Turning Eighty Quotes

She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for eighty years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that like the sound of Jem's violin, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.

about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.

I walked to Montevallo.' 'Forty miles?!' 'Forty-two,' he corrected me. 'Well. Forty-two there. Forty-two back. Eight-two miles. No. Eight-four. Yes. Eighty-four miles in forty-five hours.' 'What the hell's in Montevallo?' I asked. 'Not much. I just walked til I got too cold, and then I turned around.' 'You didn't sleep?' 'No, the dreams are terrible.

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.

Gryffindor leads by eighty points to zero, and look at that Firebolt go! Potter’s really putting it through its paces now, see it turn — Chang’s Comet is just no match for it, the Firebolt’s precision-balance is really noticeable in these long —” “JORDAN! ARE YOU BEING PAID TO ADVERTISE FIREBOLTS? GET ON WITH THE COMMENTARY!

Of one hundred persons who take up the spiritual life, eighty turn out to be charlatans, fifteen insane, and only five, maybe, get a glimpse of the real truth. Therefore beware.

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?

Mrs. Zuppa was coming in from bingo just as I was leaving the building. "Looks like you're going to work," she said, leaning heavily on her cane. "What are you packin'?" "A thirty-eight." "I like a nine-millimeter myself." "A nine's good." "Easier to use a semiautomatic after you've had hip replacement and you walk with a cane," she said. One of those useful pieces of information to file away and resurrect when I turn eighty-three.

If at eighty you're not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin' and keepin' power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on your way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss - under your breath, of course - "Fuck you, Jack! you don't own me." If you can whistle up your ass, if you can be turned on by a fetching bottom or a lovely pair of teats, if you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from going sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked.

-A Word On Statistics- Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two. Unsure of every step: almost all the rest. Ready to help, if it doesn't take long: forty-nine. Always good, because they cannot be otherwise: fourwell, maybe five. Able to admire without envy: eighteen. Led to error by youth (which passes): sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with: four-and-forty. Living in constant fear of someone or something: seventy-seven. Capable of happiness: twenty-some-odd at most. Harmless alone, turning savage in crowds: more than half, for sure. Cruel when forced by circumstances: it's better not to know, not even approximately. Wise in hindsight: not many more than wise in foresight. Getting nothing out of life except things: thirty (though I would like to be wrong). Balled up in pain and without a flashlight in the dark: eighty-three, sooner or later. Those who are just: quite a few, thirty-five. But if it takes effort to understand: three. Worthy of empathy: ninety-nine. Mortal: one hundred out of one hundred a figure that has never varied yet.

Amy turned to Nellie. "Can you create a diversion to draw the clerk outside?" The au pair was wary. "What kind of diversion?" "You could pretend to be lost," Dan proposed. "The guy comes out to give you directions, and we slip inside." "That's the most sexist idea I've ever heard," Nellie said harshly. "I'm female, so I have to be clueless. He's male, so he's got a great sense of direction." "Maybe you're from out of town," Dan suggested. "Wait–you are from out of town." Nellie stashed their bags under a bench and set Saladin on the seat with a stern "You're the watchcat. Anybody touches those bags, unleash your inner tiger." The Egyptian Mau surveyed the street uncertainly. "Mrrp." Nellie sighed. "Lucky for us there's no one around. Okay, I'm going in there. Be ready." The clerk said something to her–probably May I help you? She smiled apologetically. "I don't speak Italian." "Ah–you are American." His accent was heavy, but he seemed eager to please. "I will assist you." He took in her black nail polish and nose ring. "Punk, perhaps, is your enjoyment?" "More like a punk/reggae fusion," Nellie replied thoughtfully. "With a country feel. And operatic vocals." The clerk stared in perplexity. Nellie began to tour the aisles, pulling out CDs left and right. "Ah–Artic Monkeys–that's what I'm talking about. And some Bad Brains–from the eighties. Foo Fighters–I'll need a couple from those guys. And don't forget Linkin Park..." He watched in awe as she stacked up an enormous armload of music. "There," she finished, slapping Frank Zappa's Greatest Hits on top of the pile. "That should do for a start." "You are a music lover," said the wide-eyed cashier. "No, I'm a kleptomaniac." And she dashed out the door.

It just occurred to me—what are you like when you travel?” I beamed at him, turning on his radio. “Eighties music, baby. Don’t tell me you didn’t light the fire.” He groaned. “This is going to be one long ride.

I'm going to turn my life around. Make a complete three sixty." "Don't you mean one eighty?" he corrected. "If you do that, you'll end up right back where you started." "Maybe. But at least I'll have a chance of coming out of it a different person - a better version of me.

Janet stood and began a wide navigation of turning one hundred and eighty degrees to enter her vehicle, her slow toddles calling to mind a sleepwalking badger. Her weak forearms often came alive to shoo away invisible hindrances, pawing the air with disgruntled choler. Before beginning the climb up the van’s two carpeted steps, the most athletic portion of her adieu, she unceremoniously dropped her cigarette butt to the ground without extinguishing it. I got the feeling she hoped it might roll beneath the vehicle’s gas tank and give her a true Viking burial.

Then it was my turn. I was sixteen, I told them. I saw a few kids’ eyes widen. Olive laughed in surprise. It was strange to them that I should be so young, but what was strange to me was how young they seemed. I knew plenty of eighty-year-olds in Florida, and these kids acted nothing like them. It was as if the constance of their lives here, the unvarying days—this perpetual deathless summer—had arrested their emotions as well as their bodies, sealing them in their youth like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.

[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

Well, Onyx told me that Queen Thorn had sent her a message asking for us, and I thought, whoa, that’s kind of awesome, but guess what, that turned out to be a LIE, Qibli! She was LYING to me! Why would she DO that?” Ostrich shot Onyx a resentful look. “And we were halfway to the palace when suddenly THIS guy showed up with, like, EIGHTY creepy dragons in hoods and they bossed us all here instead, although I was pretty sure Thorn wouldn’t be here, and I was right, and then they said I couldn’t leave, and finally I realized Onyx was actually WORKING with them, and then I was, like, ARRRGH NOOO, I’m a stupid HOSTAGE again, aren’t I?

There are so many women who continue to do incredible work well into their eighties or nineties. Celia was like that. She could have turned in riveting performance after riveting performance forever, because she was always consumed by the work.

...Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift--plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion--had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man.

What height is this table?' he said suddenly, just as I was about to go to the bread bin for a slice to wipe my plate with. I turned round and looked at him, wondering why he was bothering with such an easy question. 'Thirty inches,' I told him, and took a crust from the bin. 'Wrong,' he said with an eager grin. 'Two foot six.' I shook my head at him, scowling, and wiped the brown rim of soup from the inside of my plate. There was a time when I was genuinely afraid of these idiotic questions, but now, apart from the fact that I must know the height, length, breadth, area and volume of just about every part of the house and everything in it, I can see my father's obsession for what it is. It gets embarrassing at times when there are guests in the house, even if they are family and ought to know what to expect. They'll be sitting there, probably in the lounge, wondering whether Father's going to feed them anything or just give an impromptu lecture on cancer of the colon or tapeworms, when he'll sidle up to somebody, look round to make sure everybody's watching, then in a conspiratorial stage-whisper say: 'See that door over there? It's eighty-five inches, corner to corner. ' Then he'll wink and walk off, or slide over on his seat, looking nonchalant.

Back in the "leather and lace" eighties, I was the fantasy editor for a publishing company in New York City. It was a great time to be young and footloose on the streets of Manhattan—punk rock and folk music were everywhere; Blondie, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince were all strutting their stuff on the newly created MTV; and the eighties' sense of style meant I could wear my scruffy black leather into the office without turning too many heads. The fantasy field was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was right in the middle of it, working with authors I'd worshiped as a teen, and finding new ones to encourage and publish.

Once you have turned eighty, it's important to have the right sort of wrinkles. Even more important, though is to start laughing early enough to spend more time laughing than frowning. If your wrinkles point upward, you will look happy instead of merely old.

In that seminar I attended at eighteen, the speaker asked, “What percentage of shared responsibility do you have in making a relationship work?” I was a teenager, so wise in the ways of true love. Of course I had all the answers. “Fifty/fifty!” I blurted out. It was so obvious; both people must be willing to share the responsibility evenly or someone’s getting ripped off. “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” yelled someone else, arguing that you’d have to be willing to do more than the other person. Aren’t relationships built on self-sacrifice and generosity? “Eighty/twenty,” yelled another. The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 on the paper in big black letters. “You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.” Whoa. This wasn’t what I was expecting! But I quickly understood how this concept could transform every area of my life. If I always took 100 percent responsibility for everything I experienced—completely owning all of my choices and all the ways I responded to whatever happened to me—I held the power. Everything was up to me. I was responsible for everything I did, didn’t do, or how I responded to what was done to me.

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years—the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died. In the classroom, Grant had tried different comparisons. If you imagined the human lifespan of sixty years was compressed to a day, then eighty million years would still be 3,652 years—older than the pyramids. The velociraptor had been dead a long time.

When he moved to New York after college, in the eighties, Arthur Less tried his hardest to be a good gay. He joined a gym that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a political party that turned out to believe a conspiracy theory about government health clinics. He joined a German-language society that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a book group that turned out to be only for a political party. He joined a role-playing game club that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a sex dungeon that turned out to be a government health clinic. It was all so confusing.

The Spartan king Agesilaus was still fighting in armor when he was eighty-two. Picasso was painting past ninety, and Henry Miller was chasing women (I'm sure Picasso was too) at eighty-nine. Once we turn pro, we're like sharks who have tasted blood, or renunciants who have glimpsed the face of God. For us, there is no finish line. No bell ends the bout. Life is the pursuit. Life is the hunt. When our hearts burst... then we'll go out, and no sooner.

The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.

It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God saturated the hallways in the form of a pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, cling onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he had told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view. This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for him.

A YOUNG STUDENT asked permission to go to a wedding. Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian (1872–1970) asked him if there might be women there dressed immodestly. The student replied that he had prepared a strategy: he wouldn’t look. Rabbi Lopian turned to the student and said, “I’m already over eighty years old, and blind in one eye, yet despite this, I look!

IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.

I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again.

It's a serious age, eighty eight. If you turn the numbers on their side, it's two infinities on top of each other.

a wall of heat. The furnace had to be turned up almost to eighty,

But didn't everyone get everything? Hadn't they had enough yet? Everything on earth is tailored for this everyone. Everyone gets all the TV programs, damn near all the cinema, and about eighty percent of all music. After that come the secondary medium of painting and those other visual arts that do not move. Those are generally just for someone and although you always hear people moaning that there isn't enough of them, in truth someone does all right. Galleries, museums, basements in Berlin, studio flats, journals, bare walls in urban centers—someone gets what they want and deserve, most of the time. But where are the things that no one wants? Every now and then Alex would see or hear something that appeared to be for no one but soon enough it turned out to be for someone and, after a certain amount of advertising revenue had been spent, would explode into the world for everyone. Who was left to make stuff for no one?

They say marry the person with whom you are the closest to, the guy with whom you can share your 3 am thoughts with, sitting on a rooftop and discussing random things like why cavemen were hirsute or why the earth isn’t a square. The genie who knows what you want before you open your mouth. The angel who reads your mind before you can articulate your thoughts. The friend you can laugh and cry with. The brother whose arms are safer than any amount of security and protection the outside world can provide you. The parent that will support you through thick and thin, no matter what. The soul whose love for them in the river of your heart will never dilute, even when the currents get rough, and the waters, dark. The fellow who would tell you that he loves you every night and spend the day proving it through little gestures that speak much louder than any words of love. The person with whom you can hold hands when you turn eighty and announce to the world- ‘we made it!

Men who are thoroughly false and hollow, seldom try to hide those vices from themselves; and yet in the very act of avowing them, they lay claim to the virtues they feign most to despise. 'For,' say they, 'this is honesty, this is truth. All mankind are like us, but they have not the candour to avow it.' The more they affect to deny the existence of any sincerity in the world, the more they would be thought to possess it in its boldest shape; and this is an unconscious compliment to Truth on the part of these philosophers, which will turn the laugh against them to the Day of Judgment.

If you dig into Orwell’s work, you find a lot of sentences about flowers and pleasures and the natural world. If you read enough of those sentences the gray portrait turns to color, and if you look for these passages, even his last masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, changes complexion. These sentences are less ringing, less prophetic than the political analysis, but they are not unrelated to it, and they have their own poetics, their own power, and their own politics. Nature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it, though this was not much recognized in his era.

The one thing I have insisted on with all of my friends, regardless of class or station in life, is to be able to speak truthfully. If I cannot be open and frank with a friend, or he with me, I drop him.

At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid-to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.

About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.

Vivekananda once remarked: In trying to practice religion, eighty percent of people turn cheats and about fifteen percent go mad; only the remaining five percent attain the immediate knowledge of the infinite Truth.

The competition to lead the Review was ferocious every year, involving rigorous vetting and a vote by eighty student editors. Being picked for the position was an enormous achievement for anyone. It turned out that Barack was also the first African American in the publication’s 103-year history to be selected—a milestone so huge that it had been written up in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of Barack, smiling in a scarf and winter coat. My boyfriend, in other words, was a big deal. He could have landed any number of fat-salaried law firm jobs at that point, but instead he was thinking about practicing civil rights law once he got his degree,

They were still out on the sidewalk of West Eighty-sixth Street, the taxi pulling way, when Louise put down her travel bag, raised both arms and declared herself in love with New York City. 'It's exactly as I imagined it!' She let her arms fall and looked out at the street, at the honking, halting parade of cars, headlights bright in the dusking air. She turned to Cora with glistening eyes. 'I've always known it, my whole life. This is where I'm meant to be.

You can work it out by Fractions or by simple Rule of Three, But the way of Tweedle-dum is not the way of Tweedle-dee. You can twist it, you can turn it, you can plait it till you drop, But the way of Pilly Winky’s not the way of Winkie Pop!

How about you walk around back and I’ll show you my rental. You’re going to love it.” I had a suspicion that he was still giving me shit. “Now, Van, this is no Cadillac, but she does turn heads,” he said as I walked around back with him. O’Fallon, hot on our heels. “There she is.” I couldn’t help myself that time. I laughed. And then I laughed a little more. There sat a red and orange, nineteen eighty-something piece of suburban history. “The Astro Van?” I asked. He answered, “The Astro Vaughn.

As every economist knows, third-party transactions are always more expensive, whether the third party is an insurer or the government...Third-party transactions are always inflationary. So let's return as much of daily life as possible to a two-party system--buyer and seller. You'll be amazed how affordable it is. Compare cellphone and laptop and portable music systems prices with what they were in the Eighties, and then ask yourself how it would have turned out with a government-regulated system of electronic insurance plans.

They were turning now, panning past the Sandias, the black-green crags and rocky faces, the ribbon of road leading to the white crest. Amina looked down on Albuquerque, the light bouncing off the sprawling tile of houses and pools, the cars running along the highways like busy insects. She imagined all of it gone, undone, erased back to 1968, when the city was nothing but eighty miles of hope huddling in a desert storm. She imagined Kamala on the tarmac, walking toward a life in the desert, her body pulled forward by faith and dirty wind.

My recommendation is to keep up the good work. I’m changing your title to senior executive assistant, and giving you a three percent raise effective next payday. Congratulations.” Wow, three percent. I could move up that early retirement plan to age seventy-five now, instead of eighty. Lucky me. Thank you,” I said. “That’s very generous.” You’re quite welcome.” Ms. Saunders nodded and grabbed a gold-plated letter opener to begin attacking her stack of mail. I turned to leave. Didn’t want to outstay my welcome. Damn it!” she exclaimed, and I turned back around. She winced and nodded at the letter opener that she’d dropped to her desktop. “Damn thing slipped. I’m probably going to need stitches now. Can you be a dear and fetch the first-aid kit for me?” She held her left index finger and frowned at the steady flow of blood oozing out. A few small drops of red splashed onto the other letters spread out on the desk. I felt woozy. And suddenly dizzy. I blinked. When I opened my eyes, I was no longer standing by the door about to leave. I was crouched down next to Ms. Saunders’s imported black leather chair, grasping her wrist tightly…… and sucking noisily on her fingertip. I shrieked and let go of her, staggering backward. I grabbed at her desk to keep from falling, but I dropped on my butt, anyhow, taking most of the contents of the top of her desk with me. She held her injured finger far away from her and stared at me, wide-eyed, with a mixture of shock and disgust. I scrambled to my feet and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. What in the holy hell just happened? I… I… uh… I’m so sorry,” I managed. “I don’t know what… I wouldn’t normally do something… I just…” Ms. Saunders pulled her hand close to her chest, perhaps to protect it from further abuse. Get out,” she said quietly. Yeah, I’ll get back to work. Again, I’m so, so sorry. Would you like me to bring you a cup of coffee?” No, not to your desk,” she said evenly, but her volume increased with every word. “Get out of here, you freak. I don’t care what you’ve heard, I’m not into women. You’re fired. Now get out of here before I call security.” But… my job review—” Get out!” she yelled.

Way I look at it, you get to a point in your life when you turn a corner and realise that’s about all you’re gonna get. If you can face down that knowledge and not crack open a bottle, well, you’re a better person than I am. If I make it to eighty I intend to start smoking again.

The life expectancy at the turn of the century was forty-five; now it is eighty. Living into one’s eighties, nineties, and even past one hundred is a real possibility today, one that makes your fifties and sixties a time not for winding down but for gearing up—though for what, we may not be sure.

Though they have things in common, good writing and talented writing are not the same. […] If you start with a confused, unclear, and badly written story, and apply the rules of good writing to it, you can probably turn it into a simple, logical, clearly written story. It will still not be a good one. The major fault of eighty-five to ninety-five percent of all fiction is that it is banal and dull. Now old stories can always be told with new language. You can even add new characters to them; you can use them to dramatize new ideas. But eventually even the new language, characters, and ideas lose their ability to invigorate. Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition. However paradoxical it sounds, good writing as a set of strictures (that is, when the writing is good and nothing more) produces most bad fiction. On one level or another, the realization of this is finally what turns most writers away from writing. Talented writing is, however, something else. You need talent to write fiction. Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.

18Then the king said to Doeg, “You turn and strike the priests.” And Doeg the Edomite turned and struck down the priests,  zand he killed on that day eighty-five persons who wore the linen ephod. 19And Nob, the city of the priests, he put to the sword;  aboth man and woman, child and infant, ox, donkey and sheep, he put to the sword.

In the early eighties, Maureen started to bargain with God to try and turn her marriage around. She went with a neighbor girlfriend to get baptized and then asked God to heal her marriage. Surprisingly, her husband came home early from a trip that night. They talked for hours, and she told herself that God had helped them turn a corner. It did not last a month.

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its implications, he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature. Many people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped the infection and were thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will. But some were early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, and cloud the eye as it sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift--plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion--had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man.

Kat laughed and gripped his wrists. “How turned on?” “Oh, I’m at about eighty percent and quickly gaining.” “I’ve been at a frustrating ninety percent for two weeks. I walked in a drugstore and got hot and bothered in the hair-products aisle.” Alec threw back his head and laughed. “Holy shit, Kat. My life was boring as hell before you.' Uittreksel van: Megan Erickson. 'Make It Count'. iBooks.

Grandpa recently turned sixty-five and went to the doctor for a complete physical. After an exam the doctor said grandpa was doing “fairly well” for his age. Grandpa was a little concerned and asked, “Doc, do you think I’ll live to eighty?” The doctor asked, “Do you smoke tobacco or drink alcohol?” “Oh no,” Grandpa replied, “and I don’t do drugs, either.” “Do you have many friends and entertain frequently?” Grandpa said, “No, I usually stay home and keep to myself.” “Do you eat beef and pork?” “No, my other doctor said red meat is unhealthy!” “Do you spend a lot of time doing things in the sun, like playing golf, sailing, or bicycling?” “No, I don’t.” “Do you gamble, drive fast cars, or have lots of sex?” “No, I don’t do any of those things anymore.” The doctor looked at Grandpa and said, “Then why do you care?

Will suddenly remembered that a boy at his old school had had a mum like Fiona - not exactly like her, because it seemed to Will that Fiona was a peculiarly contemporary creation, with her seventies albums, her eighties politics and her nineties foot lotion, but certainly a sixties equivalent of Fiona. Stephen Fullick's mother had a thing about TV, that it turned people into androids, so they didn't have a set in the house. 'Did you see Thund...' Will would say every Monday morning and then remember and blush, as if the TV were a parent who had just died. And what good had that done Stephen Fullick? He was not, as far as Will was aware, a visionary poet, or a primitive painter; he was probably stuck in some provincial solicitor's office, like everyone else from school. He had endured years of pity for no discernible purpose.

In just a few decades, Minnesota has gone from being approximately 99 percent German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, and Polish to 20 percent African immigrant,7 including at least one hundred thousand Somalis.8 And that’s not counting the Somalis who have recently left the country to fight with al Qaeda and ISIS. One hundred thousand is just an estimate. We don’t know precisely how many Somalis the federal government has brought in as “refugees” because the government won’t tell us. The public can’t be trusted with the truth. Since becoming more multicultural, Minnesota has turned into a hotbed of credit card skimming, human trafficking, and smash-and-grab robberies.9 Mosques have popped up all over the state—as have child prostitutes and machete attacks. Welfare consumption in Minnesota has more than doubled on account of the newcomers—only half of whom have jobs. Those Somalis who do have jobs earn an average of $21,000 a year, compared with $46,000 for the average Minnesotan. (Consider yourself lucky, Minnesota: In Sweden, only 20 percent of Somalis have jobs.) Eighty percent of Somalis in Minnesota live at or below the poverty line. Nearly 70 percent have not graduated from high school, compared with only 8.4 percent of non-Somali Minnesotans.10

Now there was just the sound of his own steadily beating heart and the turn of his thoughts. He was relieved to find himself eighty per cent determined and only twenty per cent afraid. Even that much fear made no real sense, but Luke supposed it was natural. What drove the determination---what he absolutely knew---was simple and stark: this was his chance, the only one he'd have, and he intended to make the most of it.

Honouring the youth of their town they provided a décor that a £20-a-Martini fleecing parlour could not have amortized. They had bought eighty low Alvar Aalto stools for the alcove and coctail bar seating. Also, twenty tall numbers in the same bent bleach wood classic style. Extremely expensive and brought in from Finland at equally great expense. And in the first twelve months, ninety percent had disappeared. Compared to the catastrophic damage done every other week to one of the toilets just off the main dance floor --the level of masonry demolition going deep into the floor implied the use of a full-sized pneumatic drill-- the loss of a bunch of stools was incidental. The fact that thirty-two then turned up in New Order's rehearsal room was therefore coincidental. If you couldn't join in the public in stealing from your own club, what was the point of opening it?

I have salt and sugar at home, but I'm paying eighty bucks to have ya'll rub it on my feet. If I want to yell at my sister-in-law about that fact that I just found out I am pregnant, and how my boyfriend, the recovering alcoholic, is still fragile and I don't know if he'll make it, whether I'm going to miscarry like I did before, and a whole other list of shit, like, hell, I don't know, what I'm going to be when I grow up, then I will! And maybe, just maybe, for the eighty bucks you're charging me, I can yell a bit." The woman only blinked as Lacey snickered beside her. "Keep it down and congratulations." "Thanks, and I'll try," Kacey said as the woman walked away. She then turned to Lacey, who was fully laughing at this point. "Really> This is not funny." "Oh, I'm cracking up because if you're already this emotional and bitchy, God help us all once you reach the third Trimester.

Gun up,' he whispered to Skosh. The word went back to invisible kids lying on the jungle floor. 'Set it in here,' Mellas whispered to Conman. 'Put Vancouver with his machine gun one-eighty from it.' 'He won't like it.' 'To hell with him. Send a fire team around to the left. We'll cover with Mole if they get into the shit. Who do you want to go?' Now it was Conman's turn to play God, at age nineteen. He shut his eyes. 'Rider.' So some are chosen to die young.

In June 1793 sixty of the eighty departments of France were in revolt against Paris; the armies of the German princes were invading France from the north and east; the British attacked from the south and west; the country was helpless and bankrupt. Fourteen months later all France was under firm control, the invaders had been expelled, the French armies in turn occupied Belgium and were about to enter on twenty years of almost unbroken and effortless military triumph.

This week I was watching the Rachel Maddow Show (you'd love her: she's funny and brilliant and just happens to be a stunning butch), and she was interviewing the outgoing attorney general, Loretta Lynch, about the country's post election future. The entire show was like a burst of hope so bright I almost had to put on sunglasses. The African American attorney general, prim and plump, sat perched on a barstool talking to a white butch lesbian who has her own national television news show! The event was being recorded in the Stonewall Inn, the site of one of the first places where queer people fought back against police violence! (I was so nervous about being a lesbian in 1969, I hid the tiny newspaper clipping from you.) Simply that the interview was happening made me remember that there are people in the world who are not such egotistical, political careerists as to believe that human rights don't matter. Then, as if just showing up wasn't enough, Attorney General Lynch spoke a truth that is hard to remember from our short-lived perspective: "History is bigger than one turn of the electoral wheel." During your eighty-eight years on this plane, you saw numerous turns of the wheel, and many of them did not land on a prize. Still, toward the end of your life, you took me in and bestowed not just a roof and clothes and food but the gift of your history and the knowledge that we find hope inside ourselves.

It’s been said that love is all there is; that a lack of love causes people to do evil things. I can buy that. Take it a step further: capitalism, by itself, is not a bad thing; but when taken to an extreme, as it has been in America—when Christmas is but a measuring stick for how well the economy is doing, when Wall Street and the banking industry turn nescient heads to morality in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, when love of money overshadows love of self and others—what then? In the grand scheme of the universe—whatever that scheme may be—when one considers its immensity, that it has existed for billions of years, some of us realize how insignificant our seventy or eighty years is; while others, for whatever reason (selfishness?) pursue materialism to a vulgar degree. In the end, what does all that matter, really? It’s nice to spoil oneself from time to time; but really, life’s true gift to oneself is doing and giving to others. That’s love.

Kenny Bloke offers me a smoke as Damon MacNish windmills through “Corduroy Skirts Are a Crime Against Humanity.” “I saw the lads in Fremantle, back in … eighty-six? Fackin’ A.” Kenny Bloke’s in his late fifties, sports ironmongery in his ear, and is a Noongar elder, according to the festival bumf. I observe how Damon MacNish and many of his contemporaries have turned into their own tribute bands, which must be a peculiar and postmodern fate. Kenny Bloke taps ash into the geraniums.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid. Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples. Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something. Royal's opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches: because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, "I'm no good at multitasking." Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music--but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country. And they're not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?

I understand, intellectually, that the death of a parent is a natural, acceptable part of life. Nobody would call the death of a very sick eighty-year-old woman a tragedy. There was soft weeping at her funeral and red watery eyes. No wrenching sobs. Now I think that I should have let myself sob. I should have wailed and beaten my chest and thrown myself over her coffin. I read a poem. A pretty, touching poem I thought she would have liked. I should have used my own words. I should have said: No one will ever love me as fiercely as my mother did. I should have said: You all think you’re at the funeral of a sweet little old lady, but you’re at the funeral of a girl called Clara, who had long blond hair in a heavy thick plait down to her waist, who fell in love with a shy man who worked on the railways, and they spent years and years trying to have a baby, and when Clara finally got pregnant, they danced around the living room but very slowly, so as not to hurt the baby, and the first two years of her little girl’s life were the happiest of Clara’s life, except then her husband died, and she had to bring up the little girl on her own, before there was a single mother’s pension, before the words “single mother” even existed. I should have told them about how when I was at school, if the day became unexpectedly cold, Mum would turn up in the school yard with a jacket for me. I should have told them that she hated broccoli with such a passion she couldn’t even look at it, and that she was in love with the main character on the English television series Judge John Deed. I should have told them that she loved to read and she was a terrible cook, because she’d try to cook and read her latest library book at the same time, and the dinner always got burned and the library book always got food spatters on it, and then she’d spend ages trying to dab them away with the wet corner of a tea towel. I should have told them that my mum thought of Jack as her own grandchild, and how she made him a special racing car quilt he adored. I should have talked and talked and grabbed both sides of the lectern and said: She was not just a little old lady. She was Clara. She was my mother. She was wonderful.

All right, you. Stand straight. Pull your belly in. Pull your chin in. Keep your shoulders back. Hold your head level. Look straight front. Turn left. Turn right. Face front again and hold your hands out. Palms up. Palms down. Pull your sleeves back. No visible scars. Hair dark brown, some gray. Eyes brown. Height six feet, one half inch. Weight about one ninety. Name Philip Marlowe. Occupation private detective. Well, well, nice to see you, Marlowe. That’s all. Next man.” Much obliged, Captain. Thanks for the time. You forgot to have me open my mouth. I have some nice inlays and one very high-class porcelain jacket crown. Eighty-seven dollars worth of porcelain jacket crown. You forgot to look inside my nose too, Captain. A lot of scar tissue in there for you. Septum operation and was that guy a butcher! Two hours of it in those days. I hear they do it in twenty minutes now. I got it playing football, Captain, a slight miscalculation in an attempt to block a punt. I blocked the guy’s foot instead—after he kicked the ball. Fifteen yards penalty, and that’s about how much stiff bloody tape they pulled out of my nose an inch at a time the day after the operation. I’m not bragging, Captain. I’m just telling you. It’s the little things that count.

I was only hit on once at the grocery store. I remember it was early one Saturday morning and I was buying my daily bacon, when I got tapped on the shoulder. I turned around and I saw a rather short and very feeble eighty-year-old lady looking up at me. She said in a weak, scratchy voice, "Excuse me, young man, could you reach up and grab some ketchup for me?" Well I'm no dummy. I know when I'm getting hit on. I smiled politely and reached up for the ketchup, knowing full well that she just wanted to get a gander at my derriere. As I handed her the ketchup, she said, "Thank you," like I was some piece of meat, a boy toy, or something. Finally I just blurted out, "Look, I'm married, lady!" She acted all surprised and confused. "Excuse me? I don't understand!" I shook my head with a smirk, raised my left hand, and showed her my wedding ring. "Married!" I loudly told her. "I'm taken!" A stock boy at the end of the aisle looked at us and inquired, "Is everything okay?" "I'm fine," I assured him. "I know how to deal with predators." Well, suddenly this sex-crazed lady got all angry at me. Like I was out of line. She huffed off. "Well, I never!" "And you ain't gonna with me either, " I yelled after her. I have to admit, it was nice to get the attention.

But before they grow, their roots can lay dormant for decades, waiting until the conditions are right. It simply takes time. There’s one clone that’s said to be almost eighty thousand years old, and is possibly the oldest living organism in existence.” Linus nodded slowly. “I see.” “Do you?” Phee asked. “Because even if you wiped out the grove, if you tear down all the trees, unless you get to the roots, they’ll just be reborn again, and grow as they had before. Maybe not quite the same, but eventually, their trunks will be white, and their leaves will turn gold. I would like to see them one day. I think they’d have much to tell me.

...the campaign was also among the most heated in recent memory, or short -term anticipation. The soon-to-be Opposition Leader never tired of listing the promises the new Prime Minister would break; she in turn countered with statistics of the mess he’d create as Treasurer, in the mid-eighties. (The causes of that impending recession were still being debated by economists; most claimed it was an “essential precursor” of the prosperity of the nineties , and that The Market, in its infinite, time -spanning wisdom, would choose / had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence.

Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, “‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”14

Does Jesus Care? In a fit of despondency, the psalmist once bemoaned, “No one cares for my soul” (Ps. 142:4). But in the next verse he turned his gloom into a prayer, declaring to God, “You are my refuge.” The word care occurs eighty-two times in the Bible, which frequently reminds us that when “the days are weary, the long nights dreary,” our Savior cares. Frank Graeff wrote “Does Jesus Care?” in 1901, and it was set to music by the noted conductor and composer, Dr. J. Lincoln Hall (born November 4, 1866), who later called it his most inspired piece of music. The form of the hymn is unusual. Each stanza asks questions about God’s care for us in various situations, and the chorus resounds with the bolstering answer: “Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares!” NOVEMBER 4 Does Jesus care when my heart is pained Too deeply for mirth or song, As the burdens press, and the cares distress And the way grows weary and long? Does Jesus care when I’ve tried and failed To resist some temptation strong; When for my deep grief there is no relief, Though my tears flow all the night long? Does Jesus care when I’ve said “good-bye” To the dearest on earth to me, And my sad heart aches till it nearly breaks, Is it aught to Him? Does He see? Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares, His heart is touched with my grief; When the days are weary, the long nights dreary, I know my Savior cares. . . . casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you. – 1 Peter 5:7

Did he want Nick to die on the floor of his bathroom from an overdose of mentholated rub? Did he want me to spend the last eighty years of my lifespan in a convent? Maybe he was mad that I was trying to sneak out of the house wearing his jeans for the third day in a row. "I am taking Doofus for another walk," I said clearly,daring him to defy me. "That would not be good for Doofus." Josh folded his arms. "Mom,that would not be good for Doofus." Oh! Dragging Mom into this was low.Not to mention Doofus. "Since when is going for a walk not good for a dog?" I challenged Josh. "He's an old dog," Josh protested. "He's four!" I pointed out. "That's twenty-eight in dog years! He's practically thirty!" "Strike!" Mom squealed amid the noise of electronic pins falling. Then she shook her game remote at both of us in turn. "I'm not stupid, you know.And I'm not as out of it as you assume. I know the two of you are really arguing about something else.It's those jeans again, isn't it?" She nodded to me. "I should cut them in half and give each of you a leg.Why does either of you want to wear jeans with 'boy toy' written across the seat anyway?" "I thought that was the fashion." Josh said. "Grandma wears a pair of sweatpants with 'hot mama' written across the ass." "That is different," Mom hissed. "She wears them around the kitchen." I sniffed indignantly. "I said," I announced, "I am goig for a walk with my dog. My beloved canine and I are taking a turn around our fair community. No activity could be more wholesome for a young girl and her pet. And if you have a problem with that,well! What is this world coming to? Come along, dear Doofus." I stuck my nose in the air and stalked past them, but the effect was lost. Somewhere around "our fair community," Mom and Josh both had lost interest and turned back to the TV. Or so I thought.But just as I was about to step outside,hosh appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the mud room. "What the hell are you doing" he demanded. I said self-righteously, "I am taking my loyal canine for a w-" "You're going to Nick's,aren't you?" he whispered. "Do you think that's a good idea? I heard you yelled at him for no reason at the half-pipe,right before he busted ass.

At that time, a number of myths were created by the young people of the smoking carriages and forests of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the hungry for the thirst of lysergic acid, who were too tired of the suffering they grew up in and needed to take refuge in dreams. In these children's universe there were unbelievable stories about places in the mountains that women sought to retreat to, places where people were united by music and love for a mutual spiritual growth. For Aunt Jeanine, who had grown up with the image of her father, an amputee due to the war, feeding on such stories was like a haven, one she would later try to turn into her home. And one of those stories, one particular one, stood in her memory until the last stage of her life, when she passed away at eighty-one, burned with fire. (...) At that time, kid, they said that if we searched enough, we would find a place where the world wouldn't end. Men would never know what hell of a place that was, totally unconquerable! A place where the dirty hands of men would never arrive. A place men would never know about . Don't you think I could find it? To have my body disappearing in the woods, as I saw happening to kids in Japan, in that forest that swallows them to its core. Flesh turned to powder, my essence disappearing in the middle of life. They said that, when you die at a place, you'll stay at that place forever. That was why everyone was afraid to go to war. They weren't afraid of dying, kid, they were afraid of dying there.

About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family, consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called, proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage--she must have been eighty--and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums, she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element, and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people might about weddings and holidays. The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred, when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material; they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry, they had been able to pay for the house. Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a single month--they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.

He’s a sweet guy,” Charlie says quietly. “Anyway, he let the car stuff go and started picking up paperbacks for me every time he stopped by a garage sale, or a new donation box came into Mom’s shop. He has no idea how much erotica he’s given me.” “And you actually read it.” Charlie turns his wineglass one hundred and eighty degrees, eyes boring into me. “I wanted to understand how things worked, remember?” I arch a brow. “How’d that turn out for you?” He sits forward. “I was slightly disappointed when my first serious girlfriend didn’t have three consecutive orgasms, but otherwise okay.” A torrent of laughter rips through me. “So I’ve found the key to Nora Stephens’s joy,” he says. “My sexual humiliation.” “It’s not the humiliation so much as the sheer optimism.

It doesn’t take a literary detective, scanning the passage above, to notice that he is partly saying of Orwell what Orwell actually says about Gissing. This half-buried resentment can be further noticed when Williams turns to paradox. I have already insisted that Orwell contains opposites and even contradictions, but where is the paradox in a ‘humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror’? Where is the paradox in ‘a man committed to decency who actualized a distinctive squalor’? The choice of verbs is downright odd, if not a little shady. ‘Communicated’? ‘Actualised’? Assuming that Williams means to refer to Nineteen Eighty-Four in the first case, which he certainly does, would it not be more precise to say that Orwell ‘evoked’ or even ‘prefigured’ or perhaps simply ‘described’ an extreme of inhuman terror? Yet that choice of verb, because more accurate, would be less ‘paradoxical.’ Because what Williams means to imply, but is not brave enough to say, is that Orwell ‘invented’ the picture of totalitarian collectivism. As for ‘actualising’ a distinctive squalor, the author of that useful book Keywords has here chosen a deliberately inexact term. He may mean Nineteen Eighty-Four again—he is obsessed with the ‘gritty dust’ that infests Orwell’s opening passage—or he may mean the depictions of the mean and cramped (and malodorous) existence imposed on the denizens of Wigan Pier. But to ‘actualise’ such squalor is either to make it real—no contradiction to decency—or to make it actually occur, a suggestion which is obviously nonsensical.

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

George Washington had turned down the requests of blacks, seeking freedom, to fight in the Revolutionary army. So when the British military commander in Virginia, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to Virginia slaves who joined his forces, this created consternation. A report from one Maryland county worried about poor whites encouraging slave runaways: The insolence of the Negroes in this county is come to such a height, that we are under a necessity of disarming them which we affected on Saturday last. We took about eighty guns, some bayonets, swords, etc. The malicious and imprudent speeches of some among the lower classes of whites have induced them to believe that their freedom depended on the success of the King’s troops. We cannot therefore be too vigilant nor too rigourous with those who promote and encourage this disposition in our slaves.

Texas Rangers are men who cannot be stampeded. We walk into any situation and handle it without instruction from our commander. Sometimes we work as a unit, sometimes we work alone.” He turned his attention to the jurors. “We preserve the law. We track down train and bank robbers. We subdue riots. We guard our borders. We’ll follow an outlaw clear across the country if we need to. In my four years of service, I’ve traveled eighty-six thousand miles on horse, nineteen hundred on train, gone on two hundred thirty scouts, made two hundred seventeen arrests, returned five hundred six head of stolen cattle, assisted forty-three local sheriffs, guarded a half dozen jails, and spent more time on the trail than I have in my own bed. We’ve been around since before the Alamo, and”—he turned to Hood, impaling him with his stare—“we’re touchy as a teased snake when riled, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

A good upbringing is necessary for a long life, but sometimes the patience of the young trees is sorely tested. As I mentioned in chapter 5, "Tree Lottery," acorns and beechnuts fall at the feet of large "mother trees." Dr. Suzanne Simard, who helped discover maternal instincts in trees, describes mother trees as dominant trees widely linked to other trees in the forest through their fungal-root connections. These trees pass their legacy on to the next generation and exert their influence in the upbringing of the youngsters. "My" small beech trees, which have by now been waiting for at least eighty years, are standing under mother trees that are about two hundred years old -- the equivalent of forty-year-olds in human terms. The stunted trees can probably expect another two hundred years of twiddling their thumbs before it is finally their turn. The wait time is, however, made bearable. Their mothers are in contact with them through their root systems, and they pass along sugar and other nutrients. You might even say they are nursing their babies.

[Northerners] took over the Southern myth and themselves began to revel in it. This acceptance was to culminate in Gone With the Wind, the enormous success of which novel makes a curious counterbalance to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But it began in the Century of the eighties with the stories of Thomas Nelson Page. Though Page had been only twelve at the end of the Civil War, so had had little experience of the old regime, he really invented for the popular mind Old Massa and Mistis and Meh Lady, with their dusky-skinned adoring retainers. The Northerners, after the shedding of so much blood, illogically found it soothing to be told that slavery had not been so bad, that the Negroes were a lovable but simple race, whose business was to work for whites. And Page also struck in his stories a note of reconciliation that everybody wanted to hear: he cooked up romances between young Northern officers, as gentlemanly as any Southerner, and spirited plantation beauties who might turn out to be the young men's cousins and who in any case would marry them after the war.

Christian peace comes not from thinking less but from thinking more, and more intensely, about the big issues of life. Paul gives a specific example of this in Romans 8:18, where he uses the same word, logizdomai, and speaks directly to sufferers. He says, “I reckon that our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that shall be revealed in us.” To “reckon” is to count up accurately, not to whistle in the dark. It is not to get peace by jogging or shopping. It means “Think it out! Think about the glory coming until the joy begins to break in on you.” Someone reading this might say, “You are talking about doctrine but what I really need is comfort.” But think! Is Jesus really the Son of God? Did he really come to earth, die for you, rise again, and pass through the heavens to the right hand of God? Did he endure infinite suffering for you, so that someday he could take you to himself and wipe away every tear from your eyes? If so, then there is all the comfort in the world. If not—if none of these things are true—then we may be stuck here living for seventy or eighty years until we perish, and the only happiness we will ever know is in this life. And if some trouble or suffering takes that happiness away, you have lost it forever. Either Jesus is on the throne ruling all things for you or this is as good as it gets. See what Paul is doing? He is saying that if you are a Christian today and you have little or no peace, it may be because you are not thinking. Peace comes from a disciplined thinking out of the implications of what you believe. It comes from an intentional occupation of a vantage point. There is nothing more thrilling than climbing up to some high point on a mountain and then turning around and viewing from there all the terrain you have just traversed. Suddenly, you see the relationships—you see the creek you crossed, the foothills, the town from which you have journeyed. Your high vantage point gives you perspective, clarity, and a sense of beauty. Now this is what Paul is calling us to do. Think big and high. Realize who God is, what he has done, who you are in Christ, where history is going. Put your troubles in perspective by remembering Christ’s troubles on your behalf, and all his promises to you, and what he is accomplishing. Let

We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.” He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?” We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.

A Conversation with the Author What was your inspiration for The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle? Inspiration is a flash-of-lightning kind of word. What happens to me is more like sediment building. I love time travel, Agatha Christie, and the eighties classic Quantum Leap, and over time a book emerged from that beautiful quagmire. Truthfully, having the idea was the easy part, keeping track of all the moving parts was the difficulty. Which character was the most interesting to write, and in which host do you feel Aiden truly flourishes? Lord Cecil Ravencourt, by miles. He occupies the section of the book where the character has to grapple with the time travel elements, the body swapping elements, and the murder itself. I wanted my most intelligent character for that task, but I thought it would be great to hamper him in some way, as well. Interestingly, I wanted to make him really loathsome—which is why he’s a banker. And yet, for some reason, I ended up quite liking him, and feeding a few laudable qualities into his personality. I think Derby ended up getting a double dose of loathsome instead. Other than that, it’s just really nice seeing the evolution of his relationship with Cunningham. Is there a moral lesson to Aiden’s story or any conclusion you hope the reader walks away with as they turn the final page? Don’t be a dick! Kind, funny, intelligent, and generous people are behind every good thing that’s ever happened to me. Everybody else you just have to put up with. Like dandruff. Or sunburn. Don’t be sunburn, people. In one hundred years, do you believe there will be something similar to Blackheath, and would you support such a system? Yes, and not exactly. Our prison system is barbaric, but some people deserve it. That’s the tricky part of pinning your flag to the left or right of the moral spectrum. I think the current system is unsustainable, and I think personality adjustment and mental prisons are dangerous, achievable technology somebody will abuse. They could also solve a lot of problems. Would you trust your government with it? I suppose that’s the question. The book is so contained, and we don’t get to see the place that Aiden is escaping to! Did you map that out, and is there anything you can share about the society beyond Blackheath’s walls? It’s autocratic, technologically advanced, but they still haven’t overcome our human weaknesses. You can get everywhere in an hour, but television’s still overrun with reality shows, basically. Imagine the society that could create something as hateful as Annabelle Caulker.

Chris.” Michael had another bag, and he added it to the stack. “Less talk. More work.” A spark of irritation lit Chris’s features, but he turned toward the garage. “Come on. Talk to me while I load. He’s just pissed because he’s already late.” Becca followed him into the cool cavern of the garage. He picked up a bag from the stack and heaved it onto his shoulder. This felt awkward. “Can I help you? Or—” “Go ahead.” He flashed a smile. “Bring one out.” She bent and slid her hands under the slick edges of the sack. It felt like a bag of sand, and it was marked 35KG. She could never remember if kilograms were more than pounds or the other way around, but she crouched and heaved and attempted to lift the sack of limestone. Christ. It’s more. Kilograms are more. The bag had to weigh at least eighty pounds. She couldn’t even get it off the pallet. “Excuse me.” One of the twins, his voice threaded with humor. She stepped back, already sensing sweat on her back, just from that moment of effort. She felt like an idiot. Especially when he hooked his hands under two bags and lifted them against his chest. “Showoff,” she said. He shook the hair off his forehead. “Maybe you could go in the kitchen and bake us some cookies or something.” “Shut up.” He gave her a wicked grin over his shoulder. “Just saying.

The lack of distinction between the real and the virtual is the obsession of our age. Everything in our current affairs attests to this, not to mention the big cinematic productions: The Truman Show, Total Recall, Existenz, Matrix, etc. This question has always been there behind literature and philosophy, but it has been present metaphorically, as it were, implicitly, through the filter of discourse. The 'encoding/decoding' of reality was done by discourse, that is to say, by a highly complex medium, never leaving room for a head-on truth. The encoding/decoding of our reality is done by technology. Only what is produced by this technical effect acquires visible reality. And it does so at the cost of a simplification that no longer has anything to do with language or with the slightest ambivalence and which, therefore, puts an end to this subtle lack of distinction between the real and the virtual, as subtle as the lack of distinction between good and evil. Through special effects, everything acquires an operational self-evidence, a spectacular reality that is, properly speaking, the reign of simulation. What the directors of these films have not realized (any more than the simulationist artists of New York in the eighties) is that simulation is a hypothesis, a game that turns reality itself into one eventuality among others.

And don’t tell me again that you were ten years old. Your age has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. There are no big changes between ten and twenty—or ten and eighty, for that matter. You still can’t love a Jesus as much as you’d like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done—and you know it. You’re constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who throws tables around. And you’re constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says a human being, any human being—even a Professor Tupper—is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick.” Franny was now facing directly into the sound of Zooey’s voice, sitting bolt upright, a wad of Kleenex clenched in one hand. Bloomberg was no longer in her lap. “I suppose you can,” she said, shrilling. “It’s beside the point whether I can or not. But, yes, as a matter of fact, I can. I don’t feel like going into it, but at least I’ve never tried, consciously or otherwise, to turn Jesus into St. Francis of Assisi to make him more ‘lovable’—which is exactly what ninety-eight per cent of the Christian world has always insisted on doing. Not that it’s to my credit. I don’t happen to be attracted to the St. Francis of Assisi type. But you are. And, in my opinion, that’s one of the reasons why you’re having this little nervous breakdown.

For the bus ride, which Delaney estimated would be ninety minutes, she had prepared a mix of happy journeying music, which she activated as they pulled out of the campus gate. The first song was by Otis Redding, and the first message came via her phone. Woman-hater, it said, with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he had been unkind to an ex-girlfriend who he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting. Thanks for the early-morning pick-me-up! the writer said, meaning that Delaney had ruined the day and tacitly endorsed Redding’s newly alleged misogyny. Delaney skipped to the next song, Lana Del Rey’s “High by the Beach,” and then quickly figured it was too big a risk so skipped ahead. The third song, the Muppets’ “Movin’ Right Along,” was unknown to most on the bus, and survived its three-minute length, during which a handful of passengers furiously tried to find a reason the song was complicit in evil committed or implied. Delaney skipped the next song, by Neil Diamond, thinking any Jewish singer dubious in light of the Israeli sandwich debacle, skipped songs six and seven (from Thriller), briefly considered the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” but then remembered Phil Spector, and so finally settled on a young Ghanian rapper she’d recently discovered. His first song was hunted down quickly in a hail of rhetorical buckshot—as a teen, the rapper had zinged a borderline joke about his female trigonometry teacher—so Delaney turned off the shared music, leaving everyone, for the next eighty-one minutes, to their earbuds and the safety of their individualized solitude.

Are you ready, children?” Father Mikhail walked through the church. “Did I keep you waiting?” He took his place in front of them at the altar. The jeweler and Sofia stood nearby. Tatiana thought they might have already finished that bottle of vodka. Father Mikhail smiled. “Your birthday today,” he said to Tatiana. “Nice birthday present for you, no?” She pressed into Alexander. “Sometimes I feel that my powers are limited by the absence of God in the lives of men during these trying times,” Father Mikhail began. “But God is still present in my church, and I can see He is present in you. I am very glad you came to me, children. Your union is meant by God for your mutual joy, for the help and comfort you give one another in prosperity and adversity and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children. I want to send you righteously on your way through life. Are you ready to commit yourselves to each other?” “We are,” they said. “The bond and the covenant of marriage was established by God in creation. Christ himself adorned this manner of life by his first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. A marriage is a symbol of the mystery of the union between Christ and His Church. Do you understand that those whom God has joined together, no man can put asunder?” “We do,” they said. “Do you have the rings?” “We do.” Father Mikhail continued. “Most gracious God,” he said, holding the cross above their heads, “look with favor upon this man and this woman living in a world for which Your Son gave His life. Make their life together a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world. Defend this man and this woman from every enemy. Lead them into peace. Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle upon their shoulders, and a crown upon their foreheads. Bless them in their work and in their friendship, in their sleeping and in their waking, in their joys and their sorrows, in their life and in their death.” Tears trickled down Tatiana’s face. She hoped Alexander wouldn’t notice. Father Mikhail certainly had. Turning to Tatiana and taking her hands, Alexander smiled, beaming at her unrestrained happiness. Outside, on the steps of the church, he lifted her off the ground and swung her around as they kissed ecstatically. The jeweler and Sofia clapped apathetically, already down the steps and on the street. “Don’t hug her so tight. You’ll squeeze that child right out of her,” said Sofia to Alexander as she turned around and lifted her clunky camera. “Oh, wait. Hold on. Let me take a picture of the newlyweds.” She clicked once. Twice. “Come to me next week. Maybe I’ll have some paper by then to develop them.” She waved. “So you still think the registry office judge should have married us?” Alexander grinned. “He with his ‘of sound mind’ philosophy on marriage?” Tatiana shook her head. “You were so right. This was perfect. How did you know this all along?” “Because you and I were brought together by God,” Alexander replied. “This was our way of thanking Him.” Tatiana chuckled. “Do you know it took us less time to get married than to make love the first time?” “Much less,” Alexander said, swinging her around in the air. “Besides, getting married is the easy part. Just like making love. It was the getting you to make love to me that was hard. It was the getting you to marry me…” “I’m sorry. I was so nervous.” “I know,” he said. He still hadn’t put her down. “I thought the chances were twenty-eighty you were actually going to go through with it.” “Twenty against?” “Twenty for.” “Got to have a little more faith, my husband,” said Tatiana, kissing his lips.

No-knock entries are dangerous for everyone involved—cops, suspects, bystanders. The raids usually occur before dawn; the residents are usually asleep, and then disoriented by the sudden intrusion. There is no warning, and sleepy residents may not always understand that the men breaking down their door are police. At the same time, police procedures allow terribly little room for error. Stan Goff, a retired Special Forces sergeant and SWAT trainer, says that he teaches cops to “Look at hands. If there’s a weapon in their hands during a dynamic entry, it does not matter what that weapon is doing. If there’s a weapon in their hands, that person dies. It’s automatic.” On September 13, 2000, the DEA, FBI, and local police conducted a series of raids throughout Modesto, California. By the end of the day, they had shot and killed an eleven-year-old boy, Alberto Sepulveda, as he was lying facedown on the floor with his arms outstretched, as ordered by police. In January 2011, police in Farmington, Massachusetts similarly shot Eurie Stamp, a sixty-eight-year-old grandfather, as he lay motionless on the floor according to police instructions. In the course of a May 2014 raid in Cornelia, Georgia, a flash-bang grenade landed in the crib of a nineteen-month-old infant. The explosion blew a hole in the face and chest of Bounkham Phonesavanh (“Baby Bou Bou”), covering his body with third degree burns, and exposing part of his ribcage. No guns or drugs were found in the house, and no arrests were made. Sometimes these raids go wrong before they even begin. Walter and Rose Martin, a perfectly innocent couple, both in their eighties, had their home raided by New York Police more than fifty times between 2002 and 2010. It turned out that their address had been entered as the default in the police database.

If a leaden bullet is composed of electric charges, may not a human spirit be composed of something equally intangible—or tangible? I found myself as Carlyle put it, "standing on the bosom of nothing." That was in 1920, when I was just turned sixty-nine. In the following year, on the 19th of December, 1 9 2 1, my wife died. The dear girl had a happy death. She never knew she was dying and she had no pain. She just fell asleep. The last time I saw her she was sleeping quietly, and she looked like a pretty child. There was a slight flush on her cheeks and one little white hand lay out on the green counterpane: "like an April daisy on the grass." That was at midnight, and she died at six the next morning. I had gone to bed, for I was exhausted with watching. For the last week or more she would not let me out of her room by night or day. When I got up on the morning of her death I found to my surprise that I did not believe she was dead. My materialism notwithstanding, I felt that my wife was alive. My daughters, who held the same materialistic views, shared my feeling. We could not believe that she was not. Perhaps it was because we had been so devoted to her, because she had so filled our lives. I began to ask myself if perhaps the spiritualists were right. I did what Lady Warwick did when the Socialist idea came to her. I read all the best spiritualist books I could get hold of. I read and thought steadily for a couple of years and then I wrote some articles in the Sunday Chronicle protesting against the harsh criticism and cheap ridicule to which spiritualists were subjected. Still, I was not convinced. I was only puzzled. The books had affected me as W. T. Stead's talk had affected me. I told myself that all those gifted and honourable men and women could not be dupes or knaves. And—if they were right?

I have fallen in love within the last month with a Romagnuola Countess from Ravenna--the Spouse of a year of Count Guiccioli--who is sixty--the Girl twenty--he has eighty thousand ducats of rent--and has had two wives before--but he is Sixty--he is the first of Ravenna Nobles--but he is sixty--She is fair as Sunrise--and warm as Noon--we had but ten days--to manage all our little matters in beginning middle and end. & we managed them;--and I have done my duty--with the proper consummation.--But She is young--and was not content with what she had done--unless it was to be turned to the advantage of the public--and so She made an eclat which rather astonished even the Venetians--and electrified the Conversazioni of the Benzone--the Albrizzi--& the Michelli--and made her husband look embarrassed.--They have been gone back to Ravenna--some time--but they return in the Winter.--She is the queerest woman I ever met with--for in general they cost one something in one way or other--whereas by an odd combination of circumstances--I have proved an experience to HER--which is not my custom,--but an accident--however it don't mater.--She is a sort of an Italian Caroline Lamb, except that She is much prettier, and not so savage.--But She has the same red-hot head--the same noble disdain of public opinion--with the superstructure of all that Italy can add to such natural dispositions.--To by sure they may go much further here with impunity--as her husband's rank ensured their reception at all societies including the Court--and as it was her first outbreak since Marriage--the Sympathizing world was liberal.--She is also of the Ravenna noblesse--educated in a convent--sacrifice to Wealth--filial duty and all that.--I am damnably in love--but they are gone--gone--for many months--and nothing but Hope--keeps me alive seriously.

There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman – the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed – would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivalled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional and capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia demanded, and (as he put it) ‘of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable’.

Flowers. Lots of women say they don’t want them. But every woman is happy when they get them. Which is why I’ve arranged to have them delivered to Kate’s office, every hour on the hour. Seven dozen at a time. That’s one dozen for every day we were apart. Romantic, right? I thought so too. And although I know Kate’s favorite are white daisies, I specifically told the florist to avoid them. Instead, I’ve chosen exotics—bouquets with brightly colored petals and strange shapes. The kinds of flowers Kate has probably never seen in her life, from places she’s never been. Places I want to take her to. At first I kept the notes simple and generic. Take a look: Kate, I'm sorry. Drew Kate, Let me make it up to you. Drew Kate, I miss you. Please forgive me. Drew. But after a few hours I figured I needed to step it up a notch. Get more creative. What do you think? Kate, You're turning me into a stalker. Drew Kate, Go out with me on Saturday and I'll give you all of my clients. Every. Single. One. Drew Kate, If I throw myself in front of a bus, will you come visit me at the hospital? Drew PS - Try not to feel too guilty if I don't survive. Really. That last batch was delivered forty-five minutes ago. Now I’m just sitting at my desk, waiting. Waiting for what, you ask? You’ll see. Kate may be stubborn, but she’s not made of stone. My office door slams open, leaving a dent in the drywall. Here we go. “You are driving me crazy!” Her cheeks are flushed, her breathing’s fast, and she’s got murder in her eyes. Beautiful. I raise my brows hopefully. “Crazy? Like you want to rip my shirt open again?” “No. Crazy like the itch of a yeast infection that just won’t go away.” I flinch. Can’t help it. I mean—Christ. Kate steps toward my desk. “I am trying to work. I need to focus. And you’ve got Manny, Moe, and Jack playing every cheesy eighties song ever written outside my office door!” “Cheesy? Really? Huh. I so had you pegged for an eighties kind of girl.” Well, you live and learn.

In the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were people in all the democratic countries who didn’t have any real power, and they started going to the people who did have all the power and saying, “All these principles of equality you’ve been talking about since the French Revolution are very nice, but you don’t seem to be taking them very seriously. You’re all hypocrites, actually. So we’re going to make you take those principles seriously.” And they held demonstrations and bus rides, and occupied buildings, and it was very embarrassing for the people in power, because the other people had such a good argument, and anyone who listened seriously had to agree with them. ‘Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and all the other social justice movements were getting more and more support. So, in the nineteen eighties, the CIA—’ she turned to Keith and explained cheerfully, ‘this is where X-Files Theory comes into it – hired some really clever linguists to invent a secret weapon: an incredibly complicated way of talking about politics that didn’t actually make any sense, but which spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver. ‘So instead of going to the people in power and saying, “How about upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?” the people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like “My truth narrative is in competition with your truth narrative!” And the people in power replied, “Woe is me! You’ve thrown me in the briar patch!” And everyone else said, “Who are these idiots? Why should we trust them, when they can’t even speak properly?” And the CIA were happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone who’d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit what they’d done.

The most productive nation in the world, yet unable to properly feed, clothe and shelter over a third of its population. Vast areas of valuable soil turning to waste land because of neglect, indifference, greed and vandalism. Torn some eighty years ago by the bloodiest civil war in the history of man and yet to this day unable to convince the defeated section of our country of the righteousness of our cause nor able, as liberators and emancipators of the slaves, to give them true freedom and equality, but instead enslaving and degrading our own white brothers. Yes, the industrial North defeated the aristocratic South—the fruits of that victory are now apparent. Wherever there is industry there is ugliness, misery, oppression, gloom and despair. The banks which grew rich by piously teaching us to save, in order to swindle us with our own money, now beg us not to bring our savings to them, threatening to wipe out even that ridiculous interest rate they now offer should we disregard their advice. Three-quarters of the world’s gold lies buried in Kentucky. Inventions which would throw millions more out of work, since by the queer irony of our system every potential boon to the human race is converted into an evil, lie idle on the shelves of the patent office or are bought up and destroyed by the powers that control our destiny. The land, thinly populated and producing in wasteful, haphazard way enormous surpluses of every kind, is deemed by its owners, a mere handful of men, unable to accommodate not only the starving millions of Europe but our own starving hordes. A country which makes itself ridiculous by sending out missionaries to the most remote parts of the globe, asking for pennies of the poor in order to maintain the Christian work of deluded devils who no more represent Christ than I do the Pope, and yet unable through its churches and missions at home to rescue the weak and defeated, the miserable and the oppressed. The hospitals, the insane asylums, the prisons filled to overflowing. Counties, some of them big as a European country, practically uninhabited, owned by an intangible corporation whose tentacles reach everywhere and whose responsibilities nobody can formulate or clarify. A man seated in a comfortable chair in New York, Chicago or San Francisco, a man surrounded by every luxury and yet paralyzed with fear and anxiety, controls the lives and destinies of thousands of men and women whom he has never seen, whom he never wishes to see and whose fate he is thoroughly uninterested in.

Trying to get to 124 for the second time now, he regretted that conversation: the high tone he took; his refusal to see the effect of marrow weariness in a woman he believed was a mountain. Now, too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn't count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last. And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who'd read it, it stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the way home, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was traveling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, "What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?" When he got to his house he was too tired to eat the food his sister and nephews had prepared. He sat on the porch in the cold till way past dark and went to his bed only because his sister's voice calling him was getting nervous. He kept the ribbon; the skin smell nagged him, and his weakened marrow made him dwell on Baby Suggs' wish to consider what in the world was harmless. He hoped she stuck to blue, yellow, maybe green, and never fixed on red. Mistaking her, upbraiding her, owing her, now he needed to let her know he knew, and to get right with her and her kin. So, in spite of his exhausted marrow, he kept on through the voices and tried once more to knock at the door of 124. This time, although he couldn't cipher but one word, he believed he knew who spoke them. The people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons. What a roaring.