Tracking One Line Quotes

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.

The Audi tires squealed as the vehicle tracked the same path. Jake hammered down the avenue, hunting for a getaway. Traffic thickened at the juncture ahead. A green light flickered into amber. He ramped up over the limit, punching over the white lines on a red signal. Tires screeched and a horn beeped. The needle sat on one hundred kilometers per hour. He fishtailed at a laneway. The GPS showed a right angle, car slid into a slot in an overhang. Jake got out and crept toward the opening, hugged the brick wall. He pulled the SIG and flicked off the safety. The Audi braked at the mouth. Door slammed. A shadow fell over the concrete. The swish of clothing indicated a possible weapon draw.

The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.

A floorboard cracked; knuckles tapped once on the open door. Adam looked up to see Niall Lynch standing in the doorway. No, it was Ronan, face lit bright on one side, in stark shadow on the other, looking powerful and at ease with his thumbs tucked in the pockets of his jeans, leather bracelets looped over his wrist, feet bare. He wordlessly crossed the floor and sat beside Adam on the mattress. When he held out his hand, Adam put the model into it. “This old thing,” Ronan said. He turned the front tyre, and again the music played out of it. They sat like that for a few minutes, as Ronan examined the car and turned each wheel to play a different tune. Adam watched how intently Ronan studied the seams, his eyelashes low over his light eyes. Ronan let out a breath, put the model down on the bed beside him, and kissed Adam. Once, when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the scraggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy gray sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain travelling across the vast dry field towards him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him. That was this kiss. They kissed again. Adam felt it in more than his lips. Ronan sat back, his eyes closed, swallowing. Adam watched his chest rise and fall, his eyebrows furrow. He felt as bright and dreamy and imaginary as the light through the window. He did not understand anything. It was a long moment before Ronan opened his eyes, and when he did, his expression was complicated. He stood up. He was still looking at Adam, and Adam was looking back, but neither said anything. Probably Ronan wanted something from him, but Adam didn’t know what to say. He was a magician, Persephone had said, and his magic was making connections between disparate things. Only now he was too full of white, fuzzy light to make any sort of logical connections. He knew that of all the options in the world, Ronan Lynch was the most difficult version of any of them. He knew that Ronan was not a thing to be experimented with. He knew his mouth still felt warm. He knew he had started his entire time at Aglionby certain that all he wanted to do was get as far away from this state and everything in it as possible. He was pretty sure he had just been Ronan’s first kiss. “I’m gonna go downstairs,” Ronan said.

See how they love one another.” Not a bad gauge of health. “There was no needy person among them.” A better metric would be hard to find. There is one line that stopped me in my tracks: “And awe came upon everyone.” It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as to my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cotton ball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified. A few quick cuts and cunt becomes can't, cock turns into back, clit transforms to a very unlikely cat, the l and i turned into a teetering capital A. The last words I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body. Up on my shoulder, panty calling down to cherry on the inside of my right ankle. On the underside of a big toe, sew uttering muffled threats to baby, just under my left breast. I can quiet them down by thinking of vanish, always hushed and regal, lording over the other words from the safety of the nape of my neck. Also: At the center of my back, which was too difficult to reach, is a circle of perfect skin the size of a fist. Over the years I've made my own private jokes. You can really read me. Do you want me to spell it out for you? I've certainly given myself a life sentence. Funny, right? I can't stand to look myself without being completely covered. Someday I may visit a surgeon, see what can be done to smooth me, but now I couldn't bear the reaction. Instead I drink so I don't think too much about what I've done to my body and so I don't do any more. Yet most of the time that I'm awake, I want to cut. Not small words either. Equivocate. Inarticulate. Duplicitous. At my hospital back in Illinois they would not approve of this craving. For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured. But I was out of places to write, slicing myself between my toes - bad, cry - like a junkie looking for one last vein. Vanish did it for me. I'd saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in.

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out “how long?” to Time; million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my expected lifetime. It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

At one stopover on the train journey home, Hans told his sister Inge later, he saw a young girl with the Star of David on her breast; she was repairing tracks on the line, along with other people with yellow badges on their clothes. Her face was pallid, sunken in; her eyes, beyond grief and terror. Impulsively, Hans thrust his rations in her hand. She looked up at him, then at his uniform. She threw the packet of food to the ground. He scooped it up, wiped off the dust, and picked a daisy growing by the side of the tracks. He placed the package, with the daisy on top, at her feet. He said, "I would have liked to give you a little pleasure." He boarded the train. When he looked back, the girl was standing there, watching the train disappear, the flower in her hair.

Varium et mutabile! murmurs the man sagely - "A woman's privilege is to change her mind!" If the nature of his industry were such that he had to change his mind from cooking to cleaning, from cleaning to sewing, from sewing to nursing, from nursing to teaching, and so, backward, forward, crosswise and over again, from morning to night - he too would become adept in the lightning-change act. The man adopts one business and follows it. He develops special ability, on long lines, in connection with wide interests - and so grows broader and steadier. The distinction is there, but it is not a distinction of sex. This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He is used to one consecutive train of thought and action. She, used to a varying zigzag horde of little things, can readily accommodate a few more.

We all live in an unwalled city, that was it. I saw lines scored across the map of Ireland; carved all over the globe. Train tracks, roads, shipping channels, a web of human traffic that connected all nations into one great suffering body.

And the numerous delays due to vandalism on the tracks or leaves on the line or sun on the line or a body under a train How very inconsiderate, not to her To choose to throw yourself in front of a mechanical iron beast weighing thousands of tons and racing at a top speed of one hundred and forty miles per hour? To choose such a brutal and dramatic finale Carole knows what drives people to such despair, knows what it’s like to appear normal but to feel herself swaying Just one leap away From The amassed crowds on the platforms who carry enough hope in their hearts to stay alive Swaying Just one leap away from Eternal Peace

Shirt off.” Neil stared at her. “Why?” “I can’t check track marks through cotton, Neil.” “I don’t do drugs.” “Good on you,” Abby said. “Keep it that way. Now take it off.” […] “I want to make this as painless as possible, but I can’t help you if you can’t help me. Tell me why you won’t take off your shirt.” Neil looked for a delicate way to say it. The best he managed was, “I’m not okay.” She put a finger to his chin and turned his face back toward her. “Neil, I work for the Foxes. None of you are okay. Chances are I’ve seen a lot worse than whatever it is you’re trying to hide from me.” Neil’s smile was humorless. “I hope not. “Trust me,” Abby said. “I’m not going to judge you. I’m here to help, remember? I’m your nurse now. That door is closed, and it comes with a lock. What happens in here stays in here.” […] “You can’t ask me about them,” he said at last. “I won’t talk to you about it. Okay?” “Okay,” Abby agreed easily. “But know that when you want to, I’m here, and so is Betsy.” Neil wasn’t going to tell that psychiatrist a thing, but he nodded. Abby dropped her hand and Neil pulled his shirt over his head before he could lose his nerve. Abby thought she was ready. Neil knew she wouldn’t be, and he was right. Her mouth parted on a silent breath and her expression went blank. She wasn’t fast enough to hide her flinch, and Neil saw her shoulders go rigid with tension. He stared at her face as she stared at him, watching her gaze sweep over the brutal marks of a hideous childhood. It started at the base of his throat, a looping scar curving down over his collarbone. A pucker with jagged edges was a finger-width away, courtesy of a bullet that hit him right on the edge of his Kevlar vest. A shapeless patch of pale skin from his left shoulder to his navel marked where he’d jumped out of a moving car and torn himself raw on the asphalt. Faded scars crisscrossed here and there from his life on the run, either from stupid accidents, desperate escapes, or conflicts with local lowlifes. Along his abdomen were larger overlapping lines from confrontations with his father’s people while on the run. His father wasn’t called the butcher for nothing; his weapon of choice was a cleaver. All of his men were well-versed in knife-fighting, and more than one of them had tried to stick Neil like a pig. And there on his right shoulder was the perfect outline of half a hot iron. Neil didn’t remember what he’s said or done to irritate his father so much.

Making these choices [to attend school instead of skipping], as it turned out, wasn't about willpower. I always admired people who “willed” themselves to do something, because I have never felt I was one of them. If sheer will were enough by itself, it would have been enough a long time ago, back on University Avenue, I figured. It wasn't, not for me anyway. Instead, I needed something to motivate me. I needed a few things that I could think about in my moments of weakness that would cause me to throw off the blanket and walk through the front door. More than will, I needed something to inspire me. One thing that helped was a picture I kept in mind, this image that I used over and over whenever I was faced with these daily choices. I pictured a runner running on a racetrack. The image was set in the summertime and the racetrack was a reddish orange, divided in white racing stripes to flag the runners’ columns. Only, the runner in my mental image did not run alongside others; she ran solo, with no one watching her. And she did not run a free and clear track, she ran one that required her to jump numerous hurdles, which made her break into a heavy sweat under the sun. I used this image every time I thought of things that frustrated me: the heavy books, my crazy sleep schedule, the question of where I would sleep and what I would eat. To overcome these issues I pictured my runner bolting down the track, jumping hurdles toward the finish line. Hunger, hurdle. Finding sleep, hurdle, schoolwork, hurdle. If I closed my eyes I could see the runner’s back, the movement of her sinewy muscles, glistening with sweat, bounding over the hurdles, one by one. On mornings when I did not want to get out of bed, I saw another hurdle to leap over. This way, obstacles became a natural part of the course, an indication that I was right where I needed to be, running the track, which was entirely different from letting obstacles make me believe I was off it. On a racing track, why wouldn't there be hurdles? With this picture in mind—using the hurdles to leap forward toward my diploma—I shrugged the blanket off, went through the door, and got myself to school.

Think of it, half the race is over, and I still stand here at the starting line—me, the first one out of his swaddling clothes and into his track suit! a hundred and fifty-eight points of I.Q., and still arguing with the authorities about the rules and regulations! disputing the course to be run! calling into question the legitimacy of the track commission!

There is a fine line between any contradictory matters. When our souls fail to spot it before our minds, we lose track of both reality and vision in which lead to a one way ticket for an unknown path

Consider the genesis of a single-celled embryo produced by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The genetic material of this embryo comes from two sources: paternal genes (from sperm) and maternal genes (from eggs). But the cellular material of the embryo comes exclusively from the egg; the sperm is no more than a glorified delivery vehicle for male DNA—a genome equipped with a hyperactive tail. Aside from proteins, ribosomes, nutrients, and membranes, the egg also supplies the embryo with specialized structures called mitochondria. These mitochondria are the energy-producing factories of the cell; they are so anatomically discrete and so specialized in their function that cell biologists call them “organelles”—i.e., mini-organs resident within cells. Mitochondria, recall, carry a small, independent genome that resides within the mitochondrion itself—not in the cell’s nucleus, where the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (and the 21,000-odd human genes) can be found. The exclusively female origin of all the mitochondria in an embryo has an important consequence. All humans—male or female—must have inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, who inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, and so forth, in an unbroken line of female ancestry stretching indefinitely into the past. (A woman also carries the mitochondrial genomes of all her future descendants in her cells; ironically, if there is such a thing as a “homunculus,” then it is exclusively female in origin—technically, a “femunculus”?) Now imagine an ancient tribe of two hundred women, each of whom bears one child. If the child happens to be a daughter, the woman dutifully passes her mitochondria to the next generation, and, through her daughter’s daughter, to a third generation. But if she has only a son and no daughter, the woman’s mitochondrial lineage wanders into a genetic blind alley and becomes extinct (since sperm do not pass their mitochondria to the embryo, sons cannot pass their mitochondrial genomes to their children). Over the course of the tribe’s evolution, tens of thousands of such mitochondrial lineages will land on lineal dead ends by chance, and be snuffed out. And here is the crux: if the founding population of a species is small enough, and if enough time has passed, the number of surviving maternal lineages will keep shrinking, and shrinking further, until only a few are left. If half of the two hundred women in our tribe have sons, and only sons, then one hundred mitochondrial lineages will dash against the glass pane of male-only heredity and vanish in the next generation. Another half will dead-end into male children in the second generation, and so forth. By the end of several generations, all the descendants of the tribe, male or female, might track their mitochondrial ancestry to just a few women. For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name—Mitochondrial Eve.

The answer to that question is…I won’t. You belong with me. Which leads me to the discussion I wanted to have with you.” “Where I belong is for me to decide, and though I may listen to what you have to say, that doesn’t mean I will agree with you.” “Fair enough.” Ren pushed his empty plate to the side. “We have some unfinished business to take care of.” “If you mean the other tasks we have to do, I’m already aware of that.” “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about us.” “What about us?” I put my hands under the table and wiped my clammy palms on my napkin. “I think there are a few things we’ve left unsaid, and I think it’s time we said them.” “I’m not withholding anything from you, if that’s what you mean.” “You are.” “No. I’m not.” “Are you refusing to acknowledge what has happened between us?” “I’m not refusing anything. Don’t try to put words in my mouth.” “I’m not. I’m simply trying to convince a stubborn woman to admit that she has feelings for me.” “If I did have feelings for you, you’d be the first one to know.” “Are you saying that you don’t feel anything for me?” “That’s not what I’m saying.” “Then what are you saying?” “I’m saying…nothing!” I spluttered. Ren smiled and narrowed his eyes at me. If he kept up this line of questioning, he was bound to catch me in a lie. I’m not a very good liar. He sat back in his chair. “Fine. I’ll let you off the hook for now, but we will talk about this later. Tigers are relentless once they set their minds to something. You don’t be able to evade me forever.” Casually, I replied, “Don’t get your hopes up, Mr. Wonderful. Every hero has his Kryptonite, and you don’t intimidate me.” I twisted my napkin in my lap while he tracked my every move with his probing eyes. I felt stripped down, as if he could see into the very heart of me. When the waitress came back, Ren smiled at her as she offered a smaller menu, probably featuring desserts. She leaned over him while I tapped my strappy shoe in frustration. He listened attentively to her. Then, the two of them laughed again. He spoke quietly, gesturing to me, and she looked my way, giggled, and then cleared all the plates quickly. He pulled out a wallet and handed her a credit card. She put her hand on his arm to ask him another question, and I couldn’t help myself. I kicked him under the table. He didn’t even blink or look at me. He just reached his arm across the table, took my hand in his, and rubbed the back of it absentmindedly with his thumb as he answered her question. It was like my kick was a love tap to him. It only made him happier. When she left, I narrowed my eyes at him and asked, “How did you get that card, and what were you saying to her about me?” “Mr. Kadam gave me the card, and I told her that we would be having our dessert…later.” I laughed facetiously. “You mean you will be having dessert later by yourself this evening because I am done eating with you.” He leaned across the candlelit table and said, “Who said anything about eating, Kelsey?” He must be joking! But he looked completely serious. Great! There go the nervous butterflies again. “Stop looking at me like that.” “Like what?” “Like you’re hunting me. I’m not an antelope.” He laughed. “Ah, but the chase would be exquisite, and you would be a most succulent catch.” “Stop it.” “Am I making you nervous?” “You could say that.” I stood up abruptly as he was signing the receipt and made my way toward the door. He was next to me in an instant. He leaned over. “I’m not letting you escape, remember? Now, behave like a good date and let me walk you home. It’s the least you could do since you wouldn’t talk with me.

About a third of the way through the course, one of the runners fell. The crowd gasped. But, amazingly, with utter spontaneity, the rest of the runners stopped in their tracks. They stopped and looked back at the one who had fallen. One by one they turned around and slowly made their way back to help the fallen runner. They pulled him to his feet and the race continued with everyone running arm in arm to the finish line. They all finished the race together. All of those runners could see themselves in the one who fell.

Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original, since he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny, but the John Donne paper must have been the worst of all the bad papers he ever wrote (ironic, given that it was the only thing he ever wrote that saw print. After he disappeared, a journalist asked for an excerpt from the missing young scholar's work and Marion gave him a copy of it, a laboriously edited paragraph of which eventually found its way into People magazine). Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. We never understood how this fatal connection had established itself: Henry blamed it on Men of Thought and Deed, but no one knew for sure. A week or two before the paper was due, he had started showing up in my room about two or three in the morning, looking as if he had just narrowly escaped some natural disaster, his tie askew and his eyes wild and rolling. 'Hello, hello,' he would say, stepping in, running both hands through his disordered hair. 'Hope I didn't wake you, don't mind if I cut on the lights, do you, ah, here we go, yes, yes…' He would turn on the lights and then pace back and forth for a while without taking off his coat, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. Finally he would stop dead in his tracks and say, with a desperate look in his eye: 'Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism.' 'I'm sorry. I don't know what that is.' 'I don't either,' Bunny would say brokenly. 'Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.' He would resume pacing. 'Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it.' 'Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word.' 'Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.' 'Is it in the dictionary?' 'Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean' – he made a picture frame with his hands – 'the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?' And so it would go, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. 'This is a nice paper, Bun -,' Charles said cautiously. 'Thanks, thanks.' 'But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?' 'Oh, Donne,' Bunny had said scoffingly. 'I don't want to drag him into this.' Henry refused to read it. 'I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really,' he said, glancing over the first page. 'Say, what's wrong with this type?' 'Triple-spaced it,' said Bunny proudly. 'These lines are about an inch apart.' 'Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?' Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. 'Looks kind of like a menu,' he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence 'And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.' We wondered if he would fail.

Patricia didn’t look back. She heard Tommington yelling for a long time, until they crossed a big line of trees. They got lost twice more, and at one point Dirrp began weeping into his good wing, before they stumbled across the track that led to the secret Tree. And from there, it was just a steep backbreaking climb, up a slope studded with hidden roots.

The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, ‘each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints'. Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. Thus the world was covered by ‘Dreaming-tracks’ that ‘lay over the land as “ways” of communication’, each track having its corresponding Song.... To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.

The Matterhorn has two different tracks and which one you ride is determined by which of the two lines you choose ti wait in. Seasoned park-goers know that the right line (next to Alice in Wonderland in Fantasyland) puts you on the slower track, where the ride lasts 30 seconds longer, while the left line (towards Tomorrowland) feeds into the faster track, which has one unexpected drop and tighter turns.

Quinn.” The voice on the other end of the line let out a melodramatic groan. “You are one tough person to track down.” My body went from hot to cold in a blink. Andy. He’d found me. He’d called. A month too late. I scowled into the flowery wallpaper. “And how did you get this number?” “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that my dad is the president?” Funny. “Why are you calling me?” “Because I’m finally allowed to.

There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut. There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness. The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine. On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy. Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair. The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?

My job is never boring," Staples said. "There's nuts-and-bolts stuff like getting the tarpaulin over the shaft when it rains, and so in. Cataloging and reshelving. The shelves are in a shocking state. And when you've got everything ever written or lost to keep track of, it's quite a job. And there's fetching books. "I used to really look forward to requests for books way down in the abyss. We'd all rope up, follow our lines down for miles. The order falls apart a way down but you learn to sniff out class-marks. Sometimes we'd be gone for weeks, fetching volumes.' She spoke with a faraway voice. "There are risks. Hunters, animals, and accidents. Ropes that snap. Sometimes someone gets separated. Twenty years ago, I was in a group looking for a book someone had requested. I remember, it was called 'Oh, All Right Then': Bartleby Returns. We were led by Ptolemy Yes. He was the man taught me. Best librarian there's ever been, some say. "Anyway, after weeks of searching, we ran out of food and had to turn back. No one likes it when we fail, so none of us were feeling great. "We felt that much worse when we realized that we'd lost Ptolemy. "Some people say he went off deliberately. That he couldn't bear not to find the book. That he's out there still in the Wordhoard Abyss, living off shelf-monkeys, looking. And that he'll be back one day, book in his hand.

Trust metrics over intuition. You should have a way to measure every project. Quality is a complex system, the sort of place where your intuition can easily deceive you. Similarly, as you become more senior at your company, your experience will no longer reflect most other folks’ experiences. You already know about the rough edges, and you’ll be the first person in line to get help if you find a new one, but most other folks don’t. Metrics keep you honest.

Do you want to know my favorite?” My grip tightened on the railing. In. Out. “Andromeda.” Allister moved closer. “An autumn constellation, forty-four light-years away.” His steps were smooth and indifferent, but his voice was dry, as though he found my panic attack positively boring. His attitude brought a small rush of annoyance in, but it was suddenly swayed as my lungs contracted and wouldn’t release. I couldn’t keep a strangled gasp from escaping. “Look up.” It was an order, carrying a harsh edge. With no fight in me, I complied and tilted my head. Tears blurred my vision. Stars swam together and sparkled like diamonds. I was glad they weren’t. Humans would find a way to pluck them from the sky. “Andromeda is the dim, fuzzy star to the right. Find it.” My eyes searched it out. The stars weren’t often easy to see, hidden behind smog and the glow of city lights, but sometimes, on a lucky night like tonight, pollution cleared and they became visible. I found the star and focused on it. “Do you know her story?” he asked, his voice close behind me. A cold wind touched my cheeks, and I inhaled slowly. “Answer me.” “No,” I gritted. “Andromeda was boasted to be one of the most beautiful goddesses.” He moved closer, so close his jacket brushed my bare arm. His hands were in his pockets and his gaze was on the sky. “She was sacrificed for her beauty, tied to a rock by the sea.” I imagined her, a red-haired goddess with a heart of steel chained to a rock. The question bubbled up from the depths of me. “Did she survive?” His gaze fell to me. Down the tear tracks to the blood on my bottom lip. His eyes darkened, his jaw tightened, and he looked away. “She did.” I found the star again. Andromeda. “Ask me what her name means.” It was another rough demand, and I had the urge to refuse. To tell him to stop bossing me around. However, I wanted to know—I suddenly needed to. But he was already walking away, toward the exit. “Wait,” I breathed, turning to him. “What does her name mean?” He opened the door and a sliver of light poured onto the terrace. Black suit. Broad shoulders. Straight lines. His head turned just enough to meet my gaze. Blue. “It means ruler of men.” An icy breeze almost swallowed his words before they reached me, whipping my hair at my cheeks. And then he was gone.

Expanding further on his own observations of Prince’s writing style(s) during the course of the album’s recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of ‘Electric Chair’ among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that “he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn’t really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious—it’s like something you’d do if you had no access to any equipment. He’d use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he’d record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song—and most likely, he’d have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he’d do his one man band approach to recording a song. He’d know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the ‘click track’—the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo—he’d then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He’d build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there’s your demo.

He learns that the form, in its current form, was originally called a formulary, and was invented by an Englishman named Charles Babbage, the same man who invented both an early kind of computer and the cow catcher, a device attached to the front of locomotives to clear debris from train tracks. He learns that Babbage once wrote to Alfred Tennyson to correct two lines from one of Tennyson's poems, which Babbage felt lacked scientific accuracy. This, thinks Jonas, tells you everything you need to know about both the man and the invention of forms.

When it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it’s fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it’s easy to lose track of what the issue actually is. A moral compass can convince you that all the answers are obvious (even when they’re not); that there is a bright line between right and wrong (when often there isn’t); and, worst, that you are certain you already know everything you need to know about a subject so you stop trying to learn more.

Footsteps from the stairwell startle him out of the past. He turns around as Emma's mother takes the last step into the dining area, Emma right behind her. Mrs. McIntosh glides over and puts her arm around him. The smile on her face is genuine, but Emma's smile is more like a straight line. And she's blushing. "Galen, it's very nice to meet you," she says, ushering him into the kitchen. "Emma tells me you're taking her to the beach behind your house today. To swim?" "Yes, ma'am." Her transformation makes him wary. She smiles. "Well, good luck with getting her in the water. Since I'm a little pressed for time, I can't follow you over there, so I just need to see your driver's license while Emma runs outside to get your plate number." Emma rolls her eyes as she shuffles through a drawer and pulls out a pen and paper. She slams the door behind her when she leaves, which shakes the dishes on the wall. Galen nods, pulls out his wallet, and hands over the fake license. Mrs. McIntosh studies it and rummages through her purse until she produces a pen-which she uses to write on her hand. “Just need your license number in case we ever have any problems. But we’re not going to have any problems, are we, Galen? Because you’ll always have my daughter-my only daughter-home on time, isn’t that right?” He nods, then swallows. She holds out his license. When he accepts it, she grabs his wrist, pulling him close. She glances at the garage door and back to him. “Tell me right now, Galen Forza. Are you or are you not dating my daughter?” Great. She still doesn’t believe Emma. If she won’t believe them anyway, why keep trying to convince her? If she thinks they’re dating, the time he intends to spend with Emma will seem normal. But if they spend time together and tell her they’re not dating, she’ll be nothing but suspicious. Possibly even spy on them-which is less than ideal. So, dating Emma is the only way to make sure she mates with Grom. Things just get better and better. “Yes,” he says. “We’re definitely dating.” She narrows her eyes. “Why would she tell me you’re not?” He shrugs. “Maybe she’s ashamed of me.” To his surprise, she chuckles. “I seriously doubt that, Galen Forza.” Her humor is short lived. She grabs a fistful of his T-shirt. “Are you sleeping with her?” Sleeping…Didn’t Rachel say sleeping and mating are the same thing? Dating and mating are similar. But sleeping and mating are the same exact same. He shakes his head. “No, ma’am.” She raises a no-nonsense brow. “Why not? What’s wrong with my daughter?” That is unexpected. He suspects this woman can sense a lie like Toraf can track Rayna. All she’s looking for is honesty, but the real truth would just get him arrested. I’m crazy about your daughter-I’m just saving her for my brother. So he seasons his answer with the frankness she seems to crave. “There’s nothing wrong with your daughter, Mrs. McIntosh. I said we’re not sleeping together. I didn’t say I didn’t want to.” She inhales sharply and releases him. Clearing her throat, she smoothes out his wrinkled shirt with her hand, then pats his chest. “Good answer, Galen. Good answer.” Emma flings open the garage door and stops short. “Mom, what are you doing?” Mrs. McIntosh steps away and stalks to the counter. “Galen and I were just chitchatting. What took you so long?” Galen guesses her ability to sense a lie probably has something to do with her ability to tell one. Emma shoots him a quizzical look, but he returns a casual shrug. Her mother grabs a set of keys from a hook by the refrigerator and nudges her daughter out of the way, but not before snatching the paper out of her hand.

For all their shared boundaries, the experiences of fiction and nonfiction are fundamentally different. In the traditional short story or novel, a fictive space is opened up that allows you the reader to disappear into the action, even to the point of forgetting you are reading. In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you’re always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out. This is certainly true for the essay, but it is also true, I think, for classic nonfiction in general, be it Thucydides or Pascal or Carlyle, which follows an organizing principle that can be summarized as “tracking the consciousness of the author.” What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself. The other element that keeps me reading nonfiction happily is an evolved, entertaining, elegant, or at least highly intentional literary style. The pressure of style should be brought to bear on every passage. “Consciousness plus style equals good nonfiction” is one way of stating the formula.

Humans like to consider everything as linear, when in reality everything is cyclic. They are obsessed with straight lines. Straight roads, straight houses, straight pieces of steel, glass, and timber. Straight cut diamonds. Let’s get straight to the point. Be straight with me. I am straight, not gay. And this is how they see their lives. A linear journey, along the road of life. That is where expressions such as Highway to Hell come from. But what about other expressions, such as the life cycle, the cycle of nature, and the weather cycle? Because of this obsession with straight lines, they view history and historical events, as existing way back along an imaginary path, one they are sure they are far away from. Like watching a fading wake from a ship. So when they look at the religious wars, for example, the Christians versus the Muslims, the rise and fall of Empires, democracies and dictatorships, they seem blind when comparing present day situations with those of the past. The majority of humans see evolution as a race along a straight race track, a race they are winning by a long margin, yet they are afraid to ever slow down, in case other life catches them. If they did slow down long enough, they may observe that the track is actually cyclic.

The Jewish doctors and lawyers and the successful merchants who owned big stores downtown lived in one-family houses on streets branching off the eastern slope of the Chancellor Avenue hill, closer to grassy, wooded Weequahic Park, a landscaped three hundred acres whose boating lake, golf course, and harness-racing track separated the Weequahic section from the industrial plants and shipping terminals lining Route 27 and the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct east of that and the burgeoning airport east of that and the very edge of America east of that—the depots and docks of Newark Bay, where they unloaded cargo from around the world.

How boundless is the horoscope of spring! One can read it in a thousand different ways, interpret it blindly, spell it out at will, happy to be able to decipher anything at all amid the misleading divinations of birds. The text can be read forward or backward, lose its sense and find it again in many versions, in a thousand alternatives. Because the text of spring is marked by hints, ellipses, lines dotted on an empty azure, and because the gaps between the syllables are filled by the frivolous guesses and surmises of birds, my story, like that text, will follow many different tracks and will be punctuated by springlike dashes, sighs, and dots.

Do I get to come in?” he asked. She shrugged and stood aside. “I’m just packing.” “Moving again?” he asked with faint sarcasm. “You used to be easier to keep track of.” “Because I was living in a nest of spies!” she threw at him, having only recently gleaned that bit of information from Colby. “You got me an apartment surrounded by government agents!” “It was the safest place for you,” he said simply. “Someone was always watching you when I couldn’t.” “I didn’t need watching!” “You did,” he returned, perching on the arm of her big easy chair to stare at her intently. “You never realized it, but you were a constant target for anyone who had a grudge against me. In the end, it was why I gave up government work and got a job in the private sector.” He folded his arms over his broad chest, watching surprise claim her features. “There was a communist agent with a high-powered rifle one day, and a South American gentlemen with an automatic pistol the following week. You were never told about them. But you had two close calls. If you hadn’t been living in a ‘nest of spies,’ I’d have buried you. Funerals are expensive,” he added with a cold smile. She stared at him blankly. “Why didn’t you just send me back to South Dakota?” she asked. “To your stepfather?” he drawled. That was still a sore spot with her, and she was certain that he knew it. But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of arguing. He seemed to be spoiling for a fight. She turned away to the kitchen. “Want a cup of coffee?” He got up and took her by the shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a low blow.” “Another in a long line of them lately,” she said without meeting his eyes. “I seem to do nothing except rub you the wrong way.” “And you don’t know why?” he asked curtly, letting her go. She moved one shoulder as she went about the business of getting down a cup and saucer. “At a guess, you’re mad at somebody you can’t get to, and I’m the stand-in.” He chuckled. “How do you see through me so easily? Even my mother can’t do that.” If he thought about it, he’d know, she thought miserably.

We had dinner with the high school friend once. Maddie invited her over for pizza and wine and the conversation wound its way to a point where our guest felt comfortable asking whether I agreed religion stymies intellectual curiosity. On the contrary, I said. I consider seeking knowledge a religious obligation. After all, the first word received in the Quran is: Read! And the third line is: Read, because your Lord has taught you the pen; he taught mankind what mankind did not yet know. But religion, our guest insisted with impressive confidence, allows you to ask only so many questions before you get to: Just because. You have to have faith. Well, I said. Your problem with religion is virtually every faithless person’s problem with religion: that it offers irreducible answers. But some questions in the end simply aren’t empirically verifiable. Find me the empirical evidence as to whether you should derail the train and kill all three hundred passengers if it would mean saving the life of the one person tied to the tracks. Or: Is it true because I see it, or do I see it because it’s true? The whole point of faith is that irreducible answers don’t bother the faithful. The faithful take comfort and even pride in the knowledge that they have the strength to make the irreducible answers sincerely their own, as difficult as that is to do. Everyone—irreligious people included—relies on irreducible answers every day. All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith.

Ah fall off the pan, ma knees splashing ontae the pishy flair. My jeans crumple tae the deck and greedily absorb the urine, but ah hardly notice. Ah roll up ma shirt sleeve and hesitate only briefly, glancing at ma scabby and occasionally weeping track marks, before plunging ma hands and forearms intae the brown water. Ah rummage fastidiously and get one ay ma bombs back straight away. Ah rub off some shite that's attached tae it. A wee bit melted, but still largely intact. Ah stick it oan toap ay the cistern. Locating the other takes several long dredges through the mess and the panhandling of the shite ay many good Muirhoose and Pilton punters. Ah gag once, but get ma white nugget ay gold, surprisingly even better preserved than the first. The feel ay water disgusts us even mair than the shite. Ma brown-stained airm reminds us ay the classic t-shirt tan. The line goes right up past ma elbow as ah hud tae go right aroond the bend.

For decades afterwards, I punished myself with images of Sofia standing naked in the snow, shivering, clutching a chunk of cement that a guard had told her was soap, in the worst winter Poland has ever known. But as I stared at the empty train tracks and thought of the stationmaster making the schoolyard slash across his throat, I had no idea what he was talking about. I could not have conjured up the kind of man who would be willing to design an oven that would be economically fueled by the fat of the men, women and children it was burning. I would not have believed that these same engineers would find other men willing to carry out their monstrous plans. I, too, would have dismissed it as propaganda, that one kind of human being could industriously collect and kill six million of another kind of human being. Somewhere along the line, there would have to be someone who said no. Forgive me, Sofia. Forgive me, Isaiah. I did not know.

That wasn’t necessary,” Benix told Kestrel. “It was,” she said. “He’s tiresome. I don’t mind taking his money, but I cannot take his company.” “You couldn’t spare a thought for me before chasing him away? Maybe I would like a chance to win his gold.” “Lord Irex can spare it,” Ronan added. “Well, I don’t like poor losers,” said Kestrel. “That’s why I play with you two.” Benix groaned. “She’s a fiend,” Ronan agreed cheerfully. “Then why do you play with her?” “I enjoy losing to Kestrel. I will give anything she will take.” “While I live in hope to one day win,” Benix said, and gave Kestrel’s hand a friendly pat. “Yes, yes,” Kestrel said. “You are both fine flatterers. Now ante up.” “We lack a fourth player,” Benix pointed out. Bite and Sting was played in pairs or fours. Despite herself, Kestrel looked at Arin standing not too far away, considering the garden or the house beyond it. From his position he would have had a view of Irex’s tiles, and Ronan’s. He would not, however, have been able to see hers. She wondered what he had made of the game--if he had bothered to follow it. Perhaps feeling her gaze on him, Arin glanced her way. His eyes were calm, uninterested. She could read nothing in them. “I suppose our game is over then,” she told the two lords in a bright voice. “Shall we join the others?” Ronan poured the gold into her purse and slipped its velvet strap over her wrist, unnecessarily fiddling with the broad ribbon until it lay flat against Kestrel’s skin without a winkle. He offered his arm and she took it, resting her palm on the cool silk of his sleeve. Benix fell in step, and the three walked toward the heart of the murmuring party. Kestrel knew, rather than saw, that Arin shifted position and followed, like the shadow line of a sundial. This was precisely what he was supposed to do as her attendant at Lady Faris’s picnic, yet she had the uncomfortable impression of being tracked.

White was an old-style lawman. He had served in the Texas Rangers near the turn of the century, and he had spent much of his life roaming on horseback across the southwestern frontier, a Winchester rifle or a pearl-handled six-shooter in hand, tracking fugitives and murderers and stickup men. He was six feet four and had the sinewy limbs and the eerie composure of a gunslinger. Even when dressed in a stiff suit, like a door-to-door salesman, he seemed to have sprung from a mythic age. Years later, a bureau agent who had worked for White wrote that he was “as God-fearing as the mighty defenders of the Alamo,” adding, “He was an impressive sight in his large, suede Stetson, and a plumb-line running from head to heel would touch every part of the rear of his body. He had a majestic tread, as soft and silent as a cat. He talked like he looked and shot—right on target. He commanded the utmost in respect and scared the daylights out of young Easterners like me who looked upon him with a mixed feeling of reverence and fear, albeit if one looked intently enough into his steel-gray eyes he could see a kindly and understanding gleam.

All Night, All Night Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and attitudes The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read, Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident. Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle, Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar -- The bored center of this vision and condition looked and looked Down through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking The seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well Of the great darkness under the slick glitter, And he was only one among eight million riders and readers. And all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum Of the long determined passage passed through him By his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train Like a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh-- The silent or passive night, pressing and impressing The patients' foreheads with a tightening-like image Of the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light Piercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence Into a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession. A bored child went to get a cup of water, And crushed the cup because the water too was Boring and merely boredom's struggle. The child, returning, looked over the shoulder Of a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder. A fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops Drip down the fleece of many dinners. And the bird flew parallel and parallel flew The black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified, At regular intervals, post after post Of thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees. And then the bird cried as if to all of us: 0 your life, your lonely life What have you ever done with it, And done with the great gift of consciousness? What will you ever do with your life before death's knife Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate? As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls, Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down, An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown: This is the way that night passes by, this Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

Eventually I became a tad compulsive about hearing certain songs. At first it was a handful of jazz classics—Miles Davis’s “Freddie Freeloader,” John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” Frank Sinatra’s “Luck Be a Lady.” (Before one primary debate, I must have played that last track two or three times in a row, clearly indicating a lack of confidence in my preparations.) Ultimately it was rap that got my head in the right place, two songs especially: Jay-Z’s “My 1st Song” and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” Both were about defying the odds and putting it all on the line (“Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it? Or just let it slip…”); how it felt to spin something out of nothing; getting by on wit, hustle, and fear disguised as bravado. The lyrics felt tailored to my early underdog status. And as I sat alone in the back of the Secret Service van on the way to a debate site, in my crisp uniform and dimpled tie, I’d nod my head to the beat of those songs, feeling a whiff of private rebellion, a connection to something grittier and more real than all the fuss and deference that now surrounded me. It was a way to cut through the artifice and remember who I was.

There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.

Everything in Nature ran according to its own nature; the running of grass was in its growing, the running of rivers their flowing, granite bubbled up, cooled, compressed and crumbled, birds lived, flew, sang and died, everything did what it needed to do, each simultaneously running its own race, each by living according to its own nature together, never leaving any other part of the universe behind. The world’s Holy things raced constantly together, not to win anything over the next, but to keep the entire surging diverse motion of the living world from grinding to a halt, which is why there is no end to that race; no finish line. That would be oblivion to all. For the Indigenous Souls of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It cannot be won; it is the gift of the world’s diverse beautiful motion that must be maintained. Because human life has been give the gift of our elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can. All else has, to me, the familiar taste of that domineering warlike harshness that daily tries to cover its tracks in order to camouflage the deep ruts of some old, sick, grinding, ungainly need to flee away from the elegance of our original Indigenous human souls. Our attempt to avariciously conquer or win a place where there are no problems, whether it be Heaven or a “New Democracy,” never mind if it is spiritually ugly and immorally “won” and taken from someone who is already there, has made a citifying world of people who, unconscious of it, have become our own ogreish problem to ourselves, our future, and the world. This is a problem that we cannot continue to attempt to competitively outrun by more and more effectively designed technological approaches to speed away from the past, for the specter of our own earth-wasting reality runs grinning competitively right alongside us. By developing even more effective and entertaining methods of escape that only burn up the earth, the air, animals, plants, and the deeper substance of what it should mean to be human, by competing to get ahead, we have created a brakeless competition that has outrun our innate beauty and marked out a very definite and imminent “finish” line. Living in and on a sphere, we cannot really outrun ourselves anyway. Therefore, I say, the entire devastating and hideous state of the world and its constant wounding and wrecking of the wild, beautiful, natural, viable and small, only to keep alive an untenable cultural proceedance is truly a spiritual sickness, one that will not be cured by the efficient use of the same thinking that maintains the sickness. Nor can this overly expensive, highly funded illness be symptomatically kept at bay any longer by yet more political, environmental, or social programs. We must as individuals and communities take the time necessary to learn how to indigenously remember what a sane, original existence for a viable people might look like. Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now. To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful. By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.

A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English. Because he was a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by devising an accounting system to help him keep track of his customers’ debts. He drew a picture of each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to represent the amount of money owed. Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to go on to design a system for writing the Cherokee language. He again began by drawing pictures, but gave them up as too complicated and too artistically demanding. He next started to invent separate signs for each word, and again became dissatisfied when he had coined thousands of signs and still needed more. Finally, Sequoyah realized that words were made up of modest numbers of different sound bites that recurred in many different words—what we would call syllables. He initially devised 200 syllabic signs and gradually reduced them to 85, most of them for combinations of one consonant and one vowel. As one source of the signs themselves, Sequoyah practiced copying the letters from an English spelling book given to him by a schoolteacher. About two dozen of his Cherokee syllabic signs were taken directly from those letters, though of course with completely changed meanings, since Sequoyah did not know the English meanings. For example, he chose the shapes D, R, b, h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the shape of the numeral 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He coined other signs by modifying English letters, such as designing the signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively. Still other signs were entirely of his creation, such as , , and for ho, li, and nu, respectively. Sequoyah’s syllabary is widely admired by professional linguists for its good fit to Cherokee sounds, and for the ease with which it can be learned. Within a short time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy in the syllabary, bought a printing press, had Sequoyah’s signs cast as type, and began printing books and newspapers. Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion. We know that Sequoyah received paper and other writing materials, the idea of a writing system, the idea of using separate marks, and the forms of several dozen marks. Since, however, he could neither read nor write English, he acquired no details or even principles from the existing scripts around him. Surrounded by alphabets he could not understand, he instead independently reinvented a syllabary, unaware that the Minoans of Crete had already invented another syllabary 3,500 years previously.

The children crowded about the women in the houses. What we going to do Ma? Where we going to go? The women said, We don’t know, yet. Go out and play. But don’t go near your father. He might whale you if you go near him. And the women went on with the work, but all the time they watched the men squatting in the dust–perplexed and figuring. The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK WHAT TO DO FIRST 1. Find the MAP. It will be there. No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one. It will be found in the front part of your brochure, quite near the page that says For Mom and Dad for having me and for Jeannie (or Jack or Debra or Donnie or …) for putting up with me so supportively and for my nine children for not interrupting me and for my Publisher for not discouraging me and for my Writers’ Circle for listening to me and for Barbie and Greta and Albert Einstein and Aunty May and so on. Ignore this, even if you are wondering if Albert Einstein is Albert Einstein or in fact the dog. This will be followed by a short piece of prose that says When the night of the wolf waxes strong in the morning, the wise man is wary of a false dawn. Ka’a Orto’o, Gnomic Utterances Ignore this too (or, if really puzzled, look up GNOMIC UTTERANCES in the Toughpick section). Find the Map. 2. Examine the Map. It will show most of a continent (and sometimes part of another) with a large number of BAYS, OFFSHORE ISLANDS, an INLAND SEA or so and a sprinkle of TOWNS. There will be scribbly snakes that are probably RIVERS, and names made of CAPITAL LETTERS in curved lines that are not quite upside down. By bending your neck sideways you will be able to see that they say things like “Ca’ea Purt’wydyn” and “Om Ce’falos.” These may be names of COUNTRIES, but since most of the Map is bare it is hard to tell. These empty inland parts will be sporadically peppered with little molehills, invitingly labeled “Megamort Hills,” “Death Mountains, ”Hurt Range” and such, with a whole line of molehills near the top called “Great Northern Barrier.” Above this will be various warnings of danger. The rest of the Map’s space will be sparingly devoted to little tiny feathers called “Wretched Wood” and “Forest of Doom,” except for one space that appears to be growing minute hairs. This will be tersely labeled “Marshes.” This is mostly it. No, wait. If you are lucky, the Map will carry an arrow or compass-heading somewhere in the bit labeled “Outer Ocean” and this will show you which way up to hold it. But you will look in vain for INNS, reststops, or VILLAGES, or even ROADS. No – wait another minute – on closer examination, you will find the empty interior crossed by a few bird tracks. If you peer at these you will see they are (somewhere) labeled “Old Trade Road – Disused” and “Imperial Way – Mostly Long Gone.” Some of these routes appear to lead (or have lead) to small edifices enticingly titled “Ruin,” “Tower of Sorcery,” or “Dark Citadel,” but there is no scale of miles and no way of telling how long you might take on the way to see these places. In short, the Map is useless, but you are advised to keep consulting it, because it is the only one you will get. And, be warned. If you take this Tour, you are going to have to visit every single place on this Map, whether it is marked or not. This is a Rule. 3. Find your STARTING POINT. Let us say it is the town of Gna’ash. You will find it down in one corner on the coast, as far away from anywhere as possible. 4. Having found Gna’ash, you must at once set about finding an INN, Tour COMPANIONS, a meal of STEW, a CHAMBER for the night, and then the necessary TAVERN BRAWL. (If you look all these things up in the Toughpick section, you will know what you are in for.) The following morning, you must locate the MARKET and attempt to acquire CLOTHING (which absolutely must include a CLOAK), a SADDLE ROLL, WAYBREAD, WATERBOTTLES, a DAGGER, a SWORD, a HORSE, and a MERCHANT to take you along in his CARAVAN. You must resign yourself to being cheated over most prices and you are advised to consult a local MAGICIAN about your Sword. 5. You set off. Now you are on your own. You should turn to the Toughpick section of this brochure and select your Tour on a pick-and-mix basis, remembering only that you will have to take in all of it.

One night, Kevin and I were at a pool hall where we saw a guy playing pool by himself; this guy looked like a hustler. He asked me if I wanted to play for twenty dollars. “I’ll tell you what,” I told him. “You can play my buddy Kevin. If you win two out of three games, I’ll give you twenty dollars. If he wins, you have to leave with us and go to a Bible study.” The guy looked at me like I was nuts. He walked around the pool table a few times, pondering my offer. I took a twenty-dollar bill out and placed it on the table. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.” What he didn’t know was that Kevin is quite the player and that I don’t make bets with eternal consequences on the line unless I know we’re going to win! Of course, my buddy Kevin beat him. In fact, Kevin broke and ran the table in two straight games. The other guy never even took a shot! To my surprise, the guy followed through on his bet, although he didn’t seem too happy about it. As we walked to my truck to leave, he threw a full can of beer across the road and declared he was ready for a change in his life anyway. I thought that was a powerful statement since he didn’t even know what we were going to share with him. He knew how we rolled, despite our presence in such a rugged place. We studied the Bible with him for several hours and baptized him the same night. What I didn’t know was that the guy was sentenced to prison for an earlier crime the very next day! I wouldn’t see him again until he showed up unannounced with his Bible in hand at my house on Christmas Day a couple of years later. “Hey, I just got out of jail,” he told me. “Did they let you out or did you escape?” I asked him. “I was released,” he said. He then tearfully thanked me for sharing with him and let me know that was the best thing that could have happened to him before the two years of prison. Obviously, neither one of us believed our encounter had been an accident. He came to our church a couple of times over the next few months, and I continued to study with him. After a while, though, he quit coming around and I lost track of him.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere

Death and life are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other. Each time you surrender, each time you trust the dying, your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath. You decide not to push yourself to the front of the line, and something much better happens in the back of the line. You let go of your narcissistic anger, and you find that you start feeling much happier. You surrender your need to control your partner, and finally the relationship blossoms or ends. Yet each time it is a choice—and each time it is a kind of dying. It seems we only know what life is when we know what death is. The mystics and great saints were those who had learned to trust and allow this pattern, and often said in effect, “What did I ever lose by dying?” Or try Paul’s famous one-liner: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Now even scientific studies, including those of near-death experiences, reveal the same universal pattern. Things change and grow by dying to their present state, but each time it is a risk. We always wonder, “Will it work this time?” So many academic disciplines are coming together, each in their own way, to say that there’s a constant movement of loss and renewal at work in this world at every level. It seems to be the pattern of all growth and evolution. To be alive means to surrender to this inevitable flow. It’s the same pattern in every atom, in every human relationship, and in every galaxy. Indigenous peoples, Hindu gurus, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus all saw it clearly in human history and named it as a kind of “necessary dying.” If this pattern is true, it has been true all the time and everywhere. Such seeing did not just start two thousand years ago. All of us have to eventually learn to let go of something smaller so something bigger can happen. But that’s not a religion—it’s highly visible truth. It is the Way Reality Works. Yes, I am saying that the way things work and Christ are one and the same. This is not a religion to be either fervently joined or angrily rejected. It is a train ride already in motion. The tracks are visible everywhere. You can be a willing and happy traveler. Or not.

Non-Tenure Writing Jobs The MLA session on the adjunct crisis indicates where higher education has come to in the Brave New World of the 21st century. Research by the MLA itself, by Gloria McMillan, by Eileen Schell and other colleagues, already confirm the deep replacement of tenure-track faculty with contingent adjuncts and others. This crisis is deepest in composition and in community colleges. Doug Hesse’s program at Denver Univ. is no solution; it will extend the subordination of composition through sub-faculty lines while rationalizing it as “good for students"(before research has even proved it so). But, sub-faculty writing lecturers will never be treated as “real” professors by their institutions and will never be accepted as colleagues by their tenure-track peers. Such sub-faculty plans will weaken the faculty as a whole in the academy by further dividing it into competing sub-groups. Neither will a sub-faculty plan benefit the 14 million undergraduates on campus, most who attend under-funded public colleges with no billion-dollar endowments or corporate angels to turn to. Community colleges, in particular, where about 6 million students are enrolled, can have up to 65% of classes taught by adjuncts. The sub-faculty plan is thus really a management tool available in the short-term to those colleges with deep pockets and deep readiness to entrench a lesser sub-faculty in their writing programs. Doug Hesse acknowledges such an outcome as a possibility. He is quoted in the IHE report saying he was disturbed by the degree of interest other WPAs took in DU’s new sub-faculty writing program, fearing that DU was installing a “Vichy"-type model(collaborating with the authorities desire to de-tenure faculty generally and to subordinate writing instructors particularly). But, Hesse is quoted as making peace with this because he feels that sub-faculty lines for writing teachers are at least good for writing students. Even if we knew for sure this was true, why must writing teachers be the only professionals in higher education called upon to make such sacrifices? A large private grant to finance Denver University’s program($10 million for Hesse’s project)is good fortune for one campus, but it offers no model for how we can solve the national disgrace of exploited adjuncts.

Line of AuNor, dragon bold Flows to me from days of old, And through years lost in the mist My blood names a famous list. By Air, by Water, by Fire, by Earth In pride I claim a noble birth. From EmLar Gray, a deadly deed By his flame Urlant was freed, Of fearsome hosts of blighters dark And took his reward: a golden ark! My Mother’s sire knew battle well Before him nine-score villages fell. When AuRye Red coursed the sky Elven arrows in vain would fly, He broke the ranks of men at will In glittering mines dwarves he’d kill. Grandsire he is through Father’s blood A river of strength in fullest flood. My egg was one of Irelia’s Clutch Her wisdom passed in mental touch. Mother took up before ever I woke The parent dragon’s heavy yoke; For me, her son, she lost her life Murderous dwarves brought blackened knife. A father I had in the Bronze AuRel Hunter of renown upon wood and fell He gave his clutch through lessons hard A chance at life beyond his guard. Father taught me where, and when, and how To fight or flee, so I sing now. Wistala, sibling, brilliant green Escaped with me the axes keen We hunted as pair, made our kill From stormy raindrops drank our fill When elves and dwarves took after us I told her “Run,” and lost her thus. Bound by ropes; by Hazeleye freed And dolphin-rescued in time of need I hid among men with fishing boats On island thick with blown sea-oats I became a drake and breathed first fire When dolphin-slaughter aroused my ire. I ran with wolves of Blackhard’s pack Killed three hunters on my track The Dragonblade’s men sought my hide But I escaped through a fangèd tide Of canine friends, assembled Thing Then met young Djer, who cut collar-ring. I crossed the steppes with dwarves of trade On the banks of the Vhydic Ironriders slayed Then sought out NooMoahk, dragon black And took my Hieba daughter back To find her kind; then took first flight Saw NooMoahk buried in honor right. When war came to friends I long had known My path was set, my heart was stone I sought the source of dreadful hate And on this Isle I met my fate Found Natasatch in a cavern deep So I had one more promise to keep. To claim this day my life’s sole mate In future years to share my fate A dragon’s troth is this day pledged To she who’ll see me fully fledged. Through this dragon’s life, as dragon-dame shall add your blood to my family’s fame.

If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

What would be the natural thing? A man goes to college. He works as he wants to work, he plays as he wants to play, he exercises for the fun of the game, he makes friends where he wants to make them, he is held in by no fear of criticism above, for the class ahead of him has nothing to do with his standing in his own class. Everything he does has the one vital quality: it is spontaneous. That is the flame of youth itself. Now, what really exists?" "...I say our colleges to-day are business colleges—Yale more so, perhaps, because it is more sensitively American. Let's take up any side of our life here. Begin with athletics. What has become of the natural, spontaneous joy of contest? Instead you have one of the most perfectly organized business systems for achieving a required result—success. Football is driving, slavish work; there isn't one man in twenty who gets any real pleasure out of it. Professional baseball is not more rigorously disciplined and driven than our 'amateur' teams. Add the crew and the track. Play, the fun of the thing itself, doesn't exist; and why? Because we have made a business out of it all, and the college is scoured for material, just as drummers are sent out to bring in business. "Take another case. A man has a knack at the banjo or guitar, or has a good voice. What is the spontaneous thing? To meet with other kindred spirits in informal gatherings in one another's rooms or at the fence, according to the whim of the moment. Instead what happens? You have our university musical clubs, thoroughly professional organizations. If you are material, you must get out and begin to work for them—coach with a professional coach, make the Apollo clubs, and, working on, some day in junior year reach the varsity organization and go out on a professional tour. Again an organization conceived on business lines. "The same is true with the competition for our papers: the struggle for existence outside in a business world is not one whit more intense than the struggle to win out in the News or Lit competition. We are like a beef trust, with every by-product organized, down to the last possibility. You come to Yale—what is said to you? 'Be natural, be spontaneous, revel in a certain freedom, enjoy a leisure you'll never get again, browse around, give your imagination a chance, see every one, rub wits with every one, get to know yourself.' "Is that what's said? No. What are you told, instead? 'Here are twenty great machines that need new bolts and wheels. Get out and work. Work harder than the next man, who is going to try to outwork you. And, in order to succeed, work at only one thing. You don't count—everything for the college.' Regan says the colleges don't represent the nation; I say they don't even represent the individual.

Days like that I feel that my mind is going 1,000,000 miles an hour, visions of the past, present, and future race through my mind. It races, like a train as if I was looking out the window of the car while it is speeding down the line. I am on a track that will never end.' 'I feel that I am going to derail from this runaway train that I am becoming. I cannot sleep at night, because of the fear inside me.' 'I feel restless, depressed, and loveless as well as not content with myself. I would have to say that my passion for life is gone; my imagination is the only thing that keeps me going.' 'I write the day's events that have gone by in my book of life of all the pastimes, while dreaming of what could have been in it, and besides what has not been in it.' 'If this does not stop, I am going to crack. I look into my mirror, and I do not see me, I see an impression of what I used to be.' 'I see my long brown hair that covers part of my face and covers my blue eyes of emotion. I see the cross around my neck that brings me confidence.' 'I hide behind a smile; I see the body in which nobody thinks is without drought flawless.' 'The bare body that is touched in all ways, yet I tried to hide behind my makeup. I gasp at my pale skin and the look of my body.' 'I am 95 pounds, really tiny; surely there is someone that would find me attractive?' 'I wonder if I can find someone who can think for themselves. I want someone who will love me, for who I am- and not what they want me to be.' 'Most importantly, I need someone that will not use me. Is that too much to ask for?' 'Fear!' 'Anxiety is something that I have inside, it is the source of the things which lead to distress. Not finding someone that loves me, for who I am, is some of my fears.' 'I fear the fact that I am most likely going to be alone forever. Another being that everyone that has meaning in my life is fading away from me it seems.' 'I fear not having a family by my side at all times. I have tears about the overwhelming struggle to rebuild my reputation, which has been destroyed.' 'I ask this question if I was to die tomorrow would anybody come to my wake, to see me lying there?' 'I fear what society has done to me. I fear that I have no trust in anyone or anything. I fear that my life has no meaning.' 'I fear that I will never get out of this hell.' 'I just want to start my life and get a degree in nursing someday from- 'The Conemaugh School of Nursing,' if I can make it through all of this. I do not think that is too much to ask for or is it?' 'I think that if I could be left alone, with the one that I want. I could have a life; you know what I am sure of it. I fear that the towering entity will never collapse, and the demons will keep playing in my head. I fear that I will never have a social ability, to be part of the nobility of compatibility.' 'I fear that the terror will never stop in these innocent lives like mine, and they will not be saved. I fear that nobody will ever see my creativity or recognize me for the good in which I do for others. I feel like I am the only one left in this world, that I call my life.' 'All the beauty in life has been dejected, and it is all ablaze around me. Yes, I fear to be in the outside realm of things.' 'I want to scream yet no one is going to hear it. I ask- am I becoming institutionalized?

The children crowded about the women in the houses. What we going to do Ma? Where we going to go? The women said, We don’t know, yet. Go out and play. But don’t go near your father. He might whale you if you go near him. And the women went on with the work, but all the time they watched the men squatting in the dust–perplexed and figuring. ... The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

Have no anxiety about anything,' Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track. Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can't help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you've gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you're not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head. Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since the worst things that happen are apt to be the things you don't see coming, do you think there is a kind of magic whereby, if you only can see them coming, you will be able somehow to prevent them from happening? Who knows the answer? In addition to Novocain and indoor plumbing, one of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is the existence of psychotherapists, and if you can locate a good one, maybe one day you will manage to dig up an answer that helps. But answer or no answer, the worst things will happen at last even so. 'All life is suffering' says the first and truest of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet "the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything," Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, 'but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.' He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God's will or God's judgment or God's method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best. 'In everything,' Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that 'the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.' The worst things will surely happen no matter what—that is to be understood—but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be "in Christ," as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, "Have no anxiety about anything." Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, 'Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say, Rejoice!

I first imagined each moment separate, inspired, consecutive. I could have cast the film—myself the female lead, you the star. I wore color—magenta. lavender, lime. You were in white, something textured that moved with your body. The music was sensuous, full orchestra scored for harp, piccolo, twelve double basses, a chime. The premiere, well-attended, prices high. Those who didn't like it find little to like in this world. The critics, through careful eyes, decided our performance was fresh, the location on the cliff above the ocean a splendid choice on someone's part, the humor warm. But time extracts. After the blast, the slow boil, the few grains cupped in the palm. The orchestra was really scored for wind and pelican, the dry flick of lizard. The lily, with petals like white tongues, appeared from nowhere, and the gull remained stone-still. as gulls do not do. The costumes were too simple: sun and salt on skin, and the actors kept changing roles, crawling into one another’s lines, saying the wrong words when they spoke at all, finding it hard to think in vertigo, their love clouded with a retinue of men and women, former actors who wanted the parts. The critics made no sense of the film, double-exposed, sprocket holes on either side and a garbled sound track that wove ‘always’ and ‘never’ into one word. The beginning appeared in the last scene, and the climax was a whorl of color, like looking too long at the sun through closed eyelids. One thing someone found to praise: a clear shot of a shining feather lying on a stone in the path.

I remember, when I was a kid, staring at road maps, the kind you bought at gas stations and carried in the glove box, and that were, for me at least, impossible to properly refold. I remember looking at all those intersecting lines representing roads laid over and carved through the earth, dirt tracks and superhighways, the insolent grids of the cities. I wanted to follow them all to the end. I remember thinking that if you could get hold of all the maps for the entire country, or even the hemisphere, and spread them out side by side, it would be obvious that every road leads to every other road, that everything is connected. The dull suburban lane on which I lived would carry me eventually to rocky paths in Patagonia and the rutted logging roads that cross Alaska. There were dead ends, of course, lots of them, but assuming you were free to backtrack, it was impossible, really, to get lost. You could follow any road in any direction and eventually, by however circuitous a path, get where you needed to go. Oceans notwithstanding. I don’t remember talking to anyone about this. As a child you learn to guard your thoughts, to hold close to ideas that seemed simple and self-evident and that you knew adults would scoff at. What counted as education seemed to mainly involve learning to walk in single file and otherwise keep quiet. School meant grown-ups telling you that things had to be done in a certain way, and in no other, that however many obvious and inviting paths might lead from one point to another, only one of them was right. The rest might as well not exist at all. To do well, to earn praise, you had to learn not to see them anymore.

The fact that Moore stayed put within easy reach of angry white men was proof to some that perhaps the papers and whoever gave them the story were not entirely on the right track. Or it’s just as likely that he had protection, perhaps called protective custody, during this brief span. Such were the tangled loyalties of the place where he’d lived all his life. For a black man, especially a mixed-race man like Moore in those days, the line between protection and prosecution was a fine one. Shivering inside his wool pea jacket, Hadley laid both whip and epithets upon the back of his mule Jake as he wrestled the buggy through the sucking mud a short distance to the forlorn shack of thirty-eight-year-old Loduska (“Dusky”) Crutchfield, who with her husband, Jim, was, like

Our feelings and our eyes I asked her, “Irma, what have you done?” She looked at me and replied, “nothing!” I cannot find few of my heart beats a lot seems undone, But there was a feeling that reminded me of something, And I tracked the rhythm of my every heart beat, Which led just to one trace, That whenever I see her and our eyes meet, My heart loses its pace, And there goes my heart beat missing in between this space, The distance between her eyes and mine, Though we stand on the same ground at the same place, Yet my heart beats rush towards her making a bee line, Just to beat closer to her heart, To feel her warmth and swim in the sea of her feelings, And as these love seeking heart beats depart, My heart cries in its painful reelings, Where it finds itself left in the wilderness of nowhere, She is there, her heart is there too, But our eyes still tend to wander somewhere, Where she is willing to say I love you, But her heart beats are yet to feel the miracle of a missing heart beat, That always rushes unto me, Creating love’s fondest retreat, Where wherever I may see, I see her and she only sees me, This is the distance that grows in the eyes, That only these missing heart beats can shorten, Just like when I look at those skies, I am always by her beauty smitten, Her eyes, her smiles, her face and her sweet ways, Are actually the twinkle that the night stars bear, And ah their pain on those Sunny and bright days, When they long to see her, But today, she looked at me and I felt she plugged into my spirit, And a heart beat unknown sank into me with it, Then she started beating in my every heart beat, And how I loved my heart beat, and repeat and repeat, With every heartbeat, “I love you too.” And then the distance in our eyes vanished suddenly, As I held her in my arms and said, “I was born to love you!” And then our two hearts, beat as one and forever happily.

Motivated by fear and driven by the elusive dream of normalcy, people will continue lining up for future jabs until the final one, which I believe is the mark of the Beast, fundamentally changes them into what the WEF states will cause people to “rethink what it means to be human.

Is Israel really the biggest, baddest wolf on the block? Heck no. Even if you put every single one of Israel’s mistakes under a microscope, they still wouldn’t come close to those of many other countries around the world. In Saudi Arabia, Chop Square is literally a place for weekly public decapitations. In Dubai, the working class are literal slaves. In China, disappearances are normal and Muslims are being tracked and put into camps. In Turkey, journalists and activists are imprisoned and killed. In Iran, LGBTQ+ people are executed. In Syria, the government uses chemical weapons against its own people. In Russia, there is arbitrary detention, and worse. In Myanmar, the army is massacring the Rohingya Muslim population. In Brunei, Sharia law was just enacted. In North Korea—no description needed. All over the world, millions of people are dying because of tyrannical leaders, civil wars, and unimaginable atrocities. But you don’t see passionate picket lines against Dubai or Turkey or even Russia. The one country that’s consistently singled out is… Israel. The UN has stated values of human dignity, equal rights, and economic and social advancement that are indeed fantastic, and they are the values upon which Israel was established and is operating. The sting is it that countries that certainly do not adhere to some or any of these values are often the ones who criticize Israel while keeping a straight face. “Look over there!” those leaders say, so the world will not look at their backyards and see their own gross human rights violations. All this led to a disproportionate number of UN resolutions against the only Jewish state and the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is an easy punching bag, but this obsession over one country only is being used to deflect time and energy away from any real discussion of human rights in the world’s actual murderous regimes. And Israelis aren’t the only ones who have noticed this disproportionate censorship. The United States uses its veto power to shut down almost every Security Council resolution against Israel, and it does this not because of “powerful lobbies” (sorry to burst your bubble). The reason the US shuts down most of these resolutions is because the US gets it. In a closed-door meeting of the Security Council in 2002, former US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte is said to have stated that the US will oppose every UN resolution against Israel that does not also include: condemnation of terrorism and incitement to terrorism, condemnation of various terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and a demand for improvement of security for Israel as a condition for Israeli withdrawal from territories. If a resolution doesn’t include this basic and rational language, the US will veto it. And it did and it does, thank the good Lord, in what we know today as the Negroponte Doctrine.

I stood in a stupor and would have continued to stand there were it not for a breeze that parted the smoke, revealing a sailor from the Vestal. It was Joe George. He had been following orders to cut the lines that tethered his ship to the Arizona so they could head to open waters. Since there was no one on the Arizona to help on our end, he was taking a fire ax and cutting the lines on his. We called to Joe through a seam in the smoke, motioning for him to throw us a monkey’s fist, which was a lightweight heaving line knotted around a metal ball and attached to a thicker rope. It was a long shot, but our desperate idea was that if we could secure a rope between the two ships, then perhaps we could make it to the Vestal. As Joe rummaged for the ball, I looked at my arms. A sheath of skin from each had peeled off and was draping them. I tore off one length of skin and threw it on the floor of the platform. Then the other. The remaining tissue was a webwork of pink and white and red, some of it black, all of it throbbing. But that didn’t matter. My focus narrowed to Joe George and the ball in his hand. He threw it, but it fell short. He gathered up the line and lobbed it again. Short once more. Joe was perhaps the strongest man in the harbor, an All-Navy boxer whom I described earlier as an “ox.” He was the only man with a prayer of getting that line to us—if he couldn’t do it, then it was impossible. The reality started to sink in: we were going to burn alive. Joe collected the rope once more. For a third time, he tossed it with all his strength. It sailed from one wounded ship to another, across flames, smoke, and carnage. I tracked it all the way and caught it in the air, pulling the smaller line until I felt the main rope. I tied the rope to the railing, cinching it tight, and Joe secured his end. The rope stretched seventy feet to span the water below us, which was forty-five feet down, slicked with fuel that had caught fire. Our only hope was to make it to the Vestal, hand over hand across the rope. But the flesh had been burned off all of our hands, and using those raw fingers and palms to get us across the chasm that separated us would be at best excruciating, and most likely impossible.

But there are some to-do list essentials that we should all know if we want to help our brains navigate the day, based on the science of working memory, motivation, and goal pursuit. I don’t always see people applying these brain-friendly essentials, so here’s a checklist for you to consider: Write it down as soon as it comes to mind. Never waste your brain’s precious working memory by trying to hold your tasks or ideas in your head. Use your intelligence for getting things done, rather than trying to remember what you need to do. That means having a process for capturing to-dos as soon as they occur to you, even if you then end up transferring them to a master list. Only keep today’s tasks in view. You might have a grand list of tasks you’d like to complete in the coming weeks or months. But once you’ve decided what you really need and want to get done today, work off that list, and hide the rest. As long as your longer-term items are visible, they’ll use up a little of your brain’s processing capacity—and may even depress you a little if your long list is very long. Make it satisfying to check off. If you’re online, give yourself a box to check, and a ping or a swoosh to hear. If you’re working on paper, give yourself the satisfaction of a big bold line through everything you’ve done. The more rewarding it feels to track your progress, the more your brain will tend to spur you toward getting things done. Be realistic about what you can do in a day. Progress feels good to your brain’s reward system; failure doesn’t. Do you have five things you’d like to tackle today, but know you probably only have time for three? It’s better to feel great about nailing three tasks. If you succeed and find you’ve got more time, you’ll be flushed with motivation to seek out one or two more tasks. Include mind-body maintenance. Put exercise, rest, and other physical health goals on your list alongside your other tasks. If you take a moment to put “take a walk” on the list, you’re way more likely to build it into your day rather than let it be crowded out by other demands—just as defining goals for anything makes it more likely you’ll get it done.

The mounting wave of discontent culminated in a riot that broke out off base in April 1942 as black and white soldiers queued outside Waldron’s Sports Palace. What happened next is unclear. In one version, a black soldier wanting to use a telephone took offense when a white MP told him he couldn’t leave the line. In the ensuing violence, some fifty shots were fired and three soldiers lay dead, two black privates and one white MP. The post’s public relations officer later explained opaquely that the melee was triggered by “some persons with a little too much race consciousness getting off track.” The situation remained unchanged one year later, when the Afro-American reported that the base was still a “veritable powder keg.” The incidents certainly belied the findings of a 1942 report by the Army General Staff that concluded that the policy of segregation had “practically eliminated the colored problem, as such, within the Army.” Even when violence wasn’t an issue,

My jaw drops. Whoever this guy is, he just cut in front of me in line. And yeah, he’s extremely cute, but that doesn’t matter. He’s still a jerk. The cute ones usually are.

Miss Taggart, it is not my place to call you, but nobody else will,” said the voice that came on the wire, this time; the voice sounded young and too calm. “In another day or two, a disaster’s going to happen here the like of which they’ve never seen, and they won’t be able to hide it any longer, only it will be too late by then, and maybe it’s too late already.” “What is it? Who are you?” “One of your employees of the Minnesota Division, Miss Taggart. In another day or two, the trains will stop running out of here—and you know what that means, at the height of the harvest. At the height of the biggest harvest we’ve ever had. They’ll stop, because we have no cars. The harvest freight cars have not been sent to us this year.” “What did you say?” She felt as if minutes went by between the words of the unnatural voice that did not sound like her own. “The cars have not been sent. Fifteen thousand should have been here by now. As far as I could learn, about eight thousand cars is all we got. I’ve been calling Division Headquarters for a week. They’ve been telling me not to worry. Last time, they told me to mind my own damn business. Every shed, silo, elevator, warehouse, garage and dance hall along the track is filled with wheat. At the Sherman elevators, there’s a line of farmers’ trucks and wagons two miles long, waiting on the road. At Lakewood Station, the square is packed solid and has been for three nights. They keep telling us it’s only temporary, the cars are coming and we’ll catch up. We won’t. There aren’t any cars coming. I’ve called everyone I could. I know, by the way they answer. They know, and not one of them wants to admit it. They’re scared, scared to move or speak or ask or answer. All they’re thinking of is who will be blamed when that harvest rots here around the stations—and not of who’s going to move it. Maybe nobody can, now. Maybe there’s nothing you can do about it, either. But I thought you’re the only person left who’d want to know and that somebody had to tell you.

In Minnesota, they were seizing cars from every siding, from the Mesabi Range, from the ore mines of Paul Larkin where the cars had stood waiting for a dribble of iron. They were pouring wheat into ore cars, into coal cars, into boarded stock cars that went spilling thin gold trickles along the track as they clattered off. They were pouring wheat into passenger coaches, over seats, racks and fixtures, to send it off, to get it moving, even if it went moving into trackside ditches in the sudden crash of breaking springs, in the explosions set off by burning journal boxes. They fought for movement, for movement with no thought of destination, for movement as such, like a paralytic under a stroke, struggling in wild, stiff, incredulous jerks against the realization that movement was suddenly impossible. There were no other railroads: James Taggart had killed them; there were no boats on the Lakes: Paul Larkin had killed them. There was only the single line of rail and a net of neglected highways. The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for horses—moving south, south toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them—moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges. One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders. Then rain clouds burst over the prairies of Minnesota; the rain went eating the wheat into rot at the waiting railroad stations; it went hammering the piles spilled along the roads, washing gold kernels into the soil.

The aspiring leader has been set up to fail. He just doesn’t recognize it yet. The first few months go well, but reality soon sets in. It is not easy for one person to create change in a large corporation. After one year, the leader feels as though he is trying to make innovation happen inside an organization that is, in every way, determined to fight his every move. The general manager of the company’s largest product line is anxious about the possibility that the innovation will cannibalize him. Marketing is uncooperative, worried about possible damage to the company’s brand if the new product fails. Manufacturing is upset that it has to schedule small, inefficient runs for the new product. Salespeople are reluctant to push a product without a track record. Human resources is unwilling to waive compensation rules to hire a few experts that the project badly needs. Finance is concerned about margin dilution. Information technology claims that the project is too small to warrant exceptions to standard systems and processes.

Tech Talk: Starting Out With Blockchain Cryptocurrency and also Bitcoin are popular in the electronic monetary scene. Nevertheless, such a modern technology was important in the enhancement of how monetary deals occur. Yet few individuals would certainly wish to review the system that functions behind cryptocurrency fanatics called Blockchain. To some people, the principle alone appears as well unusual for a lot of them. That's where today's assist is available in helpful. Do you wish to discover Blockchain and also how it functions? We will help you with that said. Since all the intros are off the beaten track, let's enter into it. So What Specifically Is Blockchain? Blockchain is the innovation that runs behind cryptocurrency. To place it merely, it's the system that enables deals to occur under a peer-to-peer system. What that indicates is you can have all the monetary professions and also transactions you can potentially prefer. You don't need to fret about any type of authority or overseer that screens how your transactions reoccur. The A lot of Kinds Of Blockchain If you assume that there's just one sort of Blockchain that exists, after that you could wish to reconsider. A number of sorts of Blockchain innovation are working to always keep points smooth. Inspect them out: Public Blockchain A public Blockchain is a system that has actually no decentralization. That indicates it's open up for the general public to utilize at any time they prefer. Individuals that utilize a public Blockchain for their deals can accessibility its details effortlessly. Exclusive Blockchain An exclusive Blockchain is the antithesis of its public equivalent. Unlike a public choice, an exclusive Blockchain is decentralized. Any type of specific that desires to accessibility and also make use of it have to demand approval from an authority or system manager. Additionally, an exclusive Blockchain is under one supervisor or management just. Crossbreed Blockchain A crossbreed Blockchain appears as it's total. That indicates it's a mix of both public and also exclusive Blockchain systems. There's greater than one manager that runs and also handles how points go. Additionally, a crossbreed Blockchain uses several benefits for its individuals. Sidechain A sidechain works as a back-up for the major Blockchain line. That indicates its individuals can transfer their properties and also details on a sidechain for additional protection and also storage space. Not just does a side chain supply much far better protection, yet it additionally enhances how the whole system runs.

Yeah, I thought it would be something like that.” Her wheelchair, which was cherry-red with thick velvet armrests, had the turning-circle of a doughnut. She spun it on the spot and led Lamb into a long room lined with upright cabinets which were set on tracks like tramlines, so they could be pushed together when not in use: one huge accordion structure, each row containing file after file of dusty information, some of it so ancient that the last to consult it had long since faded to dust himself. Here were Regent’s Park’s older secrets. Which could all be stored on the head of a pin, of course, if the budget were there to squeeze it into shape. Upstairs, the queens of the database ruled their digital universe. Down here, Molly Doran was the keeper of overlooked history.

We tend to understand our world through labels and through stories. Well, I love a good story. You know that. But... sometimes... I see folks getting themselves all twisted up over stories. I mean the stories we apply to ourselves. The story of our identities. Younger folks, older folks too, get anxious because they feel like their story hasn’t actually begun. That they are in a play and they’ve missed their cues and forgotten their lines. Or, they turn into literary critics of life and criticize their own character, looking for steady growth and rising action. A satisfying plot tying events together. Here’s the thing. Lives aren’t stories. They aren’t written to be tidy or to hang tight to a central theme or conflict. We consume a lot of carefully constructed stories and it can be easy to forget that life is not one of them. You aren’t headed toward a thoughtful climax and, so, you can’t be off track within your own narrative. Life doesn’t work that way. We live and then we don’t. That’s the simple truth of it. Our stories are happening now and if we get preoccupied looking for satisfying character arcs or a steady build toward some conclusion, well we miss what’s here in the moment and we will always fall short of our expectations. We can’t judge ourselves like we judge the protagonist in a book or movie. Life isn’t failing you because it isn’t delivering a cohesive story. You aren’t failing because you haven’t stuck to a clear and explainable hero’s path. Stories are a great way to understand the world, but they are paper thin compared to actual life. You, in contrast, are complicated. Make room for that truth and love yourself in all your messy complexity. (The Cryptonaturalist episode 39: Bittersweet)

This “if … then” structure becomes more important as you check e-mail less often. Since I only check e-mail once a week, it is critical that no one needs a “what if?” answered or other information within seven days of a given e-mail I send. If I suspect that a manufacturing order hasn’t arrived at the shipping facility, for example, I’ll send an e-mail to my shipping facility manager along these lines: “Dear Susan … Has the new manufacturing shipment arrived? If so, please advise me on … If not, please contact John Doe at 555-5555 or via e-mail at john@doe.com (he is also CC’d) and advise on delivery date and tracking. John, if there are any issues with the shipment, please coordinate with Susan, reachable at 555-4444, who has the authority to make decisions up to $500 on my behalf. In case of emergency, call me on my cell phone, but I trust you two. Thanks.

Preparation for the interview therefore ceases to be about the actual content of the job and instead becomes a theatrical rehearsal, concerned primarily with costume, demeanour, eye contact, stage presence, learning one's lines. The character of the applicant must be placed within a seamless yet engaging narrative, and any outside interests incorporated into the work sphere (so for instance, for a retail job, an interest in films becomes "I like to keep track of all the latest DVD releases"). Above all, it is important to appear 'natural'. Actual experience is secondary to a willingness to blend in; to contribute to that collective suspension of disbelief which is vital to the smooth running of the contemporary workplace.

blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly, without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple. And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one levelled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky.

Likewise, in the eleventh-hour simulations atop the rocket at the Cape. Al showed only one sign of stress: the cycles—Smilin’ Al/Icy Commander—now came one on top of the other, in the same place, and alternated so suddenly that the people around him couldn’t keep track. They learned a little more about the mysterious Al Shepard here in the eleventh hour. Smilin’ Al was a man who wanted very much to be liked, even loved, by those around him. He wanted not just their respect but also their affection. Now, in April, on the eve of the great adventure, Smilin’ Al was more jovial and convivial than ever. He did his José Jiménez routine. His great grin spread wider and his great beer-call eyes beamed brighter than ever before. Smilin’ Al was crazy about a comedy routine that had been developed by a comedian named Bill Dana. It concerned the Cowardly Astronaut and was a great hit. Dana portrayed the Cowardly Astronaut as a stupid immigrant Mexican named José Jiménez, whose tongue wrapped around the English language like a taco. The idea was to interview Astronaut Jiménez like a news broadcaster. You’d say things like: “What has been the most difficult part of astronaut training, José?” “Obtaining de maw-ney, señor.” “The money? What for?” “For de bus back to Mejico, you betcha, reel queeck, señor.” “I see. Well, now, José, what do you plan to do once you’re in space?” “Gonna cry a lot, I theeeenk.” Smilin’ Al used to crack up over this routine. He liked to do the José Jiménez part; and if he could get someone to feed him the straight lines, he was in Seventh Heaven, Smilin’ Al version. Feed him the lines for his José Jiménez knock-off, and he’d treat you like the best beer-call good buddy you ever had. Of course, the Cowardly Astronaut routine was also a perfectly acceptable way for bringing up, on the oblique, as it were, the subject of the righteous stuff that the first flight into space would require. But that was probably unconscious on Al’s part. The main thing seemed to be the good fun, the camaraderie, the closeness and blustery affection of the squadron on the eve of battle. In these moments you saw Smilin’ Al supreme. And in the next moment— —some poor Air Force lieutenant, thinking this was the same Smilin’ Al he had been joking and carrying on with last night, would sing out, “Hey, Al! Somebody wants you on the phone!”—and all at once there would be Al, seething with an icy white fury, hissing out: “If you have something to tell me, Lieutenant … you will call me ‘Sir’!” And the poor devil wouldn’t know what hit him. Where the hell did that freaking arctic avalanche come from? And then he would realize that … all at once the Icy Commander was back in town.

Instead, let us imagine an infinitely small piece of elastic, contracted, if that were possible, to a mathematical point. Let us draw it out gradually in such a way as to bring out of the point a line which will grow progressively longer. Let us fix our attention not on the line as line, but on the action which traces it. Let us consider that this action, in spite of its duration, is indivisible if one supposes that it goes on without stopping; that, if we intercalate a stop in it, we make two actions of it instead of one and that each of these actions will then be the indivisible of which we speak; that it is not the moving act itself which is never indivisible, but the motionless line it lays down beneath it like a track in space. Let us take our mind off the space subtending the movement and concentrate solely on the movement itself, on the act of tension or extension, in short, on pure mobility. This time we shall have a more exact image of our development in duration.

One of the most ambitious men to exploit the timber trade was Hugh F. McDanield, a railroad builder and tie contractor who had come to Fayetteville along with the Frisco. He bought thousands of acres of land within hauling distance of the railroad and sent out teams of men to cut the timber. By the mid-1880s, after a frenzy of cutting in south Washington County, he turned his gaze to the untapped fortune of timber on the steep hillsides of southeast Washington County and southern Madison County, territory most readily accessed along a wide valley long since leveled by the east fork of White River. Mr. McDanield gathered a group of backers and the state granted a charter September 4, 1886, giving authority to issue capital stock valued at $1.5 million, which was the estimated cost to build a rail line through St. Paul and on to Lewisburg, which was a riverboat town on the Arkansas River near Morrilton. McDanield began surveys while local businessman J. F. Mayes worked with property owners to secure rights of way. “On December 4, 1886, a switch was installed in the Frisco main line about a mile south of Fayetteville, and the spot was named Fayette Junction.” Within six months, 25 miles of track had been laid east by southeast through Baldwin, Harris, Elkins, Durham, Thompson, Crosses, Delaney, Patrick, Combs, and finally St. Paul. Soon after, in 1887, the Frisco bought the so-called “Fayetteville and Little Rock” line from McDanield. It was estimated that in the first year McDanield and partners shipped out more than $2,000,000 worth of hand-hacked white oak railroad ties at an approximate value of twenty-five cents each. Mills ran day and night as people arrived “by train, wagon, on horseback, even afoot” to get a piece of the action along the new track, commonly referred to as the “St. Paul line.” Saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and services from smithing to tailoring sprang up in rail stop communities.

We had to convince these guys to perform, but they were easy to win over.” She points to the curtain, and it opens slowly. “I give you the Reeds, performing to Taylor Swift’s ‘You Belong with Me.’” The curtain opens, and Paul, Matt, Logan, Sam, and Pete are all standing in a line. They’re all dressed in jeans and sleeveless T-shirts, and you can see all their tattoos and they’re so fucking handsome that I can’t even believe they’re mine. I see Hayley, Joey, and Mellie standing on the side of the stage, all waiting anxiously to watch their daddies and uncles. Seth starts the music, and he’s underlaid some kind of hip-hop track beneath the beat, but you can still pick out the music. It’s a song about unrequited love and realizing that what you wanted was right there in front of you the whole time, but you were being too stupid to see it. It’s told from a girl’s point of view, so some of the words don’t exactly fit the boys, but it makes it all the funnier. The Reeds have moves. Serious moves. I think everyone woman in the auditorium sits forward in her seat so she doesn’t miss seeing the shaking hips and flexing muscles. Paul even picks Matt up and spins him around one time, and Sam does the same to Pete. I can’t stop laughing. Even Logan dances, and I can imagine the kind of work it took for him to learn this routine when he can’t even hear the music the same way everyone else can. He can appreciate music, just in a different way. As the song starts to close, Matt, Pete, Logan, and Paul all point out at the audience when the words, “You belong with me,” play. Matt points to Sky. Pete points to Reagan, and Logan points to Emily, who is holding the baby in her lap. And Paul points in my direction. Those four men jump off the stage and come toward us. They sing and dance all the way down the aisle. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kelly get up to intercept Paul, but he doesn’t even notice her. He points past her, and sings out the last line, “You belong with me,” in my ear. He picks me up and spins me around, and I have never felt more happiness in my whole life. The music stops, and everyone looks to the stage. Sam has sat down on the side of it, and he looks pretty dejected. He’s holding a sign above his head that says, Available. After this, he won’t be available for long, because every woman there now has a crush on all the Reeds, and he’s the only one who isn’t taken. I love that they can be so silly, and so loving, and so…them. They don’t hide it. They don’t make a game of it. They just love. They love hard. “I love you so hard,” I say to Paul. His eyes jerk to meet mine, and he almost looks surprised. “You do?” he asks. I nod. “I do.” “Will you come home tonight?” he asks quietly. I nod. “Good. That’s where you belong.

The menu: legendary deep-fried Turkeyzilla, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and green beans. The theme: dysfunction. “So,” Elysia said to Lex’s parents with her ever-friendly grin, “how are you?” “How do you think they are?” Ferbus whispered. She kicked him under the table. “I mean—um—what do you do? For a living?” Lex’s mother, who hadn’t said much, continued to stare down the table at the sea of black hoodies while picking at her potatoes. Lex’s father cleared his throat. “I’m a contractor,” he said. “And she’s a teacher.” “Omigod! I wanted to be a teacher!” Elysia turned to Mrs. Bartleby. “Do you love it?” “Hmm?” She snapped back to attention and smiled vacantly at Elysia. “Oh, yes. I do. The kids are a nice distraction.” “From what?” Pip asked. Bang smacked her forehead. Lex squeezed Driggs’s hand even tighter, causing him to choke on his stuffing. He coughed and hacked until the offending morsel flew out of his mouth, landing in Sofi’s glass of water. “Ewww!” she squealed. “Drink around it,” Pandora scolded. “So! I hear New York City is lovely this time of year.” Well, it looks nice, I guess,” Mr. Bartleby said. “But shoveling out the driveway is a pain in the neck. The girls used to help, but now . . .” Sensing the impending awkwardness, Corpp jumped in. “Well, Lex has been a wonderful addition to our community. She’s smart, friendly, a joy to be around—” “And don’t you worry about the boyfriend,” Ferbus said, pointing to Driggs. “I keep him in line.” Mrs. Bartleby’s eyes widened, looking at Lex and then Driggs. “You have a—” she sputtered. “He’s your—” Ferbus went white. “They didn’t know?” “Oops!” said Uncle Mort in a theatrical voice, getting up from the table. “Almost forgot the biscuits!” “Let me help you with those,” Lex said through clenched teeth, following him to the counter. A series of pained hugs and greetings had ensued when her parents arrived—but the rest of the guests showed up so soon thereafter that Lex hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to them, much to her relief. Still, she hadn’t stopped seething. “What were you thinking?” Uncle Mort gave her a reproachful look. “I was thinking that your parents were probably going to feel more lonely and depressed this Thanksgiving than they’ve ever felt in their lives, and that maybe we could help alleviate some of that by hosting a dinner featuring the one and only daughter they have left.” “A dinner of horrors? You know my track record with family gatherings!” He ignored her. “Here we are!” he said, turning back to the table with a giant platter. “Biscuits aplenty!” Lex grunted and took her seat. “I’m not sure how much longer I can do this,” she whispered to Driggs. “Me neither,” he replied. “I think my hand is broken in three places.” “Sorry.” “And your dad seems to be shooting me some sort of a death stare.” Lex glanced at her father. “That’s bad.” “Think he brought the shotgun?” “It’s entirely possible.” “All I’m saying,” Ferbus went on, trying to redeem himself and failing, “is that we all look out for one another here.” Mr. Bartleby looked at him. Ferbus began to sweat. “Because, you know. We all need somebody. Uh, to lean on.” “Stop talking,” Bang signed. Elysia gave Lex’s parents a sympathetic grin. “I think what my idiot partner is trying to say—through the magic of corny song lyrics, for some reason—is that you don’t need to worry about Lex. She’s like a sister to me.” She realized her poor choice of words as a pained look came to Mrs. Bartleby’s face. “Or an especially close cousin.” She shut her mouth and stared at her potatoes. “Frig.” Lex was now crushing Driggs’s hand into a fine paste. Other than the folding chairs creaking and Pip obliviously scraping the last bits of food off his plate, the table was silent. “Good beans!” Pip threw in.

No. Where have you been all night?” Win leaned in conspiratorially. “Between Yu and Mee . . .” “Yes?” Win just smiled. “Oh.” Myron sighed. “I get it. Good one.” “Be happy. It used to be all about Mee. But then I realized something. It’s about Yu too.” “Or, uh, in this case, Yu and Mee together.” “Now you’re in the spirit,” Win said. “How was your sojourn to Adiona Island?” “You want to hear this now?” “Yu and Mee can wait.” “By that, you mean the girls, not us, right?” “It does get confusing, doesn’t it?” “Not to mention perverse.” “Don’t worry. When I’m not around, Yu can keep Mee occupied.” Win sat, steepled his fingers. “Tell me what you learned.” Myron did. When he finished, Win said, “Methinks Lex doth protest too much.” “You got that too?” “When a man does that much philosophizing, he’s covering.” “Plus that last line about her going back to Chile or Peru in the morning?” “Throwing you off the track. He wants you to stay away from Kitty.” “Do

How many times, she reflected ruefully, she had sought to understand a wounded wild creature. But it was another matter entirely to penetrate the mystery of a human being. Reaching Christopher’s door, she knocked softly. When there came no response, she let herself inside. To her surprise, the room brimmed with daylight, the late August sun illuminating tiny floating dust motes by the window. The air smelled like liquor and smoke and bath soap. A portable bath occupied one corner of the room, sodden footprints tracking across the carpet. Christopher reclined on the unmade bed, half propped on a haphazard stack of pillows, a bottle of brandy clasped negligently in his fingers. His incurious gaze moved to Beatri and held, his eyes becoming alert. He was clad in a pair of fawn-colored trousers, only partially fastened, and…nothing more. His body was a long golden arc on the bed, lean and complexly muscled. Scars marred the sun-browned skin in places…there was a ragged triangular shape where a bayonet had pierced his shoulder, a liberal scattering of marks from shrapnel, a small circular depression on his side that must have been caused by a bullet. Slowly Christopher levered himself upward and placed the bottle on the bedside table. Half leaning on the edge of the mattress, his bare feet braced on the floor, he regarded Beatrix without expression. The locks of his hair were still damp, darkened to antique gold. How broad his shoulders were, their sturdy slopes flowing into the powerful lines of his arms. “Why are you here?” His voice sounded rusty from disuse. Somehow Beatrix managed to drag her mesmerized gaze away from the glinting fleece on his chest. “I came to return Albert,” she said. “He appeared at Ramsay House today. He says you’ve been neglecting him. And that you haven’t taken him on any walks lately.” “Has he? I had no idea he was so loose-tongued.

The outcome of their battle was a foregone conclusion, and Loretta knew it. His friends encouraged him, whooping with ribald laughter each time her ruffles flashed. She snatched the dirty peace flag from the wooden shaft and threw it to the earth, grinding it beneath the heel of her shoe. After fending off several more passes, exhaustion claimed its victory, and Loretta realized the folly in fighting. She stood motionless, breasts heaving, her eyes staring fixedly at nothing, head lifted. The warrior circled her, guiding his stallion’s flashing hooves so close to her feet that her toes tingled. When she didn’t move, he reined the horse to a halt and studied her for several seconds before he leaned forward to finger the bodice of her dress. Her breath snagged when he slid a palm over her bosom to the indentation of her waist. “Ai-ee,” he whispered. “You learn quick.” Raising tear-filled eyes to his, she again spat in his face. This time he felt the spray and wiped his cheek, his lips quivering with something that looked suspiciously like suppressed laughter, friendly laughter this time. “Maybe not so quick. But I am a good teacher. You will learn not to fight me, Yellow Hair. It is a promise I make for you.” In that moment, what she felt for him went beyond hate, a black, churning ugliness that made her want to seize the lance he brandished and skewer him with it. I claim her. He planned to take her, then? Her gaze traveled from his woven wool belt of army blue to the muscular tracks that rippled in his belly. The hilt of his knife protruded from a leather scabbard on his hip. How many soldiers had he killed? One, a hundred, perhaps a thousand? Her hair hung from his belt, trailing in a spray of gold down the dark leather on his pants. She felt certain she had never seen him before. Yet he had her hair. The Indian down by the river must have given it to him, and he had come from God only knew where to get her. With a start, she noticed the warrior had stretched out a hand to her. A wide leather band encircled his wrist to protect him from his bowstring. Staring at his dark palm and strong fingers, she shook her head in denial. “Hi, tai,” he said in a low voice. Guiding his stallion closer, he bent to touch her chin. Her eyelid quivered when he brushed at a tear on her cheek. “Ka taikay, ka taikay, Tohobt Nabituh,” he whispered. The words made no sense. Puzzled, she met his gaze. “Tosa ehr-mahr.” Raising his hand, he showed her the glistening wetness on his fingertips. “Silver rain, tosa ehr-mahr.” He compared her tears to silver rain? She searched his eyes for some trace of humanity and found none. After a moment he straightened, raising his lance in what looked like a salute. “Suvate!” he yelled, his glittering eyes sweeping the line of encircling riders. A low rumble of answering voices replied, “Suvate!

What is the school like? First, let me set the stage. The school enrolls students from the age of 4 up. No one is too old, although most of our students are 19 or younger. The people in the school, no matter what age they are, are each doing what they want to do. Usually that means that some people are doing things with others, who can be of the most various of ages, and some people are doing things alone. Usually it means that most people are doing things not done in most other schools, and some are doing things that are done in other schools with a very unusual intensity and concentration. It more often means that children are teaching adults than that adults are teaching children, but most often people are learning and unconscious that “learning” is taking place. Doing what they choose to do is the common theme; learning is the by-product. It is first and foremost a place where students are free to follow their inner dictates. They are free to do what we all do when we have the time to, and what we all find to be most satisfactory—they play. Play is the most serious pursuit at Sudbury Valley. Some people play at games, and some play at things we who have more traditional educations are more comfortable with—writing or art or mathematics or music. But we are quite clear at Sudbury Valley that it is doing what you want to that counts! We have no curriculum and place no value on one pursuit over another. The reason that we are secure in feeling this way is that we constantly see that people play more and more sophisticated “games,” explore more and more deeply, that they constantly expand their knowledge of the world, and their ability to handle themselves in it. Children who play constantly do not draw an artificial line between work and play. In fact, you could say that they are working constantly if you did not see the joy in the place, a joy most usually identified with the pursuit of avocations. I

So again, why are you climbing a tree?” Christine asked as she shielded her eyes from the sun. She and everyone else sat around on blankets watching Kellen help Stevie put her gear on. “I wanted to learn how to do it, and Kellen fixed up this dead tree for me. I want to show off my new skills, too, because Linden made fun of me,” Stevie said and struck a pose. “Be still, I’m trying to connect the climb line to your saddle,” Kellen said, focused on the task. Kenzie climbed onto Trent’s shoulders and made a face. “Uncle Linden says Aunt Stevie’s gonna break her butt.” “Thanks, Linden,” Stevie said and shot him a look. “She won’t.” Kyle laughed. “I’ve never seen so much safety equipment in my life. Kell, you forgot to bubble wrap her butt before you put the saddle on.” “Where’d you get them giant pads from?” Walt asked. “They’re the ones the track team at the school used to use for pole vaulting.” Kellen adjusted the chinstrap on Stevie’s helmet. “This is our exercise tree.” Stevie patted the trunk. “I want iron legs like Kellen’s, so she topped it for me, cut most of the branches off, and put out the pads. See how she spoils me?” “Yeah, she gave you what looks like fifty feet of dead tree,” Kyle said with a grin. “Most people just get flowers.” Trent snorted. “Nothing says love like a fifty-foot stump.” Kellen double-checked her own gear just in case Stevie got into trouble and she had to go up for her. “Okay, babe, don’t go past the fifteen-foot mark, trust your saddle when your legs get tired, pay attention to the depth of your spikes.” She patted Stevie’s cheek and whispered, “Now show them your monkey.

How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10

The stainless-steel mold gives the cheese its disc shape, about ten inches thick and two feet in diameter. But the mold serves another increasingly important function, as an anticounterfeiting measure. The molds are specially produced by the Consorzio Parmigiano-Reggiano, an independent and self-regulating industry group funded by fees levied on cheese producers. Carefully tracked and numbered, molds are supplied only to licensed and inspected dairies, and each is lined with Braille-like needles that crate a pinpoint pattern instantly recognizable to foodies, spelling out the name of the cheese over and over again in a pattern forever imprinted on its rind. A similar raised-pin mold made of plastic is slipped between the steel and the cheese to permanently number the rind of every lot so that any wheel can be traced back to a particular dairy and day of origin. Like a tattoo, these numbers and the words Parmigiano-Reggiano become part of the skin. Later in its life, because counterfeiting the King of Cheeses has become a global pastime, this will be augmented with security holograms... One night, friends came to town and invited Alice out to dinner at celebrity chef Mario Batali's vaunted flagship Italian eatery, Babbo. As Alice told me this story, at one point during their meal, the waiter displayed a grater and a large wedge of cheese with great flourish, asking her if she wanted Parmigiano-Reggiano on her pasta. She did not say yes. She did not say no. Instead Alice looked at the cheese and asked, "Are you sure that's Parmigiano-Reggiano?" Her replied with certainty, "Yes." "You're sure?" "Yes." She then asked to see the cheese. The waiter panicked, mumbled some excuse, and fled into the kitchen. He returned a few minutes later with a different and much smaller chunk of cheese, which he handed over for examination. The new speck was old, dry, and long past its useful shelf-life, but it was real Parmigiano-Reggiano, evidenced by the pin-dot pattern. "The first one was Grana Padano," she explained. "I could clearly read the rind. They must have gone searching through all the drawers in the kitchen in a panic until they found this forgotten crumb of Parmigiano-Reggiano." Alice Fixx was the wrong person to try this kind of bait and switch on, but she is the exception, and I wonder how many other expense-account diners swallowed a cheaper substitute. This occurred at one of the most famous and expensive Italian eateries in the country. What do you think happens at other restaurants?

They had found him. Somehow they had tracked him here, predicted this move, known exactly what he was going to do. And now they had him out in the open, the time had come to spring their trap. No sooner had this thought crossed his mind than a black SUV pulled up nearby. The rear doors flew open and a pair of men leapt out. Men Drake had encountered before. Men who had tried to kill him more than once over the past few days, and who wouldn’t hesitate to do so now if they were given the order. Their hands were on weapons hidden just inside their jackets, ready to draw down on him if he so much as twitched. ‘Like I said, Ryan,’ the voice on the line said, filled with the confidence of a man in total control of the situation. ‘This can only end one way.

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

The span of the attention I have got from the audience is directly proportional to the time taken by them to understand it wholly. It simply means if I want to continue getting their attention, I would have to endlessly seek (till I reach the final point) them through my words without letting them down in any dilemma. It is so consistent an approach that I can’t get any extra time but the time they read the preceding. No matter what I must stick to the same pattern unless I want to divert their attention. The moment I divert them I am on the different track but parallel. The whole journey or communication or the conversation becomes worthful only if I can reach the destination without any distraction and distortion. Mindful I should be in switching the tracks because if not I end up putting or leaving them half way unaware of where to go on an unknown track. I must not lose them halfway, I keep that in my mind. It holds true when at first, audience is already impressed with your beginning gestures, conversational lines and an excellent entry. They then wait for something miraculous or magnificent to happen at the end. The entire process is a chain of a peculiar starting point, intimate intermediate lines and a particular ending dot. At last, from the top view, it seems that you have taken your audience via a lengthy diagonal roadway but it’s not. The whole theory is named as Parallel Perpendicular Process, where I use the oxymoron because you know where you want your audience to be at but you are improvised alongside the shifting of tracks whenever audience is one the verge of divergence and you apply your instinct immediately to converge. This is a cognitive advertising theory that can sell An Old Product to the respective customer A Joke to the laughable audience A First Impression to the corresponding prospects A New Product to the fresh market An Inspiring Speech to the potential crowd An Advertising to the target spectators The big benefit of this, if applied continuously, it gets from the start to the end on a go. While the disadvantage of it may go simultaneously, this theory fails when the audience is generic because it’s niche that this follows.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is. A moral compass can convince you that all the answers are obvious (even when they're not); that there is a bright line between right and wrong (when often there isn't); and, worst, that you are certain you already know everything you need to know about a subject so you stop trying to learn more.

One story was about a deaf man who was driving in the country, when safety bars were lowered across the road at a railroad crossing. The train passed, but the bars weren’t raised. Finally, the man went to the stationmaster and wrote him a note: “Please but.” That’s the punch line. The joke is that the sign for “but” is the index fingers crossed and then opening up, just the way the bars protecting train tracks do.

The Lums’ grocery was located on the corner of Bruce and Railroad Streets, next to the rail line. On one side of the grocery was the train depot and on the other side were two cobblers, a barber, a restaurant, and a laundry. Just south of the train depot, a short walk along the tracks, was the town’s ice plant. There, great slabs of ice were loaded into insulated boxcars. Fishermen, boots caked with the mud of the Arkansas, White, and Mississippi Rivers, heaved crates of buffalo and catfish onto waiting trains. Packed tight with ice, the fish then shipped up to Chicago, as many as three express carloads a day.

Angelina wanted to start them off with a soup, one that would contrast nicely with the veal. She decided on her Mint Sweet Potato Bisque, a wonderful pureed soup, slightly thickened with rice, accented with golden raisins, brightened by fresh mint. And dessert called for pie. This was the first time she was having Johnny and Jerry to the table, and in Jerry's case it was almost a sales pitch, so everything had to be great. She jotted "Pears, black cherries, whole allspice, airplane bottle of Old Overholt Rye" down on her shopping list. The pie would bring it across the finish line. Tracking down fresh mint and black cherries proved problematic. After four stops and no luck, she ended up taking the bus all the way to the Reading Terminal Market. Compromising on dried mint and canned cherries was out of the question. It worked out well enough in the end because she found what she was looking for and even managed to duck into the Spice Terminal and score whole allspice for the pie, some Spanish saffron (because it was on sale), cardamom pods (impossible to find anywhere else), and mace blades (because she'd never tried them before).

He turned from Lashgarak Road onto Route 425, a paved two-lane road into the mountains, bordered by a guardrail and trees. A place of incredible beauty, with waterfalls tumbling from rocks to a gorge beside the road. About five kilometers up and above the tree line, the snow got deep enough that he had to stop at a turnoff to put on chains even with the rented Toyota RAV4’s all-wheel drive. He looked around at the mountains, stark and covered with snow. No one was following him on the road and only the occasional car or truck came the other way, down the mountain from Shemshak. He didn’t expect a lot of traffic heading up. It was late afternoon and there was no night skiing at the resort; not to mention the crisis. He didn’t need to check his iPad again to see where Zahra was. She had left her cell phone on, and his tracking software on the iPad showed she was about ten kilometers ahead of him up toward the Dizin ski resort.

shhh me!” Harper said, and then she yelled, “Oh, are you afraid your girlfriend Alison might hear us?” “Omg…” Dante, completely embarrassed, walked off quickly by himself. “Heeeeey! Where are you going in a such a hurry?” Harper yelled after PigMaster. “Did he find the taco carriage?” I said as I perked up. “No, I don’t think so, but come on, we have to go after him.” “Tsk… where is that darn thing?” I said. We followed after Dante and rounded a corner. Right when we turned the corner, we ran into a huge line in front of a small carriage. “Ah, here it is!” Dante said as he turned around. “How did you find it?” Harper asked. “I used my nose.” “Oh, I thought you went looking for your girlfriend or something.” Dante rolled his eyes. “Mmm… it smells delicious,” I said as I got closer to the carriage. “It tastes even more delicious. Come on, let’s get in line,” said Dante. “But the line… it is soooo long…” “Don’t worry, it moves quickly.” “Alright…” I said reluctantly. So, the three of us got in line, and Dante told me about the new gladiator. “Aaron the warrior upgraded to a gladiator,” said Dante. “Oh, wow, cool,” I said. “And you don’t remember the others, huh?” “Nope, there were too many to remember.” “Hm… I may need to visit all the captains to get an update on the other new upgrades, then.” “Are you trying to keep track of all of our tier 1s?” asked Harper. “Yeah, it’s good information to know.” We waited in line for about ten minutes until we reached the front. “I’ll order for us, okay?” said Dante. “Sure, since you’ve been here before, you probably know what’s good,” I said. PigMaster nodded and placed his order. “Hi, can I please get five chicken tacos, three beef super tacos, one beef burrito, two chicken super burritos, and one order of nachos?” “Holy moly! Are you trying to feed the whole city, Dante?” said Harper. Dante laughed. “Wait till you try it. Then you’ll understand.

I said I could probably come over later that evening, and she said: “You’re so lucky you have cool parents,” and I pictured my parents: how they looked at me now that my hair was long, how they looked at each other a lot when they were talking to me. How obvious it seemed to me that somewhere along the line our paths had forked, and now we were on different tracks looking at each other across a distance that would soon be infinite. Cool parents, I thought, are the ones who know nothing.