Vapor Sayings And Quotes

A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

Let's just say that if these scientist had been using their brilliance for good instead of evil, cars would run off water vapor and leave fresh compost behind them; no one would be hungry; no one would be ill; all buildings would be earthquake-, bomb-, and flood-proof; and the world's entire economy would have collapsed and been replaced by one based on the value of chocolate.

Percy Jackson," Hermes said, "because you have taken on the curse of Achilles, I must spare you. You are in the hands of the Fates now. But you will never speak to me like that again. You have no idea how much I have sacrificed, how much—" His voice broke, and he shrank back to human size. "My son, my greatest pride . . . my poor May . . ." He sounded so devastated I didn't know what to say. One minute he was ready to vaporize us. Now he looked like he needed a hug.

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

In the human life time is but an instant, and the substance of it a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of certainty. And, to say all in a word, everything that belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after- fame is oblivion. What then can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy.

Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one’s breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won’t warm- these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer.

Sometimes people ask you: "When is your birthday?" But you might ask yourself a more interesting question: "Before that day which is called my birthday, where was I?" Ask a cloud: "What is your date of birth? Before you were born, where were you?" If you ask the cloud, "How old are you? Can you give me your date of birth?" you can listen deeply and you may hear a reply. You can imagine the cloud being born. Before being born it was the water on the ocean's surface. Or it was in the river and then it became vapor. It was also the sun because the sun makes the vapor. The wind is there too, helping the water to become a cloud. The cloud does not come from nothing; there has been only a change in form. It is not a birth of something out of nothing. Sooner or later, the cloud will change into rain or snow or ice. If you look deeply into the rain, you can see the cloud. The cloud is not lost; it is transformed into rain, and the rain is transformed into grass and the grass into cows and then to milk and then into the ice cream you eat. Today if you eat an ice cream, give yourself time to look at the ice cream and say: "Hello, cloud! I recognize you.

Vaporized by the sun! Wasn't that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much? For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. This was far more than dull old theology: It was precise scientific observation! Carbon was the Great Leveler--the Grim Reaper. Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds!

Zade is quiet for a beat. “Happiness is fleeting. All that matters is that they’re living their life the way they want to.” “You believe that?” I ask, facing him. “That happiness is fleeting?” He shrugs, tossing the last bite of his cone into his mouth, and chews as he contemplates something. “Absolutely,” he says finally. “It’s not something solid you can hold on to. It’s vapor in the wind, and all you can do is inhale it when it’s near and hope it comes around again when it blows away.

Who are you in love with?" I said then. For a minute Marco didn't say anything, he simply opened his mouth and breathed out a blue, vaporous ring. "Perfect!" he laughed. The ring widened and blurred, ghost-pale on the dark air. Then he said, "I am in love with my cousin." I felt no surprise. "Why don't you marry her?" "Impossible." "Why?" Marco shrugged. "She's my first cousin. She's going to be a nun." "Is she beautiful?" "There's no one to touch her." "Does she know you love her?" "Of course." I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. "If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.

As soon as he was in range, I struck. I put all my wrath into that punch. It should have been enough to vaporize Mikey and leave a thug-shaped impression on the asphalt. Instead he ducked, which I found quite annoying. I stumbled forward. I have to say that when Prometheus fashioned you humans out of clay he did a shoddy job. Mortal legs are clumsy. I tried to compensate, drawing upon my boundless reserves of agility, but Mikey kicked me in the back. I fell on my divine face.

When you've got a thing to say, Say it! Don't take half a day. When your tale's got little in it Crowd the whole thing in a minute! Life is short--a fleeting vapor-- Don't you fill the whole blamed paper With a tale which, at a pinch, Could be cornered in an inch! Boil her down until she simmers, Polish her until she glimmers.

They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines...I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them. And that's not funny....OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

The natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress.

The consequences of an ungrateful spirit are not as readily seen as, say, those of a contagious disease. But they are no less deadly. Western civilization has fallen prey to an epidemic of ingratitude. Like a poisonous vapor, this subtle sin is polluting our lives, our homes, our churches, and our culture.

The Scripture says, “What is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away” (James 4:14). Even the cynical and secular at times think deeply about life and eternity. I am convinced that if people gave more thought to death, eternity, and judgment, there would be more holy living and a greater consciousness of God.

But to say, as some writers alluded to by Augustine (Gen. ad lit. ii, 4), that waters resolved into vapor may be lifted above the starry heaven, is a mere absurdity.

She thinks: They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

time my survival isn’t the goal. Peeta’s is. I think of the eyes glued to the television screens in the districts, seeing if I will run, as the Capitol wishes, or hold my ground. I lock my fingers tightly into his and say, “Watch my feet. Just try to step where I step.” It helps. We seem to move a little faster, but never enough to afford a rest, and the mist continues to lap at our heels. Droplets spring free of the body of vapor. They burn,

Sparks come from the very source of light and are made of the purest brightness—so say the oldest legends. When a human Being is to be born, a spark begins to fall. First it flies through the darkness of outer space, then through galaxies, and finally, before it falls here, to Earth, the poor thing bumps into the orbits of planets. Each of them contaminates the spark with some Properties, while it darkens and fades. First Pluto draws the frame for this cosmic experiment and reveals its basic principles—life is a fleeting incident, followed by death, which will one day let the spark escape from the trap; there’s no other way out. Life is like an extremely demanding testing ground. From now on everything you do will count, every thought and every deed, but not for you to be punished or rewarded afterward, but because it is they that build your world. This is how the machine works. As it continues to fall, the spark crosses Neptune’s belt and is lost in its foggy vapors. As consolation Neptune gives it all sorts of illusions, a sleepy memory of its exodus, dreams about flying, fantasy, narcotics and books. Uranus equips it with the capacity for rebellion; from now on that will be proof of the memory of where the spark is from. As the spark passes the rings of Saturn, it becomes clear that waiting for it at the bottom is a prison. A labor camp, a hospital, rules and forms, a sickly body, fatal illness, the death of a loved one. But Jupiter gives it consolation, dignity and optimism, a splendid gift: things-will-work-out. Mars adds strength and aggression, which are sure to be of use. As it flies past the Sun, it is blinded, and all that it has left of its former, far-reaching consciousness is a small, stunted Self, separated from the rest, and so it will remain. I imagine it like this: a small torso, a crippled being with its wings torn off, a Fly tormented by cruel children; who knows how it will survive in the Gloom. Praise the Goddesses, now Venus stands in the way of its Fall. From her the spark gains the gift of love, the purest sympathy, the only thing that can save it and other sparks; thanks to the gifts of Venus they will be able to unite and support each other. Just before the Fall it catches on a small, strange planet that resembles a hypnotized Rabbit, and doesn’t turn on its own axis, but moves rapidly, staring at the Sun. This is Mercury, who gives it language, the capacity to communicate. As it passes the Moon, it gains something as intangible as the soul. Only then does it fall to Earth, and is immediately clothed in a body. Human, animal or vegetable. That’s the way it is. —

What can poor mortals say about clouds?While a description of their huge glowing domes and ridges, shadowy gulfs and canyons, and feather-edged ravines is being tried, they vanish, leaving no visible ruins. Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God's calendar difference of duration is nothing. We can only dream about them in wondering, worshiping admiration, happier than we dare tell even to friends who see farthest in sympathy, glad to know that not a crystal or vapor particle of them, hard or sot, is lost; that they sink and vanish only to rise again and again in higher and higher beauty.

You guys could handle this on your own. Why risk getting kicked out of your He-Man-Monster-Haters Club?" "Because we can't handle this on our own. At least I don't think we can." "You said yourself you already have some Prodigium working with you. Why not go to them?" "We have a handful," he said, frustration creeping into his voice. "And most of them suck. Look, just consider it a peace offering, okay? My way of saying I'm sorry for lying to you. And pulling a knife in your presence, even if it was just to open a damn window to get out before you vaporized me." Most girls got flowers. I got a dirt put used for demon raising. Nice. "Thanks," I replied. "But don't you want in on this?" He looked at me, and not for the first time, I wished his eyes weren't so dark. It would have been nice to have some idea of what was going on in his head. "That's up to you," he said. Mom always liked to say that we hardly ever know the decisions we make that change our lives,mostly because they're little ones. You take this bus instead of that one and end up meeting your soul mate, that kind of thing. But there was no doubt in my mind that this was one of those life-changing moments. Tell Archer no,and I'd never see him again. And Dad and Jenna wouldn't be mad at me, and Cal...Tell Archer yes, and everything suddenly got twistier and more complicated than Mrs. Casnoff's hairdo. And even though I'm a twisty and complicated girl, I knew what my answer had to be. "It's too much of a risk, Cross. Maybe one day when I'm head of the Council, and you're...well, whatever you're going to be for L'Occhio di Dio, we could work on some kind of collaboration." That brought up depressig images of me and Archer sittig across a boardroom table, sketching out battle plans on a whiteboard, so my voice was a little shaky when I continued. "But for now, it's too dangerous." And not just because basically everyone in our lives would want to kill us if they found out, I thought. But because I was pretty sure I was still in love with him, and I thought he might feel something similar for me, and there was no way we could work together preventing the Monster Apocalypse/World War III without that becoming an issue. Not that I could say any of that. Archer's face was blank as he said, "Cool. Got it." "Cross," I started to say, but then his eyes slid past me and went wide with horror. At the same time, I became aware of a slithering noice behind me. That just could not be good; in my experience, nothing pleasant slithers. Still, I was not prepared for the nightmares climbing out of the crater.

The worst possible thing you can do when you’re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you. First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors’ reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can. They ruin your multitasking high, the bath of agitation, rumination, and judgment you wallow in, without the decency to come out and just say anything. They bust you by being grateful for the day, while you are obsessed with how thin your lashes have become and how wide your bottom.

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

Monet Refuses the Operation" Doctor, you say that there are no halos around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don’t know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent. The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and changes our bones, skin, clothes to gases. Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

I’m sorry for saying you had to live with your pain.” Kyoshi put her palm to his chest in a gesture of comfort. “Because you won’t.” The cold she sent through his body formed a tunnel of ice between his ribs. It happened so fast, and with so much force, the moisture in the air behind him turned to frost. His back sprouted vaporous wings of crystal that disappeared just as quickly. With his heart and lungs frozen solid, Yun fell to the side. Kyoshi took the hand with which she’d killed one of the two people she’d loved and placed it against the wound of the other. Water. She needed more water. Her tears of light weren’t enough.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you—daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS From Ray Bradbury Imagine that you have been dead for a year, ten years, one hundred years, a thousand years. The grave and night have taken and kept you in that silence and dark which says nothing and so reveals absolutely zero. In the middle of all this darkness and being alone and bereft of sense, let us imagine that God comes to your still soul and lonely body and says: I will give you one minute of ife. I will restore you to your body and senses for sixty seconds. Out of all the minutes in your life, choose one, I will put you in that minute, and you will be alive again after a hundred, a thousand years of darkness. Which is it? Think. Speak. Which do you choose? And the answer is: Any minute. Any minute at all! Oh, God, Sweet Christ, oh mystery, give me any minute in all my life. And the further answer is: When I lived I didn't know that every minute was special, precious a gift, a miracle, an incredible thing, an impossible work, an amazing dream. But not, Like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Morn, with snow in the air and the promise of rebirth given, I know what I should have known in my dumb shambles: That all is a lark, and it is a beauty beyond tears, and also a terror. But I dance about, I become a child, I am the boy who runs for the great bird in the window and I am the man who sends the boy running for that bird, and I am the life that blows in the snowing wind along that street, and the bells that sound and say: live, love, for too soon will your name which is shaped in the snow melt, of your soul which is inscribed like a breath of vapor on a cold glass pane fade. Run, run, lad, run, down the middle of Christmas at the center of life.

Bacher asked for a receipt from the Army for the material it would soon explode. Los Alamos was officially an extension of the University of California working for the Army under contract and Bacher wanted to document the university’s release from responsibility for some millions of dollars’ worth of plutonium that would soon be vaporized. Bainbridge thought the ceremony a waste of time but Farrell saw its point and agreed. To relieve the tension Farrell insisted on hefting the hemispheres first to confirm that he was getting good weight. Like polonium but much less intensely, plutonium is an alpha emitter; “when you hold a lump of it in your hand,” says Leona Marshall, “it feels warm, like a live rabbit.”2390 That gave Farrell pause; he set the hemispheres down and signed the receipt.

Of a man who only wills the Good out of fear of punishment, it is necessary to say with special emphasis, that he fears what a man should not and ought not to fear: loss of money, loss of reputation, misjudgment by others, neglect, the world’s judgment, the ridicule of fools, the laughter of the frivolous, the cowardly whining of consideration, the inflated triviality of the moment, the fluttering mist-forms of vapor.

This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite," she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall. well, even presidents get shot," I said. I was just going to say that myself," she said, smiling. "But I didn't want to scare you." I didn't know whether this was interesting--that we were both thinking the same gruesome thing--or even whether it was actually the case. Perhaps it was just rhetorical ESP: Kreskin's Guide to Etiquette. But even if it was true, that we were about to say the same thing, did this connect us in some deep private way? Or was it just a random obviousness shared between strangers? The deeper life between two people I had yet to read with confidence. It seemed a kind of vaporous text that kept revising its very alphabet. An exfoliating narrative, my professors would probably say. The paratext of the possible.

Happiness is fleeting. All that matters is that they’re living their life the way they want to.” “You believe that?” I ask, facing him. “That happiness is fleeting?” He shrugs, tossing the last bite of his cone into his mouth, and chews as he contemplates something. “Absolutely,” he says finally. “It’s not something solid you can hold on to. It’s vapor in the wind, and all you can do is inhale it when it’s near and hope it comes around again when it blows away.

And as you put it once, Bath is a small place, so naturally we must expect to encounter one another. It's not as if I were lying in wait to see which way you went when you left your aunt’s house this morning." She’d never had an attack of the vapors, but as she imagined him doing just that, like something out of a novel, she had an inkling of what the vapors must be like. Surely he hadn’t actually done that, though. He was probably just saying that to disturb her.

You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.

Sunk in the mud, it took all my strength to flip it over. I lifted out the oar and inspected the bottom for holes and rotted wood. Seeing none, I gathered up my skirt, climbed in, and paddled to the middle of the pond, an untouchable place, far from everything. I tried to think what I would say to him, worried my voice would slink off again and leave me. I remained there a long while, lapping on the surface. Vapor curled on the water, dragonflies pricked the air, and I thought it all beautiful.

    Lead then, said EVE. Hee leading swiftly rowld   In tangles, and make intricate seem strait,   To mischief swift. Hope elevates, and joy   Bright'ns his Crest, as when a wandring Fire   Compact of unctuous vapor, which the Night   Condenses, and the cold invirons round,   Kindl'd through agitation to a Flame,   Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends,   Hovering and blazing with delusive Light,   Misleads th' amaz'd Night-wanderer from his way   To Boggs and Mires, & oft through Pond or Poole,   There swallow'd up and lost, from succour farr.

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . . But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?” I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich. He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.” “Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked. After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.

The Nurse's Song This mighty man of whom I sing, The greatest of them all, Was once a teeny little thing, Just eighteen inches tall. I knew him as a tiny tot, I nursed him on my knee. I used to sit him on the pot And wait for him to wee. I always washed between his toes, And cut his little nails. I brushed his hair and wiped his nose And weighed him on the scales. Through happy childhood days he strayed, As all nice children should. I smacked him when he disobeyed, And stopped when he was good. It soon began to dawn on me He wasn't very bright, Because when he was twenty-three He couldn't read or write. "What shall we do?" his parents sob. "The boy has got the vapors! He couldn't even get a job Delivering the papers!" "Ah-ha," I said, "this little clot Could be a politician." "Nanny," he cried, "Oh Nanny, what A super proposition!" "Okay," I said, "let's learn and note The art of politics. Let's teach you how to miss the boat And how to drop some bricks, And how to win the people's vote And lots of other tricks. Let's learn to make a speech a day Upon the T.V. screen, In which you never never say Exactly what you mean. And most important, by the way, In not to let your teeth decay, And keep your fingers clean." And now that I am eighty nine, It's too late to repent. The fault was mine the little swine Became the President.

I wiped the blade against my jeans and walked into the bar. It was mid-afternoon, very hot and still. The bar was deserted. I ordered a whisky. The barman looked at the blood and asked: ‘God?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘S’pose it’s time someone finished that hypocritical little punk, always bragging about his old man’s power…’ He smiled crookedly, insinuatingly, a slight nausea shuddered through me. I replied weakly: ‘It was kind of sick, he didn’t fight back or anything, just kept trying to touch me and shit, like one of those dogs that try to fuck your leg. Something in me snapped, the whingeing had ground me down too low. I really hated that sanctimonious little creep.’ ‘So you snuffed him?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve killed him, knifed the life out of him, once I started I got frenzied, it was an ecstasy, I never knew I could hate so much.’ I felt very calm, slightly light-headed. The whisky tasted good, vaporizing in my throat. We were silent for a few moments. The barman looked at me levelly, the edge of his eyes twitching slightly with anxiety: There’ll be trouble though, don’tcha think?’ ‘I don’t give a shit, the threats are all used up, I just don’t give a shit.’ ‘You know what they say about his old man? Ruthless bastard they say. Cruel…’ ‘I just hope I’ve hurt him, if he even exists.’ ‘Woulden wanna cross him merself,’ he muttered. I wanted to say ‘yeah, well that’s where we differ’, but the energy for it wasn’t there. The fan rotated languidly, casting spidery shadows across the room. We sat in silence a little longer. The barman broke first: ‘So God’s dead?’ ‘If that’s who he was. That fucking kid lied all the time. I just hope it’s true this time.’ The barman worked at one of his teeth with his tongue, uneasily: ‘It’s kindova big crime though, isn’t it? You know how it is, when one of the cops goes down and everything’s dropped ’til they find the guy who did it. I mean, you’re not just breaking a law, your breaking LAW.’ I scraped my finger along my jeans, and suspended it over the bar, so that a thick clot of blood fell down into my whisky, and dissolved. I smiled: ‘Maybe it’s a big crime,’ I mused vaguely ‘but maybe it’s nothing at all…’ ‘…and we have killed him’ writes Nietzsche, but—destituted of community—I crave a little time with him on my own. In perfect communion I lick the dagger foamed with God’s blood.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

Inside the castle hovered a shadow version of him, alone, watching this full, well-lit house from the other’s emptiness. Looking through the glass, he was divided in two. He saw himself with the family around him. Glad of it. Almost proud. As a parent might be. He was his own parent. He’d learned to be alone, walking. And it was still good now and then. For thought. For recognition. But being alone was also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot, say. The loop could be small or large, but it always returned to itself. You had to untie the knot, finally. Open the loop and then everything sank in. And everyone. Then you could see what was true—that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh. The world was inside you after that. Because, after all, you were made of two people only at the very last instant. Before that, of a multiplication so large it couldn’t be fathomed. Back and back in time. A tree in a forest of trees, where men grew from apes and birds grew from dinosaurs. The topmost branches were single cells. And even those cells were “ And even those cells were not the start, for they drew life from the atmosphere. The air. And the vapor. Suspended. It was the fear and loneliness that came in waves that often stopped him from remembering the one thing. The one thing and the greatest thing. Frustrating: he could only ever see it for a second before he lost sight of it again. Released his grip. Let it slip away into the vague background. But it had to be held close, the tree. In the dark, when nothing else was sure, the soaring tree sheltered you. Almost the only thing you had to see before you slept. How you came not from a couple or a few but from infinity. So you had no beginning. And you would never end.

Turbines designed for low-flow situations would be wasteful in times of high water. Turbines designed for high efficiency at, say, five hundred cubic feet per second might be ineffective in times of low water. Under certain conditions, turbines can go into a state of cavitation, wherein vaporizing water creates bubbles that implode on the metal and riddle it with tiny holes. The ideal turbine for a little mill up a creek somewhere in inconsistent country would be one that was prepared to take whatever might come, to sit there and react calmly in any situation, to respond evenly to wild and sudden demands, to make the best of difficult circumstances, to remain steadfast in time of adversity, to keep going, above all to press on, to persevere, and not vibrate, fibrillate, vacillate, cavitate, or panic - in short, to accept with versatile competence what is known in hydroelectrical engineering as the run of the river.

What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ, lady, roll that window down! You can't see the desert if you can't smell it. Dusty? Of course it's dusty—this is Utah! But it's good dust, good red Utahn dust, rich in iron, rich in irony. Turn that motor off. Get out of that peice of iron and stretch your varicose veins, take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs! You sir, squinting at the map with your radiator boiling over and your fuel pump vapor-locked, crawl out of that shiny hunk of GM junk and take a walk—yes, leave the old lady and those squawling brats behind for a while, turn your back on them and take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it, it'll do you and her and them a world of good. Give the kids a break too, let them out of the car, let them go scrambling over rocks hunting for rattlesnakes and scorpions and anthills—yes sir, let them out, turn them loose; how dare you imprison little children in your goddamned upholstered horseless hearse? Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk—walk—WALK upon your sweet and blessed land!

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

I brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn’t I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn’t fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots. The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. “Hey,” I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn’t he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn’t he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic. “Oh, hello,” I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn’t I have any respect for myself? I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. “What’re you doing in there?” I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans. “Hiding,” I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist. “Well, c’mere,” he said softly. My jeans were damp from sitting in the hamper next to a wet washcloth for two days, and the best top I could find was a cardinal and gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt from my ‘SC days. It wasn’t dingy, and it didn’t smell. That was the best I could do at the time. Oh, how far I’d fallen from the black heels and glitz of Los Angeles. Accepting defeat, I shrugged and swung open the door. He was standing there, smiling. His impish grin jumped out and grabbed me, as it always did. “Well, good morning!” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist. His lips settled on my neck. I was glad I’d spritzed myself with Giorgio. “Good morning,” I whispered back, a slight edge to my voice. Equal parts embarrassed at my puffy eyes and at the fact that I’d slept so late that day, I kept hugging him tightly, hoping against hope he’d never let go and never back up enough to get a good, long look at me. Maybe if we just stood there for fifty years or so, wrinkles would eventually shield my puffiness. “So,” Marlboro Man said. “What have you been doing all day?” I hesitated for a moment, then launched into a full-scale monologue. “Well, of course I had my usual twenty-mile run, then I went on a hike and then I read The Iliad. Twice. You don’t even want to know the rest. It’ll make you tired just hearing about it.” “Uh-huh,” he said, his blue-green eyes fixed on mine. I melted in his arms once again. It happened any time, every time, he held me. He kissed me, despite my gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt. My eyes were closed, and I was in a black hole, a vortex of romance, existing in something other than a human body. I floated on vapors. Marlboro Man whispered in my ear, “So…,” and his grip around my waist tightened. And then, in an instant, I plunged back to earth, back to my bedroom, and landed with a loud thud on the floor. “R-R-R-R-Ree?” A thundering voice entered the room. It was my brother Mike. And he was barreling toward Marlboro Man and me, his arms outstretched. “Hey!” Mike yelled. “W-w-w-what are you guys doin’?” And before either of us knew it, Mike’s arms were around us both, holding us in a great big bear hug. “Well, hi, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, clearly trying to reconcile the fact that my adult brother had his arms around him. It wasn’t awkward for me; it was just annoying. Mike had interrupted our moment. He was always doing that.

Nevertheless, in certain respects and in certain places, despite philosophy, despite progress, the spirit of the cloister lingers on, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and a bizarre new outbreak of asceticism now astounds the civilized world. The persistence of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves is like the stubbornness of stale scent clinging to your hair, the urgency of spoiled fish clamouring to be eaten, the oppression of childish garb expecting to clothe the adult, and the tenderness of corpses wanting to come back to kiss the living. 'Ungrateful wretch!' says the garment. 'I protected you in bad weather. Why will you have nothing more to do with me?' 'I come from the open sea,' says the fish. 'I was a rose,' says the perfume. 'I loved you,' says the corpse. 'I civilized you,' says the convent. There is only one answer to this: once upon a time. To dream of the indefinite protraction of defunct things and of embalmment as a way of governing mankind, to restore ravaged dogmas, regild shrines, patch up cloisters, re-bless reliquaries, revitalize superstitions, refuel fanaticisms, replace the handles on holy-water sprinklers and on sabres, recreate monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of the parasites, to force the past on the present - this seems strange. Still, there are theorists who propound these theories. Such theorists, and they are intelligent people, have a very simple method: they put a gloss on the past, a gloss they call 'social order', 'divine right', 'morality', 'family', 'respect for elders', 'ancient authority', 'sacred tradition', 'legitimacy', 'religion', and they go about shouting, 'Look! Take this, honest people.' This logic was known to the ancients The haruspices practiced it. They rubbed a black heifer with chalk and said, 'It's white.' We ourselves respect the past in certain instances and in all cases grant it clemency, provided it consents to being dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack and try to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, false pieties, prejudices, these spectres, for all that they are spectres, cling to life. They have teeth and nails in their vaporousness, and they must be tackled head-on, and war must be waged against them, and it must be waged constantly. For it is one of the fates of humanity to be doomed to eternal battle against phantoms. Shades are difficult to throttle and destroy.

No, sir! If, for example, in earlier times it was said to me: “Love your neighbour” and I acted on it, what was the result?’ continued Peter Petrovich, with perhaps excessive haste. ‘The result was that I divided my cloak with my neighbour and we were both left half-naked, for according to the Russian proverb: “If you run after two hares, you will catch neither.” Science, however, says: love yourself first of all, for everything in the world is based on personal interest. If you love yourself alone, you will conduct your affairs properly, and your cloak will remain whole. Economic truth adds that the more private enterprises are established and the more, so to say, whole cloaks there are in a society, the firmer will be its foundations and the more will be undertaken for the common good. That is to say, that by the very act of devoting my gains solely and exclusively to myself, I am at the same time benefiting the whole community, and ensuring that my neighbour receives something better than half a torn cloak, and that not by private, isolated bounty, but as a consequence of the general economic advancement. The idea is simple, but, unfortunately, has been too long in finding acceptance, obscured as it is by vaporous ideals and misguided enthusiasms; a certain keenness of intellect, it would seem, is necessary to realize …

However, as I say, he stood there and watched. Watched the smoke, or vapor, or whatever it was, whirl and whirl, faster and faster, snatching up the vagrant wisps and streamers that had strayed to the far corners of the room, sucking them in, incorporating them into the central column, until at last that column, swirling there, seemed almost solid. It was solid. It had ceased its whirling and stood there quivering, jelly-like, plastic, but nevertheless, solid. And, as though molded in the hands of an invisible sculptor, that column was changing. Indentations appeared here, protuberances there. The character of the surface altered subtly; presently it was no longer smooth and lustrous, but rough and scaly. It lost most of its luminosity and became an uncertain, lichenous green. Until at last it was a - thing. That moment, Denning thinks, was the most horrible in all the adventure. Not because of the horror of the thing that stood before him, but because at that very moment an automobile, driven by some belated citizen passed by outside, the light from its headlights casting eerie gleams across the walls and the ceiling; and the thought of the difference between the commonplace world in which that citizen was living, and the frightful things taking place in this room almost overcame the cowering man by the doorway. And, too, the light made just that much plainer the disgusting details of the creature that towered above them. ("Out Of The Jar")

You... you were telling me about your diet?" "Well, mostly I was raised on milk, potatoes, dulse, fish-" "I beg your pardon, did you say 'dulse'? What is that, exactly?" "A kind of seaweed," MacRae said. "As a lad, it was my job to go out at low tide before supper and cut handfuls of it from the rocks on shore." He opened a cupboard to view a small store of cooking supplies and utensils. "It goes in soup, or you can eat it raw." He glanced at her over his shoulder, amusement touching his lips as he saw her expression. "Seaweed is the secret to good health?" Merritt asked dubiously. "No, milady, that would be whisky. My men and I take a wee dram every day." Seeing her perplexed expression, her continued, "Whisky is the water of life. It warms the blood, keeps the spirits calm, and the heart strong." "I wish I liked whisky, but I'm afraid it's not to my taste." MacRae looked appalled. "Was it Scotch whisky?" "I'm not sure," she said. "Whatever it was, it set my tongue on fire." "It was no' Scotch, then, but rotgut. Islay whisky starts as hot as the devil's whisper... but then the flavors come through, and it might taste of cinnamon, or peat, or honeycomb fresh from the hive. It could taste of a long-ago walk on a winter's eve... or a kiss you once stole from your sweetheart in the hayloft. Whisky is yesterday's rain, distilled with barley into a vapor that rises like a will-o'-the-wisp, then set to bide its time in casks of good oak." His voice had turned as soft as a curl of smoke. "Someday we'll have a whisky, you and I. We'll toast health to our friends and peace to our foes... and we'll drink to the loves lost to time's perishing, as well as those yet to come.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

In Kafka’s works the family table locks the child into a site where Father presides; it offers one of the prime occasions for paternity to enthrone itself, conducting prescriptive raids on the child’s bearing—invading his plate, entering and altering his body, adjusting his manner of being. The table becomes the metonymy for all law, the place where sovereign exceptionalism asserts itself: Father does not have to obey his own law, he can pick his teeth or clean his ears while the eaters submit to the severity of his rule. The children, in Kafka at least, and in the simulacrum of home in which many others were grown, are consistently downgraded to the status of unshakable refugees, parasites, those who quiver under the thickness of anxiety while laws, like platters, are passed and forced down one’s delicate throat. Give us this day our daily dread: it is difficult to imagine the Kafka family going out to eat, though that is what it would have taken for the death grip of mealtime to loosen, let go. At home, at the table, little Franz Kafka was eaten alive. By the time of the famous “Letter to Father,” he was vaporized. He says so himself: A good deal of the damage done to the young psyche occurred at table. The neighborhood restaurant might have rerouted the oppressive domesticity of home rule—it might have introduced a hiatus or suspensive regime change that would allow for hunger’s pacing. Part of a spectacle of public generality, the theater of ingestion—possibly also of incorporation—the restaurant causes the hold on the child to slacken, if only because there are witnesses and waiters whose work consists in diminishing the intensities of paternal law and the sacrificial rites that underlie their daily distribution—the daily apportionment of dread.

One find in Western Australia turned up zircon crystals dated to 4.4 billion years ago, just a couple of hundred million years after the earth and the solar system formed. By analyzing their detailed composition, researchers have suggested that ancient conditions may have been far more agreeable than previously thought. Early earth may have been a relatively calm water world, with small landmasses dotting a surface mostly covered by ocean.15 That’s not to say that earth’s history didn’t have its moments of flaming drama. Roughly fifty to one hundred million years after its birth, earth likely collided with a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which would have vaporized the earth’s crust, obliterated Theia, and blown a cloud of dust and gas thousands of kilometers into space. In time, that cloud would have clumped up gravitationally to form the moon, one of the larger planetary satellites in the solar system and a nightly reminder of that violent encounter. Another reminder is provided by the seasons. We experience hot summers and cold winters because earth’s tilted axis affects the angle of incoming sunlight, with summer being a period of direct rays and winter being a period of oblique ones. The smashup with Theia is the likely cause of earth’s cant. And though less sensational than a planetary collision, both the earth and the moon endured periods of significant pummelings by smaller meteors. The moon’s lack of eroding winds and its static crust have preserved the scars but earth’s thrashing, less visible now, was just as severe. Some early impacts may have partially or even fully vaporized all water on earth’s surface. Despite that, the zircon archives provide evidence that within a few hundred million years of its formation, earth may have cooled sufficiently for atmospheric steam to rain down, fill the oceans, and yield a terrain not all that dissimilar from the earth we now know. At least, that’s one conclusion reached by reading the crystals.

We ran back, he first and I following him, between the beds and downstairs, and we picked up an armful of wood from the pile by the wall and the knife for whittling and ran up again, we couldn’t be quick enough. He knelt down in front of the stove, and it wasn’t long before he had done the trick again. Outside the window it was night now, and the wind blew vaporous white milk against the panes, milk over the forest and the fjord, but in here there were just the two of us and the stoves and the sound of wood burning behind the black iron and sending waves of heat out into the rooms and into the walls and timbers that sucked it in. I smelt the scent of wood growing warm, and it made me as white in my head as the whirling night outside, and hungry. We stood in the kitchen with our coats on eating the contents of two tins with one spoon we took it in turns to use, and we laughed, I didn’t even notice what I was eating. Soon it was warm enough for us to take off some clothes, his overcoat and my coat, and while he hung his on a hook, I let mine fall to the floor. I took off the sweater I wore underneath and dropped that on the floor too, I unbuttoned my blouse and still felt the cold against my neck. But the heat rose to the ceiling and up to the first floor and there was another stove there. Then I calmly walked across the room and upstairs with his eyes on my back, and at first he stood still, and then he followed, and when he got to the top my blouse was off and my stockings on the floor. I slowly turned round and stood there, me inside my skin, while he was fully clothed, and I cleared my head of every thought I had ever had and let them sink out into my skin till it was painfully taut and shinning all over my body, and he saw it and did not know what it was he saw. I put my arms round my back and unfastened my bra and slid the straps over my shoulders, and I thought he might be going to weep, but his voice sounded hoarse as he whispered: “You’re lovely,” and I answered “Yes”, and didn’t know if that was true. But it did not matter, for I knew what I wanted and what to say, and his hands were as I’d thought they would be, his skins as soft and his body as hard, and it was so warm around us, and the whole time I smelt the dampness of the bedclothes like the ones at Vrangbæk, and then I just shut my eyes and floated away.

Get used to it. The weather may feel like science fiction, but the science underlying it is very real and mundane. It takes only a small increase in global average temperatures to have a big effect on weather, because what drives the winds and their circulation patterns on the surface of the earth are differences in temperature. So when you start to change the average surface temperature of the earth, you change the wind patterns—and then before you know it, you change the monsoons. When the earth gets warmer, you also change rates of evaporation—which is a key reason we will get more intense rainstorms in some places and hotter dry spells and longer droughts in others. How can we have both wetter and drier extremes at the same time? As we get rising global average temperatures and the earth gets warmer, it will trigger more evaporation from the soil. So regions that are already naturally dry will tend to get drier. At the same time, higher rates of evaporation, because of global warming, will put more water vapor into the atmosphere, and so areas that are either near large bodies of water or in places where atmospheric dynamics already favor higher rates of precipitation will tend to get wetter. We know one thing about the hydrologic cycle: What moisture goes up must come down, and where more moisture goes up, more will come down. Total global precipitation will probably increase, and the amount that will come down in any one storm is expected to increase as well—which will increase flooding and gully washers. That’s why this rather gentle term “global warming” doesn’t capture the disruptive potential of what lies ahead. “The popular term ‘global warming’ is a misnomer,” says John Holdren. “It implies something uniform, gradual, mainly about temperature, and quite possibly benign. What is happening to global climate is none of those. It is uneven geographically. It is rapid compared to ordinary historic rates of climatic change, as well as rapid compared to the adjustment times of ecosystems and human society. It is affecting a wide array of critically important climatic phenomena besides temperature, including precipitation, humidity, soil moisture, atmospheric circulation patterns, storms, snow and ice cover, and ocean currents and upwellings. And its effects on human well-being are and undoubtedly will remain far more negative than positive. A more accurate, albeit more cumbersome, label than ‘global warming’ is ‘global climatic disruption.’ 

Luce closed her eyes,trying to remember exactly what he'd looked like. There were no words for it.It was just an incredible, joyous connection. "I saw him." "Who,Daniel? Yeah,I saw him,too. He was the guy who dropped the ax when it was his turn to do the chopping. Big mistake. Huge." "No,I really saw him. As he truly is." Her voice shook. "He was so beautiful." "Oh,that." Bill tossed his head, annoyed. "I recognized him.I think I've seen him before." "Doubt it." Bill coughed. "That was the first and last time you'll be able to see him like that.You saw him, and then you died.That's what happens when mortal flesh looks upon an angel's unbridled glory. Instant death. Burned away by the angel's beauty." "No,it wasn't like that." "You saw what happened to everyone else. Poof. Gone." Bill plopped down beside her and patted her knee. "Why do you think the Mayans started doing sacrifices by fire after that? A neighboring tribe discovered the charred remains and had to explain it somehow." "Yes,they burst into flames right away. But I lasted longer-" "A couple of extra seconds? When you were turned away? Congratulations." "You're wrong.And I know I've seen that before." "You've seen his wings before, maybe.But Daniel shedding his human guise and showing you his true form as an angel? Kills you every time." "No." Luce shook her head. "You're saying he can never show me who he really is?" Bill shrugged. "Not without vaporizing you and everyone around you.Why do you think Daniel's so cautious about kissing you all the time? His glory shines pretty damn bright when you two get hot and heavy." Luce felt like she could barely hold herself up. "That's why I sometimes die when we kiss?" "How 'bout a round of applause for the girl, folks?" Bill said snarkily. "But what about all those other times, when I die before we kiss, before-" "Before you even have a chance to see how toxic your relationship might become?" "Shut up." "Honestly,how many times do you have to see the same story line before you realize nothing is ever going to change?" "Something has changed," Luce said. "That's why I'm on this journey, that's why I'm still alive. If I could just see him again-all of him-I know I could handle it." "You don't get it." Bill's voice was rising. "You're talking about this whole thing in very mortal times." As he grew more agitated,spit flew from his lips. "This is the big time,and you clearly cannot handle it." "Why are you so angry all of a sudden?" "Because! Because." He paced the ledge, gnashing his teeth. "Listen to me: Daniel slipped up this once, he showed himself,but he never does that again.Never.He learned his lesson. Now you've learned one,too: Mortal flesh cannot gaze upon an angel's true form without dying.

forward, gathering speed. As they reached the barrier, Albus winced, but no collision came. Instead, the family emerged onto platform nine and three-quarters, which was obscured by thick white steam that was pouring from the scarlet Hogwarts Express. Indistinct figures were swarming through the mist, into which James had already disappeared. “Where are they?” asked Albus anxiously, peering at the hazy forms they passed as they made their way down the platform. “We’ll find them,” said Ginny reassuringly. But the vapor was dense, and it was difficult to make out anybody’s faces. Detached from their owners, voices sounded unnaturally loud. Harry thought he heard Percy discoursing loudly on broomstick regulations, and was quite glad of the excuse not to stop and say hello. …

and at as after an add act adjective answer ask am animal ant ax Africa Medial that can had back last has than man hand plant began stand black happen fast apple /a/ LONG A, OPEN SYLLABLE RULE Initial able acre agent apron Asia apex April Medial paper lady baby radio crazy labor lazy flavor tomato navy station basic label equator relation vapor enable volcano vibration basis hazy potato ladle vacation tablecloth table /a/ LONG A, FINAL E RULE Initial ate age ache ale ape ace Medial make made face same came state late tale place name wave space gave base plane game shape baseball spaceship racetrack shapeless cake /a/ LONG A, AI DIGRAPH Initial aim aid ailment ail Medial rain train wait tail chain jail mail pain sail strait afraid brain claim detail explain fail gain main obtain paid remain wait plain laid faint grain rail nail See also List 7, Suggested Phonics Teaching Order; List 8, Phonics Research Basis. // LONG A, AY DIGRAPH Medial always mayor layer maybe gayly haystack wayside payment rayon jaywalk player daylight Final day say away play may today pay gray bay stay birthday highway repay anyway way pray lay gay hay crayon

By force-marching his exhausted men through the unknown, rain-swept wilderness of the German-infested Teutoburg Forest, this guy had just made a brain-explodingly boneheaded mistake so amazing in its incompetence that it makes the Roman consuls at Cannae look like a conjoined triplet made out of Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and that dude from Total Recall who had the baby coming out of his stomach. In terms of career moves, marching three legions into the Teutoberg was the Classical Age equivalent of coauthoring an academic paper with the Unabomber or asking Charles Manson to write you a letter of recommendation for law school. Unsurprisingly, this came back to bite him in the ass. We don’t know exactly how many Germans were hiding in the woods, watching the column of imperial invaders trudge past. The Germans didn’t bother to write anything down more detailed than “killed sum d00ds 2day lulz,” and the only Romans who managed to run screaming out of this forest alive were the ones who knew better than to sit there and try to count how many GWAR fans were currently trying to brutally dismember them with axes. Let’s just say it was probably a crapload, and that when these long-haired death metal freaks unleashed a bloodcurdling shout and started charging through the forest like a bunch of gigantic mutant Ewok-Wookies ambushing the Imperial Stormtroopers on the Forest Moon of Endor it wasn’t exactly the sort of hilarious laugh riot you might see in an animated GIF involving unicorns, rainbows, and cartoon kitties with Pop-Tarts where their bodies are supposed to be. Bellowing like madmen, these balls-out, frothing-at-the-mouth, beer-swilling sausage fiends went Leeroy Jenkins toward the enemy, blitzkrieging out of the woods from every side seemingly at the same time, their ferociousness magnified not only by their savage blood rage, but by the fact that some of the dudes had taken to painting their entire bodies black with mud to help them hide in the dark forest like how Schwarzenegger hid from the Predator’s infrared vision. It was so damned terrifying that it took every ounce of Roman discipline to not simply spontaneously combust into blood vapor on the spot.

If you are not drawing fire from both Pharisees and Sadducees, you are probably saying something other than what Jesus said. And if your message is not drawing both tax collectors (Roman collaborators) and zealots (anti-Roman insurrectionists) to repentance, you are probably speaking with a different voice than does he. Jesus wasn’t inconsistent. He saw the Roman Empire, despite all its pretensions to preeminence both in its own mind and in the mind of its opponents, as a temporary obstacle, not the defining point of his agenda. We stand and we speak, with reconciliation in view. We see, therefore, even our most passionate critic not as an argument to be vaporized but as a neighbor to be evangelized. This doesn’t mean that we back down one iota from the truth. But we proclaim the whole gospel of truth and grace, never backing down from either. That means taking seriously the arguments of our opponents, not merely caricatures of those arguments.

When the music stopped and he set her down, Lily swayed and almost fell before Cade could catch her. Looking down at her suddenly pale face and glazed look, Cade swore under his breath and discreetly led her toward the door, supporting her with his arm as he practically carried her out. He saw her father bearing down on them, but he gave the old man a look that scared him off before hauling Lily through the barn door and into the brisk breeze of a December night. "Stand here, out of the wind." Cade leaned her against the barn behind the open door, blocking her from view with his bulk. "I'm all right. It's just the punch. I'd better go back in," Lily whispered unconvincingly as she pushed upright and avoided Cade's eyes. She had never felt like this in her life. Her head was spinning and she wasn't at all certain she could continue standing. She wasn't given to queasiness or the vapors. She wasn't even wearing a corset, for heaven's sake. It had to be the punch. "I only gave you the kind without whiskey," Cade replied, blocking her path with the barrier of his arm. Irrelevantly, he added, "The moon is full tonight." Lily leaned against the wall to ease her spinning head and met Cade's gaze. She was beginning to understand his mind too well, and it frightened her. A shock of black hair fell over his brow and she let her thoughts wander to how it would look if Cade grew just the one long braid of hair down the right side of his head and shaved the left like his father did. She thought he would look very good with feathers and beads in that braid. She wondered if he had tattoos like most Indians were said to have. She didn't even know what his body looked like beneath his shirt. "I'm fine, Cade. Really I am. I'd better go inside before my father comes after us." She tried to stand, but he was too close for her to get far. "It's been two moons, Lily. There's been time to know if there's a child." She had known that was what he was after. She looked over his shoulder at the blue-black night sky. "I'm not that regular, Cade. I can't count the times I thought Jim and I..." She stopped, unwilling to reveal any more of the embarrassing details of her intimate life. Her face was pale against the dark backdrop of the barn, and Cade lifted his hand to touch her cheek. Noting the difference between dark and light, he dropped it again. "In the eyes of my father, you are my wife. We will go to the alcalde to please your father. You have only to say when." He didn't mean to abandon her as Travis had. That was small consolation. Lily closed her eyes and tried to imagine Cade's hand on her cheek, but imagination failed her. He wasn't a tender man. She had evidence enough of that. She wasn't certain she wanted a tender man. She wasn't certain she wanted a man at all. But if a child existed... "I'll hold you to that," she murmured. He

Carlton Church Warning - Nuclear Fraud Scheme North Korea has been producing different nuclear weapons since last year. They have sent warning on the neighboring countries about their plan for a nuclear test. Not just South Korea, but other countries like China, U.S., and Japan have stated their complaints. Even the United Nations has been alarmed by North Korea’s move. During the last period of World War, a bomb has been used to attack Japan. Happened on 6th of August 1945, Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb just 10 kilometers away from Tokyo. This is why people and organizations like Carlton Church who’s against the use of nuclear power for production of armory in war. Many protested that it is a threat to mankind and environment. Groups who are in favor of the nuclear use explained its advantage. They say it can be helpful in generating electricity that can be used for residential and commercial purposes. They also expound how it is better to use than coal mining as it is “less harmful to the environment.” Nuclear Use: Good or Bad? Groups who are against the use of nuclear reactor and weapons try to persuade people about its catastrophic result to the environment and humankind. If such facility will be used to create weapons, there is a possibility for another world war. But the pro-nuclear groups discuss the good effects that can be gained from it. They give details on how greenhouse gas effect of coal-burning can emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants such as sulfur dioxide nitrogen oxide, and toxic compounds of mercury to the atmosphere every year. Burning coal can produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity but it also amounts to over two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. They also added that the amount of carbon dioxide it produces contributes to climate change. Sulfur dioxide may cause the formation of acid rain and nitrogen oxide, if combined with VOCs, will form smog. Nuclear power plants do not emit harmful pollutants or other toxic gases. Generating energy from nuclear involves intricate process, but as a result, it produces heat. These plants have cooling towers that release water vapor. If the facility has been properly managed it may not contribute disturbance in the atmosphere. It may sound better to use compared to coal. But studies have shown that the vapor that came from nuclear plants have an effect to some coastal plants. The heated water that was released goes back to lakes and seas, and then the heat will eventually diffuse into surface warming. As a result of the increased water temperature on the ocean bodies, it changes the way carbon dioxide is transferred within the air. In effect, major shifts in weather patterns such as hurricanes may occur. It does not stop there. The nuclear power plant produces radioactive waste, which amounts to 20 metric tons yearly. Exposure to high-level radiation is extremely harmful and fatal to human and animals. The waste material must be stored carefully in remote locations for many years. Carlton Church and other anti-nuclear groups persuade the public to initiate banning of the manufacturing of nuclear products and give warnings about its health hazards and environmental effects.

the end, however, a term like “failure” can only be applied relative to some expectation—and we have seen that the rebels’ expectations of modern government were at once fantastical in their scope and vaporous in definition. They ascribed magical or, I venture to say, divine qualities to cumbersome, all-too-human bureaucracies. They believed government could work miracles: it could give meaning to their personal lives. This faith was most evident in Israel, a country that quickly overcame the effects of the crisis. Protesters there were affluent and employed, but expected the government to deliver personal fulfillment within a context of social justice. What that meant was never explained. Most of the American Occupiers also held down jobs. Conversely, those nearest to poverty never participated in any of the 2011 street revolts.

The most enduring ideas of the Milesian physicists proved to be their speculations on the nature of matter, particularly their belief that there was an arche, or fundamental substance, that endured through all apparent change. Aristotle writes that “Thales, who led the way in this kind of philosophy, says that the principle is water, and for this reason declared that the earth rests on water.” Aristotle thought that Thales chose water as the arche “from the observation that the nourishment of all creatures is moist… and water is for most moist things the origin of their nature.” His choice of water was undoubtedly because it is normally a liquid but when heated becomes a vapor and when frozen is transformed to solid ice, so that the same substance appears in all three forms of matter.

Bubby’s kitchen is like the center of the world. It is where everyone congregates to chatter and gossip, while Bubby pours ingredients into the electric mixer or stirs the ever-present pots on the stove. Somber talks take place with Zeidy behind closed doors, but good news is always shared in the kitchen. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always gravitated toward the small white-tiled room, often fogged with cooking vapors. As a toddler I crawled down the one flight of stairs from our apartment on the third floor to Bubby’s kitchen on the second floor, edging cautiously down each linoleum-covered step with my chubby baby legs, hoping that a reward of cherry-flavored Jell-O was in it for me at the end of my labors. It is in this kitchen that I have always felt safe. From what, I cannot articulate, except to say that in the kitchen I did not feel that familiar sense of being lost in a strange land, where no one knew who I was or what language I spoke. In the kitchen I felt like I had reached the place from which I came, and I never wanted to be pulled back into the chaos again.

Being Overly Confident 13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we willa go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”;† 14whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” 16But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.

Well, she keeps an eye on big journeys from the interior to the exterior, or vice versa. She's there for the steps that takes you from one state to another. She's someone you see at crossroads, for instance. Well, you sort of see her but don't register what you've seen until it's too late to go back. She holds three keys...some say they're keys to the underworld, others that they're access to the past, present,and future. Picture the image of me fixed inthis doorway, and also in every other doorway you pass, sometimes tgree dimensional and sometimes vaporous, whatever I feel being at the moment you try to get past me. Imagine not being able to stop me from coming in, imagine not being able to cast me out because I own all thresholds. As an additional bonus, imagine me with three faces. That's who we're sending to have a little chat with Matyas Füst.

Is this about Nathaniel?” Kitty’s face went from hot to scalding. She closed her eyes, unable to stand Thomas’s pointed gaze any longer. Did he know what had happened between them, or had he simply spoken thoughtlessly? Eliza propped forward on her hands. “Did you and Nathaniel have a disagreement, Kitty?” Turning to Thomas, Kitty hurled daggers with her eyes. If he did know, he had better not say. Thomas pulled back, his jaw open. “For one who speaks so openly, I’m surprised you have yet to tell your sister.” He does know! “Kitty?” Eliza asked, eyes round. Kitty would have thanked Thomas for relieving her of the emotions of moments past, if not for the undesirable, nay wretched subject he chose to discuss. “’Tis nothing, Liza. I assure you.”  “Nothing?” Thomas shifted his weight and flicked his gaze between them, as if gauging his next move as carefully as one might a chess piece on a board. Finally his stare landed on his wife and he spoke with enough candor to make Parliament proud. “Nathaniel has kissed her.” Kitty groaned and dropped her head in her hands. Eliza gasped and tugged on Kitty’s arm, her tone carrying equal measures of delight and concern that made Kitty want to evaporate into vapors. “Did he really, Kitty?” Kitty pulled away and met Eliza’s wide stare. Better to confront the truth than deny it. “Aye, but ‘twas a mistake and won’t happen again. Are you satisfied?” She directed the last to Thomas. He stepped closer to the bed, the softening muscles in his face reading like the tender care of a sibling. “I cannot bear to see you suffer the pains of a broken heart, Kitty.” The tight muscles in her neck relaxed the longer she stared at him, the anger suddenly fleeing at the concern in his eyes. Though his disclosure was unwelcome, the tenderness was not. “Thank you, Thomas. My tears are not for Nathaniel. I can assure you my heart is fully intact.

Why Wolf Became Dog   I know how wolf became dog, why is the critical question. So awful an offering, some forerunning, I would say, today, fifteen thousand years from whence she wandered along tundra’s expanse, wolf heard a cry, a mourning song, a terrible, swelling sehnsucht from beneath a new mindfulness dwelling upright in the world. Being was being observed by its own, and there was shame in it, it seems. Wolf, from ridgeline, raised her ears at village clamor, desperate chanting, her empathy stalked shadows dancing as vapors of yearning rose into empty nights where all mythologies are spawned. Wolf lowered her head and approached the conscious savage estranged from its origins. She did what had to be done. Wolf, from primal domain, a higher terrain emptied herself, taking on mortal burdens morphed for more than survival’s sake, and nuzzled into homes, hearths, hearts living and dying in service to the great turning. Dog leading the lost, in her unequalled ways, to the new earth.

Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” —James 4:14–15 (NAS)

Also, the Bible does not explicitly say that it was only due to the water’s recession (which all sides agree is indeed a factor) as to why mountaintops were seen. The text says “the tops of the mountains were seen” (Genesis 8:5). This involves two things: water level (1) and visibility (2). This second factor that is often overlooked is the conditions that may affect visibility. The warmer ocean water (which is expected from the Flood with continental shifting, rising basalts from the mantle, and possibly some nuclear decay would surely generate heat and volcanism) gives off vapors and mists that form low-lying fog and clouds. Hence, visibility would likely be rather low. Genesis 8:5 may well be discussing the state of visibility and atmospheric condition regarding clouds and fog from the heated ocean just as much at it discusses water level.

I try not to think about you too much it's very easy to become dependent on another person. And makes you weak. Caring for someone. Yet there are days when i feel as if the thought of you is holding me together, and if were to let it go i would simply vaporize. have you sat down with a person and just talked to them. Not wanting not daring to say anything other than what you really mean just saying. The things that no does anymore for some reason. The little things the insignificant ones to those who do not take a moment out of their life to think ponder and reflect.

Death told me the Fool showed you a vision with ten swords in your back.” I nodded. “The ten of swords card indicates that a devastating catastrophe is headed one’s way and will strike without warning. Bingo, Matthew.” “Hmm.” “Hmm, what?” “That card is also about letting go and accepting one’s current circumstances.” Accepting that you can’t change fate. As my mom had done with my dad. “Should I let go of Jack? Like you let go of the man you lost?” She lifted one slim shoulder. “You’d already fallen for another.” “I swore revenge on Richter. How can I think of surrendering that need?” Richter, I’m . . . not coming for you? “Do you know what I fear more than marching off to die fighting him? That I might have to live with what he did.” “No one’s suggesting you give up your revenge. But what if we can’t find him for half a year? Two years? Will you cease living till then? Will you force Death to stop as well? He yearns to be a normal man. Even if just for a day. Will you not give that to him?” “I made the point to him about our limited time,” I said, still cringing at my clumsiness. “All I did was insult him.” “He wanted a wife. Not a buddy.” Was she listening to everything in the castle? “I don’t want to hurt him, but I don’t know what to do.” She pinned my gaze with her own. “Therein lies the lesson of the card, Evie Greene. The lesson of life. When you can’t change your situation, you must change yourself. You must rise and walk—despite the ten swords in your back.” What was harder than dying? Living a nightmare. Mom had learned to live without Dad. I had learned to live without Mom. Could I go on without Jack? “I shouldn’t even be thinking about Aric. I disobeyed the dictates of the game, and I got Jack killed. What if I do the same to Aric?” Circe made a sound of amusement. “You always did think highly of yourself. Do you believe you had something to do with that massacre? Think logically. Richter could have reversed the order of his attacks—targeting Fort Arcana earlier, vaporizing the Magician, one of Fauna’s wolves, and the stronghold of his enemies. He could have shot at the army by helicopter afterward. Instead he targeted mortals and one player. The Moon.” My lips parted. “Because she was more of a threat to him.” “She was the only one in the area who could slay him from a distance. Richter will target the Tower as well, since Joules shares that ability,” she said. “So if we should blame any card for your mortal’s death, blame the Moon.” “I’ll never blame her.” “Yet you’ll blame yourself?” Circe shook her head, and the river swirled. “I say we blame the Emperor.” Could it be that easy? Had Richter always had Selena in his sights? If fate couldn’t be changed—then she’d been doomed to die the second we’d saved her from the Lovers.

It ain’t anger,” said Gorm, stepping out from the stairway. The other heroes had been breakfasting around an old oak table, and upon Gorm’s appearance they attempted to arrange themselves around it to affect maximum nonchalance. “Oh, good morning, Gorm,” Heraldin attempted. “I mean, of course there’s some anger. You’re fightin’ after all. But anger ain’t what makes ye berserk.” Gorm stood next to the table and looked out across the terrace, to the city. “It’s purpose. Ye find something in the battle to fight for, something ye’d die for. Your brothers back in the clanhome, the honor of your Da’s name, the lives of innocents. A reason to fight, if nothing else, like a tiny fire, and ye reach out and grab it. And ye hold it no matter how it burns. And soon ye can’t separate yourself from your purpose, any more than ye could take the light from a candle flame. Ye live to win. Ye can’t lose; ye can only die.” “Whoa,” said Laruna. “And later, they’ll say ye looked crazed, or ye howled like a beast, or ye seemed possessed, but their words are nothing but a vapor in a breeze. ’Cause ye can still feel a flicker of the fire ye held inside, and ye know now what ye knew then, and ye’ll never be the same. That’s what it is to be a berserker, and I’d never trade it for anything. Or I wouldn’t have, until I ran. A berserker doesn’t run.

Melons & Dongles (The Sonnet) It is one thing to embrace one's imperfections, But there is nothing empowering in popping melons. It is one thing to fight for equal pay rights, Totally another to fight for the freedom of nipples. On the other side, nobody wants a dongle in their inbox, Only the dumb and callow care about your greek abs. Men who are concerned more with grooming than behaving, Raise a red flag to those with character and heart. It is one thing to stay healthy through regular workout, And totally another to worship one's body in the mirror. All that packaging isn't worth even a confederate bill, If inside all you have left is stinky narcissistic vapor. So I say, stay healthy, but embrace your imperfections. Once the packaging is gone, what'll be your contribution?

You believe that?” I ask, facing him. “That happiness is fleeting?” He shrugs, tossing the last bite of his cone into his mouth, and chews as he contemplates something. “Absolutely,” he says finally. “It’s not something solid you can hold on to. It’s vapor in the wind, and all you can do is inhale it when it’s near and hope it comes around again when it blows away.

The walls covered with paintings and tapestries that often concealed the doors didn't help either. There were countless animal heads of all kinds lit by torches in several corridors, and I could have sworn I saw them move, but I was always so late for the lessons that I had no time to pay attention to them. Intense smells of herbs, vapors, and fumes filled this space, as potions and spells were constantly being played throughout the days and nights. Every time we passed Mrs. Fitz's secretary's office, we had to pinch our Nose, because she seemed to burn horrible herbs while she worked, and the smell spread down the hallway to the classrooms. Then there was Miss Melva Flin with her ever-vigilant bat. She controlled every person who came in and out of Philcrocks and roamed the corridors making sure no students broke the rules or tried to stick their noses where they weren't called. She had two spare eyes as her bat squeaked whenever it detected problems. No student liked her and everyone wished they could close that bat in the library where he could eat the bookworms for the rest of his life. Found the practice sites, there were still the lessons. Every Thursday at midnight the clan would gather in the High Ridge stone circle, at which hour it aligned with the moon, and it was possible to make omens from the constellations. On Tuesdays we went to the Philcrocks Woods where we watched the wild animals and any other species that walked around, hunted and fished in the river and even stayed overnight for the next day hoping to see the vampires hunt, which did not happen. I still couldn't believe vampires existed but the next day I turned away from all the sarcophagi I came across in the castle corridors. The most boring of the chairs was the Philcrocks Story, where they talked about the story of magic. Especially because the teacher talked monotonously and always behind the book, which made it impossible to see his face and understand what he was saying. He also made references to maps and wall articles that no one understood, which did not matter to him as long as he remained immersed in its reading aloud. Most interesting so far has been the story of the division of the 3 kingdoms and the emergence of the 3 clans. For many centuries they had lived peacefully until pure races emerged and the thirst for power increased, promoting their perpetuation. The segregation of sleves began there. King Elive's Night Clan was destroyed by King Ashen and the Night Clan disappeared, except for some sorcerers who chose the Shadow Kingdom to live on and continued the clan to which I now belong. Having to memorize endless dates and events was the worst part. It was hard to remember if it was Orlk or Orls who started the battle and whether it was in Cral or Crap, especially since all those names were strange to me.

In the next room, my son, stout but saggy-kneed, clings to the crib bars like a prisoner. Menthol steam from the vaporizer has made a ghost of him. His ringlets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his small frame. The animal suffering that’s rattling him throws ice water on me, and I enjoy a surge of unalloyed love for him, followed by panic, followed by guilt. He sees me rushing toward him and abruptly drops his outstretched arms an instant to say, No pants? His head’s tilted with bald curiosity. Which cracks me up, and he laughs till the coughs start exploding through him again, by which point I’ve cleaved him to me, both of us sweating. His diaper’s sagging from the vaporizer’s work, but fresh steam is his lifeline. Carrying him to the bathroom, I crank on the shower. But before I change him, before I squirt the syrupy acetaminophen into his mouth, I haul him whooping down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the stove where a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels squats like the proverbial troll under the bridge. Needing neither glass nor ice, I press my lips to the cool mouth, and it blows into my lungs so I can keep on.

It’s a very simple idea. You recall the Bible, and the story of Gethsemane, where Our Lord waited out the hours before his trial and crucifixion, and his friends, who should have borne him company, all fell fast asleep?” “Oh,” I said, understanding all at once. “And he said ‘Can you not watch with me one hour?’ So that’s what you’re doing—watching with him for that hour—to make up for it.” I liked the idea, and the darkness of the chapel suddenly seemed inhabited and comforting. “Oui, madame,” he agreed. “Very simple. We take it in turns to watch, and the Blessed Sacrament on the altar here is never left alone.” “Isn’t it difficult, staying awake?” I asked curiously. “Or do you always watch at night?” He nodded, a light breeze lifting the silky brown hair. The patch of his tonsure needed shaving; short bristly hairs covered it like moss. “Each watcher chooses the time that suits him best. For me, that is two o’clock in the morning.” He glanced at me, hesitating, as though wondering how I would take what he was about to say. “For me, in that moment …” He paused. “It’s as though time has stopped. All the humors of the body, all the blood and bile and vapors that make a man; it’s as though just at once all of them are working in perfect harmony.” He smiled. His teeth were slightly crooked, the only defect in his otherwise perfect appearance. “Or as though they’ve stopped altogether. I often wonder whether that moment is the same as the moment of birth, or of death. I know that its timing is different for each man … or woman, I suppose,” he added, with a courteous nod to me. “But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it’s as though …” He hesitated for a moment, carefully choosing words. “As though, knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.” “But … do you actually do anything?” I asked. “Er, pray, I mean?” “I? Well,” he said slowly, “I sit, and I look at Him.” A wide smile stretched the fine-drawn lips. “And He looks at me.

The world is but a show, vain and empty, a mere nothing, bearing the semblance of reality. Set not your affections upon it. [...] Verily I say, the world is like the vapor in a desert, which the thirsty dreameth to be water and striveth after it with all his might, until when he cometh unto it, he findeth it to be mere illusion.

Beyond the possibility of disturbing the monks within the chapel, he said, “It’s a very simple idea. You recall the Bible, and the story of Gethsemane, where Our Lord waited out the hours before his trial and crucifixion, and his friends, who should have borne him company, all fell fast asleep?” “Oh,” I said, understanding all at once. “And he said ‘Can you not watch with me one hour?’ So that’s what you’re doing—watching with him for that hour—to make up for it.” I liked the idea, and the darkness of the chapel suddenly seemed inhabited and comforting. “Oui, madame,” he agreed. “Very simple. We take it in turns to watch, and the Blessed Sacrament on the altar here is never left alone.” “Isn’t it difficult, staying awake?” I asked curiously. “Or do you always watch at night?” He nodded, a light breeze lifting the silky brown hair. The patch of his tonsure needed shaving; short bristly hairs covered it like moss. “Each watcher chooses the time that suits him best. For me, that is two o’clock in the morning.” He glanced at me, hesitating, as though wondering how I would take what he was about to say. “For me, in that moment …” He paused. “It’s as though time has stopped. All the humors of the body, all the blood and bile and vapors that make a man; it’s as though just at once all of them are working in perfect harmony.” He smiled. His teeth were slightly crooked, the only defect in his otherwise perfect appearance. “Or as though they’ve stopped altogether. I often wonder whether that moment is the same as the moment of birth, or of death. I know that its timing is different for each man … or woman, I suppose,” he added, with a courteous nod to me. “But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it’s as though …” He hesitated for a moment, carefully choosing words. “As though, knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.” “But … do you actually do anything?” I asked. “Er, pray, I mean?” “I? Well,” he said slowly, “I sit, and I look at Him.” A wide smile stretched the fine-drawn lips. “And He looks at me.

When Mom says “bong,” she means her nebulizer. It turns water into vapor, and she huffs it all day like a singer breathing hot mist before a performance. Except Mom’s machine is handheld. I’m surprised she doesn’t carry it in a gun sling. But my mom is not just inhaling water. “Let’s get some colloidal silver in those lungs,” she says. Second to prayer, colloidal silver is Mom’s insurance policy on life. She makes her own, soaking two silver rods in a glass vat of water that sits next to her kitchen sink. I’ll let her explain it. This is from one of her emails telling me how to live forever: “I use distilled water and 99% pure silver rods. The rods are connected to a positive and negative charge (think of a jumper cable for your car) and they are immersed in the distilled water. Some people leave the rods in the water 2–4 hours. I leave mine in for 8–12 hours so my silver water is extra strength and powerful…I drink ¼ cup colloidal silver in a glass of water before bed, and have for years and years. RARELY am I ever sick. I take a bottle of colloidal silver on every trip (especially overseas) in case I pick up a stomach bug or am around anyone who is sick. I use it on wounds, use it for pink eye, ear infections, the flu, and more because it kills over 600 viruses and most bacteria, including MRSA. There are also studies that show the benefits of colloidal silver against cancer.” Every time I’m home, she gives me a bottle of the stuff to take back to Los Angeles. I, like a good millennial, googled its effectiveness. The scientific establishment seems to believe that colloidal silver does approximately nothing good, and in large quantities, some bad. Perhaps you’ve seen the viral meme of the old blue man? He consumed so much colloidal silver that his skin dyed blue from the inside. He looks like a Smurf with a white beard. Well, he looked like a Smurf. He’s dead. Maybe from something common like heart failure, but… When I told my mother this, she wouldn’t hear it. “I know it works. I’ve been using it for years. I don’t care what those articles say. I’ve read hundreds of articles about it.

You say I have authority as the sister of a king. I do. And yet, the men of this ship would treat me exactly the same way if I were a beggar who had convinced them I was the sister to a king. In that case, my authority is not a real thing. It is mere vapors—an illusion. I can create that illusion for them, as can you.

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers. In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly. That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.” I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.

Archaeologists who want to establish the date of a particular site have a number of techniques they can use. If they find organic material, say the bones of an animal, they can use radiocarbon dating. If they find the remains of wooden structures, a post or lintel say, they can use dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating. If they find a firepit they can use archaeomagnetic dating. Radiocarbon dating works because, when alive, an organism takes in carbon from the air or through the food chain; carbon contains small amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which decays into nonradioactive standard carbon at a constant rate; when the organism dies it ceases to ingest carbon, so the proportion of carbon-14 in its remains steadily decays. Measuring the relative amount of carbon-14 content therefore establishes a fairly accurate date for the specimen. Dendrochronology works because tree rings vary in width season by season according to the rainfall received, and so trees that grow in a given climatic region and historical period show similar ring-width patterns. Comparing the ring pattern to a known and dated local ring pattern establishes exactly the years in which the wood in the structure was growing. Archaeomagnetic dating works because the earth's magnetic field changes direction over time gradually in a known way. Clays or other materials in a firepit, when fired and cooled, retain a weak magnetism that aligns with the earth's field, and this establishes a rough date for the firepit's last use. There are still other techniques: potassium-argon dating, thermoluminescence dating, hydration dating, fission-track dating. But what I want the reader to notice is that each of these relies on some particular set of natural effects. That a technology relies on some effect is general. A technology is always based on some phenomenon or truism of nature that can be exploited and used to a purpose. I say "always" for the simple reason that a technology that exploited nothing could achieve nothing. This is the third of the three principles I am putting forward, and it is just as important to my argument as the other two, combination and recursiveness. This principle says that if you examine any technology you find always at its center some effect that it uses. Oil refining is based on the phenomenon that different components or fractions of vaporized crude oil condense at different temperatures. A lowly hammer depends on the phenomenon of transmission of momentum (in this case from a moving object-the hammer-to a stationary one-the nail). Often the effect is obvious. But sometimes it is hard to see, particularly when we are very familiar with the technology. What phenomenon does a truck use? A truck does not seem to be based on any particular law of nature. Nevertheless it does use a phenomenon-or, I should say, two. A truck is in essence a platform that is self-powered and can be moved easily. Central to its self-powering is the phenomenon that certain chemical substances (diesel fuel, say) yield energy when burned; and central to its ease of motion is the "phenomenon" that objects that roll do so with extremely low friction compared with ones that slide (which is used of course in the wheels and bearings). This last "phenomenon" is hardly a law of nature; it is merely a usable-and humble-natural effect. Still it is a powerful one and is exploited everywhere wheels or rolling parts are used.

She described tirelessly to me how effective the flat roof was, and how it was useful. I found that the stoch was also used as a place to dry food, such as tomatoes. They used to put the tomatoes on the stoch, when they were cut, crushed, and soaked in large bowls. Soaking them on the roof would cause the fluid content to vaporize. What remained of the fruit was preserved in jars for regular use over time. To the tomatoes, which turned  very thick, we used to add a little salt, and it was enough to preserve them for a long time. They layed it out on the stoch and that was it. I laughed when she added a story from her childhood as well, when she used go up on the stoch with her friends and throw pottery off of it, throwing it down to shatter as a mark of the end of summer.

A man," answered Vult, "must have some chosen one, to whom, when he has involved all others in vapor and fog, he can open his breastplate, and the breast itself, and say, look in!

How much longer can I get away with being so fucking cute? Not much longer. The shoes with bows, the cunning underwear with slogans on the crotch — Knock Here, and so forth — will have to go, along with the cat suit. After a while you forget what you really look like. You think your mouth is the size it was. You pretend not to care. When I was young I went with my hair hiding one eye, thinking myself daring; off to the movies in my jaunty pencil skirt and elastic cinch-belt, chewed gum, left lipstick imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery sighs on the cigarettes of men I hardly knew and didn’t want to. Men were a skill, you had to have good hands, breathe into their nostrils, as for horses. It was something I did well, like playing the flute, although I don’t. In the forests of grey stems there are standing pools, tarn-coloured, choked with brown leaves. Through them you can see an arm, a shoulder, when the light is right, with the sky clouded. The train goes past silos, through meadows, the winter wheat on the fields like scanty fur. I still get letters, although not many. A man writes me, requesting true-life stories about bad sex. He’s doing an anthology. He got my name off an old calendar, the photo that’s mostly bum and daisies, back when my skin had the golden slick of fresh-spread margarine. Not rape, he says, but disappointment, more like a defeat of expectations. Dear Sir, I reply, I never had any. Bad sex, that is. It was never the sex, it was the other things, the absence of flowers, the death threats, the eating habits at breakfast. I notice I’m using the past tense. Though the vaporous cloud of chemicals that enveloped you like a glowing eggshell, an incense, doesn’t disappear: it just gets larger and takes in more. You grow out of sex like a shrunk dress into your common senses, those you share with whatever’s listening. The way the sun moves through the hours becomes important, the smeared raindrops on the window, buds on the roadside weeds, the sheen of spilled oil on a raw ditch filling with muddy water. Don’t get me wrong: with the lights out I’d still take on anyone, if I had the energy to spare. But after a while these flesh arpeggios get boring, like Bach over and over; too much of one kind of glory. When I was all body I was lazy. I had an easy life, and was not grateful. Now there are more of me. Don’t confuse me with my hen-leg elbows: what you get is no longer what you see.

Would you like to dance again?” “I’m afraid not. It would be scandalous. I’m not a guest, after all.” “You’re part of the family,” Leo said. “You are very kind, my lord, but you know that’s not true. I am a paid companion, which means—” She broke off as she became aware that someone, a man, was staring at her. Glancing in his direction, she saw a face that had haunted her in nightmares. The sight of him, a figure from the past she had managed to evade for so long, extorted every bit of calm she possessed and sent her into full-scale panic. Only her grip on Leo’s arm kept her from doubling over as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. She tried to take a breath, and could only wheeze. “Marks?” Leo stopped and turned her to face him, looking down at her bleached face in concern. “What is it?” “A touch of the vapors,” she managed to say. “It must have been the exertion of the dance.” “Let me help you to a chair—” “No.” The man was still staring at her, recognition dawning on his features. She had to get away before he approached her. She swallowed hard against the biting pressure of tears welling in her eyes and throat. What might have been the happiest night of Catherine’s life had abruptly become the worst. It’s over, she thought with bitter grief. Her life with the Hathaways had come to an end. She wanted to die.

Mosquitoes use various cues for food-movement, color contrast, skin temperature. Most of all, however, they are olfactory hunters, following the vapor trail of carbon dioxide left behind by humans. Each time you breathe out, you are sending up a flare to every mosquito in your vicinity, saying, "blood container over here.