Translations Play Quotes

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls. (translation/paraphrase: Terence McKenna)

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressivee--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

And the reason you play American Football, Hiruma-san?" "Because it's fun." (Translated)

अन्य भाषाका शब्दलाई कविताबाट झिकेर नेपालीमा चोब्दै राख्दै गरेर मात्र नहुँदोरहेछ । तिनलाई पखालेर, धोएर, कुँदेर, सकेसम्म सिँगारेर जतनसाथ राख्नु पर्दोरहेछ ।

सिर्जनाको अनुवाद गर्नु भनेको प्रतिसिर्जना वा अधिसिर्जना गर्नु रहेछ ।

कविताको अनुवादमा दुईवटा कुराको सन्तुलन अत्यन्त आवश्यक हुनेरहेछ । पहिलो, मूलभाषाले अनुवाद हुने भाषामा गर्ने हस्तक्षेप र दोस्रो, त्यसलाई जोगाउन खोज्दा कविको मूल शैलीमाथि अनुवादकको हस्तक्षेप ।

Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. (There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.) {A remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac, as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by Werner Heisenberg, p. 119; it is an ironic play on the Muslim statement of faith, the Shahada, often translated: 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.'}

Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

Translator's Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.

Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate.

He turned his head, a grin playing on his lips. Then he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. "What was that for?" "Because you're a good person, Ari, one of the best. And because it sounds like we're about to get into trouble again." Which translated into: Whatever happened, we were in this together.

Pegasus started to neigh, and Paelen translated. “If anyone should try to steal it from you, Pegasus would defend you, as would Joel and I.” A playful twinkle returned to his eyes. “Of course, should that fail, you could always set yourself on fire again. That would surely scare off any attackers!” “Thanks, Paelen,” Emily teased as she shoved him lightly. Then she patted Pegasus on the neck. “And thank you, Pegs. But I still think we will need to find other clothing.

Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.

It is not surprising that young white males – most between thirty and forty – play major roles in the production of hip-pop. It’s easy to forget this because when most people critique rap and hip-pop harshly, they assume that young black men are the sole creators and producers of misogynist rap. In fact, nothing is unilaterally produced anymore. As we’ve discussed, once you have a corporate takeover of the street culture, it is no longer the property of the young, Black and Latino men and women who have created it. It is reinvented with the mass consumer audience in mind. The hard-core misogyny and the hard-core sexism isn’t a translation from street to big-time studio, it is a product of the big-time studio.

कतिपय अवस्थामा अन्य भाषामा लेखिएका कवितालाई तिनको शैली जस्ताको तस्तै अनुवाद गर्दा ओल्लो भाषामा त्यसले हस्तक्षेप गर्दो रहेछ र त्यहाँ नमिल्ने र कुरो नबुझिने वाक्यांश भएर आउँदो रहेछ । र फेरि त्यस किसिमको हस्तक्षेप हुन नदिन ओर्तिरकै भाषामा चलिरहेको संरचनामा अनुवाद गर्दा मूल कविको शैलीमाथि अनुवादकको हस्तक्षेप हुन पुग्दोरहेछ ।

So sweet is this song that no one could resist it. For in it is all the passionate ache for the moonlight, and the great hunger of the sea, and the terror of desolate places,—all things that lure men to the unattainable. Omari tessala marax, tessala dodi phornepax amri radara poliax armana piliu amri radara piliu son; mari narya barbiton madara anaphax sarpedon andala hriliu Translation: I am the harlot that shaketh Death. This shaking giveth the Peace of Satiate Lust. Immortality jetteth from my skull, And music from my vulva. Immortality jetteth from my vulva also, For my Whoredom is a sweet scent like a seven-stringed instrument, Played unto God the Invisible, the all-ruler, That goeth along giving the shrill scream of orgasm. Every man that hath seen me forgetteth me never, and I appear oftentimes in the coals of the fire, and upon the smooth white skin of woman, and in the constancy of the waterfall, and in the emptiness of deserts and marshes, and upon great cliffs that look seaward; and in many strange places, where men seek me not. And many thousand times he beholdeth me not. And at last I smite myself into him as a vision smiteth into a stone, and whom I call must follow.

अन्य भाषाका शब्दलाई कविताबाट झिकेर नेपालीमा चोब्दै राख्दै गरेर मात्र नहुँदोरहेछ । तिनलाई पखालेर, धोएर, कुँदेर, सकेसम्म सिँगारेर जतनसाथ राख्नु पर्दोरहेछ । सिर्जनाको अनुवाद गर्नु भनेको प्रतिसिर्जना वा अधिसिर्जना गर्नु रहेछ।त्यसैले मैले यहाँ शब्दको अनुवाद गरेको छैन । अर्थ वा भावको वा अझ त्यसभन्दाभित्र बरू ती शब्दहरूले छेकेर बसेका दृष्य र सङ्गीतहरूको अनुवाद गर्ने प्रयास गरेको छु ।

The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in. Word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. […] So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.

When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all—because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.

She tapped out a beat on the edge of the piano as I tripped and plummeted through the refrain of “Spacebar,” trying to translate the synth chords into a piano bit on the fly. It had been a million years since I’d played it. But it was still catchy. Whoever had written this song had known what they were doing.

Our ambition should not be to win, then, but to play with our full effort.

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

Chase, we don’t believe that homosexuality is a sin. The Bible was inspired by God, but it was written, translated, and interpreted by imperfect people just like us. This means that the passing of this sacred scripture from generation to generation and from culture to culture has been a bit like the “telephone game” you play at school. After thousands of years, it’s impossible to judge the original spirit of some scripture. We believe that when in doubt, mercy triumphs judgment. So your parents are Christians who study and pray and then carefully choose what we follow in the Bible, based on whether or not it matches our understanding of Jesus’s overall message.

कविताको अनुवादमा दुईवटा कुराको सन्तुलन अत्यन्त आवश्यक हुनेरहेछ । पहिलो, मूलभाषाले अनुवाद हुने भाषामा गर्ने हस्तक्षेप र दोस्रो, त्यसलाई जोगाउन खोज्दा कविको मूल शैलीमाथि अनुवादकको हस्तक्षेप । कतिपय अवस्थामा अन्य भाषामा लेखिएका कवितालाई तिनको शैली जस्ताको तस्तै अनुवाद गर्दा ओल्लो भाषामा त्यसले हस्तक्षेप गर्दो रहेछ र त्यहाँ नमिल्ने र कुरो नबुझिने वाक्यांश भएर आउँदो रहेछ । र फेरि त्यस किसिमको हस्तक्षेप हुन नदिन ओर्तिरकै भाषामा चलिरहेको संरचनामा अनुवाद गर्दा मूल कविको शैलीमाथि अनुवादकको हस्तक्षेप हुन पुग्दोरहेछ ।

I'm not a heroine, I just play heroines. Also psychotics, vamps, orphans, hookers, housewives, and ”on one memorable occasionâ ”a singing rutabaga. It was never my ambition to utilize my extensive dramatic training by playing a musical vegetable. However, as my agent is so fond of pointing out, there are more actors in New York than there are people in most other cities. Translation: Beggars can't be choosers.

When I am playing with my cat, who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with me than I have in gaming with her?

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

Translate into words for me the sighings of the wind through the forest and the withdrawal of the sea down the pebbly beach and the string of sunlight playing on the hyacinth-strewn grass. You cannot! Then you know why the apostle described his experiences in Paradise as unspeakable.

¿Cuál es el mejor estado del mundo?: Estar dos unidos. Translation. This phrase means: "What is the best state of the world?: Being together. " In this sentence, is a writer plays with the ambiguity of the Spanish language. The word "state" has different meanings in Spanish, plays on the double meaning, first, marital status, second, the state of a nation. The phrase "being two together" in Spanish "estar dos unidos," is very similar to the way in which the Spanish say USA.

Call it the Human Mission-to be all and do all God sent us here to do. And notice-the mission to be fruitful and conquer and hold sway is given both to Adam and to Eve. 'And God said to them...' Eve is standing right there when God gives the world over to us. She has a vital role to play; she is a partner in this great adventure. All that human beings were intended to do here on earth-all the creativity and exploration, all the battle and rescue and nurture-we were intended to do together. In fact, not only is Eve needed, but she is desperately needed. When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo. 'It is not good for the man to be alone, I shall make him [an ezer kenegdo]' (Gen. 2:18 Alter). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, who has spent years translating the book of Genesis, says that this phrase is 'notoriously difficult to translate.' The various attempts we have in English are "helper" or "companion" or the notorious "help meet." Why are these translations so incredibly wimpy, boring, flat...disappointing? What is a help meet, anyway? What little girl dances through the house singing "One day I shall be a help meet?" Companion? A dog can be a companion. Helper? Sounds like Hamburger Helper. Alter is getting close when he translates it "sustainer beside him" The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately.

He even obsessively contemplates the fact that he obsessively contemplates.

Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

Every situation, every person has a melody playing, even if you can’t hear it.

We often decide in advance how we will respond to something rather than wait for the experience to play itself out according to its proper speed.

We attend too many seminars. We take too many classes. We buy too many books. We play too many audios in our cars. It's all wasted if we're unclear on what learning really is: Learning is not attending, listening, or reading. Learning is really about translating knowing what to do into doing what we know. It's about changing. If we have not changed we have not learned.

Six Strategy Traps 1) The do-it-all strategy: failing to make choices, and making everything a priority. Remember, strategy is choice. 2) The Don Quixote strategy: attacking competitive "walled cities" or taking on the strongest competitor first, head-to-head. Remember, where to play is your choice. Pick somewhere you can have a choice to win. 3) The Waterloo Strategy: starting wars on multiple fronts with multiple competitors at the same time. No company can do everything well. If you try to do so, you will do everything weakly. 4) The something-for-everyone strategy: attempting to capture all consumer or channel or geographic or category segments at once. Remember, to create value, you have to choose to serve some constituents really well and not worry about the others. 5) The dreams-that-never-come-true strategy: developing high-level aspirations and mission statements that never get translated into concrete where-to-play and how-to-win choices, core capabilities, and management systems. Remember that aspirations are not strategy. Strategy is the answer to all five questions in the choice cascade. 6) The program-of-the-month strategy: settling for generic industry strategies, in which all competitors are chasing the same customers, geographies, and segments in the same way. The choice cascade and activity system that supports these choices should be distinctive. The more your choices look like those of your competitors, the less likely you will ever win.

I Have Walked Down Many Roads by Antonio Machado translated from the Spanish by Don Share I have walked down many roads and cleared many paths; I have navigated a hundred oceans and anchored off a hundred shores. All over, I have seen caravans of sadness, pompous and melancholy men drunk with black shadows, and defrocked pedants who stare, keep quiet, and think they know, because they don’t drink wine in the neighborhood bars. Bad people who go around polluting the earth . . . And all over, I have seen people who dance or play, when they can, and work their four handfuls of land. If they turn up someplace, they never ask where they are. When they travel, they ride on the backs of old mules, and don’t know how to hurry, not even on holidays. When there’s wine, they drink wine; when there’s no wine, they drink cool water. These are good people, who live, work, get by, and dream; and on a day like all the others they lie down under the earth.

Teenage Turn-Ons As played by Robert Pattinson in the Twilight Saga movies, Edward has a certain physical sex appeal thanks in part to the the actor's handsome features. but the appeal in both the movies and the novels has nothing to do with a bad-boy energy that so often translates into sexiness because, really, even when he's full-out vamp, there isn't that much of a bad boy to be found in his character. Curiously, the sexiness of the vampire Edward comes from his safeness. He is the ultimate fantasy man. Described in overly ripe prose, his physical perfection is glorious. He might be a little cool to the touch-but gosh! Look at him! He's youthful, with a perfect body, or the sort of man found in the pages of a million romance novels. And most important, he will do what ever it takes to keep his beloved Bella safe, whether the danger comes from the world or himself.

Dear Jim." The writing grew suddenly blurred and misty. And she had lost him again--had lost him again! At the sight of the familiar childish nickname all the hopelessness of her bereavement came over her afresh, and she put out her hands in blind desperation, as though the weight of the earth-clods that lay above him were pressing on her heart. Presently she took up the paper again and went on reading: "I am to be shot at sunrise to-morrow. So if I am to keep at all my promise to tell you everything, I must keep it now. But, after all, there is not much need of explanations between you and me. We always understood each other without many words, even when we were little things. "And so, you see, my dear, you had no need to break your heart over that old story of the blow. It was a hard hit, of course; but I have had plenty of others as hard, and yet I have managed to get over them,--even to pay back a few of them,--and here I am still, like the mackerel in our nursery-book (I forget its name), 'Alive and kicking, oh!' This is my last kick, though; and then, tomorrow morning, and--'Finita la Commedia!' You and I will translate that: 'The variety show is over'; and will give thanks to the gods that they have had, at least, so much mercy on us. It is not much, but it is something; and for this and all other blessings may we be truly thankful! "About that same tomorrow morning, I want both you and Martini to understand clearly that I am quite happy and satisfied, and could ask no better thing of Fate. Tell that to Martini as a message from me; he is a good fellow and a good comrade, and he will understand. You see, dear, I know that the stick-in-the-mud people are doing us a good turn and themselves a bad one by going back to secret trials and executions so soon, and I know that if you who are left stand together steadily and hit hard, you will see great things. As for me, I shall go out into the courtyard with as light a heart as any child starting home for the holidays. I have done my share of the work, and this death-sentence is the proof that I have done it thoroughly. They kill me because they are afraid of me; and what more can any man's heart desire? "It desires just one thing more, though. A man who is going to die has a right to a personal fancy, and mine is that you should see why I have always been such a sulky brute to you, and so slow to forget old scores. Of course, though, you understand why, and I tell you only for the pleasure of writing the words. I loved you, Gemma, when you were an ugly little girl in a gingham frock, with a scratchy tucker and your hair in a pig-tail down your back; and I love you still. Do you remember that day when I kissed your hand, and when you so piteously begged me 'never to do that again'? It was a scoundrelly trick to play, I know; but you must forgive that; and now I kiss the paper where I have written your name. So I have kissed you twice, and both times without your consent. "That is all. Good-bye, my dear" Then am I A happy fly, If I live Or if I die

I suppose I try to be a translator of sorts, striving to translate emotion and vision into words, to express the life force of animals and landscapes, to give them voice. I pore over the lustrous details of nature and human nature. How different is this from a monk devoting his life to an illuminated manuscript?

Statement number one: “I’m only playing, Hannah.” Translation: Your ass is my play-toy. You might think you have final say over what happens to your ass, but you don’t. At least, not as long as “I’m only playing.

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.

...a book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word into image, connecting these images to memories, dreams and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it... The fact that books provide us the place to imagine is critically important, as it is there, in the imagination, that all sense of possibility rests.

Thus by an unprejudiced observation of the animal kingdom, we reach the conclusion that wherever society exists at all, this principle may be found: Treat others as you would like them to treat you under similar circumstances. And when we study closely the evolution of the animal world, we discover that the aforesaid principle, translated by the one word Solidarity, has played an infinitely larger part in the development of the animal kingdom than all the adaptations that have resulted from a struggle between individuals to acquire personal advantages.

War is a primarily a game of skill. It is a Contest of mind matched against mind, tactics matched against tactics. But there is also an element of chance that is more suited to games of cards or dice. A wise tactician studies those games, as well, and learns from them. The first lesson of card games is that the cards cannot be played in random order. Only when laid down properly can victory be achieved. In this case, there were but three cards. The first was played at the encampment. The result was entrance to the Strikefast. The second was played aboard ship. The result was promise of passage to Coruscant, and the assignment of Cadet Vanto as my translator. The third was a name: Anakin Skywalker.

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

Oh, I absolutely hate it when I hear some overexcited actor in a wig shout his “passionate” lines, splitting the audience’s eardrums in an effort to impress the unsophisticated watchers standing just in front of the stage who for the most part can only appreciate loud noises and pantomime shows.

We crave nothing less that the perfect story; And while we chatter or listen all our lives to a din of craving – jokes, anecdotes, novels, dreams, films, plays, songs, half the words of our days – We are satisfied only by the one short tale we feel to be true; History is the will of a just God who knows us.

The notion that inspired play (even when audacious, offensive, or obscene) enhances rather than diminishes intellectual vigor and spiritual fulfillment, the notion that in the eyes of the gods the tight-lipped hero and the wet-cheeked victim are frequently inferior to the red-nosed clown, such notions are destined to be a hard sell to those who have E.M. Forster on their bedside table and a clump of dried narcissus up their ass. Not to worry. As long as words and ideas exist, there will be a few misfits who will cavort with them in a spirit of *approfondement*–if I may borrow that marvelous French word that translates roughly as ‘playing easily in the deep’–and in so doing they will occasionally bring to realization Kafka’s belief that ‘a novel should be an ax for the frozen seas around us’.

Over decades in power, the CCP had constructed a multilayered system for stifling dissent in China based on the Soviet psychological warfare technique of Zersetzung, which translates roughly to “psychological decomposition.”[96] The regime’s threats instill fear of open discourse about reality, resulting in self-censorship. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of this silence, individuals willfully play down the evidence before their own eyes. The collective psychological effects are deceptively enormous.

With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel, Like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and fro: Her ruthless will has just deposed once fearful kings While trustless still, from low she lifts a conquered head; No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds, But steely hearted laughs at groans her deeds have wrung. Such is a game she plays, and so she tests her strength; Of mighty power she makes parade when one short hour Sees happiness from utter desolation grow. (A Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, translated by V.E. Watts)

The twin aspects of genius, the passive and the active, are possessed by the fully realized artist; they also form the necessary equipment of the Adept. Yet in very few people are these twin aspects manifested. Nearly everyone has a capacity for the passive aspect, which involves some sort of appreciation of aesthetic values. There are few people totally unresponsive to the beauties of nature, and none at all that is not responsive to its ferocious manifestations.Fewer are able to respond profoundly to the beauty of natural phenomena, and fewer still to so-called works of art. It takes a degree of genius to respond to such manifestations the whole time. Artists in this category are among the saints, some of whom thrilled with rapture at the constant awareness of the total unity, harmony, and beauty of things. Such were Boehme, Ramakrishna, etc. Some yogis are immersed in an unsullied and vibrant bliss derived from the incessant contemplation of this 'world-bewitching maya'4-the breath-taking wonder of the great and glamorous illusion which surrounds us. On the other side of the fence, on the side of active or creative genius, there are yet fewer. Active or creative genius means nothing less than the ability to translate the wonder or the terror of the great lfla (the great play of life) in terms of visual, tactile, audible, olfactory, or some other sensual presentation of phenomena. But there is a third aspect of genius which is yet more rare. It is the ability to open the door of the theatre and admit the influences from outside, from the swarming gulfs beyond the grasp of the mind, and accessible only to the magical entity whose fantastic feelers can snare the most fugitive impulses as they flash through the holes in space, the kinks in time, to be reflected in the magic mirror of the artist's mind.

What are we playing for? This needs to be worth my while." "Honour?" Steve suggested. "Let me know if your universal translator got that one. I know it may be a tough concept for your species.

We which were Ovids five books, now are three, For these before the rest preferreth he: If reading five thou plainst of tediousnesse, Two tane away, thy labor will be lesse: With Muse upreard I meant to sing of armes, Choosing a subject fit for feirse alarmes: Both verses were alike till Love (men say) Began to smile and tooke one foote away. Rash boy, who gave thee power to change a line? We are the Muses prophets, none of thine. What if thy Mother take Dianas bowe, Shall Dian fanne when love begins to glowe? In wooddie groves ist meete that Ceres Raigne, And quiver bearing Dian till the plaine: Who'le set the faire treste sunne in battell ray, While Mars doth take the Aonian harpe to play? Great are thy kingdomes, over strong and large, Ambitious Imp, why seekst thou further charge? Are all things thine? the Muses Tempe thine? Then scarse can Phoebus say, this harpe is mine. When in this workes first verse I trod aloft, Love slackt my Muse, and made my numbers soft. I have no mistris, nor no favorit, Being fittest matter for a wanton wit, Thus I complaind, but Love unlockt his quiver, Tooke out the shaft, ordaind my hart to shiver: And bent his sinewy bow upon his knee, Saying, Poet heers a worke beseeming thee. Oh woe is me, he never shootes but hits, I burne, love in my idle bosome sits. Let my first verse be sixe, my last five feete, Fare well sterne warre, for blunter Poets meete. Elegian Muse, that warblest amorous laies, Girt my shine browe with sea banke mirtle praise. -- P. Ovidii Nasonis Amorum Liber Primus ELEGIA 1 (Quemadmodum a Cupidine, pro bellis amores scribere coactus sit)

One of the problems with shutting down feeling is that we begin to live in our heads. We tell ourselves a story about what we think we’re feeling or what we think we should be feeling rather than feeling our genuine emotions and allowing words to grow out of them so we can accurately describe our inner experience. When we can feel our feelings and then translate them into language, we can use our reasoning ability to play a role in regulating our emotional experience.

The only one of the early investigators who carried the exploration of hysteria to its logical conclusion was Breuer's patient Anna O. After Breuer abandoned her, she apparently remained ill for several years. And then she recovered. The mute hysteric who had invented the "talking cure" found her voice and her sanity, in the women's liberation movement. Under a pseudonym, Paul Berthold, she translated into German the classic treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and authored a play, Women's Rights. Under her own name, Bertha Papenheim became a prominent feminist social worker, intellectual, and organizer. In the course of a long and fruitful career she directed an orphanage for girls, founded a feminist organization for Jewish women and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East to campaign against the sexual exploitation of women and children. Her dedication, energy and commitment were legendary. In the words of a colleague, 'A volcano lived in this woman... Her fight against the abuse of women and children was almost a physically felt pain for her.' At her death, the philosopher Martin Buber commemorated her: 'I not only admired her but loved her, and will love her until the day I die. There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionate spirit. Bertha Pappenheim was a woman with just such a spirit.

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn’t come until after a long chain of wins, until you’ve accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants—they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing about the illusion of control shouldn’t discourage you from attempting to carve a space for yourself out of whatever field you want to tackle. After all, doing nothing guarantees no results. But as you do so, remember most of the future is unforeseeable. Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it. Some things are predictable and manageable, but the farther away in time an event occurs, the less power you have over it. The farther away from your body and the more people involved, the less agency you wield. Like a billion rolls of a trillion dice, the factors at play are too complex, too random to truly manage. You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.

A clear Brunian ‘coincidence of contraries’ has surfaced again, for to be happy when miserable translates Bruno’s paradoxical motto which preceded his play Candelaio: ‘In tristitia hilaris: in hilaritate tristis’—in sad- ness, happiness and in happiness, sadness.

Original sin is now also translated into sickness, calling in a new and scientific priest craft who rush to the rescue. Man is sick, addicted, lame, and dangerous, needing constant protection and supervision by the state, insurance companies, and a never-ending parade of caring, licensed professionals. We are told over and over again that man’s illness and addictions are costing US billions. Man the slave/resource, is causing US trouble, he is interfering with OUR Plans. Man’s debt has now increased a billion-fold. Those who question the “plans” or the sanity of the metaphors in play, are diagnosed as morally unfit or mentally ill. Evil emerges as a metaphor which refers to those who refuse to accept the Plan—the prevailing Garden of Eden—created by God so She may bestow Her Love and Grace. If man refuses he must be force-fed.

Many companies like to describe themselves as winning through operational effectiveness or customer intimacy. These sound like good ideas, but if they don’t translate into a genuinely lower cost structure or higher prices from customers, they aren’t really strategies worth having.

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous. ... Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone. Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope. This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

Zebras are the lions of the animal world. I mean they would be, if lions weren’t already the lions of the animal world. So, is this a book about zebras or pianos? Well, I haven’t played a zebra or ridden a piano in a few years, but that doesn’t mean I’m not an expert on both. In fact, the Bantu bestowed upon me the name “Pundamilia Mozart kupanda kinanda ng’ombe dume”, which roughly translated means, “Zebra Mozart who rides piano benches like they’re bulls.” That’s right, my friends. I’m an international man of mystery. Here’s some advice: If you want to be seen as more mysterious, remember to turn on the fog machine before you make your entrance.


This is a somewhat risky translation. It pivots on the Hebrew word for “great” gadal (#H1431 גְדִּ֖ל). This word can mean many things, including: horn, as in the horn of a powerful bull, the spike of a crown, the authority that a powerful king can wield to knock down an enemy, or gore them into bloody submission. This word also carries God-given authority to change history—as it was used in the book of Jonah. Jehovah made six things “great”: Nineveh (Jon 1:2); the storm (Jon 1:4); the fish (Jon 2:1); the plant (Jon 4:6); the worm (Jon 4:7); the wind (Jon 4:8). Each of these items were smaller tools being used by God to prod the bigger tool, like Assyria, into playing God’s weapon to punish unfaithful Israel. (Is 9:5-6) pg 15

The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this concept into English is like translating "fuckface" into Nipponese, but it might translate into "emotional intensity" in football lingo. He charges directly at Hiro, hollering at the top of his lungs... "Emotional intensity" doesn't convey the half of it, of course. It is the kind of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered bodies of samurai warriors spin in their graves. The word "zanshin" is larded down with a lot of other folderol that you have to be Nipponese to understand. And Hiro thinks, frankly, that most of it is pseudomystical crap, on the same level as his old high school football coach exhorting his men to play at 110 percent.

Nothing she says or does would surprise me.” Gideon faced the helm once more, putting his back to Barnaby. He wasn’t about to go anywhere near Sara again, not the way he was feeling now. Let Barnaby deal with her today. “Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean it’s nothing to worry about. You’ve got more schooling than I have, but isn’t Lysistrata the play where the women refuse to have relations with their husbands until the men agree to stop going to war?” With a groan, Gideon clenched the wheel. Lysistrata was among the many words of literature his father had forced down his throat once he was old enough to read. “Yes. But don’t try to tell me she’s teaching them that. It’s Greek, for god’s sake. They wouldn’t understand a word, even if she knew it well enough to recite it.” “She knows it well enough to give them a free translation, I assure you. When I left her she was telling them the story with great enthusiasm.” Barnaby reached for the helm when Gideon swung away from it with an oath. “I should never have taken her aboard,” he grumbled as he strode for the ladder. “I should have sent her back to England gagged and bound!

Harry Emerson Fosdick could write a book called On Being a Real Person, which translated literally is, “How to be a genuine fake,” because in the old sense, the person is the role, the part played by the actor. But if you forget that you are the actor, and think you are the person, you have been taken in by your own role. You are “en-rolled,” or bewitched, spellbound, enchanted.

That's why your poems can never be no more than a description of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you've fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There's no need for translation. You understand or you don't.

Asked what he would undertake first, Were he called upon to rule a nation, Confucius replied: 'To correct language . . . If language is not correct, Then what is said is not what is meant, Then what ought to be done remains undone; If this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; If morals and art deteriorate, justice "All go astray; If justice goes astray The people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This mattars above everything.' Asked to surrender in World War Two, The Japanese employed the word 'mokusatsu' In replying to the Potsdam ultimatum. The word given out by the Domei news agency Was interpreted in Washington as 'treat with contempt' Rather than 'withholding comment' - pending a decision Its correct meaning. The Americans concluded that their ultimatum had been rejected; The boys in the back-room could play with their new toy A hundred and forty thousand people lay round in helpless confusion. Today 'peace' is mis-translated, and means a seething stalemate Instead of calm; 'Strength' is mis-translated, and means paranoid force Instead of right-minded confidence...

Matthew XV:30” The first bridge, Constitution Station. At my feet the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths. Steam hisses up and up into the night, which becomes at a stroke the night of the Last Judgment. From the unseen horizon and from the very center of my being, an infinite voice pronounced these things— things, not words. This is my feeble translation, time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word: “Stars, bread, libraries of East and West, playing-cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars, a human body to walk with on the earth, fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death, shadows for forgetting, mirrors busily multiplying, cascades in music, gentlest of all time's shapes. Borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and mornings, a bronze weight, a copy of the Grettir Saga, algebra and fire, the charge at Junín in your blood, days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle, love and the imminence of love and intolerable remembering, dreams like buried treasure, generous luck, and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy— all this was given to you, and with it the ancient nourishment of heroes— treachery, defeat, humiliation. In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.

Hume’s purported fideism had serious impact on some religious thinkers. One of these, the German philosopher J. G. Hamann, decided that Hume, intentionally or not, was the greatest voice of religious orthodoxy—for insisting that there was no rational basis for religious belief, and that there was no rational evidence for Christianity. When the Dialogues appeared, Hamann became quite excited; he translated the first and last dialogues into German so that Immanuel Kant might read them and become a serious Christian. Hamann’s use of Hume as the voice of orthodoxy led the great Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard to become the most important advocate of fideistic Christianity in the nineteenth century. So, although most of Hume’s influence has been in creating doubts and leading thinkers to question accepted religious views, he also played an important role in the development of fideistic orthodoxy, culminating in Kierkegaard’s views.

The trouble with you," Parvathi said with a wisdom beyond her years, "Is that you don't know who you want to be. Girl or boy. Chinese or Malay." "Ya-lah you!" Fatima said. "No wonder the kids in your school call you OCBC." There was a bank in Singapore called the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, or OCBC in short. So some cruel kid in school played on the initials of the bank to make fun of Peranakans. They jeered, "Orang Cina Bukan Cina." The words translated as Chinese person, not Chinese.

He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: "I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando," he said to me, "when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down." Sonderkommando means special detail. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeed--one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains. Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando. "Why?" I asked him. "If you would write a book about that," he said, "and give the answer to that question, that 'Why?'--you would have a very great book." "Do you know the answer?" I said. "No," he said, "That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it." "Any guesses?" I said. "No," he said, looking me straight in the eye, "even though I was one of the ones who volunteered." He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. And he thought about Auschwitz, the thing he liked least to think about. And he came back, and he said to me: "There were loudspeakers all over the camp," he said, "and they were never silent for long. There was much music played through them. Those who were musical told me it was often good music--sometimes the best." "That's interesting," I said. "There was no music by Jews," he said. "That was forbidden." "Naturally," I said. "And the music was always stopping in the middle," he said, "and then there was an announcement. All day long, music and announcements." "Very modern," I said. He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. "There was one announcement that was always crooned, like a nursery rhyme. Many times a day it came. It was the call for the Sonderkommando." "Oh?" I said. "Leichentärger zu Wache," he crooned, his eyes still closed. Translation: "Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse." In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry. "After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music," Gutman said to me, "the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job.

A recording plays from somewhere high, or low, floating up or down through the falling dust-light. It is a voice out of time, voice of quickness, voice of glass—or wind. A melody, almost—of mud. How it takes a deep blue to tumble wet stones into a songline. The music any earth makes when touched and shaped by the original green energy. The song, if translated, might feel like this: You have been made in my likeness. I am inside you—I am you / or you are me. Let us say to one another: I am yours— and know finally that we will only ever be as much as we are willing to save of one another.

We’re not the Furies,” I said. “We just want to talk.” “Go away!” he shrieked. “Flowers won’t make it better. It’s too late to apologize!” “Look,” Thalia said, “we just want—” “La-la-la!” he yelled. “I’m not listening!” We played tag with him around the boulder until finally Thalia, who was the quickest, caught the old man by his hair. “Stop it!” he wailed. “I have rocks to move. Rocks to move!” “I’ll move your rock!”Thalia offered. “Just shut up and talk to my friends.” Sisyphus stopped fighting. “You’ll—you’ll move my rock?” “It’s better than looking at you.” Thalia glanced at me. “Be quick about it.” Then she shoved Sisyphus toward us. She put her shoulder against the rock and started pushing it very slowly uphill. Sisyphus scowled at me distrustfully. He pinched my nose. “Ow!” I said. “So you’re really not a Fury,” he said in amazement. “What’s the flower for?” “We’re looking for someone,” I said. “The flower is helping us find him.” “Persephone!” He spit in the dust. “That’s one of her tracking devices, isn’t it?” He leaned forward, and I caught an unpleasant whiff of old-guy-who’s-been-rolling-a-rock-foreternity. “I fooled her once, you know. I fooled them all.” I looked at Nico. “Translation?

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

If all art is conceptual, the issue is rather simple. For concepts, like pictures, cannot be true or false. They can only be more or less useful for the formation of descriptions. The words of a language, like pictorial formulas, pick out from the flux of events a few signposts which allow us to give direction to our fellow speakers in that game of "Twenty Questions" in which we are engaged. Where the needs of users are similar, the signposts will tend to correspond. We can mostly find equivalent terms in English, French, German, and Latin, and hence the idea has taken root that concepts exist independently of language as the constituents of "reality." But the English language erects a signpost on the roadfork between "clock" and "watch" where the German has only "Uhr." The sentence from the German primer, "Meine Tante hat eine Uhr," leaves us in doubt whether the aunt has a clock or watch. Either of the two translations may be wrong as a description of a fact. In Swedish, by the way, there is an additional roadfork to distinguish between aunts who are "father's sisters," those who are "mother's sisters," and those who are just ordinary aunts. If we were to play our game in Swedish we would need additional questions to get at the truth about the timepiece.

He was especially fond of Svetlana, who was a promising student and very attached to her father. He began to play a little game with his daughter, calling her khoziaika (which could be translated as “housekeeper” or “the boss”) while he played the role of the sekretarishka (little secretary) who followed her orders: “Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin.” Svetlana would write out orders for her father: “I order you to let me go to Zubalovo tomorrow”; “I order you to take me to the theater with you”; “I order you to let me go to the movies. Ask them to show Chapaev and an American comedy.” Stalin responded with facetious pomposity.21 Other members of Stalin’s inner circle were appointed Svetlana’s sekretarishkas, playing along with the vozhd. “Svetlana the housekeeper will be in Moscow on 27 August. She is demanding permission to leave early for Moscow so that she can check on her secretaries,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich from the south on 19 August 1935. Kaganovich replied on 31 August: “Today I reported to our boss Svetlana on our work, she seemed to deem it satisfactory.”22 Until the war began, father and daughter exchanged affectionate letters. “I give you a big hug, my little sparrow,” he wrote to her, as he had once written to his wife.23

So far from a political ideology being the quasi-divine parent of political activity, it turns out to be its earthly stepchild. Instead of an independently premeditated scheme of ends to be pursued, it is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies. The pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics. In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after; and the understanding of politics we are investigating has the disadvantage of being, in the strict sense, preposterous. Let us consider the matter first in relation to scientific hypothesis, which I have taken to play a role in scientific activity in some respects similar to that of an ideology in politics. If a scientific hypothesis were a self-generated bright idea which owed nothing to scientific activity, then empiricism governed by hypothesis could be considered to compose a self-contained manner of activity; but this certainly is not its character. The truth is that only a man who is already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis; that is, an hypothesis is not an independent invention capable of guiding scientific inquiry, but a dependent supposition which arises as an abstraction from within already existing scientific activity. Moreover, even when the specific hypothesis has in this manner been formulated, it is inoperative as a guide to research without constant reference to the traditions of scientific inquiry from which it was abstracted. The concrete situation does not appear until the specific hypothesis, which is the occasion of empiricism being set to work, is recognized as itself the creature of owing how to conduct a scientific inquiry. Or consider the example of cookery. It might be supposed that an ignorant man, some edible materials, and a cookery book compose together the necessities of a self-moved (or concrete) activity called cooking. But nothing is further from the truth. The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cooking can spring; it is nothing more than an abstract of somebody's knowledge of how to cook: it is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity. The book, in its tum, may help to set a man on to dressing a dinner, but if it were his sole guide he could never, in fact, begin: the book speaks only to those who know already the kind of thing to expect from it and consequently bow to interpret it. Now, just as a cookery book presupposes somebody who knows how to cook, and its use presupposes somebody who already knows how to use it, and just as a scientific hypothesis springs from a knowledge of how to conduct a scientific investigation and separated from that knowledge is powerless to set empiricism profitably to work, so a political ideology must be understood, not as an independently premeditated beginning for political activity, but as knowledge (abstract and generalized) of a concrete manner of attending to the arrangements of a society. The catechism which sets out the purposes to be pursued merely abridges a concrete manner of behaviour in which those purposes are already hidden. It does not exist in advance of political activity, and by itself it is always an insufficient guide. Political enterprises, the ends to be pursued, the arrangements to be established (all the normal ingredients of a political ideology), cannot be premeditated in advance of a manner of attending to the arrangements of a society; what we do, and moreover what we want to do, is the creature of how we are accustomed to conduct our affairs. Indeed, it often reflects no more than a dis­covered ability to do something which is then translated into an authority to do it.

One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: “There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!” Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play,

No one gets closer to words, and to the impulses behind them, than actors and directors working intensely on a play. The main difference between a translator and a director, when it comes to performed texts, is that a translator has only words at his disposal, while a director can employ the entire theatrical palette of lights, movement, sound, costumes, speech/ diction, and bodies moving through space in order to transform words on a page into a production on a stage. As I worked on Euripides’s Bacchae, I soon came to realize that I was a director and a translator—an intermediary between ancient plays and audiences—and that directing and translating were one and the same.

No,’ he says very firmly. ‘It doesn’t matter how good a drummer, singer, or trombone-mimer you are, bragging about anything is bad form. They have a mantra in the business – “Lego over ego” – and people follow it.’ He tells me that he and his fellow non-Danes have been guided towards the writings of a 1930s Danish-Norwegian author, Aksel Sandemose, for a better understanding of how best to ‘integrate’ into the workplace in Denmark. Sandemose outlines ten rules for living Danishly (otherwise known as ‘Jante’s Law’) in his novel, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. These, as far as Google Translate and I can make out, are: You’re not to think you are anything special You’re not to think you are as good as we are You’re not to think you are smarter than us You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than us You’re not to think you know more than us You’re not to think you are more important than us You’re not to think you are good at anything You’re not to laugh at us You’re not to think anyone cares about you You’re not to think you can teach us anything ‘Crikey, you’re not to do much round here, are you?’ ‘Oh, and there’s another, unspoken one.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘“Don’t put up with presenteeism”. If anyone plays the martyr card, staying late or working too much, they’re more likely to get a leaflet about efficiency or time management dropped on their desk than any sympathy.

In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact. The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate. Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")

Ronan was waiting in his family’s stables. He played with the gloves in his hands as he stood watching Kestrel and Arin ride toward him. “I thought you would take the carriage,” Ronan said to Kestrel. “To go riding? Really, Ronan.” “But your escort.” His eyes cut to Arin sitting easily on the stallion. “I didn’t think any of your slaves rode.” Kestrel watched Ronan tug at the gloves’ fingers. “Is there a problem?” “Now that you are here, certainly not.” Yet his voice was strained. “Because if you don’t like the way in which I have come, you may ride to my house the next time you invite me, then escort me back to your estate, then see me safely home again, and go back the way you came.” He responded to her words as if they had been flirtatious. “It would be my pleasure. Speaking of pleasure, let’s take some together.” He mounted his horse. “Where is Jess?” “Sick with a headache.” Somehow Kestrel doubted that. She said nothing, however, and let Ronan lead the way out of the stables. She turned to follow, and Arin did the same. Ronan glanced back, blond hair brushing over his shoulder. “Surely you don’t intend for him to join us.” Arin’s horse, perfectly calm up until this point, began to shift and balk. It was sensing the tension Kestrel couldn’t see in its rider, who looked impassively at her, waiting for her to translate Ronan’s words into Herrani so that he could pretend it was necessary. “Wait here,” she told him in his language. He wheeled the horse back toward the stables. “You should vary your escorts,” Ronan told Kestrel as Arin rode away. “That one stays too close to your heels.

didn’t talk soothingly to the rat, or stroke her, but firmly grabbed her behind the neck, mimicking a playful nip, and then ran his fingers up and down her rib cage, tickling her. She squirmed briefly, but stopped when he turned her over and tickled her belly. (Like humans, rats have “tickle-skin.”) That was when she began to laugh, calls that we heard through the bat detector as quick, high-pitched chirps, and saw on the computer monitor in a sonogram rendition as a vertical series of wavy lines. Compared to a sonogram of various kinds of human laughs, a rat’s chirps may be closest to a giggle. “There, she’s laughing already,” Panksepp said, tickling her some more. “Chup, chup, chup,” I wrote in my notebook, trying to approximate the bat-detector’s translation of her rat laughter. When Panksepp stopped tickling, she jumped up and bunny-hopped around the bin, while making more of her laughing play-chirps.

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits." "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret." "The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it." "Yes. This was his interpretation." "Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?" "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body." "Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs in English?" "Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago." "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking." "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'" "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.

Less is not known as a teacher, in the same way Melville was not known as a customs inspector. And yet both held the respective positions. Though he was once an endowed chair at Robert’s university, he has no formal training except the drunken, cigarette-filled evenings of his youth, when Robert’s friends gathered and yelled, taunted, and played games with words. As a result, Less feels uncomfortable lecturing. Instead, he re-creates those lost days with his students. Remembering those middle-aged men sitting with a bottle of whiskey, a Norton book of poetry, and scissors, he cuts up a paragraph of Lolita and has the young doctoral students reassemble the text as they desire. In these collages, Humbert Humbert becomes an addled old man rather than a diabolical one, mixing up cocktail ingredients and, instead of confronting the betrayed Charlotte Haze, going back for more ice. He gives them a page of Joyce and a bottle of Wite-Out—and Molly Bloom merely says “Yes.” A game to write a persuasive opening sentence for a book they have never read (this is difficult, as these diligent students have read everything) leads to a chilling start to Woolf’s The Waves: I was too far out in the ocean to hear the lifeguard shouting, “Shark! Shark!” Though the course features, curiously, neither vampires nor Frankenstein monsters, the students adore it. No one has given them scissors and glue sticks since they were in kindergarten. No one has ever asked them to translate a sentence from Carson McCullers (In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together) into German (In der Stadt gab es zwei Stumme, und sie waren immer zusammen) and pass it around the room, retranslating as they go, until it comes out as playground gibberish: In the bar there were two potatoes together, and they were trouble. What a relief for their hardworking lives. Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher.

Cheat wore a Valorian jacket Kestrel was sure she had seen on the governor the night before. He sat at the right hand of the empty head of the dining table, but stood when Kestrel and Arin entered. He approached. His eyes dragged over her. “Arin, your slave looks positively wild.” Lack of sleep made her thoughts broken and shiny, like pieces of mirrors on strings. Cheat’s words spun in her head. Arin tensed beside her. “No offense,” Cheat told him. “It was a compliment to your taste.” “What do you want, Cheat?” Arin said. The man stroked a thumb over his lower lip. “Wine.” He looked straight at Kestrel. “Get some.” The order itself wasn’t important. It was how Cheat had meant it: as the first of many, and how, in the end, they translated into one word: obey. The only thing that kept Kestrel’s face clean of her thoughts was the knowledge that Cheat would take pleasure in any resistance. Yet she couldn’t make herself move. “I’ll get the wine,” Arin said. “No,” Kestrel said. She didn’t want to be left alone with Cheat. “I’ll go.” For an uncertain moment, Arin stood awkwardly. Then he walked to the door and motioned a Herrani girl into the room. “Please escort Kestrel to the wine cellar, then bring her back here.” “Choose a good vintage,” Cheat said to Kestrel. “You’ll know the best.” As she left the room, his eyes followed her, glittering. She returned with a clearly labeled bottle of Valorian wine dated to the year of the Herran War. She placed it on the table in front of the two seated men. Arin’s jaw set, and he shook his head slightly. Cheat lost his grin. “This was the best,” Kestrel said. “Pour.” Cheat shoved his glass toward her. She uncorked the bottle and poured--and kept pouring, even as the red wine flowed over the glass’s rim, across the table, and onto Cheat’s lap. He jumped to his feet, swatting wine from his fine stolen clothes. “Damn you!” “You said I should pour. You didn’t say I should stop.” Kestrel wasn’t sure what would have happened next if Arin hadn’t intervened. “Cheat,” he said, “I’m going to have to ask you to stop playing games with what is mine.

1595, Richard Field, fellow-alumnus of the King Edward grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, printed The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea: translated out of Greeke into French by James Amiot, abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the Kings privie counsell, and great Amner of France, and out of French into English, by Thomas North. This was the book that got Shakespeare thinking seriously about politics: monarchy versus republicanism versus empire; the choices we make and their tragic consequences; the conflict between public duty and private desire. He absorbed classical thought, but was not enslaved to it. Shakespeare was a thinker who always made it new, adapted his source materials, and put his own spin on them. In the case of Plutarch, he feminized the very masculine Roman world. Brutus and Caesar are seen through the prism of their wives, Portia and Calpurnia; Coriolanus through his mother, Volumnia; Mark Antony through his lover, Cleopatra. Roman women were traditionally silent, confined to the domestic sphere. Cleopatra is the very antithesis of such a woman, while Volumnia is given the full force of that supreme Ciceronian skill, a persuasive rhetorical voice.40 Timon of Athens is alone and unhappy precisely because his obsession with money has cut him off from the love of, and for, women (the only females in Timon’s strange play are two prostitutes). Paradoxically, the very masculinity of Plutarch’s version of ancient history stimulated Shakespeare into demonstrating that women are more than the equal of men. Where most thinkers among his contemporaries took the traditional view of female inferiority, he again and again wrote comedies in which the girls are smarter than the boys—Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of Venice—and tragedies in which women exercise forceful authority for good or ill (Tamora, Cleopatra, Volumnia, and Cymbeline’s Queen in his imagined antiquity, but also Queen Margaret in his rendition of the Wars of the Roses).41

To elaborate these points in a Western philosophical context, first, the “basic stuff” of the scientific West came to be seen as substances (noun phrases), in which attributes inhere (auxiliary verbs) or which are active (transitive and intransitive verbs). Thus Heraclitus could ask how it was possible to step into the same river twice when all of its substance (water) was different. In attempting to get to the bottom of things, Descartes argued for two substances which share no predicates because they are absolutely distinct: body (that which is extended) and mind (that which thinks). But Cartesian efforts to account for how the two substances could interact were not persuasive to Descartes’ successors. Like Spinoza, Leibniz believed that substances could not, in fact, interact, but while the former concluded there could therefore only be a single substance (with many modes and attributes), the latter instead argued for an indefinitely large number of them. These individual substances, “monads,” could not causally affect each other, but could all dance to the same tune played in a preestablished harmony composed by God.

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either differential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marveling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never. . . . She was no dazzling executante; her runs were not at all like strings of pearls, and she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation. Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer's evening with the window open . . . And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what - that is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy decided that they should triumph.

we hear “the first,” our false self immediately presumes that loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength is the all-important thing. So we engage in various types of spiritual practices; we may become rigorously religious; we become very “spiritual” in our efforts to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. We figure once we really get our act together in loving God as we should, perhaps we can then work on loving our neighbor as our self. After all, didn’t Jesus say this comes second? This is not what Jesus is saying. The best translation is: “ ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.’ Another way to say the same thing is, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” If you think I’m playing fast and loose with Scripture, you haven’t read 1 John lately. John got it. He understood that our relationship with God and our relationships with others are two sides of a single coin, the symbiosis of life in loving union with God for others.3 The place where we live out our relationship of loving union with God is not in the quiet of our prayer closet but in our relationships with one another. Here is where we “put to death” the manipulative, coercive, controlling dynamics of the false self. Here is where we abandon the dehumanizing and abusive practices of the false self. We love others.

One of the most remarkable properties of our brain is its capacity to change and adapt to our individual world. Neurons and neural networks actually make physical changes when stimulated; this is called neuroplasticity. The way they become stimulated is through our particular experiences: The brain changes in a “use dependent” way. The neural networks involved in piano playing, for example, will make changes when activated by a child practicing her piano. These experience-dependent changes translate into better piano playing. This aspect of neuroplasticity—repetition leads to change—is well known and is why practice in sports, arts, and academics can lead to improvement. A key principle of neuroplasticity is specificity. In order to change any part of the brain, that specific part of the brain must be activated. If you want to learn to play the piano, you can’t simply read about piano playing, or watch and listen to YouTube clips of other people playing piano. You must put your hands on the keys and play; you have to stimulate the parts of the brain involved in piano playing in order to change them. This principle of “specificity” applies to all brain-mediated functions, including the capacity to love. If you have never been loved, the neural networks that allow humans to love will be undeveloped, as in Gloria’s case. The good news is that with use, with practice, these capabilities can emerge. Given love, the unloved can become loving.

The neighborhood of Indian Village lay just twelve blocks west of Hurlbut, but it was a different world altogether. The four grand streets of Burns, Iroquois, Seminole, and Adams (even in Indian Village the White Man had taken half the names) were lined with stately houses built in eclectic styles. Red-brick Georgian rose next to English Tudor, which gave onto French Provincial. The houses in Indian Village had big yards, important walkways, picturesquely oxidizing cupolas, lawn jockeys (whose days were numbered), and burglar alarms (whose popularity was only just beginning). My grandfather remained silent, however, as he toured his son’s impressive new home. “How do you like the size of this living room?” Milton was asking him. “Here, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Tessie and I want you and Ma to feel like this is your house, too. Now that you’re retired—” “What do you mean retired?” “Okay, semiretired. Now that you can take it a little bit easy, you’ll be able to do all the things you always wanted to do. Look, in here’s the library. You want to come over and work on your translations, you can do it right here. How about that table? Big enough for you? And the shelves are built right into the wall.” Pushed out of the daily operations at the Zebra Room, my grandfather began to spend his days driving around the city. He drove downtown to the Public Library to read the foreign newspapers. Afterward, he stopped to play backgammon at a coffee house in Greektown. At fifty-four, Lefty Stephanides was still in good shape. He walked three miles a day for exercise. He ate sensibly and had less of a belly than his son. Nevertheless

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th in New York City. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas is one of them, and he likes belonging. Since Thomas could walk, he has constantly heard that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top 1 percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top 1 percent. He scored in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t. For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, Thomas mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.) Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges? Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.