Unexpected Encounters Quotes

Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.

We need not be afraid of expecting the unexpected, but let us wheedle each instant we enjoy and endear each happy moment we encounter; let us watch each step we take and each move we make, ever since happiness is a loving and appealing fairy, but utterly frail and vulnerable. ("Happy days are back again")

When we encounter the unexpected in our lives, we can challenge the battery of our interpretations and loosen our wearying preconceived notions if we keep exploring what we do not know, maintain an open mind, and take a balanced, dispassionate approach to life's vagaries. ("Looking for the unexpected")

What if disappointment is really the exact appointment your soul needs to radically encounter God?

The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.

When we encounter an unexpected challenge of threat the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.

I tried – and failed – to imagine Dr Bairstow chuckling. Sometimes when he was pleased, he did display the satisfaction of an elderly vulture unexpectedly encountering a dead donkey. But chuckling …

When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one things encounters something else: the unexpected.

It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life.

When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.

We all go through hard times in life. It’s a part of being alive and it's the reality we all have to deal with. There are times we forget our value as a person because we are so blinded with these thoughts of loneliness, emptiness and ego. Somewhere along the road we become numbed with all the frustrations and dissatisfaction. But life itself isn't always about darkness and sadness, Life is also filled with colors and that makes it beautiful. Along this path of darkness there's always light waiting to be seen by our daunted hearts. Our heart is gifted to see this light. It may be hiding behind those circumstances that we encounter; in a stranger we just met at an unexpected place; a family who has been always there but you just ignored because of your imperfect relationship with them; it might be a long time friend you have or a friend you just met. Open your heart and you will see how blessed you are to have them all in your life. Sometimes they are the light that shines your path in some dark phases of life. Don't lose hope

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through.

When you meet a dark angel don't you ever for one minute believe they are bad because they have faced the worst demons and lived to guide you through yours. It really isn't an easy job they have been asked to do, but then neither was standing on the front line during the war in heaven.

But I can only pray ardently that Fortune walks with you, that you discover hitherto unimagined strength in yourself and encounter unexpected friends along this perilous path that you must now tread.

Almost every situation we encounter in life presents possibilities for growth...But these transformations require that a person be prepared to perceive unexpected opportunities.

I found out for the first time that things like this could happen. That a helping hand could be extended miraculously like that... you were the first one that taught me. Like all of these―" Nezumi slowly looked about his room. "―these thousand of stories here, you taught me that sometimes we encounter the most unexpected things. And that's why I was able to survive..." he lapsed into momentary silence. "So you're right. There are times when people are saved by other people. And you're the one that taught me that. You were the only one that taught me that. The debt I owe for that is high― unfortunately for me.

Our world is moving so fast and we are apt to miss so much of what is happening "right now." If we can put down our smart phones for one moment and be present to what is around us, I believe these incidental meetings and strangers who come into our lives can give us unexpected fortitude, perspective and even wisdom just when we need them the most - if we are just awake, aware and open to these new insights.

Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light. For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leaves you irritable; the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside. Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a nine thousand pound granite boulder, the surprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.

But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays, and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns are inevitable to any journey really worth taking. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way.

The greatest love stories are unexpected, unexplained... choreographed chaos played out in God’s timing. It feels like a chance encounter with a familiar stranger... Like a rekindling of an eternal flame.

Every other religion and philosophy says you have to do something to connect to God; but Christianity says no, Jesus Christ came to do for you what you couldn’t do for yourself.

When you encounter unexpected situation, don’t panic. Close our eyes, take a deep breath and pray. It will relief you of any anxiety.

Dad was a writer down to his cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit, definitely.

When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected.

I inherited the very best circumstances if all. And yet, circumstances can change. The natural trajectory of your life can be utterly disrupted by one unexpected encounter, setting you so wildly off course that you're not quite sure if you'll ever find your way back to the path you were on.

To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps. Not even the ones holding betting slips, the ones who are usually beyond caring. Possibly because they know me from the Hob, or knew my father, or have encountered Prim, who no one can help loving. So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest from of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong. Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me. But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim's place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love.

But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.

Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected.

Our lives are like water, always flowing forward in the streams of time. When we encounter what is unexpected, our best choice is to flow around the obstacle.

The basic purpose of prayer is not to bend God’s will to mine but to mold my will into his.

We cannot be truly peaceful unless we have the invincible quality of peace within us; a feeble or temporary peacefulness could always be disturbed. If we try to be kind and peaceful in a naive way, encountering a different or unexpected situation might interfere with our awareness of peace because that peace has no strength in it, has no character. So peace must be stable, deeprooted, and solid.

Once, at one of the very rare and savory moments when my own teammates grudgingly allowed me to take the ball around one of the ends, Seymour, playing for the opposite side, disconcerted me by looking overjoyed to see me as I charged in his direction, as though it were an unexpected, an enormously providential chance encounter. I stopped almost dead short, and someone, of course, brought me down, in neighborhood talk, like a ton of bricks.

There’s no higher dream than experiencing God as He moves through every circumstance of life to an eternal encounter with Himself where transformed people will enjoy perfectly loving community around Jesus Christ, the source of Perfect Love.

Well, if you insist. But, my dearest flower, how ghastly to consider that such a mustache must shadow the clean-shaven grandeur of my domicile.' Lord Akeldama was rumored to insist that all his drones go without the dreaded lip skirt. The vampire had once had the vapors upon encountering an unexpected mustache around a corner of his hallway. Muttonchops were permitted in moderation, and only because they were currently all the rage among the most fashionable of London's gentlemen-about-town. Even so, they must be as well tended as the topiary of Hampton Court.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual- if one things about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.

But Christianity is not just for the strong; it’s for everyone, especially for people who admit that, where it really counts, they’re weak.

Recognition hit Victoria like an unexpected encounter with a bat.

I have to trust that first comes the dust, and then comes the making of something even better with us. God isn’t ever going to forsake you, but He will go to great lengths to remake you. What if disappointment is really the exact appointment your soul needs to radically encounter God?

My memories of that time are fleeting, but they will never vanish completely, because the unexpected encounters of our lives will always remain with us, causing us great pain in the silent ways we evoke them.

When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void. Then you can surrender; then you have surrendered. There are thousands and thousands of stories… just by a touch, just by a look, someone became enlightened. And these minor surrenders prepare you for the total surrender. Once you have known that through surrender you receive something unknown, unbelievable, unexpected, never even dreamed of, then you are ready for a major surrender. And that is the work of the master – to help you in minor surrenders so that you can gather courage for a major surrender, for a total surrender.

He’s a part of your life and he’s part of the girls’ life. I’ll never ask you not to talk about him when I’m not around. I’ll never ask you to stop loving him. If he was here, I’d hate him.” I shake my head because that’s not true. “No, I probably wouldn’t know you if he was here, and for that I’m both thankful and remorseful because his girls are the best, most beautiful girls that I’ve ever encountered, and I want to do right by not only them, but him too.

So Jesus is a great model of how to live, pray, and relate to people. But remember that if Jesus is only a model for us, then he is no encouragement—for he is too good. No one could live up to his standard. Jesus came not just to be a model but a savior.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through. Your

to allow our hearts to break, to soften them, to sink deeply into the knowing that everything will fall, everything will pass, everything will crumble, can be the great portal to awakening. We simply stop taking everything for granted. We stop living in “tomorrow” and turn toward the living day. We stop seeking our happiness in the future, clinging to the promises of others, and begin to break open into a bigger happiness that is rooted in presence, and truth, that allows for the coming but also the going of things, that accepts the little deaths as they happen each day, the disappointments, the losses, the shattered expectations, the good-byes. The Unexpected becomes our friend, a constant companion. We break open into bitter-sweetness, into fragility and utter vulnerability, into the gift of every moment, of every encounter with a friend, a lover, a stranger.

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a lone one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. - For the Sake of a Single Poem

When we encounter unexpected obstacles in finding out something which we wish to know, there are two possible courses to take. It may be that the right course is to treat the obstacle as a spur to further efforts; but there is a second possibility - that we have been trying to find something which does not exist. You will remember that that was how the relativity theory accounted for the apparent concealment of our velocity through the aether.

At the unexpected encounter with the final boss, Subaru felt as though his spirit was about to break. In terms of how mentally prepared he was to deal with either, meeting Elsa had much more of an impact on him than meeting Not-Satella. Subaru prayed that this was the last time he was going to have to see Elsa. “I

Like Nycteris, she thought, and cringed. There was an old fairy tale called The History of Photogen and Nycteris that she still carried a copy of. The main character in it was a young woman who had been raised by a cruel witch, inside a cave beneath a castle. The girl had grown up knowing only darkness, which at the time hadn’t seemed much of an issue to child-Devon. But the general idea was that Nycteris’s world was narrow: she thought the lamp in her cave was a sun, and that the universe was just a tiny series of rooms. She knew nothing of society and had very few books. A relatable situation, for a book eater woman. One day, Nycteris escaped her cave by following a stray firefly. She ended up in the castle garden. But her reactions in the story were strange and unexpected. Upon espying the moon for the first time, Nycteris decided that it must be a giant lamp, akin to the one in her cave. She saw the sky, and likewise decided it must be another kind of roof. And when she looked at the horizon, she saw not a limitless world, but merely another room, albeit with distant walls. The concept of outside didn’t exist for one such as Nycteris, nor could it ever. Her upbringing had given her such a fixed perspective that, even when encountering something new, she could only process it along the lines already drawn for her. The story’s complexity had baffled Devon as a child, but she understood it well enough now. The truth was, Nycteris never really escaped. Oh, she got a prince and a castle and the cruel witch died at the end. But Nycteris could not ever leave the cave, because the cave was a place in her mind; it was the entire way she thought about reality. Princesses like that couldn’t be rescued.

What both halves of my heart-mind can agree on is that I am the one who chooses how to respond to the people and situations I encounter everyday.

Life was strangely glorious like that sometimes; just as it could be cruel and unforgiving, so could it be a mysterious wonderland of unexpected joy and chance encounters.

We often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams.

If there is a God, you owe him far more than a morally decent life. He deserves to be at the center of your life.

You may encounter unexpected circumstance. Don’t be discouraged. God is greater than any condition.

Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you. First, it will enslave you. Whatever that thing is, you will tell yourself that you have to have it or there is no tomorrow. That means that if anything threatens it, you will become inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself. But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected. Let me give you an eloquent contemporary expression of what Jesus is saying. Nobody put this better than the American writer David Foster Wallace. He got to the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, bestselling postmodern novelist known around the world for his boundary-pushing storytelling. He once wrote a sentence that was more than a thousand words long. A few years before the end of his life, he gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. He said to the graduating class, Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before [your loved ones] finally plant you. . . . Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.4 Wallace was by no means a religious person, but he understood that everyone worships, everyone trusts in something for their salvation, everyone bases their lives on something that requires faith. A couple of years after giving that speech, Wallace killed himself. And this nonreligious man’s parting words to us are pretty terrifying: “Something will eat you alive.” Because even though you might never call it worship, you can be absolutely sure you are worshipping and you are seeking. And Jesus says, “Unless you’re worshipping me, unless I’m the center of your life, unless you’re trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, unless you see that the solution must come inside rather than just pass by outside, then whatever you worship will abandon you in the end.

Religious experience involves an encounter with the holy, the mystery of the totally other that opens like a chasm before humans in unexpected ways, making impossible the denial of its presence.

I have by now grown accustomed, to the degree that this is humanly possible, to grasp everything that we may encounter according to its particular intensity without worrying much about how long it will last. Ultimately, this may be the best and most direct way of expecting the utmost of everything—even its duration. If we allow an encounter with a given thing to be shaped by this expectation that it may last, every such experience will be spoiled and falsified, and ultimately it will be prevented from unfolding its most proper and authentic potential and fertility. All the things that cannot be gained through our pleading can be given to us only as something unexpected, something extra: this is why I am yet again confirmed in my belief that often nothing seems to matter in life but the longest patience.

In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life.

I’d finally gotten ready, even anxious, to adopt another cat, and it’d taken long months of mourning for me to reach that point: my last companion, Suki, had, after four years of unexpected but very close cohabitation, been claimed by the cruelly short life expectancy (just four to five years) of indoor-outdoor felines, especially those in wildernesses as remote as the one we inhabited. In fact, before encountering me and deciding that I was a human she could trust, Suki had lived on her own for two years and raised at least one litter of kittens in the wild, and so had beaten the odds admirably; but her disappearance had nonetheless been a terrible blow,

My hope, for all future generations, is that they will have (in addition to sunshine, fresh air, clean water, and fertile soil) a somewhat slower pace of life, with plenty of time to pause, in quiet places . . . haunted places—everyday, accessible places, open to the public—places that are not too radically transformed over time—places susceptible of cultivation, where people can express their caring, and nature can respond—places with tough, gnarled roots and tangled stalks, with digging mammals and noisy birds—places of common remembrance and hopeful guidance—places of unexpected encounters—places that breed solidarity across difference—places where children can walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before—places that are perpetually up for adoption—places that have been humanized but not conquered or commodified—places that foster a kind of connectedness both mournful and celebratory.

• The stronger the signal you send yourself of your highest purpose, the more likely you are to notice ways to serve it • Your specificity boosts your clarity, credibility and memorability. • The specific detail proves the general conclusion, not the reverse yet we are most likely to write and speak first in generalizations. • Your focus on interconnectedness increases your frequency of serendipitous encounters, unexpected insights and deeper friendships.

Before Set’s defeat and banishment from the kingdom, he tears out one of his nephew’s eyes. But the eventually victorious Horus takes back the eye. Then he does something truly unexpected: he journeys voluntarily to the underworld and gives the eye to his father. What does this mean? First, that the encounter with malevolence and evil is of sufficient terror to damage even the vision of a god; second, that the attentive son can restore the vision of his father.

Ming is not just about the tragedies that befall us. It’s about the good things, too; the unexpected opportunities, unforeseen chances to do something we love, the chance encounter with someone who will change the trajectory of our whole life. When you hold too tightly to a plan, you risk missing out on these things. And when you wake up one day in that future, you will feel boxed in by a life that, at best, reflects only a piece of who you thought you were at one moment in time.

As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as “drive” and your anxiety as “hope.” And so you can remain almost completely oblivious to how deep your thirst actually is. Most of us tell ourselves that the reason we remain unfulfilled is because we simply haven’t been able to achieve our goals. And so we can live almost our entire lives without admitting to ourselves the depth of our spiritual thirst. And that is why the few people in life who actually do reach or exceed their dreams are shocked to discover that these longed-for circumstances do not satisfy. Indeed they can enhance the inner emptiness by their presence.

Recursion is the movement that tirelessly integrates contingency into its own functioning to realize its telos. In so doing it generates an impenetrable complexity in the course of time. Organisms exhibit a complexity of relations between parts and whole inside the body and with its environment (e.g. structural coupling) in its functioning. Life also exhibits such complexity, since it expects the unexpected, and in every encounter it attempts to turn the unexpected into an event that can contribute to its singularity.

As C. S. Lewis says in The Great Divorce, if in this life you never say to God, “Thy will be done,” then eventually God will say to you for the afterlife, “All right, then thy will be done.” If you want freedom from God, you will quite justly get what you hope for.

In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life. It starts there, in the winter of my seventeenth year.

Don't even listen to No body including your friends who tells you to Move On in life. They often will have destroyed your Motivation causing an unexpected anxiety, and a severe brain stress until you give up. No matter how dead serious they are in order for you to understand them, reject their Anti-statement with the Power of your Assertion. They will foolishly halter your situation you had been encountering over the past year, when it all started from the beginning. Therefore, you MUST KEEP MOVING FORWARD. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. Train yourself to get strong so you can outsmart and surpass the famous people who came before you. That is the way of succeeding in life in order to prove to everyone you've overcome the Obstacles and your Anxiety. Keep moving forward always surpasses moving on.

Sometimes, the most unexpected connections can become the strongest bonds. Through the serendipitous meeting on WhatsApp, our online friendship has stood the test of time, proving that distance is no match for the power of genuine connection and the beauty of chance encounters.

What about sharks?" I asked. It is one thing to encounter a shark on a reef, where there are so many other tasty nibbles to choose from, but it is another thing altogether to meet a shark in the Open Water, where you are more likely to be treated as an unexpected meal. "Yes, I saw sharks, but I couldn't catch them.

What she had unexpectedly met there in the village church was not God; it was beauty. She knew perfectly well that neither the church nor the litany was beautiful in and of itself, but they were beautiful compared to the construction site, where she spent her days amid the racket of the songs. The mass was beautiful because it appeared to her in a sudden, mysterious revelation as a world betrayed. From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenary.

Do not interpret anything I say here to mean “don’t fight back.” I’m also not going to patronize you with half-truths or platitudes. This is ugly on many levels: the level of the incident and the level of social conditioning to “get along,” which can make it so much harder to decide not to be a victim. This means that if and when a woman chooses to fight, it must be a total effort. In many cases, there is no level of force that will simply discourage a male attacker. He must be incapacitated. This is my advice and I think this mindset is critical, but the actual statistics are less grim—many assailants do run away and do not escalate when they encounter unexpected resistance.

But it is necessary for us to experience this too. We must accept our existence in as wide a sense as can be; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible within it. That, when you come down to it, is the only kind of courage that is demanded of us: the courage for the oddest, the most unexpected, the most inexplicable things that we may encounter.

Chance encounters, the desire to watch, a visit from an unexpected stranger -- all of these things fall within a realm of normalcy. There is always a moment in stories like these, a fork in the road, when you wonder which path will be chosen. Will it end quietly, without incident, or will it move on to the next level? Here lies the difference between reality and imagination.

There comes an inevitable time in every life when we must cross a threshold and encounter that invisible divider between who we are and who we must become. Sometimes, the passage is evident - a sudden catastrophe that tests our mettle, a tragic loss that opens our eyes to the bane of our mortality, or a personal triumph that instills in us the confidence we need to cast aside our fears. Other times, our passage is obscured by the minutiae of an overcrowded life until we catch it in a glimpse of forbidden desire; in an inexplicable sense of melancholic emptiness or a craving for more, always more, than what we already possess. Sometimes we embrace the chance to embark on our passage, welcoming it as a chance to finally shed the adolescent skin and prove our worth against the incessant vagaries of fate. Other times, we rail against its unexpected cruelty, against the sharp thrust into a world we're not ready to explore, one we do not know or trust. For us, the past is a haven that we are loathe to depart, lest the future corrupt our soul. Better not to change at all, rather than become someone we will not recognize.

OPEN YOURSELF TO SERENDIPITY Chance encounters can also provide enormous benefits for your projects—and your life. Being friendly while standing in line for coffee at a conference might lead to a conversation, a business card exchange, and the first investment in your company a few months later. The person sitting next to you at a concert who chats you up during intermission might end up becoming your largest customer. Or, two strangers sitting in a nail salon exchanging stories about their families might lead to a blind date, which might lead to a marriage. (This is how I met my wife. Lucky for me, neither stranger had a smartphone, so they resorted to matchmaking.) I am consistently humbled and amazed by just how much creation and realization is the product of serendipity. Of course, these chance opportunities must be noticed and pursued for them to have any value. It makes you wonder how much we regularly miss. As we tune in to our devices during every moment of transition, we are letting the incredible potential of serendipity pass us by. The greatest value of any experience is often found in its seams. The primary benefits of a conference often have nothing to do with what happens onstage. The true reward of a trip to the nail salon may be more than the manicure. When you value the power of serendipity, you start noticing it at work right away. Try leaving the smartphone in your pocket the next time you’re in line or in a crowd. Notice one source of unexpected value on every such occasion. Develop the discipline to allow for serendipity.

In all his spiciness, it was the chili pepper who posed the zesty question to me—how would you learn of what is presently unknown about our vegetal ways of communicating if you are not looking for it and do not even realize that it may exist? Generously, he had also provided the answer—exclude the known to allow yourself to see what unexpected things might happen. And the unexpected is exactly what happened.

I’m aware that I’m holding my torso tensely, one of the telltale signs of the high-reactive. It feels strange to know that Kagan must be observing this too—he says as much, nodding at me as he notes that many high-reactives become writers or pick other intellectual vocations where “you’re in charge: you close the door, pull down the shades and do your work. You’re protected from encountering unexpected things.

The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, as old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled. They wrestled with mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight. "I can see them now, the old masters. I can see them standing on the other side of the flames, speaking in the voices of lions, or thunder, or monsters, or heroes, heroines, or the earth, or fire itself -- for they had to contain all voices within them, had to be all things and nothing. They had to have the ability to become lightning, to become a future homeland, to be the dreaded guide to the fabled land where the community will settle and fructify. They had to be able to fight in advance all the demons they would encounter, and summon up all the courage needed on the way, to prophesy about all the requisite qualities that would ensure their arrival at the dreamt-of land. "The old masters had to be able to tell stories that would make sleep possible on those inhuman nights, stories that would counter terror with enchantment, or with a greater terror. I can see them, beyond the flames, telling of a hero's battle with a fabulous beast -- the beast that is in the hero." "The storyteller's art changed through the ages. From battling dread in word and incantations before their people did in reality, they became the repositories of the people's wisdom and follies. Often, conscripted by kings, they became the memory of a people's origins, and carried with them the long line of ancestries and lineages. Most important of all, they were the living libraries, the keepers of legends and lore. They knew the causes and mutations of things, the herbs, trees, plants, cures for diseases, causes for wars, causes of victory, the ways in which victory often precipitates defeat, or defeat victory, the lineages of gods, the rites humans have to perform to the gods. They knew of follies and restitutions, were advocates of new and old ways of being, were custodians of culture, recorders of change." "These old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity's truest friends and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them. They had to see clearly." "They risked their sanity and their consciousness in the service of dreaming better futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of the interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal imagination." "And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing around us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our way through the dark descending nights ahead -- I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them to be whole again.

When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance. It was serendipity that called her in the countdown to John Glenn’s flight.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov, there is a scene in which two people are talking about suffering. Ivan Karamazov is talking about there being any possibility that we can make sense of suffering, and here’s what he says: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”11

Instead of striving for a life that could somehow match the clean beauty of an image from Instagram or the blurry glory of a trailer for an orgiastically great concert that could never happen, imagine striving for a way to encounter the small details of everyday life as if they were unexpectedly delightful. Isn’t that how luxury is supposed to feel, after all? Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn’t get any better than this. Feeling that way doesn’t require money. It doesn’t require the perfect scenery. All that’s required is an ability to survey a landscape that is disheveled, that is off-kilter, that is slightly unattractive or unsettling, and say to yourself: This is exactly how it should be. This requires a big shift in perspective: Since your thoughts and feelings can’t simply be turned off, you have to train your thoughts and feelings to experience imperfections as acceptable or preferable—even divine.

I am not sure who started this chicken-and-egg problem, but as we consumers encounter offensive service, we become angrier and tend to take it out on the next service provider—whether or not he or she is responsible for our bad experience. The people receiving our emotional outbursts then go on to serve other customers, but because they are in a worse mood themselves, they aren’t in a position to be courteous and polite. And so goes the carousel of annoyance, frustration, and revenge in an ever-escalating cycle.

He is the Lion and the Lamb. Despite his high claims, he is never pompous; you never see him standing on his own dignity. Despite being absolutely approachable to the weakest and broken, he is completely fearless before the corrupt and powerful. He has tenderness without weakness. Strength without harshness. Humility without the slightest lack of confidence. Unhesitating authority with a complete lack of self-absorption. Holiness and unending convictions without any shortage of approachability. Power without insensitivity.

A person’s perception on the existence of free will affects how they perceive reality. Rather than exercising any resistance against the inevitability of the future, philosophical pessimists resign themselves to accept whatever will happen. I do believe in limited free will, in part, because I am unwilling to accept that the choices we make and our hard work to accomplish personal goals is a silly frivolity. The universe is conceivably an unstable entity subject to random events and chance encounters producing unexpected and unanticipated events.

Fate has a funny way of presenting love, sometimes delivering it in the most unexpected and seemingly contradictory of packages. When we spend years searching for our soulmate, hoping and praying for that perfect match, fate often surprises us by placing our destined love right in front of us, disguised as an adversary. The love of our life may not always arrive in the form we envision, wrapped in a neat, predictable package. Sometimes, our soulmate is the very person we're running from, the one we've labeled as our enemy. It's in these unexpected encounters that fate reveals its true humor, reminding us that love can blossom in the most unlikely of circumstances. If we allow ourselves to listen to the whispers of our heart, if we pay attention to the subtle signs that fate sends our way, we might just discover that the love we've been searching for has been there all along, hiding in plain sight. Social media and the abundance of love advice can often misguide us, creating unrealistic expectations and narrowing our perspectives. But true love doesn't conform to a formula; it's a unique and individual journey that unfolds in its own time and in its own way. Don't let the noise of the world drown out the voice of your heart. Embrace the unexpected, for it is often in the most surprising encounters that we discover the love of our lives.

Beauty, mystery, wonder. They all three go together. The primary human response to an encounter with overwhelming beauty is wonder. Wonder is the transcendent sensation we experience when we find ourselves in the presence of an awe-inspiring sunset, artistic masterpiece, or newborn baby. Wonder is the uniquely human reaction to the sublime. Wonder is a large part of what it means to be human. Wonder defined is, "a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration caused by something beautiful, unexpected, or inexplicable." We wonder at two things - the beautiful and the mysterious. A life stripped of beauty and mystery is a life barren of wonder, and a life without wonder is a kind of deep poverty.

The slim chestnut-haired woman had been battering an assailant twice her size with precisely aimed strikes of her cane. Ethan had loved the way she'd done it, as if attending to some necessary task, like carrying a household bin out to the rubbish carter. Her face had been unexpectedly young, her complexion clean-scrubbed and as smooth as a tablet of white soap. All cheekbones and cool green eyes, with a sharp little rampart of a chin. But amidst the elegant angles and edges of her features, there was a valentine of a mouth, tender and vulnerable, the upper lip nearly as full as the lower. A mouth with such pretty curves that it did something to Ethan's knees every time he saw it. After that first encounter, Ethan had taken care to avoid Garrett Gibson, knowing she would be trouble for him, possibly even worse than he would be for her. But last month he'd gone to visit her at the medical clinic where she worked, for information concerning one of her patients, and his fascination had ignited all over again. Everything about Garrett Gibson was... delicious. The dissecting gaze, the voice as crisp as the icing on a lemon cake. The compassion that drove her to treat the undeserving poor as well as the deserving. The purposeful walk, the relentless energy, the self-satisfaction of a woman who neither concealed nor apologized for her own intelligence. She was sunlight and steel, spun into a substance he'd never encountered before. The mere thought of her left him like a stray coal on the hearth.

Each thought or emotion holds its own unique form of creative energy, and thoughts having a similar frequency band together to form a homogeneous creative field around the person who emitted them. When the amassed energy of a particular creative field has accumulated to a critical point, and is triggered by some external circumstance, it manifests itself in some way on the visible plane. This manifestation might occur in the form of some sort of event, happening, or situation that emerges in the person’s life. It might take shape in the form of an encounter with another person. Or, it might manifest itself in words that are heard or read, or observed popping up unexpectedly in the person’s own mind. Once this manifestation has occurred, the energy held within the creative field is depleted to just that extent.

Mastery isn't about being the best tennis player or the best mom. The resonance of mastery is in the process and progress. It is about work, and learning to develop an appetite for challenge. Mastery inevitably means encountering hurdles; you won't always overcome them, but you won't let them stop you from trying. You may never become a world-class swimmer, but you will learn to swim across the lake. And the unexpected by-product of all of that hard work you put in to mastering things? Confidence. Not only did you learn to do something well, but you got a freebie. The next point is invaluable. The confidence you get from mastery is contagious. It spreads. It doesn't even really matter what you master: For a child, it can be as simple as tying a shoe. What matters is that mastering one thing gives you the confidence to try something else.

Everywhere, in whatever realm of life, whether among its callous, coarsely impoverished and messily moldering lower ranks, or among its monotonously gelid and tediously tidy upper strata, everywhere, if but once, a person will encounter a phenomenon on his journey that is unlike anything he has chanced to see heretofore and that, at least once will awake in him a feeling unlike any he is fated to feel for the rest of his life. Everywhere, across the sorrows, whatever they be, from which this life of ours is woven, a resplendent joy will gaily flash, just as sometimes a glittering equipage with golden trappings, picturesque steeds, and the gleam and sparkle of windows will suddenly and unexpectedly rush past some wretched little back-country village that has never seen anything but a rural cart, and long afterwards the muzhiks will stand, mouths agape, caps in hand, although the wondrous equipage has long since whirled off and disappeared from view. Such is the manner in which the pretty little blonde, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, has appeared in our story and has vanished in the same manner. If on this occasion some twenty-year-old youth had happened to be there instead of Chichikov, whether a hussar, or a student, or merely someone who had just embarked on the course of his life, then Lord! what would not have awakened, not have begun to stir, not have begun to speak within him! Long would he have remained standing, insensible, in one spot, eyes fixed vacantly upon the distance, oblivious to the road and to all the reprimands awaiting him and to the chastisements for tardiness, oblivious to himself, and his work, and the world, and everything that exists in the world.

I'm near tears at this moment. But I also get an unexpected burst of courage, and here's what it feels like: I don't care anymore if this guy hates me or badmouths me to other club owners. Because now - and I've never felt this before - I actively want him to hate me. It becomes imperative, for my self-worth, that and asshole like Reed actively loathe me. If someone like this were to like me, to like my comedy, and to like the way I conduct myself professionally, it would mean I suck as a person. I've encountered this a few times since then. Not very often. But there are those rare occasions - and they're bracing, freeing sensations when they occur - when you absolutely crave someone's disapproval and disgust. You can see it actually helping your career, your social relations, and your life if it becomes known that this person thinks you're shit.

Here is New York. This is why I stay. I stay to hear the jazz musicians playing in the parks, and to browse the tables of books for sale on the street. I stay for a drink in a quiet bar, lit by golden autumn light, and for Film Forum double features in black and white. I stay for egg creams, for the amateur opera singers practicing with their windows open so we all can listen. For the Chinese grandmothers dancing by the East River, snapping red fans in their hands. For the music of shopkeepers throwing open their gates. I stay for the unexpected spectacle, and the chance encounter, and for those tough seagulls gliding inland on rainy days to remind us that Manhattan is an island, a potential space both separate and connected. Most of all, I stay because I need New York. I can't live anywhere else, so I hold on to what remains. We've lost a lot, but there's so much left worth fighting for. And while I stay, I fight.

At the beginning of history there was also a garden and a command. God put Adam and Eve in that garden, and they were told not to eat of the Tree. The direction was: “Obey me about the Tree, and you will live”—obey me and I’ll bless you. But they disobeyed. Now there is another garden, and a Second Adam, and another command. Jesus Christ has been sent by the Father to go to the cross, which is also a tree. To the first Adam he said, “Obey me about the Tree and I will bless you”—and Adam didn’t do it. But to the second Adam he says, “Obey me about the Tree and I will crush you”—and Jesus does. Jesus is the first and last person in history to be told that obedience would bring a curse. The Father is saying, essentially, “If you obey me, if you are faithful to me, I will forsake you, cast you off and send your soul into hell.” And yet Jesus obeyed. Even as he was dying, abandoned by his Father, he called him “My God”—words that in the Bible were covenant language, conveying intimacy. Even though he was being forsaken, Jesus was still obeying.

The challenge, I thought and think, is to learn to use with freedom the cage we’re shut up in. It’s a painful contradiction: how can one use a cage with freedom, whether it’s a solid literary genre or established expressive habits or even the language itself, dialect? A possible answer seemed to me Stein’s: adapting and at the same time deforming. Maintain distance: yes, but only to then get as close as possible. Avoid the pure outburst? Yes, but then burst out. Aim at consistency? Yes, but then be inconsistent. Make a polished, highly polished, draft, until the words no longer encounter friction with the meanings? Yes, but then leave it rough. Overload the genres with conventional expectations? Yes, but in order to disappoint them. That is, inhabit the forms and then deform everything that doesn’t contain us entirely, that can’t in any way contain us. It seemed to me effective for the ornate lies of the great literary catalogue to show lumps and cracks, to bang against one another. I hoped that an unexpected truth would emerge, surprising me above all.

At eight-thirty that night Ian stood on the steps outside Elizabeth’s uncle’s town house suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to murder Elizabeth’s butler, who seemed to be inexplicably fighting down the impulse to do bodily injury to Ian. “I will ask you again, in case you misunderstood me the last time,” Ian enunciated in a silky, ominous tone that made ordinary men blanch. “Where is your mistress?” Bentner didn’t change color by so much as a shade. “Out!” he informed the man who’d ruined his young mistress’s life and had now appeared on her doorstep, unexpected and uninvited, no doubt to try to ruin it again, when she was at this very moment attending her first ball in years and trying bravely to live down the gossip he had caused. “She is out, but you do not know where she is?” “I did not say so, did I?” “Then where is she?” “That is for me to know and you to ponder.” In the last several days Ian had been forced to do a great many unpleasant things, including riding across half of England, dealing with Christina’s irate father, and finally dealing with Elizabeth’s repugnant uncle, who had driven a bargain that still infuriated him. Ian had magnanimously declined her dowry as soon as the discussion began. Her uncle, however, had the finely honed bargaining instincts of a camel trader, and he immediately sensed Ian’s determination to do whatever was necessary to get Julius’s name on a betrothal contract. As a result, Ian was the first man to his knowledge who had ever been put in the position of purchasing his future wife for a ransom of $150,000. Once he’d finished that repugnant ordeal he’d ridden off to Montmayne, where he’d sopped only long enough to switch his horse for a coach and get his valet out of bed. Then he’d charged off to London, stopped at his town house to bathe and change, and gone straight to the address Julius Cameron had given him. Now, after all that, Ian was not only confronted by Elizabeth’s absence, he was confronted by the most insolent servant he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. In angry silence he turned and walked down the steps. Behind him the door slammed shut with a thundering crash, and Ian paused a moment to turn back and contemplate the pleasure he was going to have when he sacked the butler tomorrow.

There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love. I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.

The only way to avoid encountering someone is to follow him (according to a principle opposed to the principle of the labyrinth, where you follow someone so that you do not lose him). Implicit in the situation, however, is the dramatic moment when the one being followed, suddenly intuiting, suddenly becoming conscious that there is someone behind him, swings round and spots his pursuer. Then the rules are reversed, and the hunter becomes the hunted (for there is no escaping laterally). The only truly dramatic point is this unexpected turning-round of the other, who insists upon knowing and damns the consequences. This reversal does in fact occur in the Venice scenario. The man comes towards her and asks her: 'What do you want?' She wants nothing. No mystery story, no love story. This answer is intolerable, and implies possible murder, possible death. Radical otherness always embodies the risk of death. S.'s anxiety revolves entirely around this violent revelation: the possibility of getting herself unmasked - the very thing she is trying to avoid. 'I cannot go on following him. He must be uneasy, he must be wondering if I am here, behind him - surely he is thinking about me now - so I shall have to keep track of him in some other way.' S. could have met this man, seen him, spoken to him. But in that case she would never have produced this secret form of the existence of the Other. The Other is the one whose destiny one becomes, not by making his acquaintance in difference and dialogue but by entering into him as into something secret, something forever separate. Not by engaging in a conversation with him as interlocutor, but by entering into him as his shadow, as his double, as his image, by embracing the Other the better to wipe out his tracks, the better to strip him of his shadow. The Other is never the one with whom we communicate: he is the one whom we follow - and who follows us. The other is never naturally the other: the other must be rendered other by being seduced, by being made alien to himself, even by being destroyed - if there is no alternative (but in fact there are subtler ways of achieving this end).

A phobia is an excessive or unreasonable fear of an object, situation or place. Phobias are quite common and often take root in childhood for no apparent reason. Other times they spring from traumatic events or develop from an attempt to make sense of unexpected and intense feelings of anxiety or panic. Simple phobias are fears of specific things such as insects, infections, or even flying. Agoraphobia is a fear of being in places where one feels trapped or unable to get help, such as in crowds, on a bus or in a car, or standing in a line. It is basically an anxiety that ignites from being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing). A social phobia is a marked fear of social or performance situations. When the phobic person actually encounters, or even anticipates, being in the presence of the feared object or situation, immediate anxiety can be triggered. The physical symptoms of anxiety may include shortness of breath, sweating, a racing heart, chest or abdominal discomfort, trembling, and similar reactions. The emotional component involves an intense fear and may include feelings of losing control, embarrassing oneself, or passing out. Most people who experience phobias try to escape or avoid the feared situation wherever possible. This may be fairly easy if the feared object is rarely encountered (such as snakes) and avoidance will not greatly restrict the person’s life. At other times, avoiding the feared situation (in the case of agoraphobia, social phobia) is not easily done. After all, we live in a world filled with people and places. Having a fear of such things can limit anyone’s life significantly, and trying to escape or avoid a feared object or situation because of feelings of fear about that object or situation can escalate and make the feelings of dread and terror even more pronounced. In some situations of phobias, the person may have specific thoughts that contribute some threat to the feared situation. This is particularly true for social phobia, in which there is often a fear of being negatively evaluated by others, and for agoraphobia, in which there may be a fear of passing out or dying with no one around to help, and of having a panic attack where one fears making a fool of oneself in the presence of other people. Upon recognizing their problem for what it is, men should take heart in knowing that eighty percent of people who seek help can experience improvement of symptoms or, in male-speak, the illness can be “fixed.

Or think of the tale of the blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time. One wise man, touching the ear of the elephant, declares the elephant is flat and two-dimensional like a fan. Another wise man touches the tail and assumes the elephant is like rope or a one-dimensional string. Another, touching a leg, concludes the elephant is a three-dimensional drum or a cylinder. But actually, if we step back and rise into the third dimension, we can see the elephant as a three-dimensional animal. In the same way, the five different string theories are like the ear, tail, and leg, but we still have yet to reveal the full elephant, M-theory. Holographic Universe As we mentioned, with time new layers have been uncovered in string theory. Soon after M-theory was proposed in 1995, another astonishing discovery was made by Juan Maldacena in 1997. He jolted the entire physics community by showing something that was once considered impossible: that a supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles in four dimensions, was dual, or mathematically equivalent, to a certain string theory in ten dimensions. This sent the physics world into a tizzy. By 2015, there were ten thousand papers that referred to this paper, making it by far the most influential paper in high-energy physics. (Symmetry and duality are related but different. Symmetry arises when we rearrange the components of a single equation and it remains the same. Duality arises when we show that two entirely different theories are actually mathematically equivalent. Remarkably, string theory has both of these highly nontrivial features.) As we saw, Maxwell’s equations have a duality between electric and magnetic fields—that is, the equations remain the same if we reverse the two fields, turning electric fields into magnetic fields. (We can see this mathematically, because the EM equations often contain terms like E2 + B2, which remain the same when we rotate the two fields into each other, like in the Pythagorean theorem). Similarly, there are five distinct string theories in ten dimensions, which can be proven to be dual to each other, so they are really a single eleven-dimensional M-theory in disguise. So remarkably, duality shows that two different theories are actually two aspects of the same theory. Maldacena, however, showed that there was yet another duality between strings in ten dimensions and Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. This was a totally unexpected development but one that has profound implications. It meant that there were deep, unexpected connections between the gravitational force and the nuclear force defined in totally different dimensions. Usually, dualities can be found between strings in the same dimension. By rearranging the terms describing those strings, for example, we can often change one string theory into another. This creates a web of dualities between different string theories, all defined in the same dimension. But a duality between two objects defined in different dimensions was unheard of.

The translucent, golden punch tastes velvety, voluptuous and not off-puttingly milky. Under its influence, I stage a party for my heroines in my imagination, and in my flat. It's less like the glowering encounter I imagined between Cathy Earnshaw and Flora Poste, and more like the riotous bash in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not everyone is going to like milk punch. So there are also dirty martinis, and bagels and baklava, and my mother's masafan, Iraqi marzipan. The Little Mermaid is in the bath, with her tail still on, singing because she never did give up her soaring voice. Anne Shirley and Jo March are having a furious argument about plot versus character, gesticulating with ink-stained hands. Scarlett is in the living room, her skirts taking up half the space, trying to show Lizzy how to bat her eyelashes. Lizzy is laughing her head off ut Scarlett has acquired a sense of humour, and doesn't mind a bit. Melanie is talking book with Esther Greenwood, who has brought her baby and also the proofs of her first poetry collection. Franny and Zooey have rolled back the rug and are doing a soft shoe shuffle in rhinestone hats. Lucy Honeychurch is hammering out some Beethoven (in this scenario I have a piano. A ground piano. Well, why not?) Marjorie Morningstar is gossiping about directors with Pauline and Posy Fossil. They've come straight from the shows they're in, till in stage make-up and full of stories. Petrova, in a leather aviator jacket, goggles pushed back, a chic scarf knotted around her neck, is telling the thrilling story of her latest flight and how she fixed an engine fault in mid-air. Mira, in her paint-stained jeans and poncho, is listening, fascinated, asking a thousand questions. Mildred has been persuaded to drink a tiny glass of sherry, then another tiny glass, then another and now she and Lolly are doing a wild, strange dance in the hallway, stamping their feet, their hair flying wild and electric. Lolly's cakes, in the shape of patriarchs she hates, are going down a treat. The Dolls from the Valley are telling Flora some truly scandalous and unrepeatable stories, and she is firmly advising them to get rid of their men and find worthier paramours. Celie is modelling trousers of her own design and taking orders from the Lace women; Judy is giving her a ten-point plan on how to expand her business to an international market. She is quite drunk but nevertheless the plan seems quite coherent, even if it is punctuated by her bellowing 'More leopard print, more leopard print!' Cathy looks tumultuous and on the edge of violent weeping and just as I think she's going to storm out or trash my flat, Jane arrives, late, with an unexpected guest. Cathy turns in anticipation: is it Heathcliff? Once I would have joined her but now I'm glad it isn't him. It's a better surprise. It's Emily's hawk. Hero or Nero. Jane's found him at last, and has him on her arm, perched on her glove; small for a bird of prey, he is dashing and patrician looking, brown and white, observing the room with dark, flinty eyes. When Cathy sees him, she looks at Jane and smiles. And in the kitchen is a heroine I probably should have had when I was four and sitting on my parents' carpet, wishing it would fly. In the kitchen is Scheherazade.