Ulrich Quotes

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.

To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.

Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make a history when someone notices.

Ulrich Van Holtz continued to read the latest tome on world economics, pretending to be bored, but in truth absolutely fascinated!

The Führer's judgement will be proved right - again.' 'Of course it will, Erik.' 'He has never yet been wrong!' 'A man thought he could fly, so he jumped off the top of a ten-storey building, and as he fell past the fifth floor, flapping his arms uselessly in the air, he was heard to say: So far, so good!

Whatever you do, do something else.

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.

I’ll wait until we’re both older,” the kid went on, “and then I’ll nail her.”Van hit the brakes. “What?”“Like you and Aunt Irene.”Panic beginning to set in, Van asked again, “What?”“That’s what you told her last night when I was scrubbing the pots from dinner. You were going to nail her. Then you laughed.”Oh, shit. “Uh, Ric . . .”“And so I’ll just wait until my future mate and I are older and then I’ll nail her. Or we’ll nail each other. That sounds like more fun. Nailing each other.”“Listen, Ulrich—”“What is that, anyway? Nailing? The way Aunt Irene smiled when you said it; I’m guessing its fun, right?

And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.

He was like the other half of myself,' says Boris...Ulrich says, 'You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes. 'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his. 'There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son. 'You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.

I’m here with Eggie.” All eyes focused on Ric and he suddenly felt like he’d just been handed a speedy death sentence. “Not for that!” Miss Darla gasped, then added with a firm nod. “Don’t you worry one bit, Ulrich. I made Eggie fill in that shallow grave before we drove up here.” Lock grimaced and Ric swallowed. “Thank you?

We lose keys and we find keys and we get new keys. We just have to find the ones that unlock the right doors. Sometimes, we have keys, but we don’t know what door they fit. That can be the hardest part, putting the right key in the right door.

Las mujeres que se portan bien no suelen hacer historia.

But where danger lurks, the saving powers also grow.

I have always believed that it is the artist who creates a work, but a society that turns it into a work of art. - Johannes Cladders

We do not live in the past, but the past in us.

It's all fun and games 'till someone loses an eye, then it's just fun you can't see -Lars Ulrich

[Ulrich] richtete sich auf den Trümmern seiner Kindheit nicht ohne Schwierigkeiten ein, doch auch mit ein wenig angenehmen Gefühls, das wie Nebel aus diesem Boden aufstieg.

The very idea of an exhibition is that we live in a world with each other, in which it is possible to make arrangements, associations, connections and wordless gestures, and, through this mise en scène, to speak.

only he is lost who gives himself up for lost!

The Western Powers have accepted a grave responsibility – perhaps for centuries to come – by weakening Germany only to give additional strength to Russia.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and professor, studied the diary and wrote the definitive biography of a woman who should have vanished from history. If not for one diary and the power of words.

In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a person than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pestilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a region, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk – all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility’s center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense of others as if they are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the “I” itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content of significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why. And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.

To the mind (Geist), good and evil, above and below, are not skeptical, relative concepts, but terms of a function, values that depend on the context they find themselves in…. It regards nothing as fixed, no personality, no order of things: because our knowledge may change from day to day, it regards nothing as binding: everything has the value it has only until the next act of creation, as a face changes with the words we are speaking to it. And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere: on is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit. Ulrich thought of that body of facts and discoveries, growing almost by the hour, out of which the mind must peer today if it wishes to scrutinize any given problem closely. This body grows away from its inner life. Countless views, opinions, systems of ideas from every age and latitude, from all sorts of sick and sound, waking and dreaming brains run through it like thousands of small sensitive nerve strands, but the central nodal point tying them all together is missing. Man feels dangerously close to repeating the fate of those gigantic primeval species that perished because of their size; but he cannot stop himself.

Men who have been in war have a different attitude about being wronged.

Surviving is about need. Living is about want.

Devotion to self is necessary. First, place the mask on yourself and breathe deeply. Then help the others. If you don’t save yourself, they will die.

Climate risk teaches us that the nation is not the centre of the world.

Ulrich the Axe, famed for his bloody deeds among Christians and pagans alike.

If I seem to you to change my state and alter my condition, I do not change my mind. I try always to be Hutten, never to desert myself, but to walk with equanimity through the unequal scenes of life.

I had never believed either in God, or in the Devil, or in a King, or in the Pope (as for the Revolution, so far I had no knowledge of it), but I had always been taught to recognize Grace and Beauty, and they alone, in my opinion, justified the curtseys, the fervor in our souls, the fullness of our hearts. — Max-Ulrich

I painted the lines and colours that affected my inner eye. I painted from memory without adding anything, without the details that I no longer saw in front of me. This is the reason for the simplicity of the painting, their obvious emptiness. I painted the impressions of my childhood, the dull colours of a forgotten day.

What does it mean to demonstrate in the streets, what is the significance of that collective activity so symptomatic of the twentieth century? In stupefaction Ulrich watches the demonstrators from the window; as they reach the foot of the palace, their faces turn up, turn furious, the men brandish their walking sticks, but “a few steps farther, at a bend where the demonstration seemed to scatter into the wings, most of them were already dropping their greasepaint: it would be absurd to keep up the menacing looks where there were no more spectators.” In the light of that metaphor, the demonstrators are not men in a rage; they are actors performing rage! As soon as the performance is over they are quick to drop their greasepaint! Later, in the 1960s, philosophers would talk about the modern world in which everything had turned into spectacle: demonstrations, wars, and even love; through this “quick and sagacious penetration” (Fielding), Musil had already long ago discerned the “society of spectacle.

This was clearly madness, just as clearly it was no more than a distortion of our own elements of being. Cracked and obscure it was; it somehow occurred to Ulrich that if mankind could dream as a whole, that dream would be Moosbrugger.

This is treachery, to change faith in accord with shifting fortune. The justice of my cause impelled me to withstand even adverse circumstance.

Yes, there may be suffering—in fact, it’s certain there will be—but it serves to heighten our joy. It makes us grateful to be alive.

The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but about the positive side effects of bads.

The history of the Beast is fulfilled, and in humility it awaits a double death —the physical annihilation and the obliteration of the recollection to itself.

Servitude of any sort is distasteful to all men, but especially objectionable is subjection to others in the case of those who ought to rule.

Most well-behaved women are too busy living their lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to think anybody else will care.

Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records and when later generations care.

Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died.

I don't believe in the creativity of the curator. I don't think that the exhibition-maker has brilliant ideas around which the works of artists must fit. Instead, the process always starts with a conversation, in which I ask the artists what their unrealized projects are, and then the task is to find the means to realize them.

We know—more from the faces immortalized on a handful of photographs than from the words of survivors—that the women and men who experienced that moment in Hiroshima believed they had encountered the beginning of the end of the world. There will never be enough future to prove them wrong.

why didn’t you flee when you could easily have done so? The answer couldn’t be more galling: because you thought things weren’t as bad as all that, because you continue to believe that this foul phase can’t possibly last much longer, because you cling to the conviction that Germany is still a democracy, not a madhouse

(Ulrich, 100 year old Bulgarian man): in Solo, by Rana Dasgupta "Ulrich has sometimes wondered whether his life has been a failure. Once he would have looked at all this and said yes. But now he does not know what it means for a life to succeed or fail. How can a dog fail its life, or a tree? A life is just a quantity; and he can no more see failure in it than he can see failure in a pile of earth, or a bucket of water. Failure and success are foreign terms to such blind matter." (p. 160)

Sharing our experience with someone who loves and supports us helps us feel less isolated and alone with our shame. Because the whole point of shame is to shun and exclude us, reconncecting with loving friends combats shame and keeps our foibles in perspective. Reconnecting with people who love us reminds us of our worth and value.

authoritarian governments can make us less trusting.

CORRUPTION = MONOPOLY + DISCRETION – ACCOUNTABILITY.

HR professionals play three roles: • Storyteller • Strategy interpreter • Strategic facilitator

If all you do is think about what you need, you’re no better than an animal in the woods, and no smarter either. To be human, you’ve got to want. It makes you smarter and stronger.

Being tough today might cause you to be weak in the future.

Everybody dies. It’s no risk to lose your life. You knew it was lost from the beginning.

Even in the cemetery a Jew isn’t safe from getting shoved around.

The true soldier knows nothing but war, and the true soldier, for lack of an enemy, attacks himself.

Breathing through his mouth, he found he could taste the air. It was the taste of an old, abandoned book; of a damp cemetery in autumn.

But like other well-behaved women they chose to obey God rather than men.

The most convincing and enduring foe of the global financial economy ultimately is the global financial economy itself. - Ulrich Beck

The next time I met Ulrich, he asked me: “Do you know what sookin sin is?” I

If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn't been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic. For centuries, women have sustained local communities, raising food, caring for the sick, and picking up the pieces after wars.

1) Choose a person, older than yourself, you see frequently — not too often by approx once a week or once a month. Maybe one of your grandparents if they are still alive. 2) Every time you meet the chosen person you press your 2 pointing-fingers firmly against your eyes for 10 to 20 seconds until various colors and patterns arise. 3) Try to note or memorize the patterns and colors in connection with the context and repeat the practice every time you meet the chosen person for a as long as possible, minimum 6 months. 4) After minimum 6 months of this practice you can recall the person, virtually by pressing your eyes for a while. In the midst of the colors and pattern a sense of presence of the chosen person arrives even after the chosen person has died.

In fact, if a museum were filled with all of the world's stolen artworks, it would be the most impressive collection ever created. It would have far more Baroque sculptures, much better Surrealist paintings, and the best Greek antiquities of any known institution. A gallery of stolen art would make the Louvre seem like a small-town gallery in comparison. Experts call it the Lost Museum.

Increasingly the individuals who want to live together are, or more precisely are becoming, the legislators of their own way of life, the judges of their own transgressions, the priests who absolve their own sins and the therapists who loosen the bonds of their own past.

Keep going, one foot in front of the other, millions of times. Face forward and take the next step. Don’t flinch when the road or gets rough, you fall down, you miss a turn, or the bridge you planned to cross has collapsed. Do what you say you’ll do, and don’t let anything or anyone stop you. Deal with the obstacles as they come. Move on. Keep going, no matter what, one foot in front of the other, millions of times.

Ulrich had talked himself into a state of excitement. Basically, he now maintained, this experience of almost total ecstasy or transcendence of the conscious mind is akin to experiences now lost but known in the past to the mystics of all religions, which makes it a kind of contemporary substitution for an eternal human need. Even if it is not a very good substitute it is better than nothing, and boxing or similar kinds of sport that organize this principle into a rational system are therefore a species of theology, although one cannot expect this to be generally understood as yet.

Ulrich replied by asking him whether he really believed that anything would come of this campaign. "No doubt about it," Arnheim said, "great events are always the expression of a general situation." The mere fact that a meeting such as this had been possible anywhere was proof of its profound necessity. And yet discrimination in such matters seems difficult, Ulrich said. Suppose, for instance, that the composer of the latest worldwide musical hit happened to be a political schemer and managed to become president of the world--which was certainly conceivable, given his enormous popularity--would this be a leap forward in history or an expression of the cultural situation? "That's quite impossible!" Arnheim said seriously. "Such a composer couldn't possibly be either a schemer or a politician--otherwise, his genius for musical comedy would be inexplicable, and nothing absurd happens in world history." "But so much that's absurd happens in the world, surely?" "In world history, never!

Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional “because” or “in order that” gets knotted into the thread of life, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has the look of necessity, and the impression that their life has a “course” is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost his elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.

in the same sense in which Kant held that the empirical sciences depend on some mental abilities – intuition and categories

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

To disobey an order is, I know, unforgivable, but the determination to save my comrades

Evil won’t leave you alone until you take a stand or until you’re dead.

They may not have enough of their own to take a stand, but they can do it if someone shows them how.

I’m not lookin’ to be anybody’s keeper. What I say and do is meant to protect me. If it works for somebody else, that’s okay, but I don’t want people depending on me to save them.

A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature’s demolition team comes in.

He had no ability to give up. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to quit, he couldn’t. It wasn’t in him. It never had been.

Despite his best efforts, maintaining dignity in a head attached to an unclean body wrapped in unclean garments was a battle that encouraged surrender.

Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather my sparks should burn out in a blaze than they should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than asleep and permanent as a planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

All this means, then,” he threw in, “is that until further notice you refuse to be a human being!” “That’s about it. It has such a disagreeable touch of the dilettante. But,” Ulrich continued after some thought, “I am even prepared to admit something else, something quite different. The experts never get to the end of anything. It’s not only that they haven’t got to the end of anything today. But they can’t even picture the idea of their activities ever being complete. Perhaps they can’t even wish it. Can one imagine, for instance, that man will still have a soul once he has learnt to understand it completely and manage it biologically and psychologically? And yet that is the state of things we are trying to achieve! There it is. Knowledge is an attitude, a passion. Actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is just like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all true that the scientist goes out after truth. It is out after him. It is something he suffers from. The truth is true and the fact is real without taking any notice of him. All he has is the passion for it. He is a dipsomaniac whose tipple is facts, and that leaves its mark on his character. And he doesn’t care a damn whether what comes of his discoveries is something whole, human, perfect—or indeed, what comes of them! It’s all full of contradictions and passive suffering and at the same time enormously active and energetic.

I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.

Ulrich lesse da qualche parte, primo inaspettato alito di un’imminente estate, l’espressione «il geniale cavallo da corsa». Questo è certamente un segno dei tempi, giacché non sono passati ancora molti anni da quando l’appellativo di ammirevole spirito virile era riservato a un essere il cui coraggio fosse coraggio morale, la cui forza la forza di una convinzione, la cui fermezza quella del cuore e della virtù; un essere che giudicasse la velocità una ragazzata, la finzione qualcosa di illecito, la volubilità e l’entusiasmo atteggiamenti assolutamente contrari alla dignità. Ma ormai questo essere non esiste più: lo si ritrova soltanto fra il corpo insegnante dei ginnasi e in dichiarazioni scritte di vario genere. È diventato un fantasma ideologico, e la vita ha dovuto cercarsi un nuovo modello di virilità. un cavallo e un campione di pugilato sono per certi versi addirittura superiori a una grande intelligenza, nel senso che le loro prestazioni e il loro valore possono essere misurati con incontestabile precisione, ed è veramente il migliore tra loro che viene riconosciuto come tale; in questo modo lo sport e l’oggettività sono meritatamente arrivati a imporsi sugli antiquati concetti di genio e di grandezza umana.

What ‘relations of production’ in capitalist society represented for Karl Marx, ‘relations of definition’ represent for risk society. Both concern relations of domination (Beck 2002; Goldblatt 1996). Among the relations of definition are the rules, institutions and capabilities which specify how risks are to be identified in particular contexts (for example, within nation-states, but also in relations between them). They form at the legal, epistemological and cultural power matrix in which risk politics is organized (see chapters 9 and 10). Relations of definition power can accordingly be explored through four clusters of questions:

Improving the skills of HR colleagues. The best learners are also teachers. Investing in building the skills of HR colleagues requires individuals to be clear and disciplined about a topical area, tool, or technology.

One Holocaust survivor was often told by friends, “I cannot believe in a God who allows such things to happen.” Her response was simply, “That is the only God there is.” Poignantly, we either open our hearts to this God for companionship in surviving, learning from, healing from, and preventing such catastrophes in the future, or we succumb to the devastating illusion that we are utterly alone with disastrous and pointless outcomes of our own and others’ agency. Even

How am I supposed to cope with all of this, he despaired. Reason dictates I should kill myself. But I want to live. Despite everything, I want to live! And that requires all the wits I have, but they aren’t enough, because the same reasoning is pitting me against myself. It negates my existence. So where does that leave me? It’s because I understand, he thought unhappily, that I despair. If only I could misunderstand. But that’s something I’m no longer able to do. And the only thing I have left in life is the list of all my losses.

O Banco de Portugal é dirigido por Judeus (Ulrich); o «Lisbôa e Açôres» foi fundado por judeus (Mayer); é christão-novo Souto-Mayor fundador do «Banco Colonial Portuguez», do «Banco Portuguez do Brazil», da «Casa Souto-Mayor & C.ª» do Rio de Janeiro, etc.; Henriques Tota, christão-novo, descende do tecelão de sêda Gabriel Henriques Tota condenado por judaísmo em 1750; Vieira de Castro, banqueiro, é christão-novo que ainda hoje conserva a tradição; os Pintos, os Fonsecas, os Santos, os Vianas, os Burnays, todos, pertencem á raça dos judeus que hão conquistado o reino de Portugal!...

To combat the sin of self-sufficiency, we need a special kind of faith. It's what I call Starbucks Rest Room Faith. Almost every Starbucks store has a sensor that controls the light in the rest room. You can't just flip a switch, and you can't make it go on by just waving your arm inside the door. You have to put your whole body into that dark room and trust that the light will come on as you enter. Faith in God is a lot like that. He doesn't offer a safety net, He doesn't let us hedge our bets, and He doesn't give any guaranteed results ahead of time. We have to be all in before the light comes on.

It is important to recall at the outset that by a cognitive equilibrium (which is analogous to the stability of a living organism) we mean something quite different from mechanical equilibrium (a state of rest resulting from a balance between antagonistic forces) or thermodynamic equilibrium (rest with destruction of structures). Cognitive equilibrium is more like what Glansdorff and Prigogine call ‘dynamic states’; these are stationary but are involved in exchanges that tend to ‘build and maintain functional and structural order in open systems’ far from the zone of thermodynamic equilibrium” (Piaget, 1977/2001, pp. 312–313).

1. Expect a journey and a battle. 2. Focus on the present and set intermediate goals. 3. Don’t dwell on the negative. 4. Transcend the physical. 5. Accept your fate. 6. Have confidence that you will succeed. 7. Know that there will be an end. 8. Suffering is okay. 9. Be kind to yourself. 10. Quitting is not an option.

Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will be made to... enter into competition with reality.' And yet it is an element in the situation he cannot ignore. How good it would be, he suggests, if one could find in life ' the simplicity inherent in narrative order. 'This is the simple order that consists in being able to say: "When that had happened, then this happened." What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now represented in, as a mathematician would say, a unidimensional order.' We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of causality: 'it has the look of necessity.' But the look is illusory; Musil's hero Ulrich has 'lost this elementary narrative element' and so has Musil. The Man Without Qualities is multidimensional, fragmentary, without the possibility of a narrative end. Why could he not have his narrative order? Because 'everything has now become nonnarrative.' The illusion would be too gross and absurd. Musil belonged to the great epoch of experiment; after Joyce and Proust, though perhaps a long way after, he is the novelist of early modernism. And as you see he was prepared to spend most of his life struggling with the problems created by the divergence of comfortable story and the non-narrative contingencies of modern reality. Even in the earlier stories he concerned himself with this disagreeable but necessary dissociation; in his big novel he tries to create a new genre in which, by all manner of dazzling devices and metaphors and stratagems, fiction and reality can be brought together again. He fails; but the point is that he had to try, a sceptic to the point of mysticism and caught in a world in which, as one of his early characters notices, no curtain descends to conceal 'the bleak matter-of-factness of things.

It takes guts to follow your dreams. Courage. Many people, even those who love you, don't understand how compelling that can be, and will try to keep you in the 'safety zone'. But f*ck that. Half the fun is venturing into the unknown, taking on the difficult task that yields new knowledge, doing more and testing your limits.

What he did there was, if one were to make a story of it to someone, absolutely nothing. It was fall, and in the mountains the early-autumn sun has a power of its own; mornings it lifted him up and bore him to some tree high up on the slopes, from beneath which one looked into the far distance, for in spite of his heavy hiking boots he was really not conscious of walking. In the same self-forgetful way he changed his location several times during the day and read a little in a few books he had with him. Nor was he really thinking, although he felt his mind more deeply agitated than usual, for his thoughts did not shake themselves up as they usually do, so that a new idea is always landing on top of the pyramid of the earlier ones while the ones at the bottom are becoming more and more compacted until finally they fuse with flesh, blood, skull case, and the tendons supporting the muscles, but his insights came like a jet into a full vessel, in endless overflowing and renewal, or they passed in an everlasting progression like clouds through the sky in which nothing changes, not the blue depths and not the soundless swimming of those mother-of-pearl fish. It could happen that an animal came out of the woods, observed Ulrich, and slowly bounded away without anything changing; that a cow grazed nearby, or a person went past, without any more happening than a beat of the pulse, twin to all the others of the stream of life that softly pounds without end against the walls of the understanding.

Our emotions always seek a foothold in what they form and shape, and always find it for a while. But Agathe and I feel an imprisoned ghostliness in our surroundings, the reverse magnetism of two connected poles, the recall in the call, the mobility of supposedly fixed walls; we see and hear it suddenly. To have stumbled 'into a time' seems to us like an adventure, and dubious company. We find ourselves in the enchanted forest. And although we cannot encompass 'our own,' differently constituted feeling, indeed hardly know what it is, we suffer anxiety about it and would like to hold it fast. But how do you hold a feeling fast? How could one linger at the highest stage of rapture, if indeed there were any way of getting there at all? Basically this is the only question that preoccupies us. We have intimations of an emotion removed from the entropy of the other emotions. It stand like a miraculous, motionless shadow in the flow before us. But would it not have to arrest the world in its course in order to exist? I arrive at the conclusion that it cannot be a feeling in the same sense as the other feelings." And suddenly Ulrich concluded: "So I come back to the question: Is love an emotion? I think not. Love is an ecstasy. And God Himself, in order to be able to lastingly love the world and, with the love of God-the-artist, also embrace what has already happened, must be in a constant state of ecstasy. This is the only form in which he may be imagined--" Here he had broken off this entry.

We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world.

In Austria il patriottismo era un argomento tutto particolare. A differenza della Germania, dove i bambini imparavano semplicemente a disprezzare le guerre dei bambini austriaci, e si insegnava loro che i bambini francesi sono i nipoti di fiacchi libertini che, fossero anche in mille, se la danno a gambe non appena incontrano un soldato tedesco della milizia territoriale dotato di una folta barba. E, scambiati i ruoli e apportate le opportune modifiche, si insegnavano esattamente le stesse cose ai bambini francesi, russi e inglesi, che vantavano anche loro parecchie vittorie. Ora, i bambini sono dei fanfaroni, amano giocare a guardie e ladri e, qualora ne facciano parte, sono sempre pronti a ritenere la famiglia Y, residente nella grande via X, la più importante famiglia del mondo. È dunque facile conquistarli al patriottismo. In Austria invece la faccenda era un po’ più complicata. Gli austriaci infatti avevano sì vinto tutte le guerre della loro storia, ma dopo la maggior parte di esse avevano dovuto cedere qualche territorio. Una circostanza, questa, che induce alla riflessione, e Ulrich, nel suo componimento sull’amor di patria, scrisse che un vero patriota non deve mai reputare la propria patria la migliore di tutte; anzi, in un lampo di genio che gli parve particolarmente bello, benché fosse piuttosto abbagliato dal suo splendore che non consapevole del suo effettivo contenuto, a quella frase sospetta ne aveva aggiunta un’altra, e cioè che probabilmente anche Dio preferisce parlare del suo mondo al conjunctivus potentialis (hic dixerit quispiam qui si potrebbe obiettare…), perché Dio crea il mondo e intanto pensa che esso potrebbe benissimo essere diverso. Di questa frase era molto fiero, ma forse nel formularla non si era spiegato bene, perché ne era nata una gran confusione, e per poco non lo avevano espulso dalla scuola, anche se poi non fu preso alcun provvedimento, nell’impossibilità di decidere se quell’audace osservazione fosse un oltraggio alla patria o a Dio

True, every runner wants to quit sometimes. By any definition, becoming a successful athlete requires conquering those psychological barriers, whether you’re sucking air during your first jog or gutting it out in the final four miles of a marathon, axiomatically the toughest. When you push beyond the marathon, new obstacles arise, and the necessary mental toughness comes from raising your pain threshold. All endurance sports are about continuing when it feels as if you have nothing left, when everything aches, when you feel done—but you’re not. You have to get beyond the numbers that, like certain birthdays for some people, just seem intrinsically daunting: fifty miles, one hundred miles, one thousand miles, two thousand miles, and random points in between. At such distances, the sport becomes every bit as much mental as physical.

Such is the lot of the knight that even though my patrimony were ample and adequate for my support, nevertheless here are the disturbances which give me no quiet. We live in fields, forests, and fortresses. Those by whose labors we exist are poverty-stricken peasants, to whom we lease our fields, vineyards, pastures, and woods. The return is exceedingly sparse in proportion to the labor expended. Nevertheless the utmost effort is put forth that it may be bountiful and plentiful, for we must be diligent stewards. I must attach myself to some prince in the hope of protection. Otherwise every one will look upon me as fair plunder. But even if I do make such an attachment hope is beclouded by danger and daily anxiety. If I go away from home I am in peril lest I fall in with those who are at war or feud with my overlord, no matter who he is, and for that reason fall upon me and carry me away. If fortune is adverse, the half of my estates will be forfeit as ransom. Where I looked for protection I was ensnared. We cannot go unarmed beyond to yokes of land. On that account, we must have a large equipage of horses, arms, and followers, and all at great expense. We cannot visit a neighboring village or go hunting or fishing save in iron. Then there are frequently quarrels between our retainers and others, and scarcely a day passes but some squabble is referred to us which we must compose as discreetly as possible, for if I push my claim to uncompromisingly war arises, but if I am too yielding I am immediately the subject of extortion. One concession unlooses a clamor of demands. And among whom does all this take place? Not among strangers, my friend, but among neighbors, relatives, and those of the same household, even brothers. These are our rural delights, our peace and tranquility. The castle, whether on plain or mountain, must be not fair but firm, surrounded by moat and wall, narrow within, crowded with stalls for the cattle, and arsenals for guns, pitch, and powder. Then there are dogs and their dung, a sweet savor I assure you. The horsemen come and go, among them robbers, thieves, and bandits. Our doors are open to practically all comers, either because we do not know who they are or do not make too diligent inquiry. One hears the bleating of sheep, the lowing of cattle, the barking of dogs, the shouts of men working in the fields, the squeaks or barrows and wagons, yes, and even the howling of wolves from nearby woods. The day is full of thought for the morrow, constant disturbance, continual storms. The fields must be ploughed and spaded, the vines tended, trees planted, meadows irrigated. There is harrowing, sowing, fertilizing, reaping, threshing: harvest and vintage. If the harvest fails in any year, then follow dire poverty, unrest, and turbulence.

Der Lärm ist unsterblich, der Lärmfetischist ein zeitloser Typus, in jedem Jahrhundert aufs neue vorhanden, um wechselnde Möglichkeiten zu nutzen. Seit der Peitschenknall, samt Pferd, ausstarb, sitzt der Fuhrknecht, statt auf dem Bock, auf dem Motorradsattel und bildet dort ein Kraftzentrum unverschämter Lebensfreude. Der Weg ist ihm Ziel, also befolgt er fernöstliche Weisheit, ohne sich vorher mit sowas unbedingt beschäftigt zu haben. Sein Produkt, der Lärm, erfüllt die Forderung klassischer Ästhetik nach Zweckfreiheit beim Produzieren; als l'alarme pour l'alarme steht der Lärm des Lärmfetischisten im Raum, unverdorben von tendenziösen Nebenabsichten in Richtung Fahrtzielerreichung oder Pferdequälerei. Sobald der Lärmfetischist Ausschau nach ›schädlichem Samenflug‹ und kratzenden Küssen hält, also nach den üblichen Vorwänden zum Mähen und Rasieren, wird er schon vom Teufel des Zweckdenkens und der Funktionalität beinahe geritten. Hier entwickelt sich eine Abhängigkeit vom Schlüsselreiz. Gequält muß manch ein Lärmfetischist sich erst Schlüsselreize produzieren, ehe er besinnungslos losknattert.

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry