Transcribing Quotes

I've got a war in my mind

whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.

Mary praise the rosary for my broken mind.

A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.

I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

Springsteen is the king, don't you think? I was like, hell yeah, that guy can sing.

You're divine. Didn't anyone ever tell you It's OK to shine?

Love has its own communication. It's the language of the heart, while it has never been transcribed, has no alphabet, and can't be heard or spoken by voice, it is used by every human on the planet. It is written on our souls, scripted by the finger of God, and we can hear, understand, and speak it with perfection long before we open our eyes for the first time.

Summer's in the air and baby, heaven's in your eyes

Come on, baby, let's ride. We can escape to the great sunshine

God, you're so handsome

Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.

WARNING: The following is a transcript of a digital recording. In certain places, the audio quality was poor, so some words and phrases represent the author's best guesses. Where possible, illustrations of important symbols mentioned in the recording have been added. Background noises such as scuffling, hitting, and cursing by the two speakers have not been transcribed The author makes no claims for the authenticity of the recording. It seems impossible that the two young narrators are telling the truth, but you, the reader, must decide for yourself.

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

The conversation follows its own rolling accord - no real structure or topic or internal logic or feeling; except, of course, for its own hidden, conspiratorial one. Just words, and like in a movie, but one that has been transcribed improperly, most of it overlaps.

All women write stories. It’s just that only some transcribe them.

Language changes over time. Meaning twists. Mistakes compound with each transcribing. Even those stalwart sentinels of perfection—numbers—can, in a single careless moment, be profoundly altered.

Ever transcribed 141 random bytes, one-half of a byte at a time?

I have been transcribing those poems and considering how lucky we are to live longer than flowers, even if not much happens to us.

Learn silence. With the quiet serenity of a meditative mind, listen, absorb, transcribe, and transform.

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). If you can see things this way (or at least try to), we can work together comfortably. If, on the other hand, you decide I’m crazy, that’s fine. You won’t be the first.

Good poets bleed their pain out in their words. They capture the desolation and the hopelessness of life and transcribe it to paper in a way that makes you feel like your throat’s just been cut. It’s visceral. All troubled souls have a favorite poet.

Nothing any man can do will improve that genius; but the genius needs his mind, and he can broaden that mind, fertilize it with knowledge of all kinds, improve its powers of expression; supply the genius, in short, with an orchestra instead of a tin whistle. All our little great men, our one-poem poets, our one-picture painters, have merely failed to perfect themselves as instruments. The Genius who wrote The Ancient Mariner is no less sublime than he who wrote The Tempest; but Coleridge had some incapacity to catch and express the thoughts of his genius - was ever such wooden stuff as his conscious work? - while Shakespeare had the knack of acquiring the knowledge necessary to the expression of every conceivable harmony, and his technique was sufficiently fluent to transcribe with ease.

A dog creates, transcribes, a new landscape for you. A dog like Colter sharpens your joy of all the seasons, and for a while, sometimes a long while, such a dog seems capable, by himself alone, of holding time in place--of pinning it, and holding it taught. And then when he is gone, it is as if the world is taken away. Dogs like that are young for what seems like a very long time.... One you have lost a dog--especially the first you trained from a pup, the one you first set sail into the world with--you can never fully give of yourself to another dog. You can never again look at a dog you love without hedging a tiny bit, if only subconsciously, against the day when that dog, too, must leave. You can never again hunt or enter the future so recklessly, so joyously, with that weight of forethought.... As I sleep restlessly, night after night, or more often, as I lie there awake, I can see him running and I feel guilty that I am not there to honor the birds he is finding... One way or the other, he is still out there running. He will never rest.... I will always want him to know a moment's rest, and peace, and he will always know in his hot heart that the only peace to be gotten is by never resting, by always pushing on. He is my Colter.... I am still his, and he is still mine.

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

Yet there was no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified to be President of all the people. Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character. A random survey of his achievements might show him mastering German, French, and the contrasted dialects of Harvard and Dakota Territory; assembling fossil skeletons with paleontological skill; fighting for an amateur boxing championship; transcribing birdsong into a private system of phonetics; chasing boat thieves with a star on his breast and Tolstoy in his pocket; founding a finance club, a stockmen's association, and a hunting-conservation society; reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own; climbing the Matterhorn; promulgating a flying machine; and becoming a world authority on North American game mammals. If the sum of all these facets of experience added up to more than a geometric whole - implying excess construction somewhere, planes piling upon planes - then only he, presumably, could view the polygon entire.

Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don’t simply read a story and copy it. I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.

This is a Lucent PBX with Audix voice mail, right? I used this kind at all of my old jobs, so I'm pretty familiar with them." Completely ignoring me, Pat continues to demonstrate every single one of the phone's features, half of which she describes incorrectly. I don't bother taking notes because I've used this system a thousand times. I have no need to transcribe an erroneous refresher course. "Hey, you should be writing this down." Like I said, I've used this system extensively and--" WRITE IT DOWN," Pat growls. "If you screw up the phone, Jerry's gonna be on my ass." No problem." I'm slowly learning to choose my battles and figure this isn't the hill I want to die on. I pull a portfolio out of my briefcase and begin to take notes. When the phone rings and Jerry isn't there to answer, you pick it up and hold it to your mouth like this. You say, 'Hello, Jerry Jenkins' office.'" I write: When phone rings, place receiver next to your word hole and not your hoo-hoo or other bodily aperature, and say, "Shalom.

I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere – in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.

If God could transcribe my heart, it'd still read "I love you".

A language you cannot speak yourself is not necessarily a god-awful mess,” Celia says, transcribing a line of symbols into her notebook.

When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.

It was called ‘We Wear the Mask’, by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it. We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle’s bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions. I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more. I stopped writing.

My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn't be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole.

Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. . . . Modern life is so mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions—and our own—were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. . . . The intrusion into everyday life of this all-seeing eye no longer takes us by surprise or catches us with our defenses down. We need no reminder to smile.

The fact is, parents and schools and cultures can and do shape people. The most important influence in my life, outside of my family, was my high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. She pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students -- not simply how to write a lead or accurately transcribe a quote but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way. She was nearing sixty at the time I had her as my teacher and high school newspaper adviser in the late 1960s. She was the polar opposite of "cool," but we hung around her classroom like it was the malt shop and she was Wolfman Jack. None of us could have articulated it then, but it was because we enjoyed being harangued by her, disciplined by her, and taught by her. She was a woman of clarity and principles in an age of uncertainty. I sit up straight just thinking about her!

Titivillus was a tricky little bastard. Despite the scribe’s best intentions, the work itself was repetitive and boring. The mind would wander and mistakes would be made. It was the duty of Titivillus to fill his sack a thousand times each day with manuscript errors. These were hauled to Satan, where they would be recorded in The Book of Errors and used against the scribe on Judgment Day. Thus, the work of copying came with a risk to the scribe: while properly transcribed words were positive marks, incorrectly transcribed words were negative marks.

He keeps notebooks full of symbols and glyphs, working through his old notes and finding new elements to consider. He carries smaller volumes with him at all times, transcribing them into larger ones once they are filled.

I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing. And so I now feel free to tell, for sheer narrative pleasure, the story of Adso of Melk, and I am comforted and consoled in finding it immeasurably remote in time (now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep had generated), gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day, atemporally alien to our hopes and our certainties.

Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.

Girls with poison necklaces to save themselves from torture. Just as women wear amulets which hold their rolled up fortunes transcribed on ola leaf.

On this blue day, I want to be nothing more than an amanuensis to the birds, transcribing all the bits and snatches of song riding in on the wind.

The longer i live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.

His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray's Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.

To borrow Julia Creet's phrase, maybe "memory is where we have arrived rather than where we have left." ... I used to think I was a transcriber of my own experiences and memories, adding an image here and there, but now I think I am more of a shaper. I take small fragments of image, memory, silence, and thought, and shape them with imagninary hands into something different.

At what point will I be able to write an e-mail to my grandson in Bahrain merely by thinking it?" "Thinking it?" Alif smiled contemptuously. "I expect never. Quantum computing will be the next thing, but I don't think it will be capable of transcribing thought." "Quantum? Oh dear, I've never heard of that." It will use qubits instead of-well, that's kind of complicated. Regular computers use a binary language to figure things out and talk to each other-ones and zeroes. Quantum computers could use ones and zeroes in an unlimited number of states, so in theory, they could store massive amounts of data and perform tasks that regular computers can't perform." "States?" "Positions in space and time. Ways of being." "Now it is you who are metaphysical. Let me rephrase what I think you have said in language from my own field of study: they say that each word in the Quran has seven thousand layers of meaning, each of which, though some might seem contrary or simply unfathomable to us, exist equally at all times without cosmological contradiction. Is this similar to what you mean?" "Yes," he said. "That is exactly what I mean. I've never heard anybody make that comparison.

This is huge. Saying that a gene “decides” when it is transcribed is like saying that a recipe decides when a cake is baked. Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

Ujjwal Singh, Steve Crossan, and Abdel Karim Mardini partnered with engineers from Twitter following the Egyptian government’s shutdown of the Internet in early 2011 to create Speak2Tweet, a product that takes messages from a voice mailbox and transcribes them into Tweets broadcast around the world.35 This gave Egyptians a way to communicate en masse with the world and, by dialing into the voice mailbox, to listen to one another.

The following text has been faithfully transcribed from Navarrian into the modern language by Jesinia Neilwart, Curator of the Scribe Quadrant at Basgiath War College. All events are true, and names have been preserved to honor the courage of those fallen. May their souls be commended to Malek.

transcribe experience so other people would understand. The work of telling is essential, and it is not enough. There is always the danger that the energy of the injustice will exhaust itself in the revelation—that we will be horrified but remain unchanged. The reason for this, I suspect, is that these are stories we all already know. A girl was assaulted. A boy was molested. The producer, the judge, the bishop, the boss. To hear these stories spoken aloud is jarring, but not because it causes us to reconsider who we are and how we are organized. It is only when power is threatened that power responds.

What do you see?” asked Ned, his voice hushed. “I see…I see…an elephant.” “Elephant,” Lord Blakely repeated, as he transcribed her words. “I hope that isn’t the extent of your prediction. Unless, Ned, you plan to marry into the genus Loxodonta.” Ned blinked. “Loxo-wha?” “Comprised, among others, of pachyderms.

Elsewhere in the journal, he transcribes the rules laid down by Benjamin Franklin as a prescription for happiness and success: “Eat not to dullness,” “Avoid trifling conversation,” “Waste nothing,” “Let all things have their place,” “Use no hurtful deceit,” “Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes, or habitation,” and so on.

Through her ingenuity she invented a shorthand Greek script in which a long written narrative could be transcribed with far fewer letters, and which is still used by the Greeks today, a fine invention whose discovery demanded great sublety. She [Minerva/Pallas (Athena)] invented numbers and a means of quickly counting and adding sums.

When we learn, we alter which genes in our neurons are “expressed,” or turned on. Our genes have two functions. The first, the “template function,” allows our genes to replicate, making copies of themselves that are passed from generation to generation. The template function is beyond our control. The second is the “transcription function.” Each cell in our body contains all our genes, but not all those genes are turned on, or expressed. When a gene is turned on, it makes a new protein that alters the structure and function of the cell. This is called the transcription function because when the gene is turned on, information about how to make these proteins is “transcribed” or read from the individual gene. This transcription function is influenced by what we do and think. Most people assume that our genes shape us—our behavior and our brain anatomy. Kandel’s work shows that when we learn our minds also, affect which genes in our neurons are transcribed. Thus we can shape our genes, which in turn shape our brain’s microscopic anatomy.

think i'll miss you forever, like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky

Transcribed from the 1889 J.

You cannot judge a fish by its ability to transcribe.

Somewhere it must all be recorded, as insects are captured in amber--that day on the river: transcribed in Brûlée's water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

I am a writer, not a transcriber.

What image of beauty we hold exists so brilliantly, so beautifully in our minds, and the sad task then is to somehow transcribe this image so that it becomes viewable to others.

I furiously transcribe everything that comes to mind, which oscillates between my truth and the truth.

After the meal, Borman dropped me off at my hotel, then went to visit his wife at the nursing home where she lives. As he drove away, it seemed to me strange—I felt I’d come to know Susan as well as I had Frank, despite having met her for just a few minutes, despite the fact that she had been too ill to speak. When I returned home and transcribed the tapes of my interviews, I understood why. Borman spoke of Susan constantly; there didn’t seem an aspect of his life he could explain without discussing how much she meant to him or how much he loved her. I’d heard the same from Lovell and Anders about their wives. When I discovered that Apollo 8 was the only crew in which all the marriages survived (astronaut careers were notoriously hard on marriages) it didn’t surprise me. In a singularly beautiful story, it seemed only fitting that the first men to leave Earth considered home to be the most important place in the universe.

I grieve to think that closeness requires some measure of distance as its preserver, if only as a safety measure, because it certainly seems as if connection, in a deeper sense, introduces a specter of estrangement; for to come into contact with someone is to change her—there is that certainty; it reminds me of a game that Robin told me about told me about one day after school, as we were walking down Annatta Road certainly twenty years ago: find a word, a familiar word, on a page, and then stare at it for a while, just let your eyes linger upon it; and soon enough, sometimes after no more than a few seconds, the word comes to look misspelled, or badly transcribed, or as if there are other things wrong with it; so I tried it once, with the most familiar word there is: love, first verb in the Latin primer, the word known to all men; and after no more than five seconds I could swear that it wasn't the same word I had always known: it looked odd, misshapen, and as if it had all kinds of different pronunciations, except the one I had always believed was correct, and had always used; and so there was dissonance...

Most people think of viruses as parasites, but they aren't parasites at all. An organism has to be considered alive to be classified as a parasite. Viruses don't do any of things living organisms do. They don't grow, they can't move on their own, and they don't metabolize. They don't even have cells. But the one thing a virus is very good at is reproducing. When it finds a suitable host cell, it attaches itself and injects its DNA through the cell's plasma wall. The virus's genes are transcribed into the host cell's DNA, and the host cell's genetic code is rewritten. Whatever its job was before, its new job is to do nothing but produce copies of the original virus, usually until it's created so many that the cell bursts open and spreads the infection.

She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.

This new, telegraphic writing style also influenced public speaking: short sound bites became popular because they were easier for stenographers to transcribe, and cheaper and quicker for reporters to transmit.

But half an hour later my doubts returned, I felt the need for confirmation. Who could I ask to read my text and give an opinion? My mother? My brothers? Antonio? Naturally not, the only one was Lila. But to turn to her meant to continue to recognize in her an authority, when in fact I, by now, knew more than she did. So I resisted. I was afraid that she would dismiss my half page with a disparaging remark. I was even more afraid that that remark would nevertheless work in my mind, pushing me to extreme thoughts that I would end up transcribing onto my half page, throwing off its equilibrium. And yet finally I gave in and went to look for her.

In Bilaath, I said. Bilaath, or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain. In fact, one English colloquial name for Britain, Blighty, somewhat archaic these days and mainly reserved for comedy, is derived from the word Bilaath, which was current in India in the time of the British Raj.

I sensed that he was staring at me as I was explaining Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ, which I’d been transcribing. I was seventeen that year and, being the youngest at the table and the least likely to be listened to,

I remember the embarrassment I felt when Lie With Me came out over ten years ago. There was no good way for me to explain why I shot fiction with pornography, hoping for the best. That initial public embarrassment was likely a kind of useless repression. Because I had no big truth to tell about myself. Now, though, in retrospect, I know why I wrote Lie With Me. It was to sustain this perfect, merciless feeling I first had while spitting art’s extremity into the suckhole of porn. And it’s not embarrassing for me to admit anymore that I was desperate to find meaning in this action. Unfortunately, by the end of two books I didn’t know any more about female sexuality than when I’d started out. My mercilessness had not blossomed into compassion either. Is untapped sexual energy in women even still a problem these days? In 1999, I felt that problem as acutely as my shame. And it was this push-pull of pressures that made me transcribe and complicate the getting-fucked female voice - a voice that I found in porn, a voice that was utterly wasted by porn. Porn needed fiction, I felt. I needed the fight.

When the silence comes and the echoes of former life fades, what will have mattered will be, one made the world a bit better ‘fore their de-berthing. Writing, needs none, but the initial push of heart and passion, enabling the story to take flight, doves to clouds, clouds to doves, then to faithfully follow its unfolding through the quill transcribed, this self-perpetuating engine once born, with no further fuel required, to lift others in the journey, through time, for all time.

For the next 16 hours, fueled by coffee and amphetamines, I wrestled with John Lennon's scrawls and codes and symbols. As I transcribed his words, I said them out loud like an incantation, and I began to feel Lennon's energy flowing through me.

Guardians are no longer permitted to dedicate children in service to their favored deity. The decision to serve the gods for life must be made after the age of majority and of one’s free will. —Public Notice 200.417 Transcribed by Racel Lightstone

A reader can tell if a transcribed story is true because it must contains elements of joy, pain, goodness, and malevolent thoughts. In a true story, not everything fits precisely together; a fortuitous conspiracy of events does resolve all loose ends.

Obviously, therefore, we must be able to transcribe what is in us into our mental and objective consciousness, by establishing a relationship between the life in us and observation of that life in Nature. This we find supremely well expressed by the ancient Egyptians. It is a knowledge of magic, pure and sane, which can lead rapidly toward the spiritual goal of our lives, owing to the fact that we can evoke, by means of the sympathy of analogues in our surroundings, the consciousness of the heart latent in us.

A small segment of DNA that encodes a gene is transcribed into a snippet of RNA, which then travels to the manufacturing region of the cell. There this “messenger RNA” facilitates the assembly of the proper sequence of amino acids to make a specified protein.

city. He did not bother to listen to the girl’s words. Her soft English voice sounded tired and blurred under hypnosis and he would have to listen again and again to the tape anyway as Cohen transcribed it and tried to fathom where her comments, if there were any, came from. ‘And now, Joanna,’ the Professor’s voice rose slightly as he shifted on the high stool to make himself more comfortable. ‘We’ll go back again, if you please, back before the darkness, back before the dreams, back to when you were on this earth before.’ He

For days & nights, Phoolan related her extraordinary life via an interpreter. Recorded & transcribed, the typescript ran to 2000 pages. Writer Marie-Therese Cuny & I shaped this into a first draft. Then over several weeks in 1995, and with the aid of translator & journalist Vijay Kranti, Susanna & I read it back to Phoolan page by page. She would interrupt to correct errors, clear confusing contradictions, & add more recollections as they came to her. Phoolan signed her name at the bottom of each page, the only word she knew how to write.

A land liberated from works of art. I despise those who can acknowledge beauty only when it’s already transcribed, interpreted. One thing admirable about the Arabs: they live their art, they sing and scatter it, from day to day; they don’t cling to it, they don’t embalm it in works. Which is the cause and the effect of the absence of great artists. I have always believed the great artists are the ones who dare entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?...

When real music comes to me - the music of the spheres, the music that surpasseth understanding - that has nothing to do with me, 'cause I'm just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me, and to transcribe it like a medium... those moments are what I live for.

Now consider a genome consisting of genes A and B, meaning three different transcription profiles—A is transcribed, B is transcribed, A and B are transcribed—requiring three different TFs (assuming you activate only one at a time). Three genes, seven transcription profiles: A, B, C, A + B, A + C, B + C, A + B + C. Seven different TFs. Four genes, fifteen profiles. Five genes, thirty-one profiles.fn7 As the number of genes in a genome increases, the number of possible expression profiles increases exponentially. As does the number of TFs needed to produce those profiles.

In this, the 628th year of our Unification, it is hereby recorded that Aretia has been burned by dragon in accordance with the Treaty ending the separatist movement. Those who fled, survived, and those who did not remain entombed in her ruins.—Public Notice 628.85 transcribed by Cerella Nielwart

My response is being written with ink and paper in the glorious tradition of our ancestors and then transcribed by Ms. Vliegenthart into a series of 1s and 0s to travel through the insipid web which has lately ensnared our species, so I apologize for any errors or omissions that may result. “‘Given

...re-writing the narratives that define us, making new meanings and imagining different endings. ... As our earliest caregivers transcribed our sensations, feelings and actions into words for us, our narratives took shape. We used these narratives to integrate our experience into coherent meanings.

Loden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he's trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies which Loden clearly doesn't enjoy very much. You would think that a man who felt comfortable extolling the virtues of hollow point bullets ("Expands to twice its size and just thumps that person.") would be okay talking about dead bodies, but apparently not. "You just cringe," he said when I mentioned the prospect of shooting into human cadaver tissue. Then he made a noise that I transcribed in my notes as olllggg.

It’s just that it’s a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine.” “What? Why’s that?” “Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’s talking. When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen. Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well. He just phones them up and talks at them. He has one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in a blue folder.

After school we used to lie in her room listening to music and talking about why we liked each other. These were long and intense conversations, and felt so monumental to me that I secretly transcribed parts of them from memory in the evenings. When Bobbi talked about me it felt like seeing myself in the mirror for the first time.

When the session ended, I went to my office. I sat at the desk, transcribing what had been said while it was still fresh in my mind. I wrote down everything, word for word, capturing it as precisely and accurately as possible. As you will see, it’s an incredible story—of that there is no doubt. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

ETIENNE DELANCARRE Domingo Salvard,” said Sabetha, reading out loud from the lantern-lit plaque beside the building’s street entrance. “Master solicitor, bonded law-scribe, authorized notary, executor of wills and estates, Vadran translator and transcriber. Fortunes assured, justice delivered, enemies confounded. Reasonable rates.” Locke

It may therefore be of some use to borrow the experience of the same Abdalrahman, whose magnificence has perhaps excited our admiration and envy, and to transcribe an authentic memorial which was found in the closet of the deceased caliph. “I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honours, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to FOURTEEN:—O man! place not thy confidence in this present world!

If manhood is passed down, if it is a mantle cut from the cloth of one and draped across another, it is not done so using titles or accolades. Not hardly. It occurs there—in that spout now resting neck-high—pouring down the spine and into the belly in a language that has never been transcribed, but that every boy on the planet understands and has always understood.

Those close to [Patricia Highsmith], particularly her family, often commented on how Highsmith's vision of reality was a warped one. In April 1947, she transcribed into her notebook what was, presumably, a real dialogue between herself and her mother, in which Mary accused her of not facing the world. Highsmith replied that she did indeed view the world 'sideways, but since the world faces reality sideways, sideways is the only way the world can be looked at in true perspective.' The problem, Highsmith said, was that her psychic optics were different to those around her, but if that was the case, her mother replied, then she should equip herself with a pair of new spectacles. Highsmith was not convinced. 'Then I need a new birth,' she concluded.

Connie's other job was proof-editing which she did very badly. Transferring the author's corrections to a clean sheet of proofs was something Connie was unable to do without missing an average of three corrections a page, or transcribing newly inserted material all wrong... she put angry authors' letters about the mutilation of their books under the cushion of her chair to deal with later

A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.

I look upon every good man, as a good book, lent by its owner for another to read, and transcribe the excellent notions and golden passages that are in it for his own benefit, that they may return with him when the owner shall call for the book again: but in case this excellent book shall be thrown into a corner and no use made of it, it justly provokes the owner to take it away in displeasure. --Funeral of John Upton, Esq

One moral issue that continues to loom large for her is inequality, especially if the wealthy are able to buy genetic enhancements for their children. “We could create a gene gap that would get wider with each new generation,” she says. “If you think we face inequalities now, imagine what it would be like if society became genetically tiered along economic lines and we transcribed our financial inequality into our genetic code.

Fannie Moore, interviewed in North Carolina in 1937, recalled that (as transcribed): “De ‘breed woman’ always bring mo’ money den de res’, [even the] men. When dey put her on de block dey put all her chillun aroun her to show folks how fas she can hab chillun.”12 Mary L. Swearingen of Bastrop, Louisiana, paraphrasing her enslaved grandmother, said, “Whenever a woman was an extraordinary breeder, she was mated by the master to his own accord.

When the silence comes and the echoes of former life fades, what will have mattered will be, one made the world a bit better ‘fore their de-berthing. Writing, needs none, but the initial push of heart and passion, enabling the story to take flight, doves to clouds, clouds to doves, then to faithfully follow its unfolding through the quill transcribed, this self-perpetuating engine once born, with no further fuel required, to lift others in the journey, through time, for all time.

In any ranking of near-term worries about AI, superintelligence should be far down the list. In fact, the opposite of superintelligence is the real problem. Throughout this book, I’ve described how even the most accomplished AI systems are brittle; that is, they make errors when their input varies too much from the examples on which they’ve been trained. It’s often hard to predict in what circumstances an AI system’s brittleness will come to light. In transcribing speech, translating between languages, describing the content of photos, driving in a crowded city—if robust performance is critical, then humans are still needed in the loop. I think the most worrisome aspect of AI systems in the short term is that we will give them too much autonomy without being fully aware of their limitations and vulnerabilities. We tend to anthropomorphize AI systems: we impute human qualities to them and end up overestimating the extent to which these systems can actually be fully trusted.

We have an unusual record of the Cuban missile crisis101 as a result of tapes Kennedy made of meetings of the ExComm. I wasn’t surprised to read, years later when the tapes were transcribed, that McNamara had said at the second ExComm meeting one week earlier much the same as I had: that these missiles didn’t affect our security decisively, or even significantly. “I’ll be quite frank,”102 he told the president. “I don’t think there is a military problem … This is a domestic political problem.

Jasper!’ said Katie. ‘Your machine was supposed to be making duplicate copies of all of the things that were photocopied during the week!’ Yes indeed. And so it did.’ He flung open a panel. ‘All ingeniously copied and transcribed onto one convenient wax roll, quite easily carried between the three of us.’ He hefted one end of the wax roll; it was as big as a carpet. ‘Come along. It’s a mere two hundred and twenty pounds. Try to keep one hand free for making fists. We may have to bash our way out of here.

A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy,

Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned by experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated … has found itself, often simply on account of our anxiety, immediately hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word, which we ourselves have forgotten, or else a word never uttered by us but formed on its course by the imperfect refraction of a different word, can be transported without ever halting for any obstacle to infinite distances … and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods. What we actually recall of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity even in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and behavior is no more like that which we form of them ourselves, than is like an original drawing a spoiled copy in which, at one point, for a black line, we find an empty gap, and for a blank space an unaccountable contour. It may be, all the same, that what has not been transcribed is some non-existent feature, which we behold, merely in our purblind self-esteem, and that what seems to us added is indeed a part of ourselves, but so essential a part as to have escaped our notice. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to ourselves bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, scarcely flattering, indeed, but profound and useful, as a photograph taken by X-rays. Not that that is any reason why we should recognize ourselves in it. A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you show him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labeled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.” Later on, this discrepancy between our portraits, according as it was our own hand that drew them or another, I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they themselves had taken while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but plunging them in stupor if an accident were to reveal them with the warning: “This is you.

I confess, that I have not been unmoved by the development of the tale; and that I have been depressed, nay, agonized, at some parts of the recital, which I have faithfully transcribed from my materials. Yet such is human nature, that the excitement of mind was dear to me, and that the imagination, painter of tempest and earthquake, or, worse, the stormy and ruin-fraught passions of man, softened my real sorrows and endless regrets, by clothing these fictitious ones in that ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain.

By that point, Greta had transcribed sixty-eight sessions for Om and was beginning to think that if everyone was traumatized, maybe nobody was, including her. And then she heard Big Swiss ranting about the trauma people, and comparing them to Trump people, and chastising them for using their trauma as an alibi for whatever, and Greta felt like Big Swiss was speaking directly to her, because Greta had been quietly crutching around on her own shitty history for over thirty years, and maybe it was time to put down the crutches.

Love makes you an anthropologist of your own life. What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What is this language we have got backed up into on long worst fire nights like a bad translation? It is important to keep recording the dialect forms, tracking the idioms. Yes there is a violence in it…. A dialect will sound like your own language to you, only despoiled somehow, hung up by the tail. Late at night I sit in the truck transcribing my notes by flashlight, tape quality is poor. There is a nucleus of terms I never get right. (Pleasure).

It's always felt curative, walking the dogs. Ever since middle school, when I took over the job of walking Agatha, I've felt many a problem solved in the quiet, steady transmissions through a leash. If having a child is like watching your heart walk around outside your body, then walking a dog is like walking your heart. In walking dogs, my heart endures. There is the satisfaction of offering them something so pleasurable to them, but it's also being witness to it, observing them from the inside out like a field scientist making rapt note of how a dog transcribes a road.

This OM that is eternally going on at the basis of all creation, Hum, this is 100% OM. Now there can be 75% OM and there can be 50% OM and there can be 25% of OM. But this 100% OM is life supporting; 75% OM supports life but it has a destructive quality too. Because something that is eternally going on, that upholds creation and some impulse like that but broken. When it is broken then it will have the influence of breaking life, life damaging influence to some degree. 50% OM will have a more amount of breaking effect. 25% OM will have a more amount of breaking effect.                 This OM, what we say OM, OM, OM, this is 25% OM, it has more breaking effect.  And how does it break life? By reducing brilliancy, reducing dynamism, reducing interest in life. This is how it starts to break. Peace, deeper peace leading to inertia. This is how it breaks life.

He’d been at college less than two months but had already stepped directly into the world he wanted, analyzing the stunning symmetry of the DNA molecule as if he’d crawled inside a glistening cathedral of coiling atoms and climbed the winding, acidic rungs of the helix. Seeing that all life depends on this precise and intricate code transcribed on fragile, organic slivers, which would perish instantly in a slightly warmer or colder world. At last, surrounded by enormous questions and people as curious as he to find the answers, drawing him toward his goal of research biologist in his own lab, interacting with other scientists

third way to put language in its place is to think about how we use it. Writing and speaking do not consist of transcribing an interior monologue onto paper or playing it into a microphone. Rather, we engage in a constant give-and-take between the thoughts we try to convey and the means our language offers to convey them. We often grope for words, are dissatisfied with what we write because it does not express what we wanted to say, or discover when every combination of words seems wrong that we do not really know what we want to say. And when we get frustrated by a mismatch between our language and our thoughts, we don’t give up, defeated and mum, but change the language.

You, my Master, Michael Scot, most great philosopher, wrote to my Lord [Frederick II] about the book on numbers which some time ago I composed and transcribed to you … I have given the complete doctrine of numbers according to the method of the Hindus, which method I have chosen as superior to others in this science … [Now] complying with your criticism, your more subtle examining circumspection, to the honour of you and many others, I with advantage corrected this work … Further, if in this work is found insufficiency or defect, I submit it to you for correction.68 Fibonacci need not have worried. The 1228 edition of Fibonacci’s manuscript was enthusiastically copied and recopied

What is that 95 percent? Some is junk—remnants of pseudogenes inactivated by evolution.fn4,3 But buried in that are the keys to the kingdom, the instruction manual for when to transcribe particular genes, the on/off switches for gene transcription. A gene doesn’t “decide” when to be photocopied into RNA, to generate its protein. Instead, before the start of the stretch of DNA coding for that gene is a short stretch called a promoterfn5—the “on” switch. What turns the promoter switch on? Something called a transcription factor (TF) binds to the promoter. This causes the recruitment of enzymes that transcribe the gene into RNA. Meanwhile, other transcription factors deactivate genes.

The thing I remember from the Letters Page in those antique days was the way the OBs signed off. There was Yours faithfully, Yours sincerely, and I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. But the ones I always looked for - and which I took to be the true sign of an Old Bastard - simply ended like this: Yours etc. And then the newspaper drew even more attention to the sign-off by printing it: Yours &c. Yours &c. I used to muse about that. What did it mean? Where did it come from? I imagined some bespatted captain of industry dictating his OB’s views to his secretary for transmission to the Newspaper of Record which he doubtless referred to with jocund familiarity as ‘The Thunderer’. When his oratorical belch was complete, he would say ‘Yours, etc,’ which Miss ffffffolkes would automatically transcribe into, ‘I have the honour to be, sir, one of the distinguished Old Bastards who could send you the label off a tin of pilchards and you would still print it above this my name,’ or whatever, and then it would be, ‘Despatch this instanter to The Thunderer, Miss ffffffolkes.’ But one day Miss ffffffolkes was away giving a handjob to the Archbishop of York, so they sent a temp. And the temp wrote Yours, etc, just as she heard it and The Times reckoned the OB captain a very gusher of wit, but decided to add their own little rococo touch by compacting it further to &c., whereupon other OBs followed the bespatted lead of the captain of industry, who claimed all the credit for himself. There we have it: Yours &c. Whereupon, as an ardent damp-ear of sixteen, I took to the parodic sign-off: Love, &c. Not all my correspondents unfailingly seized the reference, I regret to say. One demoiselle hastened her own de-accessioning from the museum of my heart by informing me with hauteur that use of the word etc., whether in oral communication or in carven prose, was common and vulgar. To which I replied, first, that ‘the word’ et cetera was not one but two words, and that the only common and vulgar thing about my letter - given the identity of its recipient - was affixing to it the word that preceded etc. Alack, she didn’t respond to this observation with the Buddhistic serenity one might have hoped. Love, etc. The proposition is simple. The world divides into two categories: those who believe that the purpose, the function, the bass pedal and principal melody of life is love, and that anything else - everything else - is merely an etc.; and those, those unhappy many, who believe primarily in the etc. of life, for whom love, however agreeable, is but a passing flurry of youth, the pattering prelude to nappy-duty, but not something as solid, steadfast and reliable as, say, home decoration. This is the only division between people that counts.

5 PM CHRIS TAKES THE STAGE Announces that before the African lady, there will be a surprise talk, a mind-bender, he promises, on brain-computer interface. People snap out of their truffle-and-bacon haze. Chris introduces Elgin Branch from… wait for it… Microsoft Research. Research is the only half-decent group at MS, but really? Microsoft? Audience deflating. Energy dissipating. 5:45 PM HOLY CRAP Disregard snarkiness of 5 PM post. Give me a second… I’m going to need some time… 7 PM SAMANTHA 2 Thanks for your patience. This talk won’t post on the TED website for a month. In the meantime, let me try to do it justice. Big shout-out to my blogging pal TEDGRRRL for letting me transcribe her phone video. 5 PM Branch puts on headset. On the big screen:

With you I might return from the abysms in which I have lived. I have struggled to reveal the workings of the soul be­hind life, its deaths. I have only transcribed abortions. I am myself an absolute abysm. I can only imagine myself as a being phosphorescent from all its encounters with darkness. I am the one who has felt most deeply the stutterings of the tongue in its relation to thought. I am the one who has best caught its slipperiness, the corners of the lost. I am the one who has reached states one never dares to name, states of soul of the damned. I have known those abortions of the spirit, the aware­ness of the failures, the knowledge of the times when the spirit falls into darkness, is lost. These have been the daily bread of my days, my constant obsessional quest for the irretrievable.

It was the magnesium. The addition of the ion was critical: with the solution supplemented with magnesium, the ribosome remained glued together, and Brenner and Jacob finally purified a miniscule amount of the messenger molecule out of bacterial cells. It was RNA, as expected-but RNA of a special kind. The messenger was generated afreah when a gene was translated. Like DNA, these RNA molecules were built by stringing together four bases-A,G,C, and U (in the RNA copy of a gene, remember, the T found in DNA is substituted for U). Notably, Brenner and Jacob later discovered the messenger RNA was a facsimile of the DNA chain-a copy made from the original. The RNA copy of a gene then moved from the nucleus to the cytosol, where its message was decoded to build a protein. The messenger RNA was neither an inhabitant of heaven nor of hell-but a professional go-between. The generation of an RNA copy of a gene was termed transcription-referring to the rewriting of a word or sentence in a language close to the original. A gene's code (ATGGGCC...) was transcribed into an RNA code (AUGGGCC...).

You’ve been good for him, you know. For all of us, really, but especially for the master.” Nicole’s pulse sped at the thought even as her mind discounted the comment as illogical. “I don’t see how you could think that. I’ve been here less than a week, and before today he avoided my company as much as possible.” A knowing grin curved the housekeeper’s lips. “You’re young, dearie. You don’t have the experience to see what I can. Believe me, I’ve noticed a change in him since your arrival. That burden he’s been carrying for the last year and a half has been grinding him down with its weight month after month, draining his life like an insatiable leech. Then you came, and it was as if the load lightened.” As Nicole opened her mouth to respond, Mrs. Wellborn hurried to add, “And not just because you’re helping him transcribe all those notebooks of his.” She winked at Nicole over her teacup, and Nicole immediately raised her own cup to her lips, desperate for an excuse to drop her gaze. “You give him something to think about besides those horrible boilers. Something much more uplifting, if you ask me.

The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This book is dense, difficult, long, full of blood and guts. It wasn’t written, as Thucydides himself attests at the start, to be easy or fun. But it is loaded with hardcore, timeless truths and the story it tells ought to be required reading for every citizen in a democracy. Thucydides was an Athenian general who was beaten and disgraced in a battle early in the 27-year conflagration that came to be called the Peloponnesian War. He decided to drop out of the fighting and dedicate himself to recording, in all the detail he could manage, this conflict, which, he felt certain, would turn out to be the greatest and most significant war ever fought up to that time. He did just that. Have you heard of Pericles’ Funeral Oration? Thucydides was there for it. He transcribed it. He was there for the debates in the Athenian assembly over the treatment of the island of Melos, the famous Melian Dialogue. If he wasn’t there for the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse or the betrayal of Athens by Alcibiades, he knew people who were there and he went to extremes to record what they told him.Thucydides, like all the Greeks of his era, was unencumbered by Christian theology, or Marxist dogma, or Freudian psychology, or any of the other “isms” that attempt to convince us that man is basically good, or perhaps perfectible. He saw things as they were, in my opinion. It’s a dark vision but tremendously bracing and empowering because it’s true. On the island of Corcyra, a great naval power in its day, one faction of citizens trapped their neighbors and fellow Corcyreans in a temple. They slaughtered the prisoners’ children outside before their eyes and when the captives gave themselves up based on pledges of clemency and oaths sworn before the gods, the captors massacred them as well. This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth. To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It’s the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many. Hoi polloi in Greek means “the many.” Oligoi means “the few.” I can’t recommend Thucydides for fun, but if you want to expose yourself to a towering intellect writing on the deepest stuff imaginable, give it a try.

WHY THE ADMIRALTY would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere. The Admiralty found added motivation to do so when, on May 12, wireless stations in Britain’s listening network intercepted a series of messages from the then homebound U-20, which upon entering the North Sea had resumed communication with its base at Emden. At the Admiralty these messages drew an unusual degree of attention. Room 40 asked all the stations that had intercepted them to confirm that they had transcribed them correctly and to provide signed and certified copies.

STARLIGHT and THUNDER The Limits of Art is an anthological collection for the ages...for a lifetime. A veritable ark containing excerpts from the sound and fury representative of the finest literary scriveners the world has yet produced. Unequivocally, intellectual nourishment breeds a fire in the mind...a conflagration of ideas and incendiary thoughts that furnish the spirit with conviction and courage to confront the ballet and ballistics of life with passion, wit, tenderness, reason, resolve, humor, imagination and unconditional curiosity. Amidst the clamor brought forth by the alarums and excursions of modern day pontifications, nevertheless, conform and commit your mind to the abolition of ignorance! Accede your sensibilities to the rapture of beauty and her ineffable grace. For beauty is enchantment, a romantic allegiance to the rhapsodic seduction celebratory of the ephemeral, the eternal and the esoteric nature and narratives of fictive splendor, which valorously emanate from this voluptuous volume. This magisterial tome is a figurative brocade of both starlight and thunder transcribed into an insatiable verbal delirium groping toward an unbridled exposition on life’s wonders and mysteries. Drink mightily from its gilded chalice.

…illuminates the flow of my writing, perhaps too nervous for a future reader to decipher. Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death, when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations, and some words and expressions I use normally will seem outdated and of ambiguous meaning. In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and grammar, isolate sentences and transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world’s intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurk in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as accidental obstacles to understanding what I write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seem elusive to him, who setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that I convey to him the effort I am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.

arrived in Cambridge, and made an appointment to meet the formidable Krister Stendahl, a Swedish scholar of fierce intelligence, now to be my first adviser. We met in his office. I was nervous, but also amused that this tall and severe man, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, looked to me like an Ingmar Bergman version of God. After preliminary formalities, he abruptly swiveled in his chair and turned sternly to ask, “So really, why did you come here?” I stumbled over the question, then mumbled something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. Stendahl stared down at me, silent, then asked, “How do you know it has an essence?” In that instant, I thought, That’s exactly why I came here: to be asked a question like that—challenged to rethink everything. Now I knew I had come to the right place. I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma. Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee—we might find the “real Christianity,” when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called “play Bible land” simply by digging through history. Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest. We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies. What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions

Nevertheless, repression is something quite peculiar and is more sharply differentiated from the other mechanisms than they are from one another. I should like to make this relation to the other mechanisms clear by an analogy [...] Let us imagine what might have happened to a book, at a time when books were not printed in editions but were written out individually. We will suppose that a book of this kind contained statements which in later times were regarded as undesirable [...] At the present day, the only defensive mechanism to which the official censorship could resort would be to confiscate and destroy every copy of the whole edition. At that time, however, various methods were used for making the book innocuous. One way would be for the offending passages to be thickly crossed through so that they were illegible. In that case they could not be transcribed, and the next copyist of the book would produce a text which was unexceptionable but which had gaps in certain passages, and so might be unintelligible in them. Another way, however, if the authorities were not satisfied with this, but wanted also to conceal any indication that the text had been mutilated, would be for them to proceed to distort the text. Single words would be left out or replaced by others, and new sentences interpolated. Best of all, the whole passage would be erased and a new one which said exactly the opposite put in its place. The next transcriber could then produce a text that aroused no suspicion but which was falsified.

Is It True? English is a really a form of Plattdeutsch or Lowland German, the way it was spoken during the 5th century. It all happened when Germanic invaders crossed the English Channel and the North Sea from northwest Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia to what is now Scotland or Anglo Saxon better identified as Anglo-Celtic. English was also influenced by the conquering Normans who came from what is now France and whose language was Old Norman, which became Anglo-Norman. Christianity solidified the English language, when the King James Version of the Bible was repetitively transcribed by diligent Catholic monks. Old English was very complex, where nouns had three genders with der, die and das denoting the male, female and neuter genders. Oh yes, it also had strong and weak verbs, little understood and most often ignored by the masses. In Germany these grammatical rules survive to this day, whereas in Britain the rules became simplified and der, die and das became da, later refined to the article the! It is interesting where our words came from, many of which can be traced to their early roots. “History” started out as his story and when a “Brontosaurus Steak” was offered to a cave man, he uttered me eat! Which has now become meat and of course, when our cave man ventured to the beach and asked his friend if he saw any food, the friend replied “me see food,” referring to the multitude of fish or seafood! Most English swear words, which Goodreads will definitely not allow me to write, are also of early Anglo-Saxon origin. Either way they obeyed their king to multiply and had a fling, with the result being that we now have 7.6 Billion people on Earth.

Upon the unwrapping of each package, she vows to write a thank-you letter to Aunt Tammy—a letter of the handwritten, thick-papered, thesaurus-consulted variety—but every day following, Joan “forgets.” She “forgets” for so many consecutive days that the idea of a thank-you letter begins to gain weight in her mind, becoming too heavy to lift. By the end of the first week, a mass of gratitude and shame has accumulated inside her body and grown so dense that adequately transcribing it, surely, would take a lifetime. It would bruise both writer and reader. To send a thank-you letter now, she believes by week two, would be like mailing a handwritten account of my indolence, my boorishness. I can’t. I can’t. And once Joan has decided that the opportunity to demonstrate her appreciation has expired, the gifts begin to sicken her. Even when they’re hidden, their presence fills her apartment like an odor that is also an itch. Like some toxin. Joan hides the gifts in drawers, tucks them beneath sweaters too expensive to donate but not comfortable enough to wear, twists them in plastic bags, which she then shoves in paper sacks, which she then stows in the coat closet, behind the vacuum. But it doesn’t help. She can’t eat or sleep or read or pray or watch her shows or even recite the nation’s capitals. She tears her cuticles. Her asthma worsens. At any given moment, she feels like she might cry—not because she wants to, to bespeak her sensitivity, but because she needs to, in order to proceed with her day. By the end of the month, her guilt crescendos, the odor of the unthanked gifts too foul and itchy to endure any longer, and Joan surrenders. She gathers the gifts in

I am not saying that literature is something totally unconnected with reality. What I am saying is that the truths that come out of literature are never the truths personally experienced by the writer or the reader. Literature is not a transposition of living experience. Real and important knowledge about reality always comes out of literature, but through lies, through a distortion of reality, through a transformation of reality by imagination and the use of words. That is why the novel that tries to depict real experience in an objective and precise way fails. It cannot succeed because the novel was invented, not to transcribe reality, but to transform it, to do something different, to make of real reality an illusion, a separate reality. When you succeed in creating something different out of real reality, real experience, you also achieve the possibility of communicating something that was not evident before that novel or poem or play existed. But you cannot plan this transmission of knowledge. The novel is a reality in itself, reality created out of fantasy and words that makes literature something very different from real life, which, of course, is something not created by imagination or words. Thus when you write a novel you must not shrink from the idea of distorting or manipulating reality. Distortion and manipulation of fact are necessary in a novel. You must lie without any scruples, but in a convincing way so that the reader accepts your lies as truths. If you succeed in this deception, something true will come through these lies, something that did not exist before, something that was not evident before. But if your intention is just to reproduce things of reality in fiction, you will probably fail as a writer because literature, in order to persuade and convince the reader, must become a sovereign world, independent, a world that has emancipated itself from its mother, from reality.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are. From this complacence, the critics have been emboldened to assume a dictatorial power, and have so far succeeded, that they are now become the masters, and have the assurance to give laws to those authors from whose predecessors they originally received them. The critic, rightly considered, is no more than the clerk, whose office it is to transcribe the rules and laws laid down by those great judges whose vast strength of genius hath placed them in the light of legislators, in the several sciences over which they presided. This office was all which the critics of old aspired to; nor did they ever dare to advance a sentence, without supporting it by the authority of the judge from whence it was borrowed. But in process of time, and in ages of ignorance, the clerk began to invade the power and assume the dignity of his master. The laws of writing were no longer founded on the practice of the author, but on the dictates of the critic. The clerk became the legislator, and those very peremptorily gave laws whose business it was, at first, only to transcribe them. Hence arose an obvious, and perhaps an unavoidable error; for these critics being men of shallow capacities, very easily mistook mere form for substance. They acted as a judge would, who should adhere to the lifeless letter of law, and reject the spirit. Little circumstances, which were perhaps accidental in a great author, were by these critics considered to constitute his chief merit, and transmitted as essentials to be observed by all his successors. To these encroachments, time and ignorance, the two great supporters of imposture, gave authority; and thus many rules for good writing have been established, which have not the least foundation in truth or nature; and which commonly serve for no other purpose than to curb and restrain genius, in the same manner as it would have restrained the dancing-master, had the many excellent treatises on that art laid it down as an essential rule that every man must dance in chains. To

After your email about the Late Bronze Age collapse, I became very intrigued by the idea that writing systems could be ‘lost’. In fact I wasn’t really sure what that even meant, so I had to look it up, and I ended up reading a lot about something called Linear B. Do you know all about this already? Basically, around the year 1900, a team of British excavators in Crete found a cache of ancient clay tablets in a terracotta bathtub. The tablets were inscribed with a syllabic script of unknown language and appeared to date from around 1400 BCE. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, classical scholars and linguists tried to decipher the markings, known as Linear B, with no success. Although the script was organised like writing, no one could work out what language it transcribed. Most academics hypothesised it was a lost language of the Minoan culture on Crete, with no remaining descendants in the modern world. In 1936, at the age of eighty-five, the archaeologist Arthur Evans gave a lecture in London about the tablets, and in attendance at the lecture was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy named Michael Ventris. Before the Second World War broke out, a new cache of tablets was found and photographed – this time on the Greek mainland. Still, no attempts to translate the script or identify its language were successful. Michael Ventris had grown up in the meantime and trained as an architect, and during the war he was conscripted to serve in the RAF. He hadn’t received any formal qualifications in linguistics or classical languages, but he’d never forgotten Arthur Evans’s lecture that day about Linear B. After the war, Ventris returned to England and started to compare the photographs of the newly discovered tablets from the Greek mainland with the inscriptions on the old Cretan tablets. He noticed that certain symbols on the tablets from Crete were not replicated on any of the samples from Pylos. He guessed that those particular symbols might represent place names on the island. Working from there, he figured out how to decipher the script – revealing that Linear B was in fact an early written form of ancient Greek. Ventris’s work not only demonstrated that Greek was the language of the Mycenaean culture, but also provided evidence of written Greek which predated the earliest-known examples by hundreds of years. After the discovery, Ventris and the classical scholar and linguist John Chadwick wrote a book together on the translation of the script, entitled ‘Documents in Mycenaean Greek’. Weeks before the publication of the book in 1956, Ventris crashed his car into a parked truck and died. He was thirty-four

A word of explanation about how the information in this book was obtained, evaluated and used. This book is designed to present, as best my reporting could determine, what really happened. The core of this book comes from the written record—National Security Council meeting notes, personal notes, memos, chronologies, letters, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, reports, government cables, calendars, transcripts, diaries and maps. Information in the book was supplied by more than 100 people involved in the Afghanistan War and national security during the first 18 months of President Barack Obama’s administration. Interviews were conducted on “background,” meaning the information could be used but the sources would not be identified by name. Many sources were interviewed five or more times. Most allowed me to record the interviews, which were then transcribed. For several sources, the combined interview transcripts run more than 300 pages. I have attempted to preserve the language of the main characters and sources as much as possible, using their words even when they are not directly quoted, reflecting the flavor of their speech and attitudes. Many key White House aides were interviewed in-depth. They shared meeting notes, important documents, recollections of what happened before, during and after meetings, and assisted extensively with their interpretations. Senior and well-placed military, intelligence and diplomatic officials also provided detailed recollections, read from notes or assisted with documents. Since the reporting was done over 18 months, many interviews were conducted within days or even hours after critical discussions. This often provided a fresher and less-calculated account. Dialogue comes mostly from the written record, but also from participants, usually more than one. Any attribution of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person was obtained directly from that person, from notes or from a colleague whom the person told. Occasionally, a source said mid-conversation that something was “off-the-record,” meaning it could not be used unless the information was obtained elsewhere. In many cases, I was able to get the information elsewhere so that it could be included in this book. Some people think they can lock up and prevent publication of information by declaring it “off-the-record” or that they don’t want to see it in the book. But inside any White House, nearly everyone’s business and attitudes become known to others. And in the course of multiple, extensive interviews with firsthand sources about key decision points in the war, the role of the players became clear. Given the diversity of sources, stakes and the lives involved, there is no way I could write a sterilized or laundered version of this story. I interviewed President Obama on-the-record in the Oval Office for one hour and 15 minutes on Saturday, July 10, 2

I'm investigating Lady Celia's potential suitors." "Oh," she said in a small voice. He glanced at her, surprised to find her looking stricken. "What's wrong?" "I didn't know she had suitors." "Of course she has suitors." Not any he could approve of, but he wasn't about to mention that to his aunt. "I'm sure you read about her grandmother's ultimatum in those reports you transcribed. She has to marry, and soon, too." "I know. But I was rather hoping...I mean, with you there so often and her being an unconventional sort..." When he cast her a quizzical look, she went on more forcefully, "There's no reason you couldn't offer for her." He nearly choked on his bread. "Are you out of your mind?" "She needs a husband. You need a wife. Why not her?" "Because marquess's daughters don't marry bastards, for one thing." The coarse word made her flinch. "You're still from a perfectly respectable family, no matter the circumstances of your birth." She eyed him with a sudden gleam in her eye. "And I notice you didn't say you weren't interested." Hell. He stopped up from gravy with his bread. "I'm not interested." "I'm not saying you have to be in love with her. That would perhaps be asking too much at this point, but if you courted her, in time-" "I would fall in love? With Lady Celia? That isn't possible." "Why not?" Because what he felt for Celia Sharpe was lust, pure and simple. He didn't even know if he wanted to fall in love. It was all fine and well for the Sharpes, who could love where they pleased, but for people like him and his mother, love was an impossible luxury...or a tragedy in the making. That's why he couldn't let his desire for Lady Celia overcome his reason. His hunger for her might be more powerful than he cared to admit, but he'd controlled it until now, and he would get the best of it in time. He had to. She was determined to marry someone else. His aunt was watching him with a hooded gaze. "I hear she's somewhat pretty." Hell and blazes, she wouldn't let this go. "You hear? From whom?" "Your clerk. He saw her when the family came in to the office one time. He's told me about all the Sharpes, how they depend on you and admire you." He snorted. "I see my clerk has been doing it up brown." "So she's not pretty?" "She's the most beautiful woman I've ever-" At her raised eyebrow, he scowled. "Too beautiful for the likes of me. And of far too high a consequence." "Her grandmother is a brewer. Her family has been covered in scandal for years. And they're grateful to you for all you've done so far. They might be grateful enough to countenance your suit." "You don't know the Sharpes." "Oh, so they're too high and mighty? Treat you like a servant?" "No," he bit out. "But..." "By my calculations, there's two months left before she has to marry. If she's had no offers, she might be getting desperate enough to-" "Settle for a bastard?" "Ignore the difference in your stations." She seized his arm. "Don't you see, my boy? Here's your chance. You're on the verge of becoming Chief Magistrate. That would hold some weight with her.

In physical terms, we know that every human action can be reduced to a series of impersonal events: Genes are transcribed, neurotransmitters bind to their receptors, muscle fibers contract, and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun. But for our commonsense notions of human agency and morality to hold, it seems that our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them. Consequently, some scientists and philosophers hope that chance or quantum uncertainty can make room for free will. For instance, the biologist Martin Heisenberg has observed that certain processes in the brain, such as the opening and closing of ion channels and the release of synaptic vesicles, occur at random, and cannot therefore be determined by environmental stimuli. Thus, much of our behavior can be considered truly “self-generated”—and therein, he imagines, lies a basis for human freedom. But how do events of this kind justify the feeling of free will? “Self-generated” in this sense means only that certain events originate in the brain. If my decision to have a second cup of coffee this morning was due to a random release of neurotransmitters, how could the indeterminacy of the initiating event count as the free exercise of my will? Chance occurrences are by definition ones for which I can claim no responsibility. And if certain of my behaviors are truly the result of chance, they should be surprising even to me. How would neurological ambushes of this kind make me free? Imagine what your life would be like if all your actions, intentions, beliefs, and desires were randomly “self-generated” in this way. You would scarcely seem to have a mind at all. You would live as one blown about by an internal wind. Actions, intentions, beliefs, and desires can exist only in a system that is significantly constrained by patterns of behavior and the laws of stimulus-response. The possibility of reasoning with other human beings—or, indeed, of finding their behaviors and utterances comprehensible at all—depends on the assumption that their thoughts and actions will obediently ride the rails of a shared reality. This is true as well when attempting to understand one’s own behavior. In the limit, Heisenberg’s “self-generated” mental events would preclude the existence of any mind at all. The indeterminacy specific to quantum mechanics offers no foothold: If my brain is a quantum computer, the brain of a fly is likely to be a quantum computer, too. Do flies enjoy free will? Quantum effects are unlikely to be biologically salient in any case. They play a role in evolution because cosmic rays and other high-energy particles cause point mutations in DNA (and the behavior of such particles passing through the nucleus of a cell is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics). Evolution, therefore, seems unpredictable in principle.13 But few neuroscientists view the brain as a quantum computer. And even if it were, quantum indeterminacy does nothing to make the concept of free will scientifically intelligible. In the face of any real independence from prior events, every thought and action would seem to merit the statement “I don’t know what came over me.” If determinism is true, the future is set—and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior. And to the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism—quantum or otherwise—we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will.

I no longer require your services." With her head held high, she strode for the door. Hell and blazes, he wouldn't let her do this! Now when he knew what was at stake. "You don't want to hear my report?" he called out after her. She paused near the door. "I don't believe you even have a report." "I certainly do, a very thorough one. I've only been waiting for my aunt to transcribe my scrawl into something decipherable. Give me a day, and I can offer you names and addresses and dates, whatever you require." "A day? Just another excuse to put me off so you can wreak more havoc." She stepped into the doorway, and he hurried to catch her by the arm and drag her around to face him. He ignored the withering glance she cast him. "The viscount is twenty-two years your senior," he said baldly. Her eyes went wide. "You're making that up." "He's aged very well, I'll grant you, but he's still almost twice your age. Like many vain Continental gentlemen, he dyes his hair and beard-which is why he appears younger than you think." That seemed to shake her momentarily. Then she stiffened. "All right, so he's an older man. That doesn't mean he wouldn't make a good husband." "He's an aging roué, with an invalid sister. The advantages in a match are all his. You'd surely end up taking care of them both. That's probably why he wants to marry you." "You can't be sure of that." "No? He's already choosing not to stay here for the house party at night because of his sister. That tells me that he needs help he can't get from servants." Her eyes met his, hot with resentment. "Because it's hard to find ones who speak Portuguese." He snorted. "I found out this information from his Portuguese servants. They also told me that his lavish spending is a façade. He's running low on funds. Why do you think his servants gossip about him? They haven't been paid recently. So he’s definitely got his eye on your fortune.” “Perhaps he does,” she conceded sullenly. “But not the others. Don’t try to claim that of them.” “I wouldn’t. They’re in good financial shape. But Devonmont is estranged from his mother, and no one knows why. I need more time to determine it, though perhaps your sister-in-law could tell you, if you bothered to ask.” “Plenty of people don’t get along with their families,” she said stoutly. “He has a long-established mistress, too.” A troubled expression crossed her face. “Unmarried men often have mistresses. It doesn’t mean he wouldn’t give her up when he marries.” He cast her a hard stare. “Are you saying you have no problem with a man paying court to you while he keeps a mistress?” The sigh that escaped her was all the answer he needed. “I don’t think he’s interested in marriage, anyway.” She tipped up her chin. “That still leaves the duke.” “With his mad family.” “He’s already told me about his father, whom I knew about anyway.” “Ah, but did you know about his great-uncle? He ended his life in an asylum in Belgium, while there to receive some special treatment for his delirium.” Her lower lip trembled. “The duke didn’t mention that, no. But then our conversation was brief. I’m sure he’ll tell me if I ask. He was very forthright on the subject of his family’s madness when he offered-“ As she stopped short, Jackson’s heart dropped into his stomach. “Offered what?” She hesitated, then squared her shoulders. “Marriage, if you must know.” Damn it all. Jackson had no right to resent it, but the thought of her in Lyons’s arms made him want to smash something. “And of course, you accepted his offer,” he said bitterly. “You couldn’t resist the appeal of being a great duchess.” Her eyes glittered at him. “You’re the only person who doesn’t see the advantage in such a match.

Ever since the raid on polygamous prophet Warren Jeffs' YFZ Ranch in Texas, I’d heard rumors that Texas Rangers confiscated documents in which Warren refers to me personally and calls down the wrath of God on my head. I finally got to see one of those documents. It is a sermon delivered by Jeffs and transcribed by one of his wives. Jeffs’ scribe/wife misspells my name, but hey, it’s the thought that counts.

You may have collected many useful profound texts – philosophical scriptures, Spoken advice, transcribed teachings, Yet if you do not practice, at the time of death, books don’t help. Observe your mind! This is my advice from the heart.

The thought is not easy. We are educated to associate virtue with submission to authorities rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms. Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves. We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato’; ‘These are the ipsissima verba of Aristotle.’ But what have we got to say? What judgements do we make? What are we doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do.

Love has its own communication—one you can’t prove in a courtroom, in a lab experiment, or on a doctor’s chart. It’s the language of the heart, and while it has never been transcribed, has no alphabet, and can’t be heard or spoken by voice, it is used by every human on the planet. It is written on our souls, scripted by the finger of God, and we can hear, understand, and speak it with perfection long before we open our eyes for the first time.

They would only be allowed to testify jointly -They would not be required to take an oath before testifying -The testimony would not be recorded electronically or transcribed, and that the only record would be notes taken by one of the commission staffers

For the astronomers of ancient Mesopotamia, the stars that crossed the sky each night were not just distant lights of fixed path and varying brilliance. They were letters, words, writing, a script that could be read. Babylonian inscriptions from the first millennium B.C. referred to the star-filled sky as “the heavenly writing.” Astronomical observation—the tracking of the paths of the stars and planets and the prediction of celestial events—was not an abstract science but a form of reading, an attempt to transcribe and interpret the scribblings of the gods.

Biddy Chambers did. Had she given up, no one would have criticized her. Had she walked away, no one would have thought less of her. Her God-given assignment was to partner with her husband in teaching the Bible. They met in 1908, and by 1910 they were married, living in London, and busy about their dream of starting a Bible college. They purchased a large home and made rooms available for students and missionaries on furlough. Biddy’s training was in stenography. She took careful notes of her husband’s lectures and turned them into correspondence courses. At the outbreak of World War I, he felt a call to minister to soldiers stationed in Egypt. He and Biddy and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter moved to the Middle East, where he took a position as a chaplain. Their ministry continued. He taught, she transcribed. He lectured; she captured his messages. It was a perfect partnership. Then came the setback. Her husband’s complications from appendicitis rendered Biddy a widow. Her husband died at the age of forty-three. She buried him in Egypt and returned to London to face this question: How could she partner with her husband if her husband was gone? All dreams of a teaching ministry would need to be abandoned, right? No. Biddy chose to give God her loaves and fishes. She set about the work of turning her husband’s notes into pamphlets and mailing them to friends and acquaintances. Eventually they were compiled into a book. My Utmost for His Highest was published in 1927.5

We found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.

Nor, indeed, that Erman and Sethe had similarly described that period in the Berlin seminars, thus colouring the background against which Gardiner and Breasted and later generations would transcribe and translate the Lamentations, Admonitions and Disputes. They had seen the worm within the rose. The mighty kingdom that had built the Memphite pyramids, so it was generally agreed, had suffered a similar fate to the Roman Empire as envisaged by the Victorians: weak government and moral decadence had occasioned a descent to anarchy. In reality, however, there is little evidence that pharaoh had controlled a highly structured bureaucracy similar to that of a contemporary state, and modern archaeology and the standing monuments tell a very different story: that, for example, the ending of the 400-year activity of making monuments from blocks of stone had been part-provoked by changes in the environment

About the same time, Whitmer began transcribing Smith’s revelations into a bound volume entitled “A Book of Commandments and Revelations of the Lord Given to Joseph the Seer and Others by the Inspiration of God and Gift and Power of the Holy Ghost Which Beareth Re[c]ord of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost Which Is One God Infinite and Eternal World without End Amen.

I felt the urge to transcribe the scenes, words and gestures of unknown people whom one meets once and whom one never sees again; graffiti hastily scribbled on walls and erased; sentences overheard on the radio and news items read in the papers.

Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.

Past One O’Clock ... Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed. The Milky Way streams silver through the night. I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams I have no cause to wake or trouble you. And, as they say, the incident is closed. Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind. Now you and I are quits. Why bother then To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts. Behold what quiet settles on the world. Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars. In hours like these, one rises to address The ages, history, and all creation. Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and selected poetry, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Meridian Books, New York, 1960; Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor. This poem was found among Mayakovsky’s papers after his suicide on April 14, 1930. He had used the middle section, with slight changes, as an epilogue to his suicide note.

Sartre was a profound atheist, and a humanist to his bones. He outdid even Nietzsche in his ability to live courageously and thoughtfully in the conviction that nothing lies beyond, and that no divine compensations will ever make up for anything on this earth. For him, this life is what we have, and we must make of it what we can. In one of his transcribed conversations with Beauvoir, he said to her, ‘It seems to me that a great atheist, truly atheist philosophy was something philosophy lacked. And that it was in this direction that one should now endeavour to work.’ Beauvoir replied, ‘To put it briefly, you wanted to make a philosophy of man.’ When she then asked him whether he wanted to add any final remarks to their dialogues, he said that, on the whole, the two of them had lived without paying much attention to God. She agreed. Then he said, ‘And yet we’ve lived; we feel that we’ve taken an interest in our world and that we’ve tried to see and understand it.

And it’s more than a metaphor. It’s a physical state. Think of all the things you do in the course of a day. For most tasks, the best-case scenario is that your mind is bright, sharp, and alert. Figure out whether you’re a morning person (like me) or a night person (sadly, also like me), and schedule your tasks for that time. If you need to get up at five in the morning so you can answer all your correspondence without a foggy brain, that’s what you should do. If you need to stay late in the office so you can transcribe your notes from the meeting, that’s what you should do.

changes in brain development, changes in the hormonal systems, immune system, cardiovascular system, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.

Apparently we sorcerers use black notebooks as diaries, but red notebooks for transcribing spells and exorcisms.)

It’s astonishing, he said. What is? The things that happen down there. I have no idea what you’re talking about. He couldn’t begin to tell her. Life. Four billion years of chance had written a score of inconceivable intricacy into every living cell. And every cell was a variation on that same first theme, splitting and copying itself without end through the world. All those sequences, gigabits long, were just waiting to be auditioned, transcribed, arranged, tinkered with, added to by the same brains that those scores assembled. A person could work in such a medium—wild forms and fresh sonorities. Tunes for forever, for no one.

It’d been a while since my mother last warned me about a dream. She often transcribed them in her journals and consulted her notes at a later date. Though she was a devout Christian most of the time, she also covered her bases. She noted dates murmured by ancestors, and after an earthquake, burglary, mugging, the LA Riots, or one of Chris’s more upsetting episodes, she’d consult this almanac of predetermined disaster and cluck her tongue. I asked her why she didn’t take extra care on those days if she knew something was going to happen. She explained, “We can’t live in fear, waiting for tragedy. I write these dates not to warn myself, but to console myself after the fact, that there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

„Honestly, there is courage in transcribing your emotions into words and handing them in the form of a letter to someone else. I hope seriously that things between you two work out well. You deserve it and, honestly, I hope the person isn’t an idiot who doesn’t read the letter until– like weeks later.

Meanwhile, Mother Jones and strike leaders decided to raise a hue and cry in the state capital by marching through Charleston with three thousand strikers and their supporters. At a rally, a stenographer hired by the operators transcribed a speech by Mother Jones, who told the assembly to expect no help from that “goddamned dirty coward” Governor Glasscock, whom, she added wickedly, “we shall call ‘Crystal Peter.

Although we give to the Scriptures absolute integrity, we do not therefore think that the copyists and printers were inspired (theopneustous), but only that the providence of God watched over the copying of the sacred books, so that although many errors might have crept in, it has not so happened (or they have not so crept into the manuscripts) but that they can be easily corrected by a collation of others (or with the Scriptures themselves). Therefore the foundation of the purity and integrity of the sources is not to be placed in the freedom from fault (anamartēsia) of men, but in the providence of God which (however men employed in transcribing the sacred books might possibly mingle various errors) always diligently took care to correct them, or that they might be corrected easily either from a comparison with Scripture itself or from more approved manuscripts. It was not necessary therefore to render all the scribes infallible, but only so to direct them that the true reading may always be found out. This book far surpasses all others in purity.

The mystic is trained to repeat back the words so that we may transcribe them.” The screen began to flash a series of letters—words. “Too dark,” the Astronomer read. “It is too dark to see. Only hear.” “Can you pinpoint where in Hel your mystic is?” Ithan indicated the holographic levels far below. “Not precisely, but judging by the cold, I’d say deep. Perhaps the Chasm itself.

I believe in the country America used to be.

The authors found that brief periods of cyberloafing actually helped admins fight the boredom that so often comes from hours and hours of transcribing documents, organizing files, making copies, and running office errands. Rather than sapping their productivity, taking a moment to cyberloaf helped these employees hit the mental refresh button so they could return to their work with renewed energy.24 Several other studies suggest employees become more productive and focused after a good cyberloafing session.25

If your life could be transcribed into a song, the rights and wrongs, the ups and downs, the good and the bad, and the periods of turmoil and challenges, as much as the moments in which you felt high in the clouds, in love, in awe for all the good things happening to you, mesmerized with disbelief for the joys you were experiencing, all those things would be just and only sounds, perfectly arranged to formulate your own song, the song of your life. In the same way, you must see your friends, and enemies, and loved ones and strangers. For everything is made of frequencies, and everything comes to you in precise moments, to match other frequencies. Everything that happens to you is in a perfect arrangement of vibrations and coincidences. And the maestro of this song is you. You are creating all of that with your mind.

We are educated to associate virtue with submission to authorities rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms.

The pursuit of transcribing municipal documents ranging from 1860s to 1920s introduced me to Trove’s digital gazettes and newspapers. Trove assisted me in unraveling the fascinating stories of fearless convicts who rebelled against unfair conditions and refused to comply with the authorities’ orders; stories of issues raised and resolved by the Kew council’s councilors, with the locales and expenses recorded in communications written in stylish yet illegible handwriting, different spellings, and abbreviations; and stories of meetings, its dates, venues, and list of attendees, what the attendees discussed, finalized, signed and sealed.

I am sorry, my king. I follow your lead and do what is best for our people, but I must think of my family. If you fall, if the world falls, I may be able to transcribe a weapon strong enough to help the survivors, but I cannot if I am dead.” Azrael was the one who had helped me forge the rings that The Hand wore, helping me shape metal and minerals. He was my friend, even though his loyalties lay with the God Xeohr.

Old Will reminds me of a twentieth-century Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep at the end of the Vietnam War only to wake up two decades later in a mosh pit at a Metallica concert.

This was what Jeff had been doing all this time: transcribing the contents of the Phoenix disk, word by word. Because he knew, in spite of his madness, that he couldn’t stay on Mars forever, and he wanted to leave something behind. A library, so that others could enjoy the same stories that had helped him through a dark and troubled time. The library is still here. In fact, we’ve improved it quite a bit. I had the bed and dresser removed, and replaced them with armchairs and reading lamps. The mural has been preserved within glass frames, and the books have been rebound inside plastic covers. The Phoenix disk is gone, but its contents have been downloaded into a couple of comps; the disk itself is in the base museum. And we’ve added a lot of books to the shelves; every time a cycleship arrives from Earth, it brings a few more volumes for our collection. It’s become one of the favorite places in Arsia for people to relax. There’s almost always someone there, sitting in a chair with a novel or story in his or her lap. The sign on the door reads Imperial Martian Library: an inside joke that newcomers and tourists don’t get. And, yes, I’ve spent a lot of time there myself. It’s never too late to catch up on the classics.

There was something strange about Emory Yew. Now I understood what it really was. The infection—it was eating at him, ripping away his sanity. He’s degenerating, the Nightmare said. Little by little. Magic always comes at a cost. I twisted the crow’s foot in my pocket. “What magic did Emory’s infection grant him?” Elm’s gaze shifted to his young cousin. “He can read people,” he said. “As if all their secrets had been transcribed onto the pages of a book. All it takes is a single touch.” Coldness crept up my spine. I see a yellow gaze narrowed by hate, the boy had said to me. I see darkness and shadow. And I see your fingers, long and pale, covered in blood.

I share this so that it may be of some benefit to you in your soul progression. Maybe one day it may be easier for us to reach God than others who have come before us with no map and have had to suffer more, to carve out a pathway. May our Path be easier, for we stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, who bravely and humbly ventured into the unknown, and in whose steps we can now tread more lightly. Amen. Both Teresa and John had keys to share, but these keys were bound in religious doctrines and aspects of their childhood wounding. Once these outer layers were dissolved, the gold of their souls’ wisdom, given to them by God but then filtered through their wounds, was easily apparent, and with their help and my own gifts, all three of us could transcribe the purity of what part of this Pathway to God is all about.

I feel that many of the problems our society is plagued with come from having access to information that is too sacred, too sensitive to be transcribed, catalogued, analyzed, decoded and even used.

he ended his short note with a riddle: v. n. A. 1. de A. o. na. v. e. r. Historians have found it hard enough to transcribe the letters accurately, let alone to understand them. And full interpretation remains elusive.

A sutra is, so to speak, the bare thread of an exposition, the absolute minimum that is necessary to hold it together, unadorned by a single "bead" of elaboration. Only essential words are used. Often, there is no complete sentence-structure. There was a good reason for this method. Sutras were composed at a period when there were no books. The entire work had to be memorized, and so it had to be expressed as tersely as possible. Patanjali's Sutras, like all others, were intended to be expanded and explained. The ancient teachers would repeat an aphorism by heart and then proceed to amplify it with their own comments, for the benefit of their pupils. In some instances these comments, also, were memorized, transcribed at a later date, and thus preserved for us.

Jessie’s eyes widened and her head shot up. “And you’re only coming for advice now, after all of this time?” she asked pointedly. “I don’t need your judgement, Jessie,” Toni countered angrily. In an instant Jessie regretted her tone. Where was her so called professional manner? The scratching of the ballpoint pen against yellow paper was the only sound in the office as Jessie transcribed the gist of their discussion in shorthand. A small, dark part of Jessie still hated Toni for abandoning her to the mercy of those bullies ten years ago, and it revelled in seeing her in similar straits now. But she hated that part of herself for holding on to an empty grudge for so long. As her pen filled the page with notes, she cleared her throat for Toni’s attention. “I’m very sorry to hear that you’ve suffered this kind of treatment, Toni. You really do have my sympathies. Who did you take your concerns to at your place of work?” “I spoke to the owner, Mark Baldwin. He basically tried to shut me down by taking her side.” “Did you put your complaint in writing?” “No, I didn’t see the point after my conversation with him. So what happens now? Are you going to call him?” Jessie shook her head. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. I’ll give you an outline of the procedure, should you wish to proceed.” Jessie rested the pad on the desk. “So far, you have only made an informal complaint, so your first step is to write a grievance letter to your employer about the issues you have encountered.” She restlessly played with the pen between her fingers as she continued. “They will investigate and then invite you to a meeting to state your case. You can have someone accompany you at this meeting. Your workplace will then inform you of the outcome and if you aren’t happy, you have the right to appeal their decision. It is only after this that you can consider a tribunal and it would be at that point we would get involved.” “Okay, so I just write the letter to start with? I can’t see it doing any good though,

There is basic equipment required: a headset, a Dictaphone to play the tapes that must be transcribed, and patience, a willingness to become a human conduit as the words of others enter through her ears, course through her veins, and drip out unseen through fast-moving fingertips.

Very occasionally, you’ll come across gestures transcribed in words, like *shrug* or *sigh*, but these are vanishingly rare. A

What happens when the depth of the text is thought to be swallowed up in a rational approach like this is an externalization and objectification of faith. Here the words are analyzed, contextualized, and grasped by those who are not necessarily taken up by the depth of the event housed within them. Like someone who analyzes a parable without ever touching upon its transformative power, a purely academic understanding of the text, however brilliant, will always be a (mis)understanding. To believe that the words are the Word reduces the text to what can be named, described, and transcribed. To treat it in this way means that we approach the Word as a thing that stands before us to be examined, poked, prodded, and played with. The Word of God, in this reading, thus refers to something, some thing, some set of things.

The titles at the head of each book were prefixed, not by the authors, but by the early transcribers.

Jen, the highest-ranking communications professional in Democratic politics, could hardly spit out a sentence. We had that in common, too. I’d listen to the audio of our conversations and transcribe quotes like “It’s um, I don’t, I don’t, we would, uh, it is, uh, I just saw the president’s, um, uh, comments, about it . . .” and “Like, we have a plan, literally.” I’d eventually see the sly genius in this potpourri of uhs and likes and ums, peppered with eye rolls, confused squints, and a crooked smile. Jen gave us on-the-record access while rendering virtually every conversation unquotable.

IPA is used to transcribe the sound of a word, regardless of its spelling. This is important to keep in mind when examining English, whose orthography was devised by a team of misanthropic, megalomaniacal cryptographers who distrusted and despised one another, and so sought to hide the meanings they were tasked with encoding by employing crude, arcane spellings that no one can explain.

When the handwritten guidance program was transcribed in Florida, a superscript bar was mistakenly left off the program. That one mistake meant that the program wasn’t able to correct the rocket’s course. Both the hardware failure of the Atlas antenna and the software bug in its guidance system meant that Mariner was completely out of control.

I feel that all the various features of Nature around me…provoked an emotional reaction in the depth of my soul, which I have tried to transcribe in music” wrote Franz Liszt during his stay here.

Cainan (sometimes the name is spelled Kainam) was the son of Arpachsad: "And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city. And he found a writing, which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it, for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun, moon and stars in all the signs of heaven." Here, then, is the origin of the star worship of the Sabians traced all the way back to the mysterious Watchers--whoever they were, whatever they are--who settled in the Near East in antediluvian times, taught our ancestors forbidden knowledge, broke some fundamental commandment by mating with human women and, as a result, were remembered as being responsbile for the great global cataclysm of the Deluge.

Marco Polo’s father, Niccolò Polo, traded with the Persians who were known to the early Europeans. These early Persians came from the province of Fârs, sometimes known in Old Persian as Pârsâ, located in the southwestern region of Iran. As a people, they were united under the Achaemenid Dynasty in the 6th century BC, by Cyrus the Great. In 1260, Niccolò Polo and his brother Maffeo lived in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. After the Mongol conquest of Asia Minor, the Polo brothers liquidated their assets into tangible valuables such as gold and jewels and moved out of harm’s way. Having heard of advanced eastern civilizations the brothers traveled through much of Asia, and even met with the Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who later became emperor of China and established the Yuan Dynasty. Not being the first to travel east of Iran, they had heard numerous stories regarding the riches to be discovered in the Far East. Twenty-four years later in 1295, after traveling almost 15,000 miles, they returned to Venice with many riches and treasures. The Polo brothers had experienced a quarter century of adventures on their way to Asia that were later transcribed into The Book of Marco Polo by a writer named Rustichello, who came from Pisa in Tuscany, Italy. This was the beginning of a quest that motivated explorers, including Christopher Columbus, from that time on.

I think Ru [Paul] gave me the best advice when he said to talk into a recorder and transcribe it. That is what worked for me. I just talked. Out of the talking I listened to it found what was cohesive. It all came together.

Ha! Your writing. Is that even writing, or is that just transcribing your fucked-up life?

A scribe’s job is to transcribe what he is instructed to write down. Just as God directed and inspired the authors of the Bible, so was His instruction and inspiration given to me for the writing of Divine Towels. Some may consider the concepts written about in Divine Towels to be extreme or underdeveloped. However, my goal is the planting of seeds in the souls of those who read it. Each person reading Divine Towels will need to contemplate how they can apply its concepts to their own lives and creatively address their own spiritual concerns. Too often I have found that Christian books tell a story, but do not necessarily challenge readers to dig deep into the soil of their own spiritual gardens to cultivate what needs to be growing there. As a writer, I feel bound not just to tell a story, but to offer people something substantial that will help them discover the fruits of the spirit in their own unique search for God.

Interviewees will want to be good hosts, but clinking coffee cups and plates, ice twirling in drinks, and other extraneous noises will all be picked up on the recording. The interviewee may be unperturbed by this everyday commotion, but it will distract the interviewer and make the recording more difficult to use for transcribing, editing, and research purposes. By contrast, folklorists, linguists, and anthropologists will often try to capture the "sound environment" of the interview, including ambient sounds, from church bells to ocean waves.

As for the other central vowels, do you know the song “Better Man” by Pearl Jam? (No judgment if not; they’ve done better.) See if you can find it on YouTube. Listen to the part of the chorus where Eddie Vedder sings “Can’t find a better man.” Hear how his voices changes—how it kind of sounds huskier? This is something you heard a lot in the nineties (Scott Weiland did it; Shakira does it a lot; Dave Matthews did a lot [or Dave, as his true fans call him]). What Eddie Vedder is actually doing is centralizing all the front vowels. His typical pronunciation of “can’t find a better” is something I’d transcribe as . Naturally, he doesn’t always sing this way. Every so often he simply feels the need to kick it into overdrive, and so he centralizes all the vowels. It’s a noticeably different sound. As for why, the only thing I can come up with is that it obscures a lot of the vocalic variety of English (there are fewer distinctions for central vowels than for front vowels), and makes it easier to hold a tone. It’s also why baby comes out babay a lot of times ([e] is lower than [i], which means your mouth is open wider). Anyway, if you’re trying to nail central vowels, remember Eddie Vedder (but hopefully for “Corduroy,” “Yellow Ledbetter,” “Black,” “Guaranteed,” “Oceans,” and “I Got Id” rather than “Better Man”).

Lincoln once noted how the printing press spread knowledge by making works widely available that had previously been the province of a privileged few. The same is true when primary sources are collected, transcribed, and published; when exhaustive reference works are produced; when scholars leave published books and carefully organized research files; and when interest in a subject grows to the point that entire institutions—libraries, journals, and museums—are devoted to assisting its students. The main problem with studying Lincoln is not finding sources, but choosing which sources to follow. A

Another scenario is possible, and that is the e-book will succeed and that books will be downloaded from the Internet. But at the same time, it may be the case that the digital network and the terminals that tap into it will become saturated as limits to growth of computer memory and speed of operation are reached at the same time that electronic traffic becomes gridlocked with e-mail and World Wide Web use. If that were to happen, there would likely be pressure to keep older books in print form, and perhaps even continue to issue newer books that way, rather than clutter the Internet with more and more information. Under such a scenario, older books might not be allowed to circulate because so few copies of each title will have survived the great CD digital dispersal, leaving printed editions that will be as rare as manuscript codices are today. In spite of potential problems, the electronic book, which promises to be all books to all people, is seen by some visionaries as central to any scenario of the future. But what if some electromagnetic catastrophe or a mad computer hacker were to destroy the total electronic memory of central libraries? Curious old printed editions of dead books would have to be disinterred from book cemeteries and re-scanned. But in scanning rare works into electronic form, surviving books might have to be used in a library's stacks, the entrance to which might have to be as closely guarded as that to Fort Knox. The continuing evolution of the bookshelf would have to involve the wiring of bookstacks for computer terminal use. Since volumes might be electronically chained to their section in the stacks, it is also likely that libraries would have to install desks on the front of all cases so that portable computers and portable scanners could be used to transcribe books within a telephone wire's or computer cable's reach of where they were permanently kept. The aisles in a bookstack would most likely have to be altered also to provide seating before the desks, and in time at least some of the infrastructure associated with the information superhighway might begin again to resemble that of a medieval library located in the tower of a monastery at the top of a narrow mountain road.

The Aztecs and the Elizabethans looked into their mirrors to discern danger. Today those who peer into the future want only relief from anxiety. Unable to face the prospect that the cycles of war will continue, they are desperate to find a pattern of improvement in history. It is only natural that believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt, should turn to the sorcery of numbers. Happily there are some who are ready to assist them. Just as the Elizabethan magus transcribed tables shown to him by angels, the modern scientific scryer deciphers numerical auguries of angels hidden in ourselves.

Okay, so if the conscious energy is what we collectively refer to as God, what was the vessel?” “The collective immortal soul in its unified state prior to the Big Bang.” I closed my eyes, attempting to absorb everything I had just heard. “Well, then, organized religion sure screwed that creation story up. Chalk that one up to quantum physics.” “The primer of existence is communicated to every physical species, including yours. Humans were given the information 3,409 Earth years ago.” “Really? I’d love to see it. Is it buried somewhere?” “The information was encoded into the Old Testament’s original Aramaic, transcribed on Mount Sinai to the entity Moses. Fourteen centuries later, the information was decoded and recorded in the text referred to as the Zohar.” “So all those hokey Bible stories were just written as an excuse to encrypt the info contained in our owner’s manual? What are Adam and Eve supposed to represent?” “Protons and electrons—the male and female aspect of the atom.” “Nice. What about the creation of the world in six days?” “Six days refers to the bundle of six dimensions. The only creation is the vessel of the unified soul. The physical world is not the real reality. The physical world is the lucid dream where fulfillment must be earned.

…Just walking one short path could make you feel hopeful, frustrated, bored, excited, or even nothing at all. And that this could change from one step to the next. You’re aware that you want to reach the center, and also aware that the labyrinth keeps taking you away from it. Just as you seem to be getting close, you turn and end up walking almost around its outer limits.... You love the labyrinth and you hate it at different moments, but you never feel like you’ve conquered it, because that would be ridiculous.... This is a path that is determined for you in advance, but no one can tell you what to think while you’re walking it. It’s not like a maze, you can’t get lost. No one’s playing any tricks on you. There aren’t any monsters lurking around any corners. You can see the end and yet, you walk calmly towards it, following perhaps the least logical route (in mathematical terms at least). Perhaps the labyrinth tells us why we don’t simply read the last pages of books. Why we don’t hurry through life looking for outcomes all the time, however many times we’re told that we should, and that we should be overtaking people and overcoming things as we go. The labyrinth doesn’t tell us how to live. It shows us how we do live.

Shortly after Julie began transcribing, I heard her loudly cry out. I rushed over to find her sobbing after she had heard, for the first time, her voice and mine on an FBI intercept. Few things can make you feel more violated than knowing that strange people, working for your government, are listening to conversations between you and your spouse.

It took Julie a couple of weeks of listening and transcribing before she was hardened enough not to cry.

We must not allow the academic prejudices bred by Hegelian ideology, anti-clericalism, anti-Semitism and nineteenth-century intellectual fashions to distort our view of these texts. All the internal evidence shows that those who set down and conflated these writings, and the scribes who copied them when the canon was assembled after the return from Exile, believed absolutely in the divine inspiration of the ancient texts and transcribed them with veneration and the highest possible standards of accuracy, including many passages which they manifestly did not understand. Indeed, the Pentateuch text twice gives solemn admonitions, from God himself, against tampering: ‘Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish aught from it.’25

March 9 MORNING “Yea, He is altogether lovely.” — Song of Solomon 5:16 THE superlative beauty of Jesus is allattracting; it is not so much to be admired as to be loved. He is more than pleasant and fair, He is lovely. Surely the people of God can fully justify the use of this golden word, for He is the object of their warmest love, a love founded on the intrinsic excellence of His person, the complete perfection of His charms. Look, O disciples of Jesus, to your Master’s lips, and say, “Are they not most sweet?” Do not His words cause your hearts to burn within you as He talks with you by the way? Ye worshippers of Immanuel, look up to His head of much fine gold, and tell me, are not His thoughts precious unto you? Is not your adoration sweetened with affection as ye humbly bow before that countenance which is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars? Is there not a charm in His every feature, and is not His whole person fragrant with such a savour of His good ointments, that therefore the virgins love Him? Is there one member of His glorious body which is not attractive? — one portion of His person which is not a fresh loadstone to our souls? — one office which is not a strong cord to bind your heart? Our love is not as a seal set upon His heart of love alone; it is fastened upon His arm of power also; nor is there a single part of Him upon which it does not fix itself. We anoint His whole person with the sweet spikenard of our fervent love. His whole life we would imitate; His whole character we would transcribe. In all other beings we see some lack, in Him there is all perfection. The best even of His favoured saints have had blots upon their garments and wrinkles upon their brows; He is nothing but loveliness. All earthly suns have their spots: the fair world itself hath its wilderness; we cannot love the whole of the most lovely thing; but Christ Jesus is gold without alloy — light without darkness — glory without cloud — “Yea, He is altogether lovely.

And then there are fiction writers. Historians of psychic phenomena are fortunate to have a particularly rich record of precognitive experiences in the lives of writers. This is partly a natural file-drawer effect: Reports of anomalous experiences in the lives of athletes and soldiers, for example, would be relatively rare simply because sports and combat do not leave as rich a paper trail as writing. But additionally, because writing is (for some writers at least) precisely an enjoyable flow activity that engages an individual’s intuitive and creative juices, the very act of recording ideas and inspirations may induce an “altered state” conducive to channeling information from a writer’s future.39 It is like attaching a printer directly to the phenomenon of interest. In memoirs and interviews, writers often describe their creative frenzies as a kind of trance in which ideas come unbidden; some report feeling that the thoughts of some other entity or higher self are being transcribed or channeled. In the last part of this book, we will examine two writer-precogs, Morgan Robertson and Philip K. Dick, who both described feeling possessed by a feminine muse when they wrote. Is “inspiration”—which originally meant possession by a divine spirit—simply a psychologically neutral term for drawing precognitively or presentimentally on a writer’s own future?

In his literary commonplace book, Jefferson transcribed these lines from a version of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch’d with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treasons, Stratagems, & Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such Man be trusted.

no one compares to you

I pause in my work. Before I develop a notation for aesthetics, I must establish a vocabulary for all the emotions I can imagine. I’m aware of many emotions beyond those of normal humans; I see how limited their affective range is. I don’t deny the validity of the love and angst I once felt, but I do see them for what they were: like the infatuations and depressions of childhood, they were just the forerunners of what I experience now. My passions now are more multifaceted; as self-knowledge increases, all emotions become exponentially more complex. I must be able to describe them fully if I’m to even attempt the composing tasks ahead. Of course, I actually experience far fewer emotions than I could; my development is limited by the intelligence of those around me, and the scant intercourse I permit myself with them. I’m reminded of the Confucian concept of ren: inadequately conveyed by “benevolence,” that quality which is quintessentially human, which can only be cultivated through interaction with others, and which a solitary person cannot manifest. It’s one of many such qualities. And here am I, with people, people everywhere, yet not a one to interact with. I’m only a fraction of what a complete individual with my intelligence could be. I don’t delude myself with either self-pity or conceit: I can evaluate my own psychological state with the utmost objectivity and consistency. I know precisely which emotional resources I have and which I lack, and how much value I place on each. I have no regrets. — My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn’t be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole. Such an ideogram could convey, more deliberately than a picture, what a thousand words cannot. The intricacy of each ideogram would be commensurate with the amount of information contained; I amuse myself with the notion of a colossal ideogram that describes the entire universe. The printed page is too clumsy and static for this language; the only serviceable media would be video or holo, displaying a time-evolving graphic image. Speaking this language would be out of the question, given the limited bandwidth of the human larynx.