Theme Of The Outsiders With Quotes

I wondered for a long time how to start that theme, how to start writing about something that was important to me. And I finally began like this: When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home...

The anarch differs from the anarchist in that he has a very pronounced sense of the rules. Insofar as and to the extent that he observes them, he feels exempt from thinking. This is consistent with normal behavior: everyone who boards a train rolls over bridges and through tunnels that engineers have devised for him and on which a hundred thousand hands have labored. This does not darken the passenger’s mood; settling in comfortably, he buries himself in his newspaper, has breakfast, or thinks about his business. Likewise, the anarch – except that he always remains aware of that relationship, never losing sight of his main theme, freedom, that which also flies outside, past hill and dale. He can get away at any time, not just from the train, but also from any demand made on him by state, society, or church, and also from existence.

Truth changes with the season of our emotions. It is the shadow that moves with the phases of our inner sun. When the nights falls, only our perception can guess where it hides in the dark. Within every solar system of the soul lies a plan of what truth is--- the design God has created, in our own unique story. This is as varying as the constellations, and as turning as the tide. It is not one truth we live to, but many. If we ever hope to determine if there is such a thing as truth, apart from cultural and personal preferences, we must acknowledge that we are then aiming to discover something greater than ourselves, something that transcends culture and individual inclinations. Some say that we must look beyond ourselves and outside of ourselves. However, we don’t need to look farther than what is already in each other. If there was any great plan from a higher power it is a simplistic, repetitious theme found in all religions; the basic core importance to unity comes from shared theological and humanistic virtues. Beyond the synagogue, mosques, temples, churches, missionary work, church positions and religious rituals comes a simple “message of truth” found in all of us, that binds theology---holistic virtues combined with purpose is the foundation of spiritual evolution. The diversity among us all is not divided truth, but the opportunity for unity through these shared values. Truth is the framework and roadmap of positive virtues. It unifies diversity when we choose to see it and use it. It is simple message often lost among the rituals, cultural traditions and socializing that goes on behind the chapel doors of any religion or spiritual theology. As we fight among ourselves about what religion, culture or race is right, we often lose site of the simple message any great orator has whispered through time----a simplistic story explaining the importance of virtues, which magically reemphasizes the importance of loving one another through service.

In my work with hundreds of women over the past few years a theme has emerged: women’s desperate, unquenchable desire to step into their power, countered by the fear of what will happen if they do. The longing to express the riches inside them, wrestling with the deep terror of being burned by the judgement, hatred or rejection of strangers or loved ones if they do. This fear of being burned is an oddly female one. It is a fear which keeps us small and scared… but seemingly safe. From the outside this can seem like an overreaction. Both the need, and the fear. But women, it seems, have an innate knowing of what it means to burn… and be burned. They know the dangers in their bones. And it makes them wary.

As Adrian hurried past the Senate House he noticed two old men standing outside Bowes and Bowes. He put an extra spring in his step, a thing he often did when walking near elderly. He imagined old people would look at his athletic bounce with a misty longing for their own youth. Not that he was trying to show off or rub salt into the wounds of the infirm, he really believed he was offering a service, an opportunity for nostalgia, like whistling the theme tune from Happidrome or spinning a Diablo. He skipped past them with carefree ease, missed his footing and fell to the ground with a thump. One of the old men helped him up.

It leads to a realization that man is not a constant, unchanging being: he is one person one day, another person the next. He forgets easily, lives in the moment, seldom exerts will-power, and even when he does, gives up the effort after a short time, or forgets his original aim and turns to something else. No wonder that poets feel such despair when they seem to catch a glimpse of some intenser state of consciousness, and know with absolute certainty that nothing they can do can hold it fast. And this theme, implicit in Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, and even more explicit in writers like T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, leads to a question, ‘How can man be stronger? How can he be less of a slave of circumstances?

picked up the Christmas-themed paper bag that was leant against the wall and we both headed outside.

visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation.

There are portions of the sovereign people who spend most of their spare time and spare money on motoring and comparing motor cars, on bridge-whist and post-mortems, on moving pictures and potboilers, talking always to the same people with minute variations on the same old themes. They cannot really be said to suffer from censorship, or secrecy, the high cost or the difficulty of communication. They suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene. Theirs is no problem of access to the world outside. Worlds of interest are waiting for them to explore, and they do not enter.

Many biologists claim that our thoughts and feelings of”ethics and meaning” derive only from the proclivities of our nervous systems. Our behaviour and psychology developed by the process of evolution, as did the minds and emotions of animals: so no us and them, just different variations on evolutionary themes. If so, ethics are vapors arising from our synapses, not truths with objective validity outside our own minds.

Are broken windows a new decorating theme around here?” Archer asked, coming up behind Jenna and me and poking his head into the parlor. “So it would seem,” I said. I was still looking outside when a faint light appeared in the gloom. It took me a minute to realize that it was from Cal’s cabin. Was someone out there? Was Cal out there? But just as quickly as it had appeared, the light went out again. Frowning, I turned from the doorway, and I went to slip my arm through Archer’s. Then I remembered what Nausicaa had said earlier. Now wasn’t exactly the best time for PDA, probably. The three of us trailed behind everyone else into the ballroom. Here, at least, things looked more or less the same. Of course, the ballroom had always been one of the more bizarre rooms at Hex Hall, so that didn’t say much. Still, I was relieved to see the familiar jumble of tables and chairs and not, like, tree stumps or whatever.

These stories have a dark side. Outsiders and eccentrics are regarded with suspicion, tortured, even killed. The major theme that emerges is of families diminished by conflict; almost a generation of adult males appears to be missing. Their absence is balanced by a number of strong female presences. This also reflects the dominance of women in the Acehnese household. Azhari is a master of suspense. He wastes no words; his narration is sparse. The overall atmosphere of the stories in Nutmeg Woman is tense and anxious. If there is a message, it is a plea for peace and tolerance and an end to bloodshed and oppression.

For the same reason there is nowhere to begin to trace the sheaf or the graphics of differance. For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, a principal responsibility. The problematic of writing is opened by putting into question the value of the arkhe. What I will propose here will not be elaborated simply as a philosophical discourse, operating according to principles, postulates, axioms, or definitions, and proceeding along the discursive lines of a linear order of reasons. In the delineation of differance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. Adventurous because this strategy is a not simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics, or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of differance, it no more follows the lines of philosophical-logical discourse than that of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.

The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe (Beowulf) The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area - the monster Grendel - and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it. It starts with a mention of 'olden days', looking back, as many stories do, to an indefinite past ('once upon a time'), in which fact blends with fiction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture - as is the theme of transience and mortality. ................ Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance. Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, and of the need to resolve and bring to fruition a proper human order, against the enemy - whatever it be - here symbolised by a monster and a dragon, among literature's earliest 'outsiders'. ....... Beowulf has always attracted readers, and perhaps never more than in the 1990s when at least two major poets, the Scot Edwin Morgan and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, retranslated it into modern English. Heaney's version became a worldwide bestseller, and won many awards, taking one of the earliest texts of English literature to a vast new audience.

One final note: in this book I say “we” a lot. No matter who you are, you will probably encounter at least one “we” to which your reaction is “not me.” And maybe that’s true. But that reaction illustrates a theme of the book, which is that the basic American struggle is over who is an insider and who an outsider—who comes within the most fundamental “we”: We the People.

Every year there was an important poetry contest at the fair of ‘Ukaz, just outside Mecca, and the winning poems were embroidered in gold on fine black cloth and hung on the walls of the Kabah. Muhammad’s followers would, therefore, have been able to pick up verbal signals in the text that are lost in translation. They found that themes, words, phrases, and sound patterns recurred again and again—like the variations in a piece of music, which subtly amplify the original melody, and add layer upon layer of complexity. The Qur’an was deliberately repetitive; its ideas, images, and stories were bound together by these internal echoes, which reinforced its central teaching with instructive shifts of emphasis. They linked passages that initially seemed separate, and integrated the different strands of the text, as one verse delicately qualified and supplemented others. The Qur’an was not imparting factual information that could be conveyed instantaneously. Like Muhammad, listeners had to absorb its teachings slowly; their understanding would grow more profound and mature over time, and the rich, allusive language and rhythms of the Qur’an helped them to slow down their mental processes and enter a different mode of consciousness.

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront. The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.” Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.

Dignity concerns at all times the person taken in his entirety - the unity of what lies inside and outside - and describes the ideal constitution to which one strives, but which is only too infrequently reached. The higher the person wants to reach, the harder it is for him to reach this idea; for, with the one-sidedness that results from concentration on a great theme he tears open a crevice between himself and his ambition.

There's a theme that appears in much of your work," I say to Maurice on my last visit to Connecticut, "and I can only hint at it because it's difficult to formulate or describe. It has something to do with the lines: 'As I went over the water/the water went over me' [from As I Went over the Water] or 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me' [from Night Kitchen]." "Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…" "What is this one obsession?" "I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it." "There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'" "Inside the rain?" "When it's raining outside," I explain, "I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well." "It's strange you say that," Maurice answers, "because rain has become one of the potent images of my new book. It sort of scares me that you mentioned that line. Maybe that's what rain means. It's such an important ingredient in this new work, and I've never understood what it meant. There was a thing about me and rain when I was a child: if I could summon it up in one sentence, I'd be happy to. It's such connected tissue…

God's curse on the man draws him unwholesomely away from the woman, even as God's curse on the woman draws her unwholesomely toward the man. This is why most marital counseling sessions are some variation on this theme: Wife-"You don't pay any attention to me." Husband-"You are too demanding and nag too much." God has cursed the marriage relationship with a poisonous desire for control by the woman and a self-absorbed focus outside the relationship by the man.

I will need no one is the resounding and self-affirming mantra of the narcissist, particularly for male narcissists. You owe me is more often the female narcissist’s recurring refrain. These underlying themes are, of course, completely outside of the narcissist’s awareness—an automatic tune that plays repeatedly in the background thanks to well-grooved memories. This intricate memory system is also where self-preserving well-worn masks that assist in coping reside.

Wilder made history. Sealing her themes inside an unassailably innocent vessel, a novelistic Trojan horse for complex and ambiguous reactions to manifest destiny, wilderness, self-reliance, and changing views of women’s roles outside the home, her books have exercised more influence, across a wider segment of society, than the thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, which held that American democracy was shaped by settlers conquering the frontier. Their place in our culture continues to evolve.

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are common themes in the American culture today. Folks sometimes mistake my meaning when I say, “You have the freedom of choice and the ability to create your best life”, because they all too often rush to drop everything that is weighing them down. They quit the job, ditch the unhappy marriage, cut out negative friends and family, get out of Dodge, etc. I do not advocate such hastiness; in fact, I believe that rash decision-making leads to more problems further down the road. Another unsatisfying job manifests; another unhappy relationship results. These people want a new environment, yet the same negative energy always seems to occupy it. This is because transformation is all about the internal shift, not the external. Any blame placed on outside sources for our unhappiness will forever perpetuate that unhappiness. Pointing the finger is giving away your power of choice and the ability to create our best life. We choose: “That person is making me unhappy” vs. “I make myself happy.” When you are in unhappy times of lack and feelings of separation – great! Sit there and be with it. Find ways to be content with little. Find ways to be happy with your Self. As we reflect on the lives of mystics past and present, it is not the things they possess or the relationships they share that bring them enlightenment – their light is within. The same light can bring us unwavering happiness (joy). Love, Peace, Joy – these three things all come from within and have an unwavering flame – life source – that is not dependent on the conditions of the outside world. This knowing is the power and wisdom that the mystics teach us that we are all capable of achieving. When I say, “You have the freedom of choice and the ability to create your best life”, I am not referring to external conditions; I am referring to the choice you have to look inward and discover the ability to transform the lead of the soul into gold. Transformation is an inner journey of the soul. Why? Because, as we mentioned above, wherever we go, ourselves go with us. Thus, quitting the job, dumping relationships, etc. will not make us happy because we have forgotten the key factor that makes or breaks our happiness: ourselves. When we find, create, and maintain peace, joy, and love within ourselves, we then gain the ability to embrace the external world with the same emotions, perspective, and vibration. This ability is a form of enlightenment. It is the modern man’s enlightenment that transforms an unsatisfying life into one of fulfillment.

Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside of our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the universals are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature.

It's a theme born out of the Christian faith rather than a pagan understanding of the universe. Both views agree that we human beings are small, frail, and limited in our ability to battle the forces of the world that seek to destroy us. In response, the pagan worldview says, "We cannot win this on our strength. Therefore, let us go down fighting nobly and die well." The Christian worldview, on the other hand, says, "We cannot win this on our own strength. Therefore, we must rely on a Power outside of ourselves to win this for us.

Some may think it inadvisable to include the people as investigators in the search for their own meaningful thematics: that their intrusive influence (n.b., the “intrusion” of those who are most interested—or ought to be—in their own education) will “adulterate” the findings and thereby sacrifice the objectivity of the investigation. This view mistakenly presupposes that themes exist, in their original objective purity, outside people—as if themes were things. Actually, themes exist in people in their relations with the world, with reference to concrete facts.

In 2010, the Priesthood quorums and Relief Society used the same manual (Gospel Principles)… Most lessons consist of a few pages of exposition on various themes… studded with scriptural citations and quotations from leaders of the church. These are followed by points of discussion like “Think about what you can do to keep the purpose of the Sabbath in mind as you prepare for the day each week.” Gospel Principles instructs teachers not to substitute outside materials, however interesting they may be. In practice this ensures that a common set of ideas are taught in all Mormon chapels every Sunday. That these ideas are the basic principles of the faith mean that Mormon Sunday schools and other church lessons function quite intentionally as devotional exercises rather than instruction in new concepts. The curriculum encourages teachers to ask questions that encourage catechistic reaffirmation of core beliefs. Further, lessons focus to a great extent on the importance of basic practices like prayer, paying tithing, and reading scripture rather than on doctrinal content… Correlated materials are designed not to promote theological reflection, but to produce Mormons dedicated to living the tenants of their faith.

He said we had to find a way to reach Muslims who “didn’t think it was such a great thing to have a McDonald’s down the street and American pop culture on their television.” All people, he said, want to maintain their identity in the modern world. “We should acknowledge that not everything we see is positive—there’s a mindless violence, a crude sexuality, a lack of reverence for life, a glorification of materialism.” That said, he wanted to make several statements of belief in human progress—that countries succeed when they are tolerant of different religious beliefs; that governments that give voice to their people and respect the rule of law are more stable and satisfying; and that countries where women are empowered are more successful. “When I was a kid in Indonesia,” he said, “I remember seeing girls swimming outside all the time. No one covered their hair. That was before the Saudis started building madrassas.” This was a theme he’d come back to again and again. He told a story about how his mother once worked in Pakistan. She was riding on an elevator. Her hair was uncovered and her ankles were showing. Yet even though she was older, “this guy in the elevator with her couldn’t stand to be in that type of space with a woman who was uncovered. By the time the door opened he was sweating.” He paused for effect. “When men are that repressed, they do some crazy shit.

The idea that hyperreactivity and hyporeactivity are two variations on a theme might even have implications for theory of mind. The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t. “Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality, but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.” Behavior that looks antisocial to an outsider might actually be an expression of fear.

Milton argued, in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, that a people 'free by nature' had a right to overthrow a tyrant; a subject that recalls vividly the questions examined by Shakespeare in his major tragedies about fifty years before. Milton continued to defend his ideals of freedom and republicanism. But at the Restoration, by which time he was blind, he was arrested. Various powerful contacts allowed him to be released after paying a fine, and his remaining years were devoted to the composition - orally, in the form of dictation to his third wife - of his epic poem on the fall of humanity, Paradise Lost, which was published in 1667. It is interesting that - like Spenser and Malory before him, and like Tennyson two centuries later - Milton was attracted to the Arthurian legends as the subject for his great epic. But the theme of the Fall goes far beyond a national epic, and gave the poet scope to analyse the whole question of freedom, free will, and individual choice. He wished, he said, to 'assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men'. This has been seen as confirmation of Milton's arrogance, but it also signals the last great attempt to rationalise the spirit of the Renaissance: mankind would not exist outside Paradise if Satan had not engineered the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve. For many critics, including the poets Blake and Shelley, Satan, the figure of the Devil, is the hero of the poem.

Top Choices of Metroid Prime 2 Rom And, once you're at the local game store, have a peak at their used section. Nearly all the initial theme and game play will be preserved intact within this 24-Meg cart, together with some new characteristics which are certain to blow away all of the hardcore metroid fanatics everywhere. Just head over to the website and hunt for the sport you desire. Fortunately for you, your preceding pal Casey is here to assist you outside. If you are not able to accomplish this, the boss will regain hitpoints and you have got to fight. All the original weapons are here plus a completely different roster! The most obvious positive about buying a hard copy of a game is it could be shared with other folks.

On retiring to Capri [Tiberius] devised a pleasance for his secret orgies: teams of wantons of both sexes, selected as experts in deviant intercourse and dubbed analists, copulated before him in triple unions to excite his flagging passions. Its bedrooms were furnished with the most salacious paintings and sculptures, as well as with an erotic library, in case a performer should need an illustration of what was required. Then in Capri's woods and groves he arranged a number of nooks of venery where boys and girls got up as Pans and nymphs solicited outside bowers and grottoes. e acquired a reputation for still grosser depravities that one can hardly bear to tell or be told, let alone believe. For example, he trained little boys (whom he termed tiddlers) to crawl between his thighs when he went swimming and tease him with their licks and nibbles; and unweaned babies he would put to his organ as though to the breast, being by both nature and age rather fond of this form of satisfaction. Left a painting of Parrhasius's depicting Atalanta pleasuring Meleager with her lips on condition that if the theme displeased him he was to have a million sesterces instead, he chose to keep it and actually hung it in his bedroom. The story is also told that once at a sacrifice, attracted by the acolyte's beauty, he lost control of himself and, hardly waiting for the ceremony to end, rushed him off and debauched him and his brother, the flute-player, too; and subsequently, when they complained of the assault, he had their legs broken.

Racism” as a blanket explanation of intergroup differences is not simply an over-rated explanation. It is itself a positive hindrance to a focus on the acquisition of the human capital or cultural capital needed to rise economically and socially. If there is any central theme that emerges from the histories examined in these three volumes, it is that the cultural capital of a people is crucial to their economic and social advancement, whether that people is a racial minority, a nationstate, or a whole civilization. In some cases, the factors inhibiting the development of this human capital have been geographical or historical. But they need not include self-inflicted ideologies or ideologies congenial to sympathetic outsiders, whose sympathies may prove to be more of a handicap than the hostility of others.

Even when a couple manages to establish harmonious family commitments, the stereotypes on which these commitments rest often make life outside the family even more harsh for people who do not or cannot conform to gender expectations. The more women are defined in terms of an ideal myth, for example, the more possible it is for men to ignore or actively abuse women who do not meet that ideal. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the cult of True Womanhood was perfectly compatible with the exploitation of female slaves and factory workers. In the twentieth century, a recurring theme in rape and sexual harassment cases has been the notion that if a woman has ever departed from ideal behavior in any way, she has no real 'womanhood' to be violated or offended. The wives and mothers of rapists almost invariably, and usually in good faith, defend them as the soul of chivalry -- at least toward women who conform to the prevailing myths.

To implement these changes, the school initially followed a more typical, top-down strategy of reform: the state sent in a consultant to implement changes. “It was an outsider who came in and talked about the civil rights movement and did touchy feely group discussions,” Guthertz recalls. “Someone else came in and for one day taught behavior management strategies that focused on controlling and penalizing students versus making changes in teaching practices that would engage and support them. That blew up at the school. The administration got rid of that program.” The issues that come with this kind of approach to school reform—“do what the district, state, or consultants say”—have been a recurring theme in the long careers of Guthertz, Roth, and McKamey. “It comes off as an attempt to hijack the effort by the teachers to think about education,” McKamey comments. “It’s the deepest disrespect. The teacher has been teaching for ten years and someone is going to come in and say, ‘I’m going to show you something.’ Most of these people have never taught in the classroom.

Minstrelsy had virtually nothing to do with the way black people really were; it was a purely white construction. Black performers who wanted to work in minstrelsy were run off the stage or forced to blacken their black faces. The form worked literally as, and only as, a black façade for whites: whites in blackface. The black mask permitted whites to say illegal, unorthodox, seditious, and sexually illicit things in public. In short, it was a kind of public pornography, the main theme of which was sexual rebellion, sexual license, poverty, and criminality. In short, all of the fears and ambivalences whites had that were otherwise hidden from public discourse could be articulated through the mouth of a black who was understood to be already outside the law and therefore serviceable. In this fashion, the black mask permitted freedom of speech and created a place for public, national dialogue. For whites that is. On the other hand, the mask hid more ligence, and most importantly, it hid the true causes of social conflict by transferring that conflict to a black population.

I now turn to a *subjective* consideration that belongs here; yet I can give even less distinctness to it than to the objective consideration just discussed, for I shall be able to express it only by image and simile. Why is our consciousness brighter and more distinct the farther it reaches outwards, so that its greatest clearness lies in sense perception, which already half belongs to things outside us; and, on the other hand, becomes more obscure as we go inwards, and leads, when followed to its innermost recesses, into a darkness in which all knowledge ceases? Because, I say, consciousness presupposes *individuality*; but this belongs to the mere phenomenon, since, as the plurality of the homogeneous, it is conditioned by the forms of the phenomenon, time and space. On the other hand, our inner nature has its root in what is no longer phenomenon but thing-in-itself, to which therefore the forms of the phenomenon do not reach; and in this way, the chief conditions of individuality are wanting, and distinct consciousness ceases therewith. In this root-point of existence the difference of beings ceases, just as that of the radii of a sphere ceases at the centre. As in the sphere the surface is produced by the radii ending and breaking off, so consciousness is possible only where the true inner being runs out into the phenomenon. Through the forms of the phenomenon separate individuality becomes possible, and on this individuality rests consciousness, which is on this account confined to phenomena. Therefore everything distinct and really intelligible in our consciousness always lies only outwards on this surface on the sphere. But as soon as we withdraw entirely from this, consciousness forsakes us―in sleep, in death, and to a certain extent also in magnetic or magic activity; for all these lead through the centre. But just because distinct consciousness, as being conditioned by the surface of the sphere, is not directed towards the centre, it recognizes other individuals certainly as of the same kind, but not as identical, which, however, they are in themselves. Immortality of the individual could be compared to the flying off at a tangent of a point on the surface; but immortality, by virtue of the eternity of the true inner being of the whole phenomenon, is comparable to the return of that point on the radius to the centre, whose mere extension is the surface. The will as thing-in-itself is entire and undivided in every being, just as the centre is an integral part of every radius; whereas the peripheral end of this radius is in the most rapid revolution with the surface that represents time and its content, the other end at the centre where eternity lies, remains in profoundest peace, because the centre is the point whose rising half is no different from the sinking half. Therefore, it is said also in the *Bhagavad-Gita*: *Haud distributum animantibus, et quasi distributum tamen insidens, animantiumque sustentaculum id cognoscendum, edax et rursus genitale* (xiii, 16, trans. Schlegel) [Undivided it dwells in beings, and yet as it were divided; it is to be known as the sustainer, annihilator, and producer of beings]. Here, of course, we fall into mystical and metaphorical language, but it is the only language in which anything can be said about this wholly transcendent theme.

Doubtless, if, at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I pronounced the words "going to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice,” I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but something as different from anything that I knew, something as delicious, as might be, for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a morning in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those which had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say who saw nothing), as in an opera a melodic theme introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre counting only the minutes as they passed. And besides, even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our lives the days are not all equal. To get through each day, natures that are at all highly strung, as was mine, are equipped, like motor-cars, with different gears. There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes. During this month—in which I turned over and over in my mind, like a tune of which one never tires, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, of which the desire that they excited in me retained something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for a person—I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith on the eve of his entry into Paradise. Thus, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with the organs of my senses what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all—though all the more tempting to them, in consequence, more different from anything that they knew— it was that which recalled to me the reality of these visions that most inflamed my desire, by seeming to offer the promise that it would be gratified.

The Hungryalist or the hungry generation movement was a literary movement in Bengali that was launched in 1961, by a group of young Bengali poets. It was spearheaded by the famous Hungryalist quartet — Malay Roychoudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy. They had coined Hungryalism from the word ‘Hungry’ used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poetic line “in the sowre hungry tyme”. The central theme of the movement was Oswald Spengler’s idea of History, that an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from outside. These writers felt that Bengali culture had reached its zenith and was now living on alien food. . . . The movement was joined by other young poets like Utpal Kumar Basu, Binoy Majumdar, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Falguni Roy, Tridib Mitra and many more. Their poetry spoke the displaced people and also contained huge resentment towards the government as well as profanity. … On September 2, 1964, arrest warrants were issued against 11 of the Hungry poets. The charges included obscenity in literature and subversive conspiracy against the state. The court case went on for years, which drew attention worldwide. Poets like Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal and Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg visited Malay Roychoudhury. The Hungryalist movement also influenced Hindi, Marathi, Assamese, Telugu & Urdu literature.

Elizabeth,” he said, trying not to laugh. “At a wedding reception, the guests cannot leave until the bride and groom retire. If you look over there, you’ll notice my great-aunts are already nodding in their chairs.” “Oh!” she exclaimed, instantly contrite. “I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” “Because,” he said, taking her elbow and beginning to guide her from the ballroom, “I wanted you to enjoy every minute of our ball, even if we had to prop the guests up on the shrubbery.” “Speaking of shrubbery,” she teased, pausing on the balcony to cast a last fond look at the “arbor” of potted trees with silk blossoms that occupied one-fourth the length of the entire ballroom, “everyone is talking about having gardens and arbors as themes for future balls. I think you’ve stared a new ‘rage.’” “You should have seen your face,” he teased, drawing her away, “when you recognized what I had done.” “We are probably the only couple,” she returned her face turned up to his in laughing conspiracy, “ever to lead off a ball by dancing a waltz on the sidelines.” When the orchestra had struck up the opening waltz, Ian had led her into the mock “arbor,” and they had started the ball from there. “Did you mind?” “You know I didn’t,” she returned, walking beside him up the curving staircase. He stopped outside her bed chamber, opened the door for her, and started to pull her into his arms, then checked himself as a pair of servants came marching down the hall bearing armloads of linens. “There’s time for this later,” he whispered. “All the time we want.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

Doctrinal formulae are neither a set of neat definitions nor some sort of affront to the free-thinking soul; they are words that tell us enough truth to bring us to the edge of speech, and words that sustain enough common life to hold us there together in worship and mutual love... I learned to rethink Hegel and to grasp that what he was concerned with was not a system that could be projected on to some detached reality 'out there', but a habit of thinking that always sought to understand itself as a process of self-questioning and self-dissolution in the process of discovering *real* language - and thus real thinking. It is the energy of surpassing the settled individual self in the journey to truth... The Hegelian point (as I understand it) is that meaning does not come in the gaps between words or things, but in the way in which the structure and the surface of the world and speech can be so read and heard as to lead us into new and strange configurations of understanding - how words and things always deliver more than themselves, more than a series of objects and labels, and so both undermine and re-establish appearances. Hans Urs von Balthasar... developed an aesthetic of extraordinary depth in which some of the same themes may be discerned. His 'dramatic' construal of the world is meant to remind us that we do not start from intuitions of spiritual truth and then embody them in some way in practices and words. First we are addressed and engaged by what is utterly outside our capacity; we are forced towards new horizons. For Balthasar, this is how we establish on the firmest basis the recognition of the gap between what we can achieve or understand and what God makes known to us... God is free from obligation to our good deeds, free from confinement in our categories; God defines who he is by what he says and does, in revelation.

The Gates of Eden,” as he called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic and reason. Like “It’s Alright, Ma,” the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake’s disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery. After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan’s listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to “Gates of Eden,” it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the “utopian hermit monks” riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desire; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by “the gray flannel dwarf”); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much or even exist inside the gates of Eden. The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation—and that at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It’s a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn’t saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? (“All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan’s song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the “New Vision,” two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who got it. I

So what can we generalize about Victorian vampires? They are already dead, yet not exactly dead, and clammy-handed. They can be magnetically repelled by crucifixes and they don’t show up in mirrors. No one is safe; vampires prey upon strangers, family, and lovers. Unlike zombies, vampires are individualists, seldom traveling in packs and never en masse. Many suffer from mortuary halitosis despite our reasonable expectation that they would no longer breathe. But our vampires herein also differ in interesting ways. Some fear sunlight; others do not. Many are bound by a supernatural edict that forbids them to enter a home without some kind of invitation, no matter how innocently mistaken. Dracula, for example, greets Jonathan Harker with this creepy exclamation that underlines another recurring theme, the betrayal of innocence (and also explains why I chose Stoker’s story “Dracula’s Guest” as the title of this anthology): “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will.” Yet other vampires seem immune to this hospitality prohibition. One common bit of folklore was that you ought never to refer to a suspected vampire by name, yet in some tales people do so without consequence. Contrary to their later presentation in movies and television, not all Victorian vampires are charming or handsome or beautiful. Some are gruesome. Some are fiends wallowing in satanic bacchanal and others merely contagious victims of fate, à la Typhoid Mary. A few, in fact, are almost sympathetic figures, like the hero of a Greek epic who suffers the anger of the gods. Curious bits of other similar folklore pop up in scattered places. Vampires in many cultures, for example, are said to be allergic to garlic. Over the centuries, this aromatic herb has become associated with sorcerers and even with the devil himself. It protected Odysseus from Circe’s spells. In Islamic folklore, garlic springs up from Satan’s first step outside the Garden of Eden and onion from his second. Garlic has become as important in vampire defense as it is in Italian cooking. If, after refilling your necklace sachet and outlining your window frames, you have some left over, you can even use garlic to guard your pets or livestock—although animals luxuriate in soullessness and thus appeal less to the undead. The vampire story as we know it was born in the early nineteenth century. As

The Essence and Character of a People, his overriding message was that Judaism is an “eternal countercultural.” In his book, Hertzberg declares, “Abraham, the first Jew, is the archetypal Jewish character. As the leader of a small, dissenting minority living precariously on the margins of society, he defines the enduring role of the Jew as the outsider. The recurring themes of Jewish history—otherness, defiance, fragility, and morality—are present in his life.

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

A warning. However, it may also be that in some cases we fill the role of the surrounding nations rather than that of God’s suffering people. For a common theme in God’s accusation of the nations is that they rejoiced at the divine judgment falling on others. Perhaps we too have been heedless or even happy when our opponents have apparently received their “comeuppance” at the hands of God, whether those opponents be inside or outside the Christian community. We have perhaps been secretly, or not so secretly, glad over the fall of prominent televangelists; some

Outside, the sign says “Sushi-Yo” in bright green neon letters. Inside it looks like a sushi bar frozen in time from the ‘80s. They’re playing Ghostbusters on a neon jukebox. Old-fashioned pinball machines light up the corner. The booths are themed after popular bands and movies.

The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat...With the living being, a milieu of events appears, which opens on a spatial and a temporal field. This surging - forth of a privileged milieu is not the manifestation of a new force. The living being works only with physico-chemical elements, but these subordinated forces join the unseen relations between them. We can at this moment speak of an animal...The animal is like a quiet force...In short, it is the theme of the melody, much more than the idea of a nature - subject or of a suprasensible thing, that best expresses the intuition of the animal according to Uexküll. The animal subject is its realization, transspatial and transtemporal. The theme of the animal melody is not outside its manifest realization; it is a variable thematism that the animal does not seek to realize by a copy of the model, but that haunts its particular realizations, without these themes being the goal of the organism...The Umwelt is not presented in front of the animal like a goal; it is not present like an idea, but as a theme that haunts consciousness.

The practice of explicitly describing others as less than humans is nowadays often frowned upon and is widely condemned. So propagandists who cultivate dehumanizing attitudes most often do this indirectly. Rather than overtly referring to a group of people as animals or monsters, they describe them in ways that invoke this image in the minds of their listeners. There are certain themes that reappear over and over in this dehumanizing discourse. The common one is criminality. The dehumanized group is made to appear inherently threatening and their criminality is represented as crudely animalistic typically involving rape and murder. Another common theme is parasitism. The dehumanized group conspires to exploit the majority sucking the blood out of decent, hard-working people and claiming privileges that they haven't earned. Images of filth and disease are also very frequent. Dehumanised groups are vectors of infection, they are dirty and contaminating. They are often thought of as invaders, outsiders who are taking us over. They are reproducing at an alarming rate and they will soon outnumber us unless we do something about it.

Well, what do you think? Avanti?" "Avanti," cries everyone, and, after a few quick re-tunings of our instruments, and re-initialisings of our hearts, we enter the slow theme-and-variations movement. How good it is to pay this quintet, to play it, not to work at it - to play for our own joy, with no need to convey anything to anyone outside our ring of recreation, with no expectation of a future stage, of the too-immediate sop of applause. The quintet exists without us yet cannot exist without us. It sings to us, we sing into it, and somehow, through these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines, the man who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed speaks into us across land and water and ten generations, and fills us here with sadness, here with amazed delight.

The theme of his life’s work was his effort to bridge this gap. The way to do it was simply to refuse to see anything in isolation. Everything, as he saw it, existed within a context, outside of which it was unintelligible. Moreover, every problem existed within a context, outside of which it was unsolvable. Agriculture, thus, cannot be understood or its problems solved without respect to context. The same applied even to an individual plant or crop. And this respect for context properly set the standard and determined the methodology of agricultural science: The basis of research was obviously to be investigation directed to the whole existence of a selected crop, namely, “the plant itself in relation to the soil in which it grows, to the conditions of village agriculture under which it is cultivated, and with reference to the economic uses of the product”; in other words research was to be integral, never fragmented. 11 If nothing exists in isolation, then all problems are circumstantial; no problem resides, or can be solved, in anybody’s department. A disease was, thus, a symptom of a larger disorder.

Deanna was up and out of her chair like it was spring-loaded.Thankfully, Lucky had excellent reflexes. It also didn’t hurt that he’d already been anticipating her quick departure, so he was right behind her. As soon as they made it outside, her phone buzzed in her purse. She pulled it out and said, “Shit!” “Everything okay?” he asked. Apparently, she hadn’t realized he was hot on her tail, because she screamed and threw her arms up in the air, sending her phone flying. Thanks to his aforementioned great reflexes, he caught it in midair. Gripping her chest, she asked, wild-eyed, “What are you doing?” “I want to talk to you.” “I don’t want to talk to you,” her response was so fast, it felt like it’d been rehearsed. Maybe it had. Maybe she’d planned on saying that if he ever showed interest in having a conversation with her. Handing her phone back, he ignored her protest and repeated, “Everything okay?” Looking flustered, Deanna replied, “I just… I forgot that Eli is my ride.” “I’ll take you home,” Lucky offered. Pulling her head back, she scoffed. “What? No. Thanks, but no. I’ll walk.” Then she turned on her heel and started hightailing out of the parking lot. In two strides, he was beside her. “What are you doing?” Deanna asked, which was becoming a running theme in their relationship. Lucky smiled. “Walking you home.” “Thanks, but I’m fine. This is Hope Falls.” She dramatically stretched her arms out. “Seriously, I can take care of myself.” “Really?” He continued walking beside her. “Yes, really.” Her feet moved faster. “Like you did back there when you screamed and threw your phone in the air?” Stopping, she spun towards him and crossed her arms. She was mad—or, at the very least, irritated—so he tried not to let the fact that she looked cuter than anything he’d ever seen in his life show on his face. “I didn’t know you were there,” she said in a defiant explanation. He knew that he might just piss her off more, but that didn’t stop him from saying, “Oh, right. And I guess most attackers announce their presence. Give you plenty of time to prepare your retaliation.” Taking a deep breath, she tried to calm down. Or stay mad. He couldn’t really tell, but he was enjoying the show. Between her arms pushing her breasts up so they were spilling over her revealing neckline, and the motion of her chest rising and falling, he could’ve stood there and watched her breathe all night and not get bored. “Look, this is a safe town. I’ve studied self-defense, and I was just distracted.” “Okay,” he agreed. She narrowed her gaze as if she didn’t accept his easy answer. “Okay?” Shrugging casually, he repeated, “Okay.” Nodding, she smoothed her hands over her dress and started walking again. So, naturally, he followed. “You said okay!” she exclaimed indignantly as she once again stopped. “Yes, I did. Just because I agreed with the points you made doesn’t mean I’m going to let you walk home alone.” He grinned, trying to disguise the fact that she was so damn adorable when flustered from irritation.

Because interiority focuses on the inside-outside aspect of hygge, it introduces the important theme of contrast. When we hygger there is a sense of distance between us and the outside world, a contrast between the feeling that we are at the still axis of a moment of pleasure and our awareness of ever-moving life around us. Our experience of contrast is heightened by spatial, temporal and social conditions - inside versus outside, shelter versus exposure, warm versus cold, day versus night, light versus shadow, stillness versus activity, indulgence versus restraint, relaxation versus work, independence versus society, equality versus hierarchy, peace versus conflict.

Labels police individuals and are intended to exert power and control over their behavior and lifestyle. Determining someone to be hetero, female, kinky, or cisgendered is to reduce them to a container, allowing no room for evolution and defining their behaviors as caused by that identity…. Any label creates a border, which causes oppression via privilege and hierarchy. The boundaries of sexual-gender categories (stereotypes) require criteria for belonging, which inherently allows for discrimination and ambivalence… The extension of one’s identity to their entire life is reductionist and oppressive… There is little commonality between the experiences of a white, lower-income, neuroatypical, disabled, forty-something, lesbian, transsexual woman and a multiracial, high-income, thirty-something, able-bodied, neurotypical, heterosexual, cisgendered woman. They may have intersecting points of shared identity or experience, but no common culture, heritage, or social field. The erasure of all the other important and meaningful traits outside of their womanhood reduces them to one common theme. This is both oppressive and naïve. Apply this same issue to “gay,” “man,” or any other identity. There is a severe reduction of many components of the self outside the limits of identity.

The Reformation is one root of the idea of human freedom and autonomy as it is represented in modern democracy. However, while this aspect is always stressed, especially in non-Catholic countries, its other aspect—its emphasis on the wickedness of human nature, it insignificance and powerlessness of the individual, and the necessity for the individual to subordinate himself to a power outside himself—is neglected. This idea of the unworthiness of the individual, his fundamental inability to rely on himself and his need to submit, is also the main theme of Hitler's ideology, which, however, lacks the emphasis on freedom and moral principles which was inherent to Protestantism.

As they got closer, Dave saw that the outside of the walls was surrounded by a huge moat. The train was heading towards a bridge leading across the moat, but as far as Dave could see, there was no hole for the train to pass through. “Is this train just going to crash into those walls?” said Carl, peering out of one of the broken windows. “Which idiot designed this thing?” They sped across the moat, and Dave had a brief glimpse of a deep pit with water at the bottom of it. They were rushing straight towards the quartz walls, and in a few seconds, they would smash into them. “Everyone, brace yourselves!” Dave shouted. They all held on tightly to the seats as the train sped forward, but the crash never happened. Instead, a pair of large quartz doors opened, allowing the train to pass through. The next thing they knew, they were inside the theme park, still speeding along the train track. Dave caught glimpses of rides and shops and buildings as they zoomed forward, going deeper and deeper into the park. “Robot idiot, why isn’t the train stopping?” Carl demanded. “We’re inside the theme park now.” “When you say ‘robot idiot’, are you referring to me?” the friendly voice on the speakers asked. “Yes,” said Carl. “You’re a robot, and you’re an idiot, so I’m calling you a robot idiot.

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.

First we have the tract of Gildas, upon whom the gratitude of the Middle Ages bestowed the title of “the Wise”. The tract was written in approximately A.D. 545, and therefore a hundred years after the curtain fell between Britannia and the Continent. Nearly two hundred years later the Venerable Bede, whose main theme was the history of the English Church, lets fall some precious scraps of information, outside his subject, about the settlement itself. A compilation known as the Historia Britonum contains some documents earlier than Bede. Finally, in the ninth century, and very likely at the direction of King Alfred, various annals preserved in different monasteries were put together as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

It was a beautiful fall day at the soccer fields when I met Stacy for the first time. The game had just begun when she arrived carrying homemade pumpkin spice muffins with cream cheese frosting for everyone, photos of the jack-o’-lantern she had elaborately carved earlier that morning into the shape of a witch stirring a bubbling cauldron with the rising steam spelling out the word “Boo,” enough material and glue for each of the siblings not playing soccer to make adorable “easy no-sew” bat wings as a fun craft to fill their time, as well as little gift bags for every mother full of Halloween-themed wine charms and sleep masks that were embroidered with “Sleeping for a spell.” Besides her generous gifts, she also looked terrific. She was wearing the perfect fall outfit with just the right number of layers and textures and cool boots. Her hair was beautifully twisted into a loose braid casually thrown over one shoulder. While everyone sat in their lawn chair and screamed at their kid to “attack the ball,” Stacy ran up and down the sidelines taking (no doubt fabulous) photos of her son and overseeing the siblings’ craft bonanza. At this point I should also mention, in case you don’t feel bad enough about yourself, that Stacy has a full-time job outside the home. Like a really important one. I’m not sure what she does exactly, but from the thirty seconds that she slowed down long enough to talk to me, I learned that she works fifty hours a week or so and travels around the country every few days and then comes home and makes her kids pancakes in the shape of clovers for breakfast, because it’s International Clover Day or some shit like that.

One theme is an unflinching pioneer optimism. You can do great things. Everyone has this capacity. Every day, you can be better than you were yesterday; and there is nothing that exceeds your grasp if you put your mind to it. This sort of optimism is, of course, a semi-ubiquitous mantra of American life. I love this belief, and I find its profession, by large swathes of the American population, touching and sincere. The only problem is that I'm pretty sure it's not true. Most things lie outside the grasp of most people. And the one unbreakable truth of life is that we get worse.

This is life seen by life. I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has. I want to write to you like someone learning. I deepen the words as if I were painting, more than an object, its shadow. I don’t want to ask why, you can always ask why and always get no answer—could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the great answer for me does exist. And then I shall know how to paint and write, after the strange but intimate answer. Listen to me, listen to the silence. What I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead. It captures the thing that escapes me and yet I live from it and am above a shining darkness. One instant athematic theme unfurls without a plan but geometric like the successive shapes in a kaleidoscope. I slowly enter my gift to myself, splendor ripped open by the final song that seems to be the first. I enter the writing slowly as I once entered painting. It is a world tangled up in creepers, syllables, woodbine, colors and words—threshold of an ancestral cavern that is the womb of the world and from it I shall be born. And if I often paint caves that is because they are my plunge into the earth, dark but haloed with brightness, and I, blood of nature— extravagant and dangerous caves, talisman of the Earth, where stalactites, fossils and rocks come together, and where the animals mad by their own malign nature seek refuge. The caves are my hell. Forever dreaming cave with its fogs, memory or longing? eerie, eerie, esoteric greenish with the slime of time. All is weighted with sleep when I paint a cave or write to you about it—from outside it comes the clatter of dozens of wild horses stamping with dry hoofs the darkness, and from the friction of the hoofs the rejoicing is freed in sparks: here I am, I and the cave, in the very time that will rot us. I want to put into words but without description the existence of the cave that some time ago I painted—and I don’t know how. Only by repeating its sweet horror, cavern of terror and wonders, place of afflicted souls, winter and hell, unpredictable substratum of the evil that is inside an earth that is not fertile. I call the cave by its name and it begins to live with its miasma. I then fear myself who knows how to paint the horror, I, creature of echoing caverns that I am, and I suffocate because I am word and also its echo.

One of John’s major themes is that Jesus is the Savior of the world, not simply the Redeemer of Israel. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1: 29). “For God so loved the world” (John 3: 16). The Samaritans rightly identified Him as “the Savior of the world” (John 4: 42). He gave His life for the world, and He gives life to the world (John 6: 33). He is the Light of the World (John 8: 12). The universal emphasis of John’s gospel is too obvious to miss. Jesus will bring the “other sheep” who are outside the Jewish fold (John 10: 16; and see 11: 51–52) (p. 190).

Even more strikingly, just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L’Ingénu was half Wendat and half French.41 All took up and developed themes and arguments borrowed directly from Kandiaronk, supplemented by lines from other ‘savage critics’ in travellers’ accounts.

You do know scones are not donuts, right?" Nina wasn't one to pass up any baked goods, but a donut was a donut. No scone would do. "This is not your white, British-royals high tea, my friend. This is Highland Park high tea. It opened a month ago, and I think we're about to have our whole world rocked." The Jam's exterior was black-and-white---- if you blinked you'd miss it. But when they went inside Nina immediately spotted a colorful mural of dinosaurs seated on velvet cushions, eating donuts and drinking out of porcelain cups. A pristine glass display case on the opposite wall featured rows and rows of endless donuts--- a happy welcoming committee of frosting and dough. "We'll be having tea for two," Jasmine said at the counter. "And for my donut, could I get the Swirly Rosewater, please?" As soon as she saw the names and flavors of the donuts, she instantly knew two things: one, she was going to love these, and two, Leo would absolutely hate them. Nina suddenly felt sympathy for Leo any time a contestant created a unique flavor pairing on the show. She raced to find the donut her friend had ordered in the case, and landed on a frosted pink cake donut that had a lemon rosewater glaze topped with roasted pistachios. "You live your life in pink, Jas." "No better color. So from what I read online, the deal is that instead of scones, they do vegan donuts---" Nina's eyes narrowed, and Jasmine glared right back. "Don't judge. What are you going to get?" "I need chocolate," Nina said. She scanned the rows in search of the perfect solution. "May I recommend our Chocolate from the Crypt donut?" the saleswoman suggested from behind the display. Her sharp bangs and blunt ponytail bobbed as she explained, "It's our fall-themed donut--- chocolate cake with a chocolate glaze, and it's got a kick from the cayenne pepper and cinnamon we add in." "Oh, my donut," Nina said. In the case was an absolutely gorgeous chocolate confection--- the cayenne and cinnamon flakes on the outside created a black-and-orange effect. "I am sold." "You got it." The saleswoman nodded and rang them up. A narrow hallway covered in murals of cartoon animals drinking tea led them to the official tearoom. Soaring ceilings revealed exposed beams and brick walls, signaling that the building was likely older and newly restored. Modern, barrel-back walnut chairs were clustered around ultrasleek Scandinavian round tables. Nina felt like she'd followed Jasmine down a rabbit hole and emerged into the modern interpretation of the Mad Hatter's tea party. "This is like..." Nina began. "It's a fun aesthetic." "I know, right?" Jasmine replied as they sat down. "It makes me feel like I'm not cool enough to be here, but glad I got invited." Nina picked up the prix fixe high tea menu on the table. The Jam's version of finger sandwiches were crispy "chicken" sliders, potato-hash tacos and mini banh mi, and in lieu of scones, they offered cornbread with raspberry jam and their signature donuts. "And it's all vegan...?" "Yes, my friendly carnivore, and hopefully delicious.

Our daily experience of this world is almost nothing like Plato's world of universal and perfect forms and ideas; it is always filled with huge diversity, and variations on every theme from neutrino light inside of darkness, to male seahorses that bear their young, to the most extraordinary flowers that only open at night for no one to see. Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers, Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep. He ate with outsiders regularly, to the chagrin of the church stalwarts, who always love their version of order over any compassion toward the exceptions. Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of “salvation.” Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not “think” right.

Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits—being from that hated family. (FDR’s cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma constitution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation’s great names. Then he took up the cause of the “forgotten man”—the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hardship and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer. “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy,” he said. Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers,” FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith “in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails. “How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms?

Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists who had stunned the world between 1870 and 1960 by entirely redefining art. VAN GOGH… SEURAT… PICASSO… MUNCH… MATISSE… MAGRITTE… KLIMT… KANDINSKY… JOHNS… HOCKNEY… GAUGUIN… DUCHAMP… DEGAS… CHAGALL… CÉZANNE… CASSATT… BRAQUE… ARP… ALBERS… This section terminated at one last architectural rib, and Langdon moved past it, finding himself in the final section of the library. The volumes here appeared to be dedicated to the group of artists that Edmond, in Langdon’s presence, liked to call “the school of boring dead white guys”—essentially, anything predating the modernist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Edmond, it was here that Langdon felt most at home, surrounded by the Old Masters. VERMEER… VELÁZQUEZ… TITIAN… TINTORETTO… RUBENS… REMBRANDT… RAPHAEL… POUSSIN… MICHELANGELO… LIPPI… GOYA… GIOTTO… GHIRLANDAIO… EL GRECO… DÜRER… DA VINCI… COROT… CARAVAGGIO… BOTTICELLI… BOSCH… The last few feet of the final shelf were dominated by a large glass cabinet, sealed with a heavy lock. Langdon peered through the glass and saw an ancient-looking leather box inside—a protective casing for a massive antique book. The text on the outside of the box was barely legible, but Langdon could see enough to decrypt the title of the volume inside. My God, he thought, now realizing why this book had been locked away from the hands of visitors. It’s probably worth a fortune. Langdon knew there were precious few early editions of this legendary artist’s work in existence. I’m not surprised Edmond invested in this, he thought, recalling that Edmond had once referred to this British artist as “the only premodern with any imagination.” Langdon disagreed, but he could certainly understand Edmond’s special affection for this artist. They are both cut from the same cloth. Langdon crouched down and peered through the glass at the box’s gilded engraving: The Complete Works of William Blake. William Blake, Langdon mused. The Edmond Kirsch of the eighteen hundreds. Blake had been an idiosyncratic genius—a prolific luminary whose painting style was so progressive that some believed he had magically glimpsed the future in his dreams. His symbol-infused religious illustrations depicted angels, demons, Satan, God, mythical creatures, biblical themes, and a pantheon of deities from his own spiritual hallucinations

The neurological disorder of oversensitivity to touch, which Nietzsche posited to account for Jesus' hate of reality, seems far-fetched. As a diagnosis of Jesus, these quotes are not very convincing; yet as an admission of Nietzsche's problems in intimacy, these words are suggestive. In fact, Nietzsche describes himself almost in the same way. The themes of depersonalization and derealization appear in other places too. Zarathustra said, 'To men, I am still the mean between a fool and a corpse' and as was mentioned before 'as my own father I am already dead'. Nietzsche wrote in similar terms about Jesus himself as living outside of reality, which brings up back to the dissociative phenomena in PTSD. Dissociation is the most direct defense against overwhelming traumatic experiences, consisting in symptoms of derealization (feeling as if the world is not real), and depersonalization (feeling as if one self is not real). Experiencing the world and the self from afar, enables victims of abuse, torture, and war, to escape from an unbearable and unavoidable external reality, on the one hand; and the internal distress and arousal, on the other hand. It somehow allows them to continue to live and function. In the follow comment, Nietzsche connected his disassociation, his being 'beyond life', with cryptic reference to his father: 'I regard it as a great privilege to have had such a father: it even seems to me that this exhausts all that I can claim in the matter of privileges-life, the great yea to life, excepted. What I owe to him above all is this, that I do not need any special intention, but merely patience, in order to enter involuntarily into a world of higher and finer things. There I am at home, there alone does my profoundest passion have free play. The fact that I almost paid for this privilege with my life, certainly does not make it a bad bargain. In order to understand even a little of my Zarathustra, perhaps a man must be situated much as I am myself with one foot beyond life.' Mind you, in fact, thanking his father for almost losing or ruining his life! We arrived at a secret again and have only hints that Nietzsche dropped such as 'What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father'.

There was an uneasiness in doing the Blitzstein play, which had deep anti-capitalist themes. It gave a vivid picture of an industrial tyrant, boss of the fictional “Steeltown,” and the fight of Labor against his tyranny. The WPA was already under fire for staging what some people thought were too many labor plays, and there were rumblings in Washington that its funds might be cut. The shoe fell less than three weeks before the June 16, 1937, preview—a sweeping WPA funds cut, followed by a directive prohibiting new openings until the “reorganization” caused by the cuts was implemented. Welles flew to Washington to argue his case. Failing in that, he threatened to open the play himself. The government’s response was severe: as Houseman would recall it in his memoir, on June 15 “a dozen uniformed guards took over the building in force. Project members arriving to sign in found their theater sealed and dark. The Cossacks, as they came to be known, guarded the front of the house and the box office; they hovered in the alley outside the dressing rooms with orders to see that no government property was used or removed.

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

THE FOURTH FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF PRIMORDIAL DIMENSIONAL SPACE: GOD’S THEORY OF RANDOMNESS Primordial dimensional space and Minus Zero may not have always existed. They were random events in the life cycle of the primordial dimension space. Everything that came from them was also random. This was the God’s Theory of Randomness. The God’s Theory of Randomness says that randomness is the main theme of development in the primordial dimension, which is beyond all other dimensions. This randomness often shows up outside the framework of a symbolic order that is not dominant. The God’s Theory of Randomness can explain everything, such as the origin of the universe, the extinction of dinosaurs, the advancement of civilization, the rise and fall of technology, the inequality between the rich and the poor, and the destiny of individuals.

In the Forgotten Books of Eden, an apocryphal book allegedly translated from ancient Egyptian in the nineteenth century, we are told that Satan and his hosts were fallen angels who populated the earth before Adam was brought into being, and Satan used lights, fire, and water in his efforts to rid the planet of this troublesome creature. He even disguised himself as an angel from time to time and appeared as a beautiful young woman in his efforts to lead Adam to his doom. UFO-type lights were one of the Devil’s devices described in the Forgotten Books of Eden. Subtle variations on this same theme can be found in the Bible and in the numerous scriptures of the Oriental cultures. Religious man has always been so enthralled with the main (and probably allegorical) story line that the hidden point has been missed. That point is that the earth was occupied before man arrived or was created. The original occupants or forces were paraphysical and possessed the power of transmogrification. Man was the interloper, and the earth’s original occupants or owners were not very happy over the intrusion. The inevitable conflict arose between physical man and the paraphysical owners of the planet. Man accepted the interpretation that this conflict raged between his creator and the Devil. The religious viewpoint has always been that the Devil has been attacking man (trying to get rid of him) by foisting disasters, wars, and sundry evils upon him. There is historical and modern proof that this may be so. A major, but little-explored, aspect of the UFO phenomenon is therefore theological and philosophical rather than purely scientific. The UFO problem can never be untangled by physicists and scientists unless they are men who have also been schooled in liberal arts, theology, and philosophy. Unfortunately, most scientific disciplines are so demanding that their practitioners have little time or inclination to study complicated subjects outside their own immediate fields of interest. Satan and his demons are part of the folklore of all races, no matter how isolated they have been from one another. The Indians of North America have many legends and stories about a devil-like entity who appeared as a man and was known as the trickster because he pulled off so many vile stunts. Tribes in Africa, South America, and the remote Pacific islands have similar stories.

The pièce de résistance was the aisle and spot where the couple would say their vows. The aisle itself was made of white plexiglass, and above it were draped lush, dimensional bouquets of white flowers with silver and blue accents. At a glance, it looked like fluffy clouds in a blue sky. The planners had managed to rig up other mirrors at angles to reflect the afternoon sky outside of the hangar. It would be like Jacqueline was walking on clouds to meet her groom. My internal wedding planner gave a silent slow clap. Bravo.

The absurdity of many UFO stories and of many religious visions is not a superficial logical mistake. It may be the key to their function. According to Major Murphy, the confusion in the UFO mystery may have been put there deliberately to achieve certain results. One of these results has been to keep scientists away. The other is to create the conditions for a new form of social control, a change in Man’s perception of his place in the universe. Are his theories fantastic? Before we decide, let us review a few other facts. We need to examine more closely the political connections. Paris Flammonde, in his well-documented Age of Flying Saucers, remarked that “a great many of the contactees purvey philosophies which are tinged, if not tainted, with totalitarian overtones.”1 A catalogue of contactee themes, compiled from interviews I have conducted, includes the following. Intellectual abdication. The widespread belief that human beings are incapable of solving their own problems, and that extraterrestrial intervention is imperative to save us “in spite of ourselves.” The danger in such a philosophy is that it makes its believers dependent on outside forces and discourages personal responsibility: why should we worry about the problems around us, if the Gods from Outer Space are about to solve them? Racist philosophy. The pernicious suggestion that some of us on the Earth are of extraterrestrial descent and therefore constitute a “higher race.” The dangers inherent in this belief should be obvious to anybody who hasn’t forgotten the genocides of World War II, executed on the premise that some races were somehow “purer” or better than others. (Let us note in passing that Adamski’s Venusian, the Stranger of the Canigou seen by Bordas, and many other alleged extraterrestrials were all tall Aryan types with long blond hair.) Technical impotence. The statement that the birth of civilization on this planet resulted not from the genius and ability of mankind, but from repeated assistance by higher beings. Archaeologists and anthropologists are constantly aware of the marvelous skill with which the “Ancient Engineers” (to use L. Sprague de Camp’s phrase) developed the tools of civilization on all continents. No appeal to superior powers is necessary to explain the achievements of early culture. The belief expressed by the contactees reveals a tragic lack of trust on their part in human ability. Social utopia. Fantastic economic theories, including the belief that a “world economy” can be created overnight, and that democracy should be abolished in favor of Utopian systems, usually dictatorial in their outlook.

These remarks help us to see that there's more to the Christian understanding of humility than a simple negative definition like "the absence of pride" acknowledges. Humility frees us from excessive self-regard, thereby allowing our attention to turn elsewhere. [C. S. ] Lewis's observation that humble people take a "real interest" in what others say to them points to a major theme of Christian thinking about what humility makes possible: humility opens us up to the world outside our own heads.

Excuse me? Who here had the bright idea of healing a gunshot wound with the bullet still in it?” All eyes turned to another doctor that had stepped into the hallway. Toriel narrowed her eyes. “That was my doing. You must be Doctor Akron. Doctor Ross mentioned you might stop by.” “I'll bet. Listen to me. What you did put that girl's life in danger. You left contaminated shrapnel in an open wound and sealed it up without even trying to sterilize it.” “I... I am not familiar with the details of human medical treatment-” “Exactly! You have no business making those kinds of calls! All you did was make things worse! Even with the X-Rays we had to perform exploratory surgery to find all of those bullet fragm-” Hal Greene suddenly pushed past the queen and stood face to face with Dr. Akron. “Hi there doctor! You sound cranky, you could use some fresh air!” Before anyone could respond, Hal grabbed the doctor's shoulder, knelt down, pulled, and twisted in one seamless movement that left the doctor in a fireman's carry across his shoulders. “What in the- PUT ME DOWN THIS INSTANT!” “I can't put you down here, you silly billy! The fresh air is outside the building! Let's go! DAH NAH NAAAAAH DAH NAH NAHHHH....” Every person in the hallway watched in confusion as Hal carried the angry doctor on his shoulders, running down the hallway, into the lobby, and presumably outside the building. “...WAS THAT THE ROCKY THEME HE WAS TRYING TO SING?” Papyrus scratched his skull in confusion. “Yeah.” Justin shrugged. “Hal loves underdog stories.

Charles Darwin “could be considered a professional outsider,” according to creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton. Darwin was not a university faculty member nor a professional scientist at any institution, but he was networked into the scientific community. For a time, he focused narrowly on barnacles, but got so tired of it that he declared, “I am unwilling to spend more time on the subject,” in the introduction to a barnacle monograph. Like the 3M generalists and polymaths, he got bored sticking in one area, so that was that. For his paradigm-shattering work, Darwin’s broad network was crucial. Howard Gruber, a psychologist who studied Darwin’s journals, wrote that Darwin only personally carried out experiments “opportune for experimental attack by a scientific generalist such as he was.” For everything else, he relied on correspondents, Jayshree Seth style. Darwin always juggled multiple projects, what Gruber called his “network of enterprise.” He had at least 231 scientific pen pals who can be grouped roughly into thirteen broad themes based on his interests, from worms to human sexual selection. He peppered them with questions. He cut up their letters to paste pieces of information in his own notebooks, in which “ideas tumble over each other in a seemingly chaotic fashion.” When his chaotic notebooks became too unwieldy, he tore pages out and filed them by themes of inquiry. Just for his own experiments with seeds, he corresponded with geologists, botanists, ornithologists, and conchologists in France, South Africa, the United States, the Azores, Jamaica, and Norway, not to mention a number of amateur naturalists and some gardeners he happened to know. As Gruber wrote, the activities of a creator “may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany,” but he or she can “map” each activity onto one of the ongoing enterprises. “In some respects,” Gruber concluded, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.

This also points to a theme we’ve not touched on, namely that in Luke’s Gospel Jesus prays, and prays a lot. In 3:21-22, it is while he is praying as he is baptized that the Holy Spirit comes upon him and he hears the voice of his Father saying, “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.” In 5:16, Luke writes, “Jesus would withdraw to deserted places for prayer.” In 6:12, Jesus prays to God “all night long” before choosing his twelve disciples. In Luke 9:18, he prays by himself. In Luke 9:28, he takes Peter, John, and James up on a mountain to pray, and while he prays he is radiantly transformed. In 11:1, as Jesus was praying, his disciples noticed and asked him to teach them to pray, and he taught them to pray the Lord’s Prayer. There are other times Jesus prays, but in Gethsemane, we see Jesus modeling for us the practice of praying when in anguish and filled with anxiety. The prayer doesn’t remove the threat, but it does provide strength for Jesus in the midst of despair.

When the pianists and their parents talked about their first piano teachers, they consistently focused on one theme: the teachers were caring, kind, and patient. The pianists looked forward to piano lessons because their first teachers made music interesting and fun. “The children had very positive experiences with their first lessons. They made contact with another adult, outside their home, who was warm, supportive, and loving,” Bloom’s team explains. The world-class pianists had their initial interest sparked by teachers who were givers. The teachers looked for ways to make piano lessons enjoyable, which served as an early catalyst for the intense practice necessary to develop expertise. “Exploring possibilities and engaging in a wide variety of musical activities took precedence” over factors such as “right or wrong or good or bad.

SELECTIVE SUBJECTIVISM Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations : (1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures have gills. These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it. In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science. An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. “There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them. The ichthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. “Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of ichthyological knowledge, and is not part ot the kingdom of fishes which has been defined as the theme of ichthyological knowledge. In short, what my net can't catch isn’t fish.” Or— to translate the analogy— If you are not simply guessing, you arc claiming a knowledge ot the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unvenfiablc by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah !

You can also check my blog’s archive for a list of every post I have written or use the search function below my picture in the sidebar to find other posts that might be of interest. My Biography I have worked in the book publishing industry my entire career. I began at Word Publishing while a student at Baylor University. I worked at Word for a total of six years. In addition to serving as vice president of marketing at Thomas Nelson in the mid-80s, I also started my own publishing company, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, with my partner Robert Wolgemuth in 1986. Word eventually acquired our company in 1992. I was a successful literary agent from 1992 until early 1998. However, I really missed the world of corporate publishing. As a result, I rejoined Thomas Nelson in 1998. I have worked in a variety of roles in both divisional and corporate management. I was CEO from August 2005 to April 2011, when I was succeeded by Mark Schoenwald. Additionally I am the former chairman of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (2006–2010). I have also written four books, one of which landed on the New York Times best-sellers list, where it stayed for seven months. I am currently working on a new book for Thomas Nelson. It is called Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (May 2012). I have been married to my wife, Gail (follow her on Twitter @GailHyatt), for thirty-three years. We have five daughters, four grandsons, and three granddaughters. We live outside Nashville, Tennessee. In my free time, I enjoy writing, reading, running, and golfing. I am a member of St. Ignatius Orthodox Church in Franklin, Tennessee, where I have served as a deacon for twenty-three years. My Contact Information You can contact me via e-mail or follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Please note: I do not personally review book proposals or recommend specific literary agents. Colophon My blog is built on WordPress 3.1 (self-hosted). My theme is a customized version of Standard Theme, a simple, easy-to-use WordPress theme. Milk Engine did the initial customization. StormyFrog did some additional work. I highly recommend both companies. In terms of design, the body text font is Georgia. The titles and subhead fonts are Trebuchet MS. Captions and a few other random text elements are Arial. Keely Scott took most of my personal photos. Laurel Pankratz also took some. I get most of the photos for my individual

We are forever being told to 'think outside the box'. Fortunately, less excitable creativity researchers have pointed out that it only makes sense to think outside the box if you know that there is a box (and what it's made of). In most cases, it's probably wiser to balance on the edge of the box, only tinkering around the edges and improvising around tried-and-tested themes. The new only makes sense within a horizon of something known. If you know nothing of the past and its traditions, it's impossible to create anything new that is useful.

The professor's voice was amplified with her mike. 'In the nineteenth century... artists were compelled by the idea of the sublime, which was the most elevated expression of the harmony between nature and man. By contemplating nature, a figure like this one on the mountaintop would be inspired with reverence for the majesty of what God created--both humbled by it and also elevated by it because he, as a witness and an observer, had a privileged relation to all of creation--both of it and standing outside it to contemplate it. It was through contemplating nature that one would gain this experience of the sublime, so you tend to find in pictures from this time--' Slide changed. '--this theme repeated: the untamed and overwhelming power and beauty of nature, and the witness to it, somewhere in the painting, a stand-in for the viewer and the painter....

Pericles’ speech is not only a programme. It is also a defence, and perhaps even an attack. It reads, as I have already hinted, like a direct attack on Plato. I do not doubt that it was directed, not only against the arrested tribalism of Sparta, but also against the totalitarian ring or ‘link’ at home; against the movement for the paternal state, the Athenian ‘Society of the Friends of Laconia’ (as Th. Gomperz called them in 190232). The speech is the earliest33 and at the same time perhaps the strongest statement ever made in opposition to this kind of movement. Its importance was felt by Plato, who caricatured Pericles’ oration half a century later in the passages of the Republic34 in which he attacks democracy, as well as in that undisguised parody, the dialogue called Menexenus or the Funeral Oration35. But the Friends of Laconia whom Pericles attacked retaliated long before Plato. Only five or six years after Pericles’ oration, a pamphlet on the Constitution of Athens36 was published by an unknown author (possibly Critias), now usually called the ‘Old Oligarch’. This ingenious pamphlet, the oldest extant treatise on political theory, is, at the same time, perhaps the oldest monument of the desertion of mankind by its intellectual leaders. It is a ruthless attack upon Athens, written no doubt by one of her best brains. Its central idea, an idea which became an article of faith with Thucydides and Plato, is the close connection between naval imperialism and democracy. And it tries to show that there can be no compromise in a conflict between two worlds37, the worlds of democracy and of oligarchy; that only the use of ruthless violence, of total measures, including the intervention of allies from outside (the Spartans), can put an end to the unholy rule of freedom. This remarkable pamphlet was to become the first of a practically infinite sequence of works on political philosophy which were to repeat more or less, openly or covertly, the same theme down to our own day. Unwilling and unable to help mankind along their difficult path into an unknown future which they have to create for themselves, some of the ‘educated’ tried to make them turn back into the past. Incapable of leading a new way, they could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom. It became the more necessary for them to assert their superiority by fighting against equality as they were (using Socratic language) misanthropists and misologists—incapable of that simple and ordinary generosity which inspires faith in men, and faith in human reason and freedom. Harsh as this judgement may sound, it is just, I fear, if it is applied to those intellectual leaders of the revolt against freedom who came after the Great Generation, and especially after Socrates. We can now try to see them against the background of our historical interpretation.

In An Enemy of the People, speaking the language of comic exaggeration through the mouth of his spokesman, the idealist Doctor Thomas Stockmann, Ibsen puts into very literal terms the theme of the play: It is true that ideas grow stale and platitudinous, but one may go one step further and say flatly that truths die. According to Stockmann, there are no absolute principles of either wisdom or morality. In this Ibsen is referring indirectly to the reception of his previous plays. For example, the commandment "honor thy father and thy mother" referred to in Ghosts is not simply either true or false. It may have been a truth once and a falsehood today. As Stockmann states in his excited harangue to his political enemies: Truths are by no means the wiry Methuselahs some people think them. A normally constituted truth lives — let us say — as a rule, seventeen or eighteen years; at the outside twenty; very seldom more. And truths so patriarchal as that are always shockingly emaciated.

As seemed to be the theme of his days recently, Danny was questioning his reality, questioning his dreams, questioning his mind, questioning what was real, what was imagined, and then questioning why. “It’s as real as you want it to be, Danny,” barked that voice again that definitely wasn’t his. He was feeling displaced, like an outsider, as though he were simply doing a pale impersonation of himself. And not even a good impersonation either, with steps too long, breaths too quick, smile too wide, blinks too slow. Get a hold of yourself, idiot. So he searched the room, searched his world, interrogating the shadows, prodding the corners, acknowledging the spaces, seeking for something to ground himself.

I try to imagine Zach as a teenager. I remember my mom dealing with me as a teenager and finding me as alien as I might one day find Zach. It seems not that long ago that he was in preschool, and my parents were healthy, and I was healthy, and the neighborhood kids all ran outside to play every evening after dinner, and the only thought I had about the future at all was the sense of Things will be easier, I’ll have more flexibility, more sleep. I never thought about what would be lost. Who knew that a phone call with my mother could bring all this to the surface—that underneath the old mother-daughter frustration was not a wish for her to go away but a longing for her to stay forever? I think of something else Wendell once said: “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” It was a paraphrase of something he’d read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person’s struggles. The day before he said this, I had been told by my eye doctor that I had developed presbyopia, which happens to most people in their forties. As people age, they become farsighted; they have to hold whatever they’re reading or looking at farther away in order to see it clearly. But maybe an emotional presbyopia happens around this age too, where people pull back to see the bigger picture: how scared they are to lose what they have, even if they still complain about it.