The Maps That Contain Us Quotes

Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes. Let desert sand harden your feet. Let the arch of your feet be the mountains. Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps And the ways you go be the lines of your palms. Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing And your outbreath be the shining of ice. May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. May you smell food cooking you have not eaten. May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. May your soul be at home where there are no houses. Walk carefully, well-loved one, Walk mindfully, well-loved one, Walk fearlessly, well-loved one. Return with us, return to us, Be always coming home.

It is a shame, such a shame, Harry thought, that to be a human is to be one thing, to be contained, to have these walls of skin and a singular sense of self that sloshes and slaps around inside of us like water on the inside of a well.

The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.

Spiritual crises happen to us every day. Most of them are sufficiently low grade, devoid of enduring consequences, so we pay no attention and keep on rolling. A spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our road map are substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or are overwhelmed by experience that cannot be contained by our understandings of self and world.

As children, we start off at the center of our own universe, where we interpret everything that happens from an egocentric vantage point. If our parents or grandparents keep telling us we’re the cutest, most delicious thing in the world, we don’t question their judgment—we must be exactly that. And deep down, no matter what else we learn about ourselves, we will carry that sense with us: that we are basically adorable. As a result, if we later hook up with somebody who treats us badly, we will be outraged. It won’t feel right: It’s not familiar; it’s not like home. But if we are abused or ignored in childhood, or grow up in a family where sexuality is treated with disgust, our inner map contains a different message. Our sense of our self is marked by contempt and humiliation, and we are more likely to think “he (or she) has my number” and fail to protest if we are mistreated.

That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy,

Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real. Then there’s the mind, half-focused on the TV, the settee, the clock. This ghostly knot of memory, idea and feeling that we call ourself also exists, though not within the measurable world our science may describe. Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know. The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas. Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored. Before the Age of Reason was announced, humanity had polished strategies for interacting with the world of the imaginary and invisible: complicated magic-systems; sprawling pantheons of gods and spirits, images and names with which we labelled powerful inner forces so that we might better understand them. Intellect, Emotion and Unconscious Thought were made divinities or demons so that we, like Faust, might better know them; deal with them; become them. Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably ezdst, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love’s name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred? The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognized an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone´s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades

An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her again patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress’s map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps… Whether the subject was a community librarian or a prophet, almost every librarian obituary contained some version of this sentence: “Under [their] watch, the library changed from a collection of books into an automated research center.” I began to get the idea that libraries were where it was happening - wide open territory for innovators, activists, and pioneers.

DEAR YOUNG DEMIGOD, Your destiny awaits. Now that you have discovered your true parentage, you must prepare yourself for a difficult future—fighting monsters, adventuring across the world, and dealing with temperamental Greek and Roman gods. I don’t envy you. I hope this volume will help you on your journeys. I had to think long and hard before publishing these stories, as they were given to me in the strictest confidence. However, your survival comes first, and this book will give you an inside look at the world of demigods—information that may help keep you alive. We’ll begin with “The Diary of Luke Castellan.” Over the years, many readers and campers at Camp Half-Blood have asked me to tell the story of Luke’s early days, adventuring with Thalia and Annabeth before they arrived at camp. I have been reluctant to do this, as neither Annabeth nor Thalia likes to talk about those times. The only information I have is recorded in Luke’s own handwriting, in his original diary given to me by Chiron. I think it’s time, though, to share a little of Luke’s story. It may help us understand what went wrong for such a promising young demigod. In this excerpt you will find out how Thalia and Luke arrived in Richmond, Virginia, chasing a magic goat, how they were almost destroyed in a house of horrors, and how they met a young girl named Annabeth. I have also included a map of Halcyon Green’s house in Richmond. Despite the damage described in the story, the house has been rebuilt, which is very troubling. If you go there, be careful. It may still contain treasures. But it most assuredly contains monsters and traps as well. Our second story will definitely get me in trouble with Hermes. “Percy Jackson and the Staff of Hermes” describes an embarrassing incident for the god of travelers, which he hoped to solve quietly with

Longstreet reached Catoosa Station the following afternoon, September 19, but found no guide waiting to take him to Bragg or give him news of the battle he could hear raging beyond the western screen of woods. When the horses came up on a later train, he had three of them saddled and set out with two members of his staff to find the headquarters of the Army of Tennessee. He was helped in this, so far as the general direction was concerned, by the rearward drift of the wounded, although none of these unfortunates seemed to know exactly where he could find their commander. Night fell and the three officers continued their ride by moonlight until they were halted by a challenge out of the darkness just ahead: “Who comes there?” “Friends,” they replied, promptly but with circumspection, and in the course of the parley that followed they asked the sentry to identify his unit. When he did so by giving the numbers of his brigade and division—Confederate outfits were invariably known by the names of their commanders—they knew they had blundered into the Union lines. “Let us ride down a little way to find a better crossing,” Old Peter said, disguising his southern accent, and the still-mounted trio withdrew, unfired on, to continue their search for Bragg. It was barely an hour before midnight when they found him—or, rather, found his camp; for he was asleep in his ambulance by then. He turned out for a brief conference, in the course of which he outlined, rather sketchily, what had happened up to now in his contest with Rosecrans, now approaching a climax here at Chickamauga, and passed on the orders already issued to the five corps commanders for a dawn attack next morning. Longstreet, though he had never seen the field by daylight, was informed that he would have charge of the left wing, which contained six of the army’s eleven divisions, including his own two fragmentary ones that had arrived today and yesterday from Virginia. For whatever it might be worth, Bragg also gave him what he later described as “a map showing prominent topographical features of the ground from the Chickamauga River to Mission Ridge, and beyond to the Lookout Mountain range.” Otherwise he was on his own, so far as information was concerned.

CHAPTER 5 “You’re kidding, right?” This was not the reaction I’d been looking for. “This isn’t a joke, Beck,” I said as we made our way belowdecks and headed toward the bow. The Room was in the forward-most section of the hull. We stood in front of The Door staring at The Lock. “Maybe Dad went in there during the storm, maybe to secure some extremely important documents or seal a treasure map inside a watertight container, when, all of a sudden, a wave slammed into the side of the boat, knocked something off a shelf, and—BAM!—he got conked on the head, and he’s been knocked out ever since.” Beck just looked at me. “Seriously?” “It’s possible.” “Then why didn’t we see him, Bick? Hello? We were standing right here in the hallway, remember? If not, allow me to refresh your memory.” She made a bunch of splash-splash-gurgle-gurgle noises. “We were up to our necks in water, and I don’t remember seeing Dad swim past us so he could sneak into The Room.” “You weren’t there the whole time. Maybe he used one of the secret hatches up on deck.” Oh, in case I forgot to mention

Soon we were alone in the pitch dark except for the despatcher and the parachutes, four of them for us, the others for huge cylindrical containers. In these, and about our persons, were the gear for our operation: maps, pistols, bombs, commando daggers, coshes, knuckledusters, telescopic sights, silencers, a sheaf of Marlin sub-machine guns, ammunition, wire-cutters, sewn-in files for prison bars, magnetic escape devices, signal flares, disguises, gags, chloroform, rope-ladders, gold sovereigns, stealthy footwear, Bangalore torpedoes, every type of explosive from gelignite and gun-cotton to deceptive mule droppings which, they said, could blow a tank to smithereens; all the things indeed on which espionage writers dwell at such fond length; also Benzedrine, field dressings, morphine, knockout drops and suicide pills to bite under duress, if captured in the wrong clothes. I hoped we would use none of them, especially the last.

His next step was to detour ships on their way back from Vietnam, now empty of cargo, to Japan to pick up containers filled with inexpensive goods destined for U.S. customers. Manufacturers in the Asian “tigers”—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—followed suit. It was the spread of this innovation, and the networks and system that implemented it, that integrated East Asia into the world economy.

Interviewer: In church on Sunday we sang a two hundred year old hymn with some contemporary words and the words go God you spin the whirling planets, fill the Seas and spread the plain, mould the mountains fashion blossoms call for the sunshine wind and rain. Now the scientist wouldn’t put it that way. The scientist would have said that there is a an explanation for why the planets were, for why the rain falls, for why the seas rise, for why the mountains form, but knowledge isn’t enough for us, it’s not enough to know why these things happen , we need the poetry, don’t we? Are we hardwired to seeks that kind of meaning in life that only poetry religion and writing can give us? Atwood: Probably so. Because we are a symbol making creature. We seem to need create and exist within structures of symbolism. We seem to have always done that as human beings, we usually date humanness from the point at which we discover some form of art. Art is always symbolic. … Interviewer: This God is a God of radical unpredictability and terrifying moral ambivalence. The God of the Old Testament. …. Interviewer: I heard what you said that human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years. Atwood: Yes. Interviewer: How do we know? Atwood: Oh…because we’ve read the myths. And the myths show pretty clearly what we want, what we fear, what we would like to have, what we very much would not like to have. Heaven and hell. We always wanted to fly, in the myths Gods fly. We don’t. And now everything that we do, every piece of technology we make is an extension of a fear or desire. And those human fears and desires really have not changed and they are reflected in the myths that have been with us for a long time. Interviewer: Are they true? Atwood: What is true? True means more than one thing. True means prove it, it has to be proven and in a very materialistic society that’s all it means. Another type of truth is it true about human nature? Is it true about who we are? Is it true about how we behave? People have a divided opinion about why myths continue and why they are important, and what they are… some people say they are maps of prehistory, some people say they are maps of the human mind and psyche, and some people say they are language-dependent. Interviewer: What do you mean by that? Atwood: It’s one of the characteristics of human beings that they have very elaborate languages. And these languages all have grammars and the grammars all contain past tenses and future tenses. Now dogs have languages too but we don’t think any dog has ever said to any other dog, where do dogs come from, what is the origin of dogs, and what about before that , what about before where any dogs. But because we have the kinds of languages we do, we go back in time as far as we can get, in our imagination, we want a beginning of the story and we go as far ahead in the future as we can. We want an end to the story. And it’s just not gonna be us getting born and us dying we want to place ourselves within a larger story. Here’s where we came form, here’s where we are going. And when you die this is what happens and some of those stories are happier than other but there’s always more, there’s always an and then. And then what happened… and then and then and then. Once we had that language we had to postulate either a God entity or an unknown.

Could it be, then, that we owe our understanding of time—dull time, that we wear like a leash, the time that’s always running out, that drags us toward the grave and that we yet never have enough of, empty, fragmented, insulting, oppressive, insufferable time, blinking away on our iPhones, measurable on a management consultant’s spreadsheet—not just to ancient wounds and the demands of capital and conquest, but also to the undimmed ecstasies of two-thousand-year-old Egyptian gnostics convinced that “Eternity is the Power of God,” that nothing ever begins or ends, and that, in Yates’s paraphrasing, “in this divine and living world, nothing can die and everything moves”? Can even time in all its vastness contain such contradictions? Where, in the substance of a moment, would they fit?

Theoretical physicists have since envisaged the cosmos in terms not so different from his, as a patchwork multiverse containing all possible worlds infinitely repeated. If they’re right, and if Blanqui was right, then among all those worlds surely there is one—there must be—in which humans have, at the brink of the abyss, stepped back and learned to live inside of time, and to hold each other there. To hold tight to everything outside of us, and everything within, to everything above and below. Perhaps it’s not this world. But perhaps it is.

Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you, it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live. Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway. For me it is too late, of course, I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end, that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity to go back and do things differently.

Another strange fact is that one form of these alien entities has been with us since we were little more than microbes ourselves. Mitochondria are physically independent structures that contain their own DNA designated as mtDNA, which is inherited by humans down the female line. Analysis of mtDNA in the brain tissue of females has allowed very accurate mapping of evolutionary relationships, leading to the conclusion that modern humans evolved in Africa.

Pick an act or task. Think back on your day and choose one self-contained, seemingly insignificant act that you performed. (Hint: pick something you think is routine and boring.) This could be saying hi to another person, smiling at someone, or having a conversation in line for coffee. The key is that you choose an act that happened only once. Try to avoid general actions that span a longer time frame like, “I went to work.” Be very specific. Now, write down what you did or said. Imagine. Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” This is where the fun starts. Start to imagine and follow the “ripple” of the act that you wrote down. Who did and could the act impact? How? Did it change someone’s emotions? Did it change someone’s mind-set? Someone’s perception? Did it change the simple direction they were walking or what flavor latte they ordered? Now, start thinking about one step removed from your act. What changed as a result of the initial change the act caused? Now keep imagining, step by step, how each act builds on the former, describing what and who changed after each successive act. Keep going until you reach a point of global impact. Now, if you’re like me, you will inevitably get to the point of saying to yourself “no way this would ever happen” or “this is so cheesy.” This is the precise barrier you need to break through. Our doubt can consume us and bring us down into a nice, comfortable place called complacency. Map it. As you trace your act, literally draw it out. Draw one arrow or path leading from one effect to the next and write out a short description of each effect as you go. Try to imagine at least ten steps removed from the original act until you reach a global level of impact. The first time you do this, it will be very hard. But do it daily, weekly, or monthly and it can change your thinking. Believe it. Once you finish your map, you’re not done. Now, you have to believe it. Do you believe that this is all possible? What if you did this exercise for every moment in your day? Imagine if just one of those trajectories turned out the way you imagined. One will. I never imagined that when I said, “Hey, how’s it going?” to a fellow student during my summer job it would completely transform her entire life trajectory. But I wish I had every day. My alarm clock would have meant much more.

Several chapters back, you may remember, we mentioned Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrel With Science by Gross and Levitt. This book claims for current mainstream science what only religious zealots have previously claimed for their faiths, namely that in a certain correlation of formulas (ideas contain no more than that) humans have created a True Picture of Reality (All Reality) which we should adore in humility and never dare to doubt or to question. As regular readers of my works know, I refer to that kind of faith, whether in religion or science (or philosophy . . .) as Idolatry, because it asks us to worship a representation of the experiential world, and I do not think representations or maps (or masks) make satisfactory objects of worship.

By their very nature, returnees seek a reconnection to a past life, a former identity marked more often than not by a single language or a single cultural frame of reference. We go back to what we know, including our native tongues. This process of reclaiming a homogenous existence runs counter to multi-culturalism on a societal level and hybridity on an individual level. Aren't we supposed to be complex, hybrid creatures containing multitudes? What about the concept of multiple belongings promoted by such internationally successful authors as Elif Shafak and Zadie Smith? On paper, where it mostly lives, this concept sounds ideal. "Multiple belongings are nurtured by cultural encounters but they are not only the preserve of people who travel", writes Shafak. "It is an attitude, a way of thinking, rather than the number of stamps on your passport. It is about thinking of yourself, and your fellow human beings, in more fluid terms than solid categories". I wouldn't go as far as to suggest that returns imply a repudiation of a complex view of identity or of globalization - it's globalization that has allowed the many people you'll meet in this book, me included, to come and go, to cross borders and cultures - but they force us to think of movement in multi-directional ways. Some returnees find that the life they thoughts they would have back home is a fantasy, so they make their way back to the host country. Homeland returns remain unpredictable, in part because despite their historical contexts, they don't have the clear road maps and narratives that outward migrations enjoy.

The "world" of the Sumerians was not objective reality, as we presently construe it. It was simultaneously more and less—more, in that this "primitive" world contained phenomena that we do not consider part of "reality," such as affect and meaning; less, in that the Sumerians could not describe (or conceive of) many of those things that processes of science have revealed to us. Myth is not primitive proto-science. It is a qualitatively different phenomenon.

According to Mackinder, Europe and the Middle East are much more affected by the Heartland than India and China, whose hundreds of millions of people are self-contained and thus able to peacefully develop. This leads him to predict that the future lies to a large extent in the “Monsoon lands of India and China.”38

As strange as it sounds, it is no longer possible to determine how many human genomes have been sequenced. At present the strategy of choice is whole-genome re-sequencing (Chapter 3) whereby next-generation sequence data are mapped onto a reference genome. The results have been breathtaking. The recently concluded (and aptly named) 1000 Genomes Project Consortium catalogued ~85 million SNPs, 3.6 million short insertions/deletions, and 60,000 larger structural variants in a global sampling of human genetic diversity. These data are catalysing research in expected and unexpected ways. Beyond providing a rich source of data for GWA-type studies focused on disease, scientists are also using the 1000 Genomes Project data to learn about our basic biology, something that proved surprisingly difficult when only a pair of genomes was available. For example, a recent GWAS taking advantage of the 1000 Genomes Project data identified ten genes associated with kidney development and function, genes that had previously not been linked to this critical aspect of human physiology. In 2016, Craig Venter’s team reported the sequencing of 10,545 human genomes. Beyond the impressively low cost (US$1,000–2,000 per genome) and high quality (30–40× coverage), the study was significant in hinting at the depths of human genome diversity yet to be discovered. More than 150 million genetic variants were identified in both coding and non-coding regions of the genome; each sequenced genome had on average ~8,600 novel variants. Furthermore, each new genome was found to contain 0.7 Mbp of sequence that is not contained in the reference genome. This underscores the need for methods development in the area of structure variation detection in personal genome data. Overall, however, the authors concluded that ‘the data generated by deep genome sequencing is of the quality necessary for clinical use’.

When an airplane navigates through the sky it works its way along a route composed of beacons and waypoints – invisible signposts in the sky – which are defined by geographic coordinates. They constitute the pilot’s map of the world. Flight computers are programmed into these waypoints which are put into the systems before take-off. Assuming these coordinates have been programmed correctly, the plane will go from point A, passing through the designated waypoints, before arriving at point B without a hitch. However, if any of these waypoints are wrong, the aircraft will deviate from its flight programme and its destination which can prove fatal. Life for each of us contains thousands of waypoints; signposts that hopefully provide us with directions as to what to do, how to go about things and where to go next – our decision-making processes. But what happens when our own onboard computer, our brain, has initially been programmed with data that is corrupt and socially unacceptable. How are we able to make life decisions – correct decisions that is?

Faith and mythology, in their profoundest sense, are the twin pillars that uphold the vast cathedral of human consciousness. They are the intertwined roots that nourish our understanding of existence, grounding us in the fertile soil of the unknown. Faith, is the audacious whisper in the heart of man, defying the chasm of uncertainty with its unwavering resonance. It is the audacity to trust in the unseen, to hear the unspoken, and to pursue the uncharted. It is the flame that illuminates the caverns of our deepest fears, casting shadows on our doubts, and lighting the path to our truest selves. Meanwhile, mythology is the grand tapestry we weave to contain the boundless cosmos within the finite landscapes of our minds. It is the narrative thread that stitches together the fabric of our collective consciousness, painting vibrant portraits of gods and monsters, of heroes and villains, of creation and destruction. Mythology gives form to faith, translating the abstract into the tangible, the divine into the comprehensible, the eternal into the temporal. It is the language of symbols, narrating the timeless tales of the human spirit dancing with the cosmos' infinite possibilities. Yet, both faith and mythology are but reflections in the mirror of existence, shimmering illusions that hint at a reality far beyond our comprehension. They are the echoes of the universe whispering its secrets to those daring enough to listen, the gentle lullabies that soothe our existential anxieties, the sweet honey that makes the bitter pill of the unknown more palatable. They are not the ultimate answers to life's mysteries, but the beautiful questions that keep us seeking, exploring, and wondering. They are the compass and the map, guiding us on our endless quest for truth, reminding us that the journey, not the destination, is the essence of existence.

Today, finishing this, I am feeling better, but perhaps, tomorrow, I will not. That is okay. It is okay not to feel better. It is okay not to produce art. There is so much pressure, in narrative, for us to 'recover', to reach 'catharsis', to find 'resolution', to 'speak out'. I offer resolution here because I have found it, but that resolution is as much truth as sleight of hand, a conjuring trick. I may never manage to 'resolve' what has happened to me. In naming it, I have learned to live with it, and this in turn breaks a pattern of suffering. Naming is, for me, a magical act: it is a way of saying daily, I am alive. I have harnessed naming to bring order to chaos. Naming maps experience into history. Contains, within it, a legacy and a lineage: it offers up a spectrum of thought. But naming cannot undo what was done. Hope, for me, is found in the telling.

In this world, that’s how it ended. For Blanqui, at least. Theoretical physicists have since envisaged the cosmos in terms not so different from his, as a patchwork multiverse containing all possible worlds infinitely repeated. If they’re right, and if Blanqui was right, then among all those worlds surely there is one—there must be—in which humans have, at the brink of the abyss, stepped back and learned to live inside of time, and to hold each other there. To hold tight to everything outside of us, and everything within, to everything above and below. Perhaps it’s not this world. But perhaps it is.

From the last three decades of psychological research, we know that our minds are formed in relationships. This means not simply that our minds are concerned with relationships (which they are), but that relationships shape the ways we process and experience reality. Psychology has made huge strides in mapping the connections between early attachment, emotional development, and adult intimate relationships. Throughout life, our emotions signal what’s important, and what’s important—at any age—is satisfying relationships. In a real sense, then, marriage picks up where childhood left off. As a close relationship that engages body, heart, and mind, marriage offers a powerful lifelong vehicle for knowing another, being known, and developing our deep emotional life. Overall, research finds that the most important factors in whether our relationships are satisfying all have to do with emotions: how we tune into our emotions, experience them, manage them, communicate about them, calm them enough to respond to others, and align them with our behavior and goals. Throughout this book, I will sum up the key capacities of healthy emotional relating as curiosity, compassion, and control. When we’re curious, we are open to trying to understand our own and the other’s truth. When we’re compassionate, we feel empathy for our own and the other’s struggles. When we exert self-control, we contain and communicate our emotional responses to others in ways that are accurate, sensitive, and likely to get heard. The triad of curiosity, compassion, and (self-)control takes us toward a sense of personal agency, and away from holding our partner responsible for our own feelings. It helps us build the inner capacities we need to reckon well with the rough patch. Finding a way to be happy in marriage depends on our ability to exercise emotional skill, flexibility, and resilience. But

For example, Angelina Jolie had Uranus transiting her 10th House roughly from 2010/11-2018/19, the House containing her Midheaven. As we can see, her popularity exploded in this period and she was propelled to stardom. Since Uranus rules sudden changes, her reputation in the tabloids seemed to fluctuate to either side. We may possibly see her return to more normal levels of stardom in 2019 once Uranus leaves her 10th House in March. However, as the Coarse Tuning Map has shown us, she is still well underway to manifest further success. Though now it may be in the slower, traditional Saturn way, together with the easygoing, occasional fortune of the Jupiter way.

This is, in general, what iconicity in language is: a metaphorical image-mapping in which the structure of the mean- ing is understood in terms of the structure of the form of the language presenting that meaning. Such mappings are possible because of the existence of image- schemas, such as schemas characterizing bounded spaces (with interiors and exte- riors), paths, motions along those paths, forces, parts and wholes, centers and pe- ripheries, and so on. When we speak of the “form of language,” we are under- standing that form in terms of such image-schemas. Thus, for example, one aspect of sentence structure is given in terms of parts and wholes, that is, the parts of speech and the higher-level constituents containing them. Other aspects of a sen- tence’s structure are given in terms of balance, proximity, subordination, sequence, and so on. The schematic images that allow us to understand such syntactic no- tions are also used in conceptual structure. It is for this reason that image- schematic correspondences between form and meaning are possible. The mech- anism that relates them is the same mapping mechanism used in metaphor.

Traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand -- especially accurate, sophisticated maps of the kind used by Guzarate to chart Vasco da Gama's course from Malindi to Calicut in 1498 -- are quite another matter. If maps have indeed come down to us containing recognizable representations of Ice Age topography -- as arguably may be the case with the depictions of India and of the long-submerged Sundaland peninsula by Cantino and Reinal and with the depiction of the 'Golden Chersonese' by Ptolemy -- then prehistory cannot be as it has hitherto been presented to us. If they are what they seem, such maps mean a lost civilization. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Our solar system, in turn, is just one tiny corner of the Milky Way galaxy, that thick band of stars visible in the darkest night skies stretching far over our heads. We’re about 25,000 light-years away from the center of the rotating galaxy, which astronomers estimate contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars—and at least that number of planets—and stretches across some 87,400 light-years. What we see in our skies from Earth is the equivalent of staring at the side of the Milky Way stretching off before us, as if we’re looking at the edge of a plate or a Frisbee. It is spiral-shaped, like an enormous spinning pinwheel, first mentioned, as far as we know, by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in AD 964, recorded in his The Book of the Fixed Stars. In 1610, Galileo was the first astronomer to piece together, using a telescope, that the Milky Way visible in our skies was a collection of faint stars; a century later, Immanuel Kant surmised that it was a rotating body of stars, and over the next two hundred years, astronomers came to begin to grasp how enormous the universe truly is. Now we understand that our Milky Way is about 2.5 million light-years from the next closest galaxy, known as Andromeda. Together, these two massive galaxies—and all the stuff in between them, including a number of so-called dwarf galaxies and satellite galaxies, as well as a third large galaxy known as Triangulum—make up what astronomers call the “Local Group,” which is one corner of a larger cosmic structure known as a “supercluster.”II For most of the last fifty years, our particular galactic neighborhood was believed to be part of the “Virgo Supercluster,” a gathering of about one hundred galaxies, but in 2014 a team of astronomers led by Hawaii’s R. Brent Tully realized we were more connected to our neighbors than anyone had realized; they redrew the boundaries of the galactic map after realizing that our supercluster was far more vast and in fact consisted of what had been four separate superclusters that all moved in the same gravitational rhythm. They dubbed the new supercluster “Laniakea,” Hawaiian for “immense heaven,” and we now believe it encompasses about one hundred thousand other galaxies that astronomers define as “nearby,” despite the fact that they stretch across more than 520 million light-years of outer space. Laniakea, in turn, is now understood to be part of the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, an enormous structure of about sixty superclusters that together stretch across a billion light-years. The Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex is what’s known as a “galaxy filament,” the largest structures known to exist in our universe, in which NASA now estimates there are about 200 billion galaxies stretching across 46 billion light-years.III (Each of those galaxies is estimated to have perhaps 100 million stars—although the largest, known as supergiants, can contain 100 trillion.)