moderno, você localizava as estrelas a uma grande distância. Agora terá de substituir essa distância por um tipo de distância muito especial e muito menos abstrata chamada altura; Os Céus 1 103 que fala imediatamente aos nossos músculos e nervos. O Modelo Medieval é vertiginoso. E o fato de que a altura das estrelas na astronomia medieval é muito pequena comparada às distâncias modernas acabará se manifestando como não tendo o tipo de importância que você supunha. Para o pensamento e a imaginação, dez milhões de milhas e um bilhão são a mesma coisa. Ambas podem ser concebidas (isto é, podemos fazer contas com ambas) e nenhuma delas pode ser imaginada; e quanto mais imaginação tivermos, melhor deveríamos saber disso. A diferença realmente importante é que o universo medieval, ao mesmo tempo que era inimaginavelmente grande, também era indubitavelmente finito. E um resultado inesperado disso foi o de fazer com que a pequenez da Terra fosse sentida com mais vivacidade. Em nosso Universo ela é pequena, sem dúvida; mas as galáxias e tudo o mais também são - e daí? Mas para eles havia um padrão finito de comparação. A esfera celeste mais alta, o maggior corpo de Dante, era tão simples e finalmente o maior objeto existente. A palavra "pequeno" aplicada à Terra assume, então, uma significância bem mais absoluta. Repito, pelo fato de o universo medieval ser finito, ele adquire uma forma, a forma perfeitamente esférica, que contém em si uma diversidade ordenada. Consequentemente, olhar para fora numa noite escura com olhos modernos é como olhar para o mar, que vai minguando num dia de nevoeiro; ou olhar para uma floresta virgem - infindáveis árvores sem nenhum horizonte. Vislumbrar o universo medieval altaneiro é mais como visualizar um prédio bem alto. O "espaço" da astronomia moderna pode infligir terror, espanto ou um vago devaneio; as esferas celestes dos medievais nos apresentam um objeto no qual a mente pode repousar, impressionando por sua grandeza, mas satisfazendo por sua harmonia. Esse é o sentido pelo qual o nosso universo é romântico, e o deles era clássico.

In a letter written to the play's director, Peter Wood, on 30th March 1958, just before the start of rehearsals, Pinter rightly refused to add extra lines explaining or justifying Stanley's motives in withdrawing from the world into a dingy seaside boarding-house: 'Stanley cannot perceive his only valid justification - which is he is what he is - therefore he certainly can never be articulate about it.' But Pinter came much closer than he usually does to offering an explanation of the finished work: We've agreed: the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio- religious monsters arrive to affect censure and alteration upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility (that word again) towards himself and others. (What is your opinion, by the way, of the act of suicide?) He does possess, however, for my money, a certain fibre - he fights for his life. It doesn't last long, this fight. His core being a quagmire of delusion, his mind a tenuous fuse box, he collapses under the weight of their accusation - an accusation compounded of the shit- stained strictures of centuries of 'tradition'. This gets us right to the heart of the matter. It is not simply a play about a pathetic victim brainwashed into social conformity. It is a play about the need to resist, with the utmost vigour, dead ideas and the inherited weight of the past. And if you examine the text, you notice how Pinter has toughened up the original image of the man in the Eastbourne digs with 'nowhere to go'. Pinter's Stanley Webber - a palpably Jewish name, incidentally - is a man who shores up his precarious sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing: he's an ersatz, scarpegrace Oedipus to her boardinghouse Jocasta. But once she makes the fateful, mood-changing revelation - 'I've got to get things in for the two gentlemen' - he's as dangerous as a cornered animal. He affects a wanton grandeur with his talk of a European concert tour. He projects his own fear on to Meg by terrorising her with stories of nameless men coming to abduct her in a van. In his first solo encounter with McCann, he tries to win him over by appealing to a shared past (Maidenhead, Fuller's tea shop, Boots library) and a borrowed patriotism ('I know Ireland very well. I've many friends there. I love that country and I admire and trust its people... I think their policemen are wonderful'). At the start of the interrogation he resists Goldberg's injunction to sit down and at the end of it he knees him in the stomach. And in the panic of the party, he attempts to strangle Meg and rape Lulu. These are hardly the actions of a supine victim. Even though Stanley is finally carried off shaven, besuited, white-collared and ostensibly tamed, the spirit of resistance is never finally quelled. When asked how he regards the prospect of being able to 'make or break' in the integrated outer world, he does not stay limply silent, but produces the most terrifying noises.

Louis de Broglie’s wave model of the electron provided the missing theoretical basis, but while particle-wave duality justifies the idea of allowed states, it requires us to discard the image of electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun.

Words that do not create images should be discarded. Words that have no intrinsic emotional or visual content ought to be avoided. Words that are directed to the sterile intellectual head-place should be abandoned. Use simple words, words that create pictures and action and that generate feeling.

Developing the courage to think negatively allows us to look at ourselves as we really are. There is a remarkable consistency in people’s coping styles across the many diseases we have considered: the repression of anger, the denial of vulnerability, the “compensatory hyperindependence.” No one chooses these traits deliberately or develops them consciously. Negative thinking helps us to understand just what the conditions were in our lives and how these traits were shaped by our perceptions of our environment. Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and autoimmune disease. The purpose is not to blame parents or previous generations or spouses but to enable us to discard beliefs that have proved dangerous to our health. “The power of negative thinking” requires the removal of rose-coloured glasses. Not blame of others but owning responsibility for one’s relationships is the key. It is no small matter to ask people with newly diagnosed illness to begin to examine their relationships as a way of understanding their disease. For people unused to expressing their feelings and unaccustomed to recognizing their emotional needs, it is extemely challenging to find the confidence and the words to approach their loved ones both compassionately and assertively. The difficulty is all the greater at the point when they have become more vulnerable and more dependent than ever on others for support. There is no easy answer to this dilemma but leaving it unresolved will continue to create ongoing sources of stress that will, in turn, generate more illness. No matter what the patient may attempt to do for himself, the psychological load he carries cannot be eased without a clear-headed, compassionate appraisal of the most important relationships in his life. “Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,” wrote Hans Selye. The power of negative thinking requires the strength to accept that we are not as strong as we would like to believe. Our insistently strong self-image was generated to hide a weakness — the relative weakness of the child. Our fragility is nothing to be ashamed of. A person can be strong and still need help, can be powerful in some areas of life and helpless and confused in others. We cannot do all that we thought we could. As many people with illness realize, sometimes too late, the attempt to live up to a self-image of strength and invulnerability generated stress and disrupted their internal harmony.

There is a real Bharatvarsha—a complete India. Unless we establish ourselves there, we can’t absorb its true living essence into our minds and hearts. Therefore I say, forgetting all else, discarding book-learning, the lure of prestige, and the temptation of odd profits, we must set sail for that very port, whether we drown or perish. No wonder I can never forget the true, complete image of Bharatvarsha.

Most readers of this section of the book will smile at this point, realising that a seemingly sophisticated philosophical argument is clearly invalidated by the context within which Lewis sets it. Yet Lewis has borrowed this from Plato—while using Anselm of Canterbury and René Descartes as intermediaries—thus allowing classical wisdom to make an essentially Christian point. Lewis is clearly aware that Plato has been viewed through a series of interpretative lenses—those of Plotinus, Augustine, and the Renaissance being particularly familiar to him. Readers of Lewis’s Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Spenser’s Images of Life will be aware that Lewis frequently highlights how extensively Plato and later Neoplatonists influenced Christian literary writers of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Lewis’s achievement is to work Platonic themes and images into children’s literature in such a natural way that few, if any, of its young readers are aware of Narnia’s implicit philosophical tutorials, or its grounding in an earlier world of thought. It is all part of Lewis’s tactic of expanding minds by exposing them to such ideas in a highly accessible and imaginative form.

In the end, Lewis enjoyed a long and productive period at Cambridge, until ill health finally forced him to resign his chair with effect from October 1963. By my reckoning, Lewis wrote thirteen books and forty-four articles during his Cambridge years, not to mention numerous book reviews and several poems, and he edited three collections of essays. There were controversies, of course, perhaps most significantly the 1960 debate with F. R. Leavis and his supporters over the merits of literary criticism. Nevertheless, Lewis’s Cambridge period—while not being anything like Bunyan’s “Plain called Ease”—was certainly an oasis of creativity, resulting in some of his most significant works, including Till We Have Faces (1956), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), The Four Loves (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and The Discarded Image (published posthumously in 1964). Yet Lewis’s Cambridge period was dominated by an event in his personal life, which had a significant impact on his writings during this time. Lewis found a new—but rather demanding—literary stimulus: Helen Joy Davidman.

Careful, Stella.” His low warning pulsed between my legs. “I’m not the gentleman you think I am.” Images of crumpled silk and discarded suits, rough words and rougher touches, flashed through my mind. The products of instinct, not experience. My reply fought its way past my dry throat. “I don’t think you’re a gentleman at all.” A slow, lazy smile tugged at his lips. “Smart girl.

At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted 'a place for everything and everything in the right place'. Distinction, definition, tabulation were his delight. Though full of turbulent activities, he was equally full of the impulse to formalise them. War was (in intention) formalised by the art of heraldry and the rules of chivalry; sexual passion (in intention), by an elaborate code oflove. Highly original and soaring philosophical speculation squeezes itself into a rigid dialectical pattern copied from Aristotle. Studies like Law and Moral Theology, which demand the ordering of very diverse particulars, especially flourish. Every way in which a poet can write (including some in which he had much better not) is classified in the Arts of Rhetoric. There was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modem inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

Don’t Rylee me! Do you want some sick fuck somewhere jacking off to images of you and me having sex? I mean, seriously? Doesn’t that make your stomach turn, Colton? I’m your wife. Not some whore you slept with and discarded for God’s sake.” I push myself out of the chair needing to get away from him and get some perspective. He’s talking crazy, and right now, I have enough crazy in my life.

Paul’s letter to Philemon has never been fully satisfying to activists and abolitionists, nor to those who bear the burden of injustice. It seems too incremental, too slow to right systemic wrongs. But it is less slow than it is patient. Paul’s expectations of Philemon are indeed radical, but they are couched in the radical patience of love. Institutions, even image-breaking ones, are so deeply woven into our culture that they cannot be ripped out of the cultural fabric without doing serious damage. Only when broken, image-breaking institutions are carefully unwoven and replaced with the power of new imagination and new image-bearing relationships can they be fruitfully discarded. Perhaps this is why Paul’s letter, so radical in its expectations, ends with hospitality, friendship and grace. Only as guests and friends of the true Host, the one who is himself preparing a guest room for us, can we unmake our institutions at their worst and be ready to greet him joyfully and wholeheartedly at his own return.

The process of creating .jpgs is synonymous with the process of throwing away information. 12-bits of data per channel from the sensor gets squeezed into 8 bits of data per channel (giving up some tonality and fine shades of color). A little bit of dynamic range gets lost too.  Then Lots of visual information that the human brain cannot perceive gets thrown away, which is what’s responsible for JPG’s famously small size.  If there is a lot of high-frequency detail in the image, then that gets replaced by what’s called a .jpg compression artifact (which I describe in a couple of sections).  Then the compressed .jpg image file is written to the memory card, and then the raw information from which the .jpg was produced is discarded (unless you were wise enough to shoot in RAW + JPG mode). 

Amid the mass amnesia sustained by the culture of global capitalism, images have become one of many depleted and disposable elements that, in their intrinsic archiveability, end up never being discarded, contributing to an ever more congealed and futureless present.

Unlike television or the computer, language appears to be not an extension of our powers but simply a natural expression of who and what we are. This is the great secret of language: Because it comes from inside us, we believe it to be a direct, unedited, unbiased, apolitical expression of how the world really is. A machine, on the other hand, is outside of us, clearly created by us, modifiable by us, even discardable by us; it is easier to see how a machine re-creates the world in its own image. But in many respects, a sentence functions very much like a machine, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the sentences we call questions.

I believe in you my friend, so much so, that if any of my ideas make you feel belittled in any manner, I want you to rise against me and throw my work into the fire. Any notion, any book, any institution that weakens the self instead of strengthening it, must be discarded at ones.

In Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit, Dr. Eleven is visited by the ghost of his mentor, Captain Lonagan, recently killed by an Undersea assassin. Miranda discarded fifteen versions of this image before she felt that she had the ghost exactly right, working hour upon hour, and years later, at the end, delirious on an empty beach on the coast of Malaysia with seabirds rising and plummeting through the air and a line of ships fading out on the horizon, this was the image she kept thinking of, drifting away from and then toward it and then slipping somehow through the frame: the captain is rendered in delicate watercolors, a translucent silhouette in the dim light of Dr. Eleven’s office, which is identical to the administrative area in Leon Prevant’s Toronto office suite, down to the two staplers on the desk. The difference is that Leon Prevant’s office had a view over the placid expanse of Lake Ontario, whereas Dr. Eleven’s office window looks out over the City, rocky islands and bridges arching over harbors. The Pomeranian, Luli, is curled asleep in a corner of the frame. Two patches of office are obscured by dialogue bubbles: Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end? Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.

But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them.