Vacant Time Quotes

What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

Man was born for society. However little He may be attached to the World, He never can wholly forget it, or bear to be wholly forgotten by it. Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of Mankind, the Misanthrope flies from it: He resolves to become an Hermit, and buries himself in the Cavern of some gloomy Rock. While Hate inflames his bosom, possibly He may feel contented with his situation: But when his passions begin to cool; when Time has mellowed his sorrows, and healed those wounds which He bore with him to his solitude, think you that Content becomes his Companion? Ah! no, Rosario. No longer sustained by the violence of his passions, He feels all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart becomes the prey of Ennui and weariness. He looks round, and finds himself alone in the Universe: The love of society revives in his bosom, and He pants to return to that world which He has abandoned. Nature loses all her charms in his eyes: No one is near him to point out her beauties, or share in his admiration of her excellence and variety. Propped upon the fragment of some Rock, He gazes upon the tumbling waterfall with a vacant eye, He views without emotion the glory of the setting Sun. Slowly He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous as the former.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below. I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon. History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment. 'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple. I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.' He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.' 'What?' He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said. 'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.' Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'That information is classified, I'm afraid.' 1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor. 'Is it open to the public?' I said. 'Not generally, no.' I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. 'Are you happy here?' I said at last. He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.' St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch. 'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.' He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.

It was time laid bare, time in and of itself, time at its most basic and primal, and it forced me to call it by its true name (for now I was living pure time—pure, vacant time) so as not to forget it for a moment, keep it constantly before me, and feel its weight.

Abby's eyes seemed almost as vacant as those of the girl in the photograph. Then a shiver came over her and she blinked. Gently, almost affectionately, she put the picture back on the wall. She touched it one last time and said, "Poor little bird. I wonder if she ever escaped her cage.

Every time I bestow a vacant office I make a hundred discontented persons and one ingrate. Louis XIV, 1638-1715

What the Chronics are—or most of us—are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

Ideals are just a bunch of raving without power to back them up, and power is just kind of a vacant void without ideals to back it up, isn’t it?

Away There is no sorrow Time heals never; No loss, betrayal, Beyond repair. Balm for the soul, then, Though grave shall sever Lover from loved And all they share. See the sweet sun shines The shower is over; Flowers preen their beauty, The day how fair! Brood not too closely On love, on duty; Friends long forgotten May wait you where Life with death Brings all to an issue; None will long mourn for you, Pray for you, miss you, Your place left vacant, You not there.

These questions are punctuated by other questions, as diverse as "Will I ever do time?" and "Did this girl have a trusting heart?" The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don't notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the disembodied voice coming from its mouth: These are terrible times. Maggots already writhe across the human sausage, the drool pouring from my lips dribbles over them, and still I can't tell if I'm cooking any of this correctly, because I'm crying too hard and I have never really cooked anything before.

Spending time with God will fill vacant places in our lives.

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers. Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

We stare vacantly into our own future, frightened of all that time confiscates from us. We lament the theft of our beauty, youth, and loved-ones. And yet we somehow overlook the many ways in which we deprive ourselves: through anxiety and worry, we rob our hearts of peace and tranquility, as we sever the thin threads which tether us to the source of our creation.

Three hundred nights like three hundred walls must rise between my love and me and the sea will be a black art between us. Time with a hard hand will tear out the streets tangled in my breast. Nothing will be left but memories. (O afternoons earned with suffering, nights hoping for the sight of you, dejected vacant lots, poor sky shamed in the bottom of the puddles like a fallen angel. . . . And your life that graces my desire and that run-down and lighthearted neighborhood shining today in the glow of my love. . . .) Final as a statue your absence will sadden other fields.

Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

—I speak as one who plumbs Life’s dim profound, One who at length can sound Clear views and certain. But—after love what comes? A scene that lours, A few sad vacant hours, And then, the Curtain.

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling. There was a gusty wind blowing in at the windows and the soot from the oil burners of the hotel next door was drown-draughted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot. I was thinking about going out to lunch and that life was pretty flat and that it would probably be just as flat if I took a drink and that taking a drink all alone at that time of day wouldn't be any fun anyway.

He'd obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear. I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon. "It's that vacant expression," she said, "people just want to fill the empty void".

No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches.

Kusha, settling into the driver’s seat of the truck, gazes vacantly in the air. Is it safe to go now? (a) Yes (b) No: she wonders and soon finds the answer with her intuition-like alarm. It’s easy to pick the right one when the options are only two. “Yes. It’s safe.” “I love your intuition!” Taha says. “It’s unfair you don’t tell me the war hero action-figure winning numbers.” She makes a sad face. She saw how Kusha correctly guessed the High Auction’s ticket number one digit at a time. If you have a lottery-guessing sister, it’s hard not to feel excited.

Some departure from the norm Will occur as time grows more open about it. The consensus gradually changed; nobody Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring Over the body, changing it without decay— People with too many things on their minds, but we live In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling, Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness And the other livers of it get off at the same stop. How careless. Yet in the end each of us Is seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s time That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it, Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it were The same as making it happen. You’re not sorry, Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen, Yet would like an exacter share, something about time That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means. It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it, Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there. If it isn’t enough, take the idea Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end As though you cared. The event combined with Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the wiser Usages of age, but it’s both there And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight, At the back of the mind, where we live now.

Every time I look up and catch that kid's vacant eye, I suffer agonies. I tell you, Bertie, sometimes when he gives me a patronising glance and then turns away and is sick, as if it revolted him to look at me, I come within an ace of occupying the entire front page of the evening papers as the latest murder sensation.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time." And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness...: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the corking care of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:- "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain. " ... "Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

The little group before her finally moved on and Sarah took its place, standing before Tom like he was a painting in a museum. And then his vacant eyes dropped from that point somewhere above her head and he looked at her—looked into her eyes and registered her presence. His eyes widened and his mouth opened wordlessly. For the space of six heartbeats they stared at one another and then Sarah simply said, “Come home.” She held her hand out to him. He gazed at it for a moment. “Come with me,” she said softly. Slowly he rose from his chair and walked toward her. He slipped his hand into hers and his palm was warm and callused. She stepped back and pulled him along with her. Suddenly his arms went around her, hugging her tight, his head dropped to her shoulder and his mouth pressed into her hair as he whispered, “I can’t believe you’re here.” Her hands slipped up the smooth, supple skin of his back to hook over his shoulders. She buried her face against his chest, breathing him in, forgetting time and place and circumstance and just holding him.

Someday you will murder your father and be with your mother, he said.” Once I’ve spoken this, put this thought into concrete words, a hollow feeling grabs hold of me. And inside that hollow, my heart pounds out a vacant, metallic rhythm. Expression unchanged, Oshima gazes at me for a long time. “So he said that someday you would kill your father with your own hands, that you would sleep with your mother.” I nod a few more times. “The same prophecy made about Oedipus. Though of course you knew that.” I nod. “But that’s not all. There’s an extra ingredient he threw into the mix. I have a sister six years older than me, and my father said I would sleep with her, too.” “Your father actually said this to you?” “Yeah. I was still in elementary school then, and didn’t know what he meant by ‘be with.’ It was only a few years later that I caught on.” Oshima doesn’t say anything. “My father told me there was nothing I could do to escape this fate. That prophecy is like a timing device buried inside my genes, and nothing can ever change it. I will kill my father and be with my mother and sister.

To say that one goes on holiday is to speak the language of the working class, for whom the time off appears merry and playful; but to say one goes on vacation is to speak the language of the ruling class. Vacation comes from the same root as vacant and reflects what the owner sees when he looks around the floor—a vacancy where John 'should' 'be'. (I suspect that the owner probably thinks some negative thoughts about the Labor Unions and the 'damned Liberal' Government that force him to pay John even when John 'is vacant.') I leave it as a puzzle for the reader: Do the Irish and English speak Working Class in this case because they have had several socialist governments, or have the had several socialist governments because they learned to speak the language of the Working Class? And: has the U.S., alone among industrial nations, never had a socialist government because it speaks the Ruling Class language, or does it speak the Ruling Class language because it has never had a socialist government?

What no one ever told me was that sometimes ‘time’ only adds layers to the wounds and if you scratch off the dust years later, you will still find him in your blood and flesh, residing in a vacant house that you thought had no tenants. Time. They never said that time only teaches us regrets.

I was the vacant, repressed depressive, and she was the obsessive blabbermouth, always knocking on my door, asking random questions, looking for any excuse to talk. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness.

This was the reason why, when he would try to remember how he looked when dead, he could remember nothing clearly except the powerful sculptured weight and symmetry of his tremendous hands as they lay folded on his body in the coffin. The great hands had a stony, sculptured and yet living strength and vitality, as if Michelangelo had carved them. They seemed to rest there upon the groomed, bereft and vacant horror of the corpse with a kind of terrible reality as if there really is, in death, some energy of life that will not die, some element of man's life that must persist and that resumes into a single feature of his life the core and essence of his character.

All love is bittersweet. Love is inexplicable; it is part poetry and part masochism. Part of love is the loss of self-control because one must openly surrender their sense of an exclusive self to the manic powers of love. The personal act of surrender to a lover leaves one vulnerable to entanglement in a maze of emotions. When we fall in love, our lover’s happiness and well-being assumes the primary role in our mind, they become copilots of our souls. When we are in love for the first time, we feel what it means to become a complete person; we identify who we are by seeing our reflection in our lover’s eye; and we sense what we might become when infused with love. When our lover leaves us, we feel vexed and vacant because we recognize that they took up such a large part of what made us feel intoxicated with life. When our lover abandons us, we lose our sense of self; we temporarily cease to exist as a whole person, and we must reconstruct the shattered remnants of oneself in the wake of a love lost.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself. When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to chose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it. Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

What did I want? What was I looking for? What was I doing there, hour after hour?Contradictory things. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated. I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space. I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded by superfluity. I wanted to hypnotise myself with data, with coloured pixels, to become vacant, to overwhelm any creeping anxious sense of who I actually was, to annihilate my feelings. At the same time I wanted to wake up, to be politically and socially engaged. And then again I wanted to declare my presence, to list my interests and objections, to notify the world that I was still there, thinking with my fingers, even if I’d almost lost the art of speech. I wanted to look and I wanted to be seen, and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.

look at the phone thinking about calling out there There’s no one to call Just voices Other worlds Sometimes I feel so thrown down So used up and vacant That I have to let time pass me by

Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, even if for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place. If that were true, then maybe he should be happy he was hollow.

In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as "No Man's Land." Here 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity.

Up early on Friday, May 18, the day when nominations were to be made, he passed some time playing “fives”—a variety of handball—with some other men in a vacant lot next to the Illinois State Journal office.

I didn't know. All I know was that the sex was terrific. And that the hippie was cute. She loved sweet pickles. She liked the name Willie. She even liked Apocalypse Now. She was not a vegeterian. These were all on the plus side. But, once I introduced her to my friends, at the time, and they were all stuck-up asshole Lit majors and they made fun of her and she understoond what was going on and her eyes, usually blue, too blue, vacant, were sad. And I protected her. I took her away from them. ('Spell Pynchon,' they asked her, cracking up.) And she introduced me to her friends. And we ended up sitting on some Japanese pillows in her room and we all smoked some pot and this little hippie girl with a wreath on her head, looked at me as I held her and said, "The world blows my mind'. And you know what? I fucked her anyway.

News of your death. Tears, and the memory of all the times we talked the sun down the sky. You, Herakleitos of Halikarnassos, once my friend, now vacant dust, whose poems are nightingales beyond the clutch of the unseen god.

FOR THE TIME OF NECESSARY DECISION The mind of time is hard to read. We can never predict what it will bring, Nor even from all that is already gone Can we say what form it finally takes; For time gathers its moments secretly. Often we only know it’s time to change When a force has built inside the heart That leaves us uneasy as we are. Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul Or the love where we once belonged Calls nothing alive in us anymore. We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere Until we stand before a threshold we know We have to cross to come alive once more. May we have the courage to take the step Into the unknown that beckons us; Trust that a richer life awaits us there, That we will lose nothing But what has already died; Feel the deeper knowing in us sure Of all that is about to be born beyond The pale frames where we stayed confined, Not realizing how such vacant endurance Was bleaching our soul’s desire.

Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous. Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in “An Apology for Idlers” (1885): “Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.

Doc awakened very slowly and clumsily like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool. His mind broke the surface and fell back several times. There was red lipstick on his beard. He opened one eye, saw the brilliant colors of the quilt and closed his eye quickly. But after a while he looked again. His eye went past the quilt to the floor, to the broken plate in the corner, to the glasses standing on the table turned over on the floor, to the spilled wine and the books like heavy fallen butterflies. There were little bits of curled red paper all over the place and the sharp smell of firecrackers. He could see through the kitchen door to the steak plates stacked high and the skillets deep in grease. Hundreds of cigarette butts were stamped out on the floor. And under the firecracker smell was a fine combination of wine and whiskey perfume. His eye stopped for a moment on a little pile of hairpins in the middle of the floor. He rolled over slowly and supporting himself on one elbow he looked out the broken window. Cannery Row was quiet and sunny. The boiler was open. The door of the Palace Flophouse was closed. A man slept peacefully among the weeds in the vacant lot. The Bear Flag was shut up tight.

The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class- leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.

Pretty; beautiful even; touchingly untouched. An advertisement for soap, all natural ingredients. The face looks deaf: it has that vacant, posed imperviousness of all well-brought-up girls of the time. A tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on.

And when you got to the Trestle or the Vacant Lot or the Pond there would already be six hundred kids there. There were always six hundred kids everywhere except where two or more neighbourhoods met – at the Park, for instance – where the numbers would grow into the thousands. I once took part in an ice hockey game at the lagoon in Greenwood Park that involved four thousand kids, all slashing away violently with sticks, and went on for at least three quarters of an hour before anyone realized that we didn’t have a puck.

You have that look again,” my father says. “That vacant, lost stare. I’ve seen it a few times, and it’s always him.” “That’s ridiculous.” “Is it?” “Of course. I’m fine.” “I didn’t say you weren’t fine. I said you looked lost, not that you didn’t know your way.

In every room the recollection of my childhood is slight, and fireflies of memory disappear as soon as I turn my mind to them. I passed through my past, I didn't or couldn't savour the time, and now my history is huge and vacant, like a film I never finished watching.

In no time we roll into Sedona proper and find a Cirlce K. The place is full of men with silver ponytails and ratty sandals, old hippie women in loose flowing pants grinning vacantly as they molest the produce, and I am reminded of my old neighborhood in San Francisco. We buy enough fruit and bread and jerked meat for three days, as well as a couple spare handlers of SoCo and a big bottle of cheap Chianti for me. As I'm paying I wonder at how we cling so relentlessly to the little conventions like commerce, as though they can save us.

Nick Sinclair will not be present today," he informed the thunderous-looking group. "He asked me to express his regrets and to explain that he was called away on an urgent matter." In unison, six outraged faces turned to glare with impotent hostility at the vacant chair of their missing member. "Last time it was a labor relations problem. What the hell is Sinclair's problem this time?" a jowly man demanded unsympathetically. "A merger," the chairman answered. "He said he is going to try to negotiate the most important merger of his life.

I was the vacant, repressed depressive, and she was the obsessive blabbermouth, always knocking on my door, asking random questions, looking for any excuse to talk. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness

Call him!” echoed Barnaby, sitting upright upon the floor, and staring vacantly at Gabriel, as he thrust his hair back from his face. “But who can make him come! He calls me, and makes me go where he will. He goes on before, and I follow. He’s the master, and I’m the man. Is that the truth, Grip?” The raven gave a short, comfortable, confidential kind of croak; — a most expressive croak, which seemed to say, “You needn’t let these fellows into our secrets. We understand each other. It’s all right.” “I make him come!” cried Barnaby, pointing to the bird. “Him, who never goes to sleep, or so much as winks!—Why, any time of night, you may see his eyes in my dark room, shining like two sparks. And every night, and all night too, he’s broad awake, talking to himself, thinking what he shall do to-morrow, where we shall go, and what he shall steal, and hide, and bury. I make him come! Ha, ha, ha!

How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying! This world is pleasant–it would be dreary to be called from it, and to have to go who knows where?" And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all around an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood–the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering , and plunging amid that chaos.

There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacant. Yet none of that matters in the end. How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us. How God indeed enters into our messy lives and loves us through them, whether we want God’s help or not. And how, even after we’ve experienced some sort of resurrection, it’s never perfect or impressive like an Easter bonnet, because, like Jesus, resurrected bodies are always in rough shape.

The two of us, in the rain, went down streets of vacant lots. The sidewalks in that part of the world sink and evade your step, in winter the branches of the little ash trees at the edge hold the raindrops a long time, a tenuous fairyland trembling in the breeze. Our way back to the hospital led past a number of newly built hotels, some had names, others hadn’t even gone to that much trouble. “Rooms by the week” was all they had to say for themselves. The war had suddenly emptied them of all the workers and wage slaves who had lived there. They wouldn’t even come back to die. Dying is work, too, but they’d do it somewhere else.

But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, if even for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place. If that were true, then maybe he should be happy he was hollow.

How easy it would be to scare the living wits out of this fucking guy. Kimball is utterly unaware of how truly vacant I am. There is no evidence of animate life in this office, yet still he takes notes. By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world. I would like a Pilsner Urquell.

…and so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the bride to be.” I applauded because everyone else did, on automatic, and looked up to behold the linear mortal who Vincent had decided to occupy himself with this time. Would she be a Frances, chosen to make an unseen Hugh jealous while playing tennis on the lawn? Or Leticia, perhaps, pretty but vacant; perhaps a Mei, adding that air of respectability as he went about his nefarious deeds, or a Lizzy, a companion in dark hours, a figure who was nine parts being there to only one part chemistry. She stepped to the front of the room, a woman with a hint of grey streaking the edge of her hair, dressed in a mermaid dress the colour of clotted cream, and she was Jenny. My Jenny. Memory, moving too fast to process.

So he'd waited. Counted the minutes. It had been worth it. Seeing her claw her way onto the landing, panting, hair curling with the sweat sliding down her face- completely worth his generally shit day. Nesta was still sprawled on the hall floor when she hissed, 'Whoever designed those stairs was a monster.' 'Would you believe that Rhys, Az, and I had to climb up and down them as punishment when we were boys?' Her eyes shimmered with temper- good. Better than the vacant ice. 'Why?' 'Because we were young and stupid and testing boundaries with a High Lord who didn't understand practical jokes regarding public nudity.' He nodded toward the stairs. 'I got so dizzy on the hike down that I puked on Az. he then puked on Rhys, and Rhys puked all over himself. It was the height of summer, and by the time we made the trek back up, the heat was unbearable, we all reeked, and the scent of the vomit on the stairs had become horrific. We all puked again as we walked through it.' He could have sworn the corners of her mouth were trying to twitch upward. He didn't hold back his own grin at the memory. Even if they'd still had to hike back down and mop it all up.

Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, if even for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place. If that were true, then maybe he should be happy he was shallow.

The brushstrokes were precisely the artist’s, not hers. It was thievery in every possible aspect of its creation. She had left nothing of herself in its reproduction, merely cloning the vacant starvation that had existed there before, and then she’d done the same another dozen times; proving to herself that, at very least, she could still see, she could still think, she could still interpret.

Instead, as the crystal splinters entered Hornwrack's brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved across the ceiling frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes and smiled, or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips. Viriconium, with all her narcissistic intimacies and equivocal invitations welcomed him again. He had hated that city, yet now it was his past and it was he had to regret...The second of these visions was of the Rue Sepile. It was dawn, in summer. Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour. Up at the second-floor casement window a boy was busy with the bright red geraniums arranged along the outer still in lumpen terra-cotta pots. He looked down at Hornwrack and smiled. Before Hornwrack could speak he drew down the lower casement and turned away. The glass which no separated them reflected the morning sunlight in a silent explosion; and Hornwrack, dazzled mistaking the light for the smile, suddenly imagined an incandescence which would melt all those old streets! Rue Sepile; the Avenue of Children; Margery Fry Court: all melted down! All the shabby dependencies of the Plaza of Unrealized Time! All slumped, sank into themselves, eroded away until nothing was left in his field of vision but an unbearable white sky above and the bright clustered points of the chestnut leaves below - and then only a depthless opacity, behind which he could detect the beat of his own blood, the vitreous humour of the eye. He imagined the old encrusted brick flowing, the glass cracking and melting from its frames even as they shrivelled awake, the sheds of paints flaring green and gold, the geraniums toppling in flames to nothing, not even white ash, under this weight of light! All had winked away like reflections in a jar of water glass, and only the medium remained, bright, viscid, vacant. He had a sense of the intolerable briefness of matter, its desperate signalling and touching, its fall; and simultaneously one of its unendurable durability He thought, Something lies behind all the realities of the universe and is replacing them here, something less solid and more permanent. Then the world stopped haunting him forever.

The prescription for spiritual transformation has often been too individualistically oriented. We are encouraged to engage in spiritual disciplines so that we might have the power to do what we can’t do by will power alone. But what happens when people don’t have the “will power” to engage spiritual disciples on a consistent basis? Our character is left untended. “In a wild world like ours, your character, left untended, will become a stale room, an obnoxious child, a vacant lot filled with thorns, weeds, broken bottles, raggedy grocery bags, and dog droppings. Your deepest channels will silt in, and you will feel yourself shallowing. You’ll become a presence neither you nor others will enjoy, and you and they will spend more and more time and energy trying to be anywhere else.”[1] So what are we to do?

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

One day in the spring of 1894 or so, Amanda Cobb looked out her kitchen window and saw Tyrus and a bunch of Negro boys merrily hauling a cart laden with scrap metal, broken furniture, and other things they’d found in backyards and vacant lots around town. They were headed toward the junkyard to try to make a few dollars, and Mrs. Cobb knew for what. “He was always thinking up ways of earning money to buy baseball supplies,” she would tell a writer for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Sunday Union and Republican in 1928. “He was always playing when he was a child. In fact, we had a hard time getting him to go to school. I remember that the first money he earned he spent for a mitt. He couldn’t have been more than six years old when a neighbor asked him to take his cow to the pasture and gave Ty some change for doing it. Ty didn’t buy candy or ice cream. He knew what he wanted, and he got it—a baseball glove.

Why do we bury our dead?” His nose was dented in at the bridge like a sphinx; the cause of which I could only imagine had been a freak archaeological accident. I thought about my parents. They had requested in their will that they be buried side by side in a tiny cemetery a few miles from our house. “Because it’s respectful?” He shook his head. “That’s true, but that’s not the reason we do it.” But that was the reason we buried people, wasn’t it? After gazing at him in confusion, I raised my hand, determined to get the right answer. “Because leaving people out in the open is unsanitary.” Mr. B. shook his head and scratched the stubble on his neck. I glared at him, annoyed at his ignorance and certain that my responses were correct. “Because it’s the best way to dispose of a body?” Mr. B. laughed. “Oh, but that’s not true. Think of all the creative ways mass murderers have dealt with body disposal. Surely eating someone would be more practical than the coffin, the ceremony, the tombstone.” Eleanor grimaced at the morbid image, and the mention of mass murderers seemed to wake the rest of the class up. Still, no one had an answer. I’d heard Mr. B. was a quack, but this was just insulting. How dare he presume that I didn’t know what burials meant? I’d watched them bury my parents, hadn’t I? “Because that’s just what we do,” I blurted out. “We bury people when they die. Why does there have to be a reason for everything?” “Exactly!” Mr. B. grabbed the pencil from behind his ear and began gesticulating with it. “We’ve forgotten why we bury people. “Imagine you’re living in ancient times. Your father dies. Would you randomly decide to put him inside a six-sided wooden box, nail it shut, then bury it six feet below the earth? These decisions aren’t arbitrary, people. Why a six-sided box? And why six feet below the earth? And why a box in the first place? And why did every society throughout history create a specific, ritualistic way of disposing of their dead?” No one answered. But just as Mr. B. was about to continue, there was a knock on the door. Everyone turned to see Mrs. Lynch poke her head in. “Professor Bliss, the headmistress would like to see Brett Steyers in her office. As a matter of urgency.” Professor Bliss nodded, and Brett grabbed his bag and stood up, his chair scraping against the floor as he left. After the door closed, Mr. B. drew a terrible picture of a mummy on the board, which looked more like a hairy stick figure. “The Egyptians used to remove the brains of their dead before mummification. Now, why on earth would they do that?” There was a vacant silence. “Think, people! There must be a reason. Why the brain? What were they trying to preserve?” When no one answered, he answered his own question. “The mind!” he said, exasperated. “The soul!” As much as I had planned on paying attention and participating in class, I spent the majority of the period passing notes with Eleanor. For all of his enthusiasm, Professor Bliss was repetitive and obsessed with death and immortality. When he faced the board to draw the hieroglyphic symbol for Ra, I read the note Eleanor had written me. Who is cuter? A. Professor Bliss B. Brett Steyers C. Dante Berlin D. The mummy I laughed. My hand wavered between B and C for the briefest moment. I wasn’t sure if you could really call Dante cute. Devastatingly handsome and mysterious would be the more appropriate description. Instead I circled option D. Next to it I wrote Obviously! and tossed it onto her desk when no one was looking.

You're walking down Fool's Street, Laura used to say when he was drinking, and she had been right. He had known even then that she was right, but knowing had made no difference; he had simply laughed at her fears and gone on walking down it, till finally he had stumbled and fell. Then, for a long time, he stayed away, and if he had stayed away long enough he would have been all right; but one night he began walking down it again - and met the girl. It was inevitable that on Fool's Street there should be women as well as wine. He had walked down it many times in many different towns, and now he was walking down it once again in yet another town. Fool's Street never changed, no matter where you went, and this one was no different from the others. The same skeletonic signs bled beer names in vacant windows; the same winos sat in doorways nursing muscatel; the same drunk tank awaited you when at last your reeling footsteps failed. And if the sky was darker than usual, it was only because of the rain which had begun falling early that morning and been falling steadily ever since.

Eighty years, whether it feels that way to us right now? It’s a long time. We’ve had a good run. And we—not you and I, but the Big We—we’re getting into the habit of destroying everything good about ourselves before taking our belated leave. Remember those horror films we grew up watching? About zombies, and mummies, and Frankenstein’s monster, staggering around with gaping mouths and vacant eyes? Those creatures played on a primal fear: of living death. And despite the fact that it’s one of our mythic terrors, that’s what we're trying to arrange for everyone now: a living death.

No one will shake my conviction that those leaders of men, who are in the nature of carbuncles, of semi-conscious abscesses, who draw feverish crowds to them like noxious humours, have an innate knowledge of arrested time. They play with those vacant moments as though at a game of chequers. A fraction of suspended, frozen time, of inert time, jammed like a wedge into the most wonderfully oiled cogs of the most lucid of minds: and the whole mechanism is brought crashing to the ground, prepared to accept any authority, to endorse the most monstrous aberrations, especially collective ones.

Yes, I had turned a deaf ear to my girlhood with my silence. It was a time when I was unable to love myself, so I had to go from fifteen straight to twenty. Whether I started walking out of my past or walked into it from the present, my footprints always came to a stop in the same place. I would go from being fifteen to twenty, or go from being twenty to fifteen, If I set out from the past, I had to ignore sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and skip straight to twenty. If I set out from the present, I had to ignore nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, and skip straight to fifteen. Those years always remained vacant, like naked sunlight, like the well with its bottom completely covered.

He speculated that, just as a powerful west wind blows away thick banks of clouds, the graphic, scorching emotion that passed through his soul in the form of a dream must have canceled and negated the longing for death, a longing that had reached out and grabbed him around the neck. All that remained now was a sort of quiet resignation. A colorless, neutral, empty feeling. He was sitting alone in a huge, old, vacant house, listening as a massive grandfather clock hollowly ticked away time. His mouth was closed, his eyes fixed on the clock as he watched the hands move forward. His feelings were wrapped in layer upon layer of thin membrane and his heart was still a blank, as he aged, one hour at a time.

The flower-covered grave of the saint in the inner room could be seen dimly through the narrow doorway. In front of it was a wide vestibule where about two dozen people were seated in a circle. One of them was singing lustily some Persian verses, while others kept the time by clapping their hands; they joined in the refrain which was sung in chorus. Like rising tidal waves, the tempo of the singing was getting faster and faster, the clapping became more frantic and heads rolled from side to side, keeping time with the tempestuous melody. Eyes were closed and everyone was lost in the surging waves of emotion that seemed to flow out of the Sufistic poetry of the great Roomi. Then, to his amazement Anwar saw a man in the centre of the crowd open his eyes and stare vacantly. For a moment this man was silent, ominously silent and motionless in the midst of the emotional storm that raged around him. Then he was caught by a sudden frenzy, his whole body quivered and moved, beating time to the song which by now had reached a weird and frightening crescendo, faster and faster, louder and louder. The man's hands rose high in the air and as if clutching at an unseen rope, he raised himself and started to dance, wildly, ecstatically, tearing his clothes and pulling his hair, completely unselfconscious and unrestrained, oblivious of everything by some mysterious inner urge that demanded expression in this wild manner. And then the song died on the lips of the singer, the waves of emotion receded and in the ghostly silence that descended upon the assembly the standing figure of the man in the centre which looked inspired and hallowed a moment ago, suddenly appeared ridiculous and grotesque. For a few moments he stood as if poised for another outburst of frenzy. Then, deprived of the emotional support of the song, his knees sagged and he collapsed to the ground. For several minutes Anwar was speechless; so great had the effect of this spectacle been on him. His pulse beat faster, his mind was in a whirl and, as the song stopped, he felt a gnawing emptiness in his bowels. This then was Qawwali, the ecastatic ritual of the Persian Sufis.

Why, thou monkey,’ said a harpooneer to one of these lads, ‘we ’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.’ Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious revery is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. 10 There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise forever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is the absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

Man/Woman, it has always insisted, does not live by bread alone. The weakness of the church is that it has too often accepted the separation between the material and the spiritual … leaving the material to the economic and political power structure.… The crisis of a city like Detroit provides the church with an extraordinary opportunity to develop and practice a vision of a new economy and a new educational system which meets both the material and spiritual needs of human beings.… Churches are … in an excellent position to develop small enterprises that provide models of how to meet the needs of the community and the city and at the same time teach young people the importance of skills, process and respect for Nature. All over the city churches are surrounded by vacant and unused land. If Detroiters, and especially young Detroiters, could see this land being used by churches for organic gardens to supply produce for local needs or to plant Christmas trees for sale at Yuletide or greenhouses where vegetables are grown year round, the idea of a self-reliant living economy to meet the material and spiritual needs of people could come alive.10

Suddenly he was sobered: a vacant space appeared near Miss de Bassompierre; the circle surrounding her seemed about to dissolve. This movement was instantly caught by Graham’s eye—ever-vigilant, even while laughing; he rose, took his courage in both hands, crossed the room, and made the advantage his own. Dr. John, throughout his whole life, was a man of luck—a man of success. And why? Because he had the eye to see his opportunity, the heart to prompt to well-timed action, the nerve to consummate a perfect work. And no tyrant-passion dragged him back; no enthusiasms, no foibles encumbered his way. How well he looked at this very moment! When Paulina looked up as he reached her side, her glance mingled at once with an encountering glance, animated, yet modest; his colour, as he spoke to her, became half a blush, half a glow. He stood in her presence brave and bashful: subdued and unobtrusive, yet decided in his purpose and devoted in his ardour. I gathered all this by one view. I did not prolong my observation—time failed me, had inclination served: the night wore late; Ginevra and I ought already to have been in the Rue Fossette. I rose, and bade good-night to my godmother and M. de Bassompierre.

The speaker standing on an upturned barrel at the intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue was shouting monotonously: “BLACK POWER! BLACK POWER! Is you is? Or is you ain’t? We gonna march this night! March! March! March! Oh, when the saints — yeah, baby! We gonna march this night!” Spit flew from his looselipped mouth. His flabby jowls flopped up and down. His rough brown skin was greasy with sweat. His dull red eyes looked tired. “Mistah Charley been scared of BLACK POWER since the day one. That’s why Noah shuffled us off to Africa the time of the flood. And all this time we been laughing to keep from whaling.” He mopped his sweating face with a red bandanna handkerchief. He belched and swallowed. His eyes looked vacant. His mouth hung open as though searching for words. “Can’t keep this up,” he said under his breath. No one heard him. No one noticed his behavior. No one cared. He swallowed loudly and screamed. “TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT! We launch our whale boats. Iss the night of the great white whale. You dig me, baby?” He was a big man and flabby all over like his jowls. Night had fallen but the black night air was as hot as the bright day air, only there was less of it. His white short-sleeved shirt was sopping wet. A ring of sweat had formed about the waist of his black alpaca pants as though the top of his potbelly had begun to melt. “You want a good house? You got to whale! You want a good car? You got to whale! You want a good job? You got to whale! You dig me?” His conked hair was dripping sweat. For a big flabby middle-aged man who would have looked more at home in a stud poker game, he was unbelievably hysterical. He waved his arms like an erratic windmill. He cut a dance step. He shuffled like a prizefighter. He shadowed with clenched fists. He shouted. Spit flew. “Whale! Whale! WHALE, WHITEY! WE GOT THE POWER! WE IS BLACK! WE IS PURE!” A crowd of Harlem citizens dressed in holiday garb had assembled to listen. They crowded across the sidewalks, into the street, blocking traffic. They were clad in the chaotic colors of a South American jungle. They could have been flowers growing on the banks of the Amazon, wild orchids of all colors. Except for their voices. “What’s he talking ’bout?” a high-yellow chick with bright red hair wearing a bright green dress that came down just below her buttocks asked the tall slim black man with smooth carved features and etched hair. “Hush yo’ mouth an’ lissen,” he replied harshly, giving her a furious look from the corners of muddy, almond-shaped eyes. “He tellin’ us what black power mean!

River was in his office, having spent the day staring at his screen, or else through the window, which had planted a square of sunlight onto the vacant desk he shared the room with. It had once been where Sid Baker sat, and that remained its chief significance even during JK Coe’s tenure, which hadn’t been fair on Coe, but Slough House wasn’t big on fairness. And now Sid was back. All this time, she’d been in the world, hidden away; partly erased but still breathing, waiting for the moment to appear to him, in his grandfather’s study. For months he’d been wondering what secrets might be preserved in that room, encrypted among a wealth of facts and fictions. Bringing them into the light would be a task for an archivist—a Molly Doran. He remembered sitting in the kitchen once, watching his grandmother prepare a Christmas goose: this had involved removing its organs, which Rose had set about with the same unhurried calm she had approached most things, explaining as she did so the word haruspicate. To divine the future from the entrails of birds or beasts. He’d planned the opposite: to unshelve those books, crack their spines, break their wings, and examine their innards for clues to the past. His grandfather’s past, he’d assumed. Instead, what he’d found in that room was something broken off from his own life. Now read on.

Madrid. It was that time, the story of Don Zana 'The Marionette,' he with the hair of cream-colored string, he with the large and empty laugh like a slice of watermelon, the one of the Tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra on the tables, on the coffins. It was when there were geraniums on the balconies, sunflower-seed stands in the Moncloa, herds of yearling sheep in the vacant lots of the Guindalera. They were dragging their heavy wool, eating the grass among the rubbish, bleating to the neighborhood. Sometimes they stole into the patios; they ate up the parsley, a little green sprig of parsley, in the summer, in the watered shade of the patios, in the cool windows of the basements at foot level. Or they stepped on the spread-out sheets, undershirts, or pink chemises clinging to the ground like the gay shadow of a handsome young girl. Then, then was the story of Don Zana 'The Marionette.' Don Zana was a good-looking, smiling man, thin, with wide angular shoulders. His chest was a trapezoid. He wore a white shirt, a jacket of green flannel, a bow tie, light trousers, and shoes of Corinthian red on his little dancing feet. This was Don Zana 'The Marionette,' the one who used to dance on the tables and the coffins. He awoke one morning, hanging in the dusty storeroom of a theater, next to a lady of the eighteenth century, with many white ringlets and a cornucopia of a face. Don Zana broke the flower pots with his hand and he laughed at everything. He had a disagreeable voice, like the breaking of dry reeds; he talked more than anyone, and he got drunk at the little tables in the taverns. He would throw the cards into the air when he lost, and he didn't stoop over to pick them up. Many felt his dry, wooden slap; many listened to his odious songs, and all saw him dance on the tables. He liked to argue, to go visiting in houses. He would dance in the elevators and on the landings, spill ink wells, beat on pianos with his rigid little gloved hands. The fruitseller's daughter fell in love with him and gave him apricots and plums. Don Zana kept the pits to make her believe he loved her. The girl cried when days passed without Don Zana's going by her street. One day he took her out for a walk. The fruitseller's daughter, with her quince-lips, still bloodless, ingenuously kissed that slice-of-watermelon laugh. She returned home crying and, without saying anything to anyone, died of bitterness. Don Zana used to walk through the outskirts of Madrid and catch small dirty fish in the Manzanares. Then he would light a fire of dry leaves and fry them. He slept in a pension where no one else stayed. Every morning he would put on his bright red shoes and have them cleaned. He would breakfast on a large cup of chocolate and he would not return until night or dawn.

Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here. Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mysticocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wickliff's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

She hadn't gotten his expression quite right in her imagination, because the stunned, vacant expression on Shane's face when she started down the stairs was even better than fantasy. His mouth actually dropped open. Next to him, Michael turned around, and although she hadn't counted on it, there was a warm fuzzy to making a hot golden-angel vampire blink and give her a quick, involuntary once-over. Claire stopped on the steps above them and did a tentative hip-shimmy. "Okay?" she asked. Shane's mouth shut with a snap, and Michael actually cleared his throat. "Fine," Michael said. "Fine?" That was Eve, coming down the stairs behind Claire. She moved around the roadblock and punched Michael in the arm. "She looks amazing. I'm not half g*y and I think she's hot." Shane wasn't saying anything. Claire felt warm and a little dizzy, the way he was looking at her. She resisted the urge to check to see if her skirt was straight -- she'd done it a dozen times already --and forced herself to meet his gaze and smile. "You sure this is smart?" Shane asked, which was not what she'd expected, not at all. "You look fantastic." "Thanks -- " He interrupted her. "Fantastic in this town pops you to the top of the take-out menu." She held up her left hand and pointed to her wrist. The gold bracelet was clearly visible. "I'll be okay," she said. "The vamps won't bother me." "Not even talking about the vamps. You're going to be drawing every guy there who's looking to get off.

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. No doubt, in the Swann they had formed for themselves, my family had failed out of ignorance to include a host of details from his life in the fashionable world that caused other people, when they were in his presence, to see refinements rule his face and stop at his aquiline nose as though at their natural frontier; but they had also been able to garner in this face disaffected of its prestige, vacant and spacious, in the depths of these depreciated eyes, the vague, sweet residue—half memory, half forgetfulness—of the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the card table or in the garden, during our life of good country neighborliness.

Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

human kind to the danger of a painful and comfortless situation. A state of scepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. Their love of the marvellous and supernatural, their curiosity with regard to future events, and their strong propensity to extend their hopes and fears beyond the limits of the visible world, were the principal causes which favoured the establishment of Polytheism. So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition. Some deities of a more recent and fashionable cast might soon have occupied the deserted temples of Jupiter and Apollo, if, in the decisive moment, the wisdom of Providence had not interposed a genuine revelation, fitted to inspire the most rational esteem and conviction, whilst, at the same time, it was adorned with all that could attract the curiosity, the wonder, and the veneration of the people. In their actual disposition, as many were almost disengaged from their artificial prejudices, but equally susceptible and desirous of a devout attachment; an object much less deserving would have been sufficient to fill the vacant place in their hearts, and to gratify the uncertain eagerness of their passions. Those who are inclined to pursue this reflection, instead of viewing with astonishment the rapid progress of Christianity, will perhaps be surprised that its success was not still more rapid and still more universal.

The Equator runs close to the Rongai Valley, and, even at so high an altitude as this we hunted in, the belly of the earth was hot as live ash under our feet. Except for an occasional gust of fretful wind that flattened the high, corn-like grass, nothing uttered — nothing in the valley stirred. The chirrup-like drone of grasshoppers was dead, birds left the sky unmarked. the sun reigned and there were no aspirants to his place. We stopped by the red salt-lick that cropped out of the ground in the path of our trail. I did not remember a time when the salt-lick was as deserted as this. Always before it had been crowded with grantii, impala, kongoni, eland, water-buck, and a dozen kinds of smaller animals. But it was empty today. It was like a marketplace whose flow and bustle of life you had witnessed ninety-nine times, but, on your hundredth visit, was vacant and still without even an urchin to tell you why. I put my hand on Arab Maina’s arm. ‘What are you thinking, Maina? Why is there no game today?’ ‘Be quiet, Lakweit, and do not move.’ I dropped the butt of my spear on the earth and watched the two Murani stand still as trees, their nostrils distended, their ears alert to all things. Arab Kosky’s hand was tight on his spear like the claw of an eagle clasping a branch. ‘It is an odd sign,’ murmured Arab Maina, ‘when the salt-lick is without company!’ I had forgotten Buller, but the dog had not forgotten us. He had not forgotten that, with all the knowledge of the two Murani, he still knew better about such things. He thrust his body roughly between Arab Maina and myself, holding his black wet nose close to the ground. And the hairs along his spine stiffened. His hackles rose and he trembled. We might have spoken, but we didn’t. In his way Buller was more eloquent. Without a sound, he said, as clearly as it could be said — ‘Lion.

This is a way of thinking about the past in which space and time echo each other, and it is by no means particular to the Bandanese. Indeed, this form of thought may well have found its fullest elaboration on the other side of the planet, among the Indigenous peoples of North America, whose spiritual lives and understanding of history were always tied to specific landscapes. In the words of the great Native American thinker Vine Deloria Jr., a shared feature of Indigenous North American spiritual traditions is that they all “have a sacred center at a particular place, be it a river, a mountain, a plateau, valley, or other natural feature. . . . Regardless of what subsequently happens to the people, the sacred lands remain as permanent fixtures in their cultural or religious understanding.”12 Developing this argument, Deloria contrasts modes of thought that take their orientation from terrestrial spaces with those that privilege time. For the latter, the crucial question in relation to any event is “when did it happen?” For the former, it is “where did it happen?” The first question shapes the possible answers in a determinate way, locating the event within a particular historical period. The second question shapes the possible answers in a completely different way, because it accords a degree of agency to the landscape itself, and all that lies within it, including the entire range of nonhuman beings. The result, in Deloria’s words, is that “the [Indian] tribes confront and interact with a particular land along with its life forms. The task or role of the tribal religions is to relate the community of people to each and every facet of creation as they have experienced it.” For many Indigenous groups, landscapes remain as vividly alive today as they ever were. “For Indian men and women,” writes the anthropologist Peter Basso, of the Western Apache of Arizona, “the past lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think.”13 Stories about the past, built around familiar landmarks, inform every aspect of Apache life. Through these stories features of the landscape speak to people just as loudly as the human voices that historians bring to life from documentary sources.

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. No doubt, in the Swann they had formed for themselves, my family had failed out of ignorance to include a host of details from his life in the fashionable world that caused other people, when they were in his presence, to see refinements rule his face and stop at his aquiline nose as though at their natural frontier; but they had also been able to garner in this face disaffected of its prestige, vacant and spacious, in the depths of these depreciated eyes, the vague, sweet residue—half memory, half forgetfulness—of the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the card table or in the garden, during our life of good country neighborliness. The corporeal envelope of our friend had been so well stuffed with all this, as well as with a few memories relating to his parents, that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann—to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality—to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.

It was awful. It was three in the morning. And I finally said, “Chip, I’m not sleeping in this house.” We were broke. We couldn’t go to a hotel. There was no way we were gonna go knock on one of our parents’ doors at that time of night. That’s when I got an idea. We happened to have Chip’s parents’ old RV parked in a vacant lot a few blocks down. We had some of our things in there and had been using it basically as a storage unit until we moved in. “Let’s get in the RV. We’ll go find somewhere to plug it in, and we’ll have AC,” I said. As we stepped outside, the skies opened up. It started pouring rain. When we finally got into the RV, soaking wet, we pulled down the road a ways and Chip said, “I know where we can go.” It was raining so hard we could barely see through the windshield, and all of a sudden Chip turned the RV into a cemetery. “Why are you pulling in to a cemetery?” I asked him. “We’re not going to the cemetery,” Chip said. “It’s just next to a cemetery. There’s an RV park back here.” “Are you kidding me? Could this get any worse?” “Oh, quit it. You’re going to love it once I get this AC fired up.” Chip decided to go flying through the median between the two rows of RV parking, not realizing it was set up like a culvert for drainage and rain runoff. That RV bounced so hard that, had it not been for our seat belts, we would’ve both been catapulted through the roof of that vehicle. “What was that?!” “I don’t know,” Chip said. I tried to put it in reverse, and then forward, and then reverse again, and the thing just wouldn’t move. I hopped out to take a look and couldn’t believe it. There was a movie a few years ago where the main character gets his RV caught on this fulcrum and it’s sitting there teetering with both sets of wheels up in the air. Well, we sort of did the opposite. We went across this valley, and because the RV was so long, the butt end of it got stuck on the little hill behind us, and the front end got stuck on the little hill in front of us, and the wheels were just sort of hanging there in between. I crawled back into the RV soaking wet and gave Jo the bad news. We had no place to go, no place to plug in so we could run the AC; it was pouring rain so we couldn’t really walk anywhere to get help. And at that point I was just done. We wound up toughing it out and spending the first night after our honeymoon in a hot, old RV packed full of our belongings, suspended between two bumps in the road.

The phone was snatched from her grasp. She let out a screech, her fingers clasping at air. “Hey! Give that back.” Gracie slipped it down the V of her tank and into her ample cleavage. “Come and get it.” Billy plopped down on a vacant stool, eyes bugging out of his head. Maddie stared at Gracie’s chest and contemplated. She could stick her hand down a woman’s top. It was no big deal—just skin, for God’s sake. She jumped off the stool and straightened to her full five-foot-three inches. “What is wrong with calling him?” “It’s a girlfriend’s responsibility to stop her friend from the dreaded drunk dial.” Maddie scowled. She was not drunk dialing! “Telling him where I am isn’t a crime.” Gracie planted her hands on her hips. “Sorry, honey. I’m doing this for your own good.” “You don’t understand.” Maddie picked up her drink and took a slow sip. Her gaze was fixed on the stretch of fabric across Gracie’s ample chest. She wanted that phone, and with way too many margaritas in her system, she wasn’t above groping another woman to get it. “I’m getting that phone.” Billy’s mouth dropped open, and Maddie was surprised no drool hung down his chin like a rabid dog’s. “You’ll thank me later.” Gracie didn’t appear the least bit threatened. If anything, she thrust her breasts out farther, as though daring Maddie to come and get it. “Give it to me!” Maddie stomped her foot. “Like I said, come and get it.” Gracie batted her thick lashes, cornflower-blue eyes sparkling. She tucked her hand into her top and shoved it lower into her bra. “All right, but remember, I know how to fight.” Gracie laughed and Billy whooped like he’d hit the jackpot. Maddie charged. Gracie’s eyes widened in surprise, and she let out a holler, crossing her arms over her chest for protection. Maddie refused to be thwarted. She squeezed her lids together so she wouldn’t have to look and flung her hands out, praying she’d get hold of something. When her palm brushed against soft, pillowy cotton, she squealed. Pay dirt. “Maddie!” Gracie grabbed her hand, twisting her body to block Maddie’s progress. “That’s my boob!” Maddie reached again and this time her hand curled around the cotton neckline. She pulled, squirming down the deep V of the top. Her fingers brushed the phone and a surge of adrenaline pounded through her. “Now, why doesn’t this surprise me?” Mitch’s voice made her knees go weak. Before she could swing around, she was hauled against his warm, strong body. She sagged in relief. He’d come for her after all. “You girls are giving everyone quite a show.” Charlie stood next to Mitch, looking lethal in all black. Maddie could picture him with an FBI armband over his bicep. Wait . . . was that the FBI? Or was it SWAT? “With all these disappointed faces, I’m sorry we broke them up.” Mitch’s tone rang with amusement, and Maddie realized it had been too long since she’d heard him sound like that. “I wanted to call you, but she wouldn’t let me.” Her pulse raced from her girl fight and the buzz of tequila. His palm spread wide over the expanse of her stomach, his thumb brushing the bottom of her breast. “Well, here I am.” “See!” Gracie pointed and shook her hips in a little booty dance. “I told you so!” Yes,

As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had a strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them bold and venturous, they were no more shy of one another, or restrained within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse. One would say to another, “I do not ask how you are, or say how I am; it is certain we shall all go; so ’tis no matter who is sick or who is sound;” and so they ran desperately into any place or any company. As it brought the people into publick company, so it was surprizing how it brought them to crowd into the churches. They enquired no more into who, they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met with, or what condition the people seemed to be in, but looking upon themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches without the least caution, and crowded together, as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there. Indeed, the zeal which they shewed in coming, and the earnestness and affection they shewed in their attention to what they heard, made it manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be their last. Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away all manner of prejudice or of scruple about the person who they found in the pulpit when they came to the churches. It cannot be doubted but that many of the ministers of the parish churches were cut off, among others, in so common and dreadful a calamity; and others had courage enough to stand it, but removed into the country as they found means for escape. As then some parish churches were quite vacant and forsaken, the people made no scruple of desiring such Dissenters as had been a few years before deprived of their livings by virtue of the Act of Parliament called the Act of Uniformity to preach in the churches; nor did the church ministers in that case make any difficulty of accepting their assistance; so that many of those who they called silenced ministers had their mouths opened on the occasion and preached publickly to the people. Here we may observe, and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it, that a near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union so much kept and far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before. As the people who had been used to join with the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their parish churches, and to conform to the worship which they did not approve of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those things all returned again to their less desirable channel, and to the course they were in before.

As the bus headed into the night, I noticed that the bench seat in the back of the bus was vacant. So I took my blanket and pillow, made my way to the back and stretched out. Rumbling along I was vaguely aware of the stops we made, but the night passed quickly. Eventually it started getting light outside, but looking around I saw that most people were still sleeping, including a Negro woman wearing a Navy uniform. She was a WAVE and must have boarded the bus sometime during the night. I had no idea where we were, but it didn’t matter as long as we were heading west. Slowly the passengers woke up and looked around, including the young Negro lady. I never had a problem talking to people, so, striking up a conversation, I discovered that she was going home to Oklahoma City. I told her about being a cadet at Farragut and that I was now heading to California for the summer. Time always goes faster when there is someone to talk to and we had the entire back of the bus to ourselves. The first inkling that something was wrong came when we got off the bus for a rest stop in Little Rock, Arkansas. The driver told me that it wasn’t fitting to sit in the back of the bus with a Negro. I was dumbfounded, and coming from the North, I didn’t understand. I tried to explain that this woman was wearing the uniform of her country, but it didn’t make any difference. That’s just the way it was in the South! We ran into the same kind of bigotry in the diner at our next rest stop, but before I could make an issue out of it, she hushed me up and explained that she just wanted to go home and didn’t need any problems. The two of us sat in the section for “Negroes Only,” where they served her but not this white boy, which is what I was called, along with other derogatory remarks. Never mind, I shared her sandwich and I guess they were just glad to get rid of us when we boarded the bus again. Behind me, I heard someone say something about my being a “nigger lover”.... Big as life, I sat in the back again! This time no one said anything and everything seemed forgotten by the time she got off in Oklahoma City. Another driver came aboard and took over. Saying goodbye to my friend, I got up and moved back to the seat I had had originally -- the one over the big hump for the rear tires!

SPENT MY ENTIRE CHILDHOOD AND THE ENTIRETY OF my twenties poor. No, not momentarily broke where you can’t go to the concert you want or can’t eat out for dinner that week—I mean poor. The type of poor that cuts the electricity off, that doesn’t have a phone, that eats dinners in soup kitchens. I remember trying to sleep longer so that I would have less time awake to feel hungry. I remember sneaking down the hall to use a vacant apartment to shower after our water had been cut off. But I also remember that we weren’t alone.

There were the twins, faces vacant with concentration as they walloped small red balls attached to paddles. Pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a . . . They’d been jai-alai-ing all this time. Despite himself, Dexter smiled.

As the boar’s tusk bore down, Talis leapt out of the way just in time. He thrust his spear down at the beast, piercing the back of its neck. The creature squealed in pain. Mara lunged at the boar and stabbed its side. It shrieked, swung its tusks around and rammed into her. She spun through the air and slammed onto the ground. A sickening feeling twisted in his stomach. What had they done?  “Mara!” he shouted and reached out for her, as if he could do anything from this range. Fury raged in his chest and he stabbed and prodded the boar, trying to keep it away from her, until thankfully the creature gave up and bounded away, howling and grunting in a mad rush. Gods, please let her be ok! He ran over and bent down next to her. Mara winced, her eyes vacant and bloodshot, but she was still conscious. She tried to lift herself up but he stopped her.  “Wait, don’t get up. Rest a moment.” He tried to discover where the tusk had struck her. “Where does it hurt? Wait, don’t close your eyes! Look at me, are you all right?” She coughed and inhaled a huge gulp of air and coughed again, a redness sweeping over her face. “It knocked my breath out… There are stars everywhere!” She started to laugh but crimped up in pain. After ten heartbeats she began to breathe normally. “We’ve got to go home before it gets dark,” Mara whispered, her face urgent now. “Can you help me?” “Are you sure you’re ok to walk?” “I have to try.” Talis helped her up, but she grit her teeth in pain at the pressure of standing. Why hadn’t he stopped her? It was insane for them to go after the boar. No time to think about that now. He had to focus and get Mara home to a healer. But how? She

that. I heard a soft laugh flow out of him as he exhaled, and my smile grew. This time, when Corwin approached the island, he took his mug and walked around to the side I was on. I did a celebratory dance in my head, but I remained as I was, giving him whatever space he needed to make this work. He skipped a stool, leaving one vacant between us, but

It’s preposterous, expecting a man to unburden himself to a woman,” Bennett Winchester slurred as the mantel clock chimed. Though it was midmorning the Bow Street Society’s parlour had neither daylight nor gaslight to soften the retired captain’s pointed profile. Bloodshot, brown eyes looked beyond the wall as he approached, turned, and retraced his route, each thump of his boot succeeded by the heavy thud of his peg-leg. Miss Trent’s gaze tracked him during each pass of her armchair yet she remained seated. “Captain Winchester,” she began, “you weren’t obligated to come here and I wasn’t obligated to receive you, yet here we are. Putting aside my disinclination to beg your pardon for my gender, I instead ask you to observe your surroundings. You and I are the only ones here. Therefore, your choice is clear—either swallow your masculine pride and tell me why you’re here, or leave and put your trust in those at Bow Street Police Station.” “Don’t speak such impertinence to me!” Captain Winchester barked, drawing Miss Trent to her feet. She countered, “I shall speak whatever I want, Captain, when you are in my domain.” His lips repeatedly furled and unfurled against gritted teeth while calloused hands, which had previously rested within his greatcoat’s deep pockets, balled at his sides. Starting at his neck, his already pink face steadily flushed as if port had spilt under his skin. He snarled, “How daare you, you uncouth wretch.” “Continue as you are, Captain Winchester, and I will be calling upon the officers at Bow Street,” Miss Trent promised despite his stale-rum-drenched breath turning her stomach. Whether it was the tone of her voice, her fixed gaze, the words themselves, or a combination of all three which cooled Bennett Winchester’s rage was unclear. Regardless the result was the same. After some aggressive chewing of his anger, the captain plonked himself in the vacant armchair. The clerk wasn’t naïve enough to think it ended, however. Instead, she enabled additional calming time by fetching tea from the kitchen. Coffee would’ve been more sobering for him but, alas, she suspected such a blatant assumption wouldn’t have been welcomed by his volatile temper. In due course Captain Winchester’s pallid complexion had returned and his hands had come to rest upon his thighs. She poured the amber liquid in silence and he accepted the cup without remark. “I must beg your pardon for my brutishness, Miss Trent,” he muttered against the steam rising from his cup.

The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason.I04 So much unreason / was in man that he 42 /43 needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate ofthe Logos: in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the One, the Powerful One, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. Some have their reason in thinking, others in feeling. Both are servantsofLogos,andinsecretbecomeworshipersoftheserpent.I05 You can subjugate yourself shackle yourself in irons, whip yourself bloody every day: you have crushed yourself but not overcome yourself Precisely through this you have helped the Powerful One, strengthened your paralysis, and promoted his blindness. He would like to see it in others, and inflict it on them, and would like to force the Logos on you and others, longingly and tyrannically with blind obstinacy and vacant stubborness. Give him a taste of Logos. He is afraid, and he already trembles from afar since he suspects that he has become outdated, and that a tiny droplet ofthe poison ofLogos will paralyze him. But because he is your beautiful, much loved brother, you will act slavishly toward him and you would like to spare him as you have spared none of your fellow men. You spared no merry and no powerful means to strike your fellow men with the poisoned arrow. Paralyzed game is an unworthy prey. The powerful huntsman, who wrestles the bull to the ground and tears the lion to pieces and strikes the army of Tiamat, is your bow's worthy target.

Every statuette is a shape imagined in the point of convergence of the capable pro. The specialist has been pondering it for quite a while, the way by which a parent expects a child, or a brave life adornment envisions that her life partner will return home. Carved Wooden Figures By then they put their hands into the earth and make a remarkable pearl or emerge artful culminations if they are painters. Stone carvers are as regularly as conceivable energized by out of date Gods, unbelievable creatures, and marvellous holy people. They breathe life into the legend. Statues are dumbfounding, dynamic, survive and imaginative. They converse with you in a thousand of calm ways. They look perfect and inaccessible, comparatively as from a serene, pixie heaven. No doubt the Gods are to an amazing degree living in them, sitting tight for individuals to take in life in their signs from earth and marble. Carved Wooden Figures They advancement to us, they boggle, they whisper. Statues are tirelessly related to time everlasting. We scan for noteworthiness, we research, and we respect great statues of Egyptian cats. Carved Wooden Figures A bit of the statuettes looks so legitimate, it takes after they are living. There once carried on a stone expert named Pygmalion, who made a figure of a female shape so grand, that he started to look all starry looked toward at it. He respected Venus, the Goddess, and she offered life to his regarded statue. Her skin was pale, her carriage was to some degree firm, her eyes had a vacant look, regardless she had trademark tints on her lips, eyes, hair and chests. The grandness of an uncommon statue can enamour her creator, and despite breath life into stone.

Just because something is old, doesn’t mean we need to throw it away. What kind of society have we become, what happens to our values when we say that just because something or someone has been around a hell of a long time that they’ve outlived their usefulness? We become a society of vacant, immature materialists. Moving from one new thing on to the next. Devaluing age and experience.” He was talking about the Constitution, but he couldn’t help but feel like he was talking about himself as well.