Views From Home Quotes

It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

It is possible to be honest every day. It is possible to live so that others can trust us-can trust our words, our motives, and our actions. Our examples are vital to those who sit at our feet as well as those who watch from a distance. Our own constant self-improvement will become as a polar star to those within our individual spheres of influence. They will remember longer what they saw in us than what they heard from us. Our attitude, our point of view, can make a tremendous difference.

Someday, I would like to go home. The exact location of this place, I don't know, but someday I would like to go. There would be a pleasing feeling of familiarity and a sense of welcome in everything I saw. People would greet me warmly. They would remind me of the length of my absence and the thousands of miles I had travelled in those restless years, but mostly, they would tell me that I had been missed, and that things were better now I had returned. Autumn would come to this place of welcome, this place I would know to be home. Autumn would come and the air would grow cool, dry and magic, as it does that time of the year. At night, I would walk the streets but not feel lonely, for these are the streets of my home town. These are the streets that I had thought about while far away, and now I was back, and all was as it should be. The trees and the falling leaves would welcome me. I would look up at the moon, and remember seeing it in countries all over the world as I had restlessly journeyed for decades, never remembering it looking the same as when viewed from my hometown.

All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.” At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes. “The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there's a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.” “Yeah but Maestra—” “Don't interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in tern, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing'll go wrong and it'll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it's playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That's why, Switters my dearest, every time you've shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I've played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me— you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.” “But what about self-esteem?” “Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.

One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu: All our dream-worlds may come true. Fairy lands are fearsome too. As I wander far from view Read, and bring me home to you.

I was free with every road as my home. No limitations and no commitments. But then summer passed and winter came and I fell short for safety. I fell for its spell, slowly humming me to sleep, because I was tired and small, too weak to take or handle those opinions and views, attacking me from every angle. Against my art, against my self, against my very way of living. I collected my thoughts, my few possessions and built isolated walls around my values and character. I protected my own definition of beauty and success like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, for no one saw what I saw, or felt the same as I did, and so I wanted to keep to myself. You hide to protect yourself.

Here, too, I found neither home nor company, nothing but a seat from which to view a stage where strange people played strange parts.

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. it opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. in moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages. As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive. Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either. School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics. Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media--one of the technology's greatest achievements. The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla. Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by groups, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection. But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation. Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only ambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.

It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men and he did not like it much. He was glad he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies and threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would no rather have stayed there in peace -

Here you sit on your high-backed chair Wonder how the view is from there I wouldn't know 'cause I like to sit Upon the floor, yeah upon the floor If you like we could play a game Let's pretend that we are the same But you will have to look much closer Than you do, closer than you do And I'm far too tired to stay here anymore And I don't care what you think anyway 'Cause I think you were wrong about me Yeah what if you were, what if you were And what if I'm a snowstorm burning What if I'm a world unturning What if I'm an ocean, far too shallow, much too deep What if I'm the kindest demon Something you may not believe in What if I'm a siren singing gentlemen to sleep I know you've got it figured out Tell me what I am all about And I just might learn a thing or two Hundred about you, maybe about you I'm the end of your telescope I don't change just to suit your vision 'Cause I am bound by a fraying rope Around my hands, tied around my hands And you close your eyes when I say I'm breaking free And put your hands over both your ears Because you cannot stand to believe I'm not The perfect girl you thought Well what have I got to lose And what if I'm a weeping willow Laughing tears upon my pillow What if I'm a socialite who wants to be alone What if I'm a toothless leopard What if I'm a sheepless shepherd What if I'm an angel without wings to take me home You don't know me Never will, never will I'm outside your picture frame And the glass is breaking now You can't see me Never will, never will If you're never gonna see What if I'm a crowded desert Too much pain with little pleasure What if I'm the nicest place you never want to go What if I don't know who I am Will that keep us both from trying To find out and when you have Be sure to let me know What if I'm a snowstorm burning What if I'm a world unturning What if I'm an ocean, far too shallow, much too deep What if I'm the kindest demon Something you may not believe in What if I'm a siren singing gentlemen to sleep Sleep... Sleep...

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows. You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die? Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity. If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?

So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began. In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed. Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simply humanity to get us through. We are the humbugs now.

When I'd first brought it home from the thrift store, I'd planned to keep it in the closet I shared with Summer, But Jordis asked me to hang it in full view of the room because she liked the glitter.

If we can use an H-bomb--and as you said it's no checker game; it's real, it's war and nobody is fooling around--isn't it sort of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed . . . and even losing the war . . . when you've got a real weapon you can use to win? What's the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?' Zim didn't answer at once, which wasn't like him at all. Then he said softly, 'Are you happy in the Infantry, Hendrick? You can resign, you know.' Hendrick muttered something; Zim said, 'Speak up!' I'm not itching to resign, sir. I'm going to sweat out my term.' I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isn't really qualified to answer . . . and one that you shouldn't ask me. You're supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?' What? Sure--yes, sir.' Then you've heard the answer. But I'll give you my own--unofficial--views on it. If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cuts its head off?' Why . . . no, sir!' Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy with an H-Bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how--or why--he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people--"older and wiser heads," as they say--supply the control. Which is as it should be. That's the best answer I can give you. If it doesn't satisfy you, I'll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can't convince you--then go home and be a civilian! Because in that case you will certainly never make a soldier.

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men. Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them. I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of society, you can still feel a compassionate impulse to help its suffering beings. In that case you tend to view the personal and the political in a sequential fashion. "I'll get enlightened first, and then I'll engage in social action." Those who are not engaged in spiritual pursuits put it differently: "I'll get my head straight first, I'll get psychoanalyzed, I'll overcome my inhibitions or neuroses or my hang-ups (whatever description you give to samsara) and then I'll wade into the fray." Presupposing that world and self are essentially separate, they imagine they can heal one before healing the other. This stance conveys the impression that human consciousness inhabits some haven, or locker-room, independent of the collective situation -- and then trots onto the playing field when it is geared up and ready. It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -- release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love of the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.

This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It's because you're seeing it backwards.

Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values. For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible. Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light. While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine's books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen. I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man... Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing. Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object. ...we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration: 'The world is my country; to do good my religion.' Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in 'The Rights of Man', and that genius busy at his favorite task - liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, 'The Rights of Man' yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke's effort in his 'Reflections'. Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him. 'Tom Paine is quite right,' said Pitt, the Prime Minister, 'but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.' Here we see the progressive quality of Paine's genius at its best. 'The Rights of Man' amplified and reasserted what already had been said in 'Common Sense', with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France. So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre's enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument. But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of 'The Age of Reason' and now turned his time to the latter part. Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events 'The Age of Reason' appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle - a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can't quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there. Winter had begun.

Many were the tears shed by them in their last adieus to a place so much beloved. "Dear, dear Norland!" said Marianne, as she wandered alone before the house, on the last evening of their being there; "when shall I cease to regret you!—when learn to feel a home elsewhere!—Oh! happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more!—And you, ye well-known trees!—but you will continue the same.—No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer!—No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade!—But who will remain to enjoy you?

Not long ago, I learned that if I let other people tell me how God was supposed to work in my life I would be dead. If I would have given into someone else’s version of God then I would have done nothing to improve my situation. The notion that “if it was meant to be, it will be”, is a pacifying, yet harmful quote, that many spiritualists use to soften the blow of anger. God is not passive. He is relentless, and he will build you through fire. He will put in your heart a need for answers. The intensity of what bothers your soul is often his voice trying to take you from the limited vision of mankind to the full view of the best life he would like to offer you. He is above any pastor, any bishop, any prophet, any church, any cleverly crafted sermon or multi-meaning verse. He is the master of his craft and the author of your forever. Inner peace is only found through action. Fear may darken the trail, but the light of peace stands at the end of such a journey ----waiting with truth.

Bleak as the scene was, though, there was growing joy in Inman's heart. He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on skin, in his longing to see the lead of hearth smoke from the houses of people he had known all his life. People he would not be called upon to hate or fear. He rose and took a wide stance on the rock and stood and pinched down his eyes to sharpen the view across the vast propect to one far mountain. It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland.

We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.

Tennessee Williams once wrote, 'We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.' Yes, but oh! What a view from that upstairs window! What Tennessee failed to mention was that if we look out of that window with an itchy curiousity and a passionate eye; with a generous spirit and a capacity for delight; and yes, the language with which to support and enrich the thing we see, then it DOESN'T MATTER that the house is burning down around us. It doesn't matter. Let the motherfucker blaze!

In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb. Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began -- the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights. Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.

At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.

I forbid you from frequenting taverns, public houses, or other establishments of vice.” She snorted in amusement. “Establishments of vice? That’s a rather puritanical view of things, isn’t it? I assure you, I was quite safe.” “You were with Ralston!” he said, as though she were simpleminded. “He was perfectly respectable,” she said, the words coming out before she remembered that the carriage ride home was anything but respectable. “Imagine—my sister and the Marquess of Ralston together. And he turns out to be the respectable one,” Benedick said wryly, sending heat flaring on Callie’s cheeks, but not for the reason he thought. “No more taverns.

As we travel great lengths in this world away from home, most of us come back with a clearer view on what home means. And most likely it isn't so much about the place in itself, but more about the places and people that have made us feel AT home…

More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability—its ineluctable wildness—that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California. Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple—at least five per apple, several thousand per tree—that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree’s adopted home.

The Author To Her Book Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth did'st by my side remain, Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad exposed to public view, Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judge). At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call. I cast thee by as one unfit for light, The visage was so irksome in my sight, Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could. I washed thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet. In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find. In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam. In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come, And take thy way where yet thou art not known. If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none; And for thy mother, she alas is poor, Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

The judge punishes lawbreakers as a burning house injures its occupants. A person may be burned to death while robbing a home or saving a friend. Similarly, from a moral point of view, the judge's work is good or evil, depending on whether the laws he enforces are good or evil.

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems.

Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm: What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears. An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.

A Faint Music by Robert Hass Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing

When Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson -- the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father -- Les, as he'll be called hereafter -- dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation -- in my view, at least -- was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les -- as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle.

Even viewed conservatively, trees are worth far more than they cost to plant and maintain. The U.S. Forest Service's Center for Urban Forest Research found a ten-degree difference between the cool of a shaded park in Tucson and the open Sonoran desert. A tree planted in the right place, the center estimates, reduces the demand for air conditioning and can save 100 kilowatt hours in annual electrical use, about 2 to 8 percent of total use. Strategically planted trees can also shelter homes from wind, and in cold weather they can reduce heating fuel costs by 10 to 12 percent. A million strategically planted trees, the center figures, can save $10 million in energy costs. And trees increase property values, as much as 1 percent for each mature tree. These savings are offset somewhat by the cost of planting and maintaining trees, but on balance, if we had to pay for the services that trees provide, we couldn't afford them. Because trees offer their services in silence, and for free, we take them for granted.

For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart. There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers. It's a shock to find yourself outdoors and alone again, hard to imagine that you could ever live in another house, big where this one was small, small where it was big, hard when your body has learned all the twists and turns of the staircase so that you could walk it in your sleep, hard when you have built it from scratch and called it home, hard to imagine building again. But you lit the fire that burned it down yourself.

Above all, the very world view, “Every town our home town, every[one our kin - யாதும் ஊரே யாவரும் கேளிர்]” can only emanate from a civilizational wisdom which has seen places, found merit in give and take and is enriched by travels, journeys and migrations.

Bold prayers honor God, and God honors bold prayers. God isn’t offended by your biggest dreams or boldest prayers. He is offended by anything less. If your prayers aren’t impossible to you, they are insulting to God. Prayers are prophecies. They are the best predictors of your spiritual future. Who you become is determined by how you pray. Ultimately, the transcript of your prayers becomes the script of your life. The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked. God does not answer vague prayers. The more specific your prayers are, the more glory God receives. Most of us don’t get what we want because we quit praying. We give up too easily. We give up too soon. We quit praying right before the miracle happens. If you don’t take the risk, you forfeit the miracle. Take a step of faith when God gives you a vision because you trust that the One who gave you the vision is going to make provision. And for the record, if the vision is from God, it will most definitely be beyond your means. We shouldn’t seek answers as much as we should seek God. If you seek answers you won’t find them, but if you seek God, the answers will find you. If your plans aren’t birthed in prayer and bathed in prayer, they won’t succeed. Are your problems bigger than God, or is God bigger than your problems? Our biggest problem is our small view of God. That is the cause of all lesser evils. And it’s a high view of God that is the solution to all other problems. Because you know He can, you can pray with holy confidence. Persistence is the magic bullet. The only way you can fail is if you stop praying. 100 percent of the prayers I don’t pray won’t get answered. Where are you most proficient, most sufficient? Maybe that is precisely where God wants you to trust Him to do something beyond your ability. What we perceive as unanswered prayers are often the greatest answers. Our heavenly Father is far too wise and loves us far too much to give us everything we ask for. Someday we’ll thank God for the prayers He didn’t answer as much or more than the ones He did. You can’t pray for open doors if you aren’t willing accept closed doors, because one leads to the other. Just as our greatest successes often come on the heels of our greatest failures, our greatest answers often come on the heels of our longest and most boring prayers. The biggest difference between success and failure, both spiritually and occupationally, is your waking-up time on your alarm clock. We won’t remember the things that came easy; we’ll remember the things that came hard. It’s not just where you end up that’s important; it’s how you get there. Goal setting begins and ends with prayer. The more you have to circle something in prayer, the more satisfying it is spiritually. And, often, the more glory God gets. I don’t want easy answers or quick answers because I have a tendency to mishandle the blessings that come too easily or too quickly. I take the credit or take them for granted. So now I pray that it will take long enough and be hard enough for God to receive all of the glory. Change your prayer approach from as soon as possible to as long as it takes. Go home. Lock yourself in your room. Kneel down in the middle of the floor, and with a piece of chalk draw a circle around yourself. There, on your knees, pray fervently and brokenly that God would start a revival within that chalk circle.

I froze all night. My back’s killing me. I want home, and I’m scared to death. But I guess the view makes it all worth it.” “You’re funny,” Angel said

The belief that science proceeds from observation to theory is still so widely and so firmly held that my denial of it is often met with incredulity. I have even been suspected of being insincere- of denying what nobody in his senses would doubt. But in fact the belief that we can start with pure observation alone, without anything in the nature of a theory is absurd; as may be illustrated by the story of the man who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his priceless collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as evidence. This story should show us that though beetles may profitably be collected, observations may not. Twenty-five years ago I tried to bring home the same point to a group of physics students in Vienna by beginning a lecture with the following instructions : 'Take pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed!' They asked, of course, what I wanted them to observe. Clearly the instruction, 'Observe!' is absurd. (It is not even idiomatic, unless the object of the transitive verb can be taken as understood.) Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems.

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.

We may mount from this dull Earth; and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her cost and finery upon this small speck of Dirt. So, like Travellers into other distant countries, we shall be better able to judge of what’s done at home, know how to make a true estimate of, and set its own value upon every thing. We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorn’d as well as our own.

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age. At least you used to. But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

It seems so dreadful to be a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one's dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, having to carry one's meal home in one's hand, unable to expect anyone with a lazy sense of calm confidence, able only with difficulty and vexation to give a gift to someone, having to say good night at the front door, never being able to run up a stairway beside one's wife, to lie ill and have only the solace of the view from one's window when one can sit up, to have only side doors in one's room leading into other people's living rooms, to feel estranged from one’s family, with whom one can keep on close terms only by marriage, first by the marriage of one's parents, then, when the effect of that has worn off, by one's own, having to admire other people's children and not even being allowed to go on saying: “I have none myself,” never to feel oneself grow older since there is no family growing up around one, modeling oneself in appearance and behavior on one or two bachelors remembered from our youth.

Gently, John brought her face into view and stroked her hair back with a stiff, scarred hand. “I don’t want you to worry about us either,” he said. “God doesn’t protect us from every danger, but He’s always with us, helping us through it. We’re going to face this together, my Love, with the Lord at our side.

If my love for cats were hydrogen, there’d be enough of it to give you skin cancer if you didn’t wear suntan lotion. The only sad part for me about getting a cat from the pound is that I can only choose one. If I could, I’d take home all of them. Actually, my view is why take them home? Why not just move in to an animal shelter? But my future wife wouldn’t go for that. Though I’m pretty sure she could move into a shoe store no problem.

Isn't this everyone's Point of View?" asked Tock, looking around curiously. "Of course not," replied Alec, sitting himself down on nothing. "It's only mine, and you certainly can't always look at things from someone else's Point of View. For instance, from here that looks like a bucket of water," he said, pointing to a bucket of water; "but from an ant's point of view it's a vast ocean, from an elephant's just a cool drink, and to a fish, of course, it's home. So, you see, the way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.

Grief is by nature the most violent of them all. The ancients tore their hair and rent their clothing to express it. Now we keep the dead body in our homes, shaking people’s hands as they pass by to view it and trying to stop ourselves from crying because it’s not socially acceptable. Tell me—which of these mourning practices is least sane?

Someone knocked on the back door. He push back the chair and had to pause. The wolf was angry that someone had breached his sanctuary. Not even his pack had been brave enough the past few days to approch him in his home. By the time he stalked into the kitchen, he had it mostly under control. He jerked open the back door and expect to see one of his wolves. But it was Mercy. She didn't look cheerful—but then, she seldom did when she had to come over and talk to him. She was tough and independent and not at all happy to have him interfere in any way with that independence. It had been a long time since someone had bossed him around the way she did—and he liked it. More than a wolf who'd been Alpha for twenty years ought to like it. She smelled of burnt car oil, Jasmine from the shampoo she'd been using that month, and chocolate. Or maybe that last was the cookies on the plate she handed him. "Here," she said stiffly. And he realize it was shyness in the corner of her mouth. "Chocolate usually helps me regain my balance when life kicks me in the teeth." She didn't wait for him to say anything, just turned around and walked back to her house. He took the cookies back to the office with him. After a few minutes, he ate one. Chocolate, thick and dark, spread across his tongue, it's bitterness alleviated by a sinfull amount of brown sugar and vanilla. He'd forgotten to eat and hadn't realized it. But it wasn't the chocolate or the food that made him feel better. It was Mercy's kindness to someone she viewed as her enemy. And right at that moment, he realized something. She would never love him for what she could do for her. He ate another cookie before getting up to make himself dinner.

In short: when we are exposed to sunlight, trees, water or even just a view of green leaves, we become happier, healthier and stronger. People living in green spaces have more energy and a stronger sense of purpose, and being able to see green spaces from your home is associated with reduced cravings for alcohol, cigarettes and harmful foods.

C. S. Lewis says that if we were able to return to the locus of our nostalgia, the place or person or spot of time in which we experienced joy, we would find only more nostalgia. As far back as we could go—a view from a childhood window, patterned light on a nursery wall—we would find only an unsatisfied desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. An indication not of the illusion of our existence, but of its ultimate reality elsewhere. A home we once knew but can’t quite remember, to which we will someday return.

Our presence here, outside the domain of the home planet, was not rooted in an accident of nature, nor the capricious political whim of a technological civilization. It was rather an extension of the same universal process that evolved our molecules. And what I felt was an extraordinary personal connectedness with it. I experienced what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. I not only saw the connectedness, I.felt it and experienced it sentiently. I was overwhelmed with the sensation of physically and mentally extending out into the cosmos. The restraints and boundaries of flesh and bone fell away. I realized that this was a biological response of my brain attempting to reorganize and give meaning to information about the wonderful and awesome processes I was privileged to view from this vantage point.

The bus-driver was whistling, perhaps in anticipation of his wife, who would be a woman with ample breasts, those of a realized maturity. It would be impossible that he did not have, from my point of view, a wife and children, indeed, a happiness such as I could not imagine to be real, even like some legend out of the golden ages. He had spoken numerous times during our journey of his old woman waiting, and he was going home.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.

Being Scared-off by Evil Lastly, we deny the presence of evil because we are terrified by the horrendously hurtful, cruel, and bloody kinds of evil people tell us about—if we are willing to listen. This was poignantly brought home during an interdisciplinary case conference involving a resident who was counseling for the first time a woman who had been sexually abused. As we worked with him, it became clear that he was resisting entering what he called the 'psychic cave" of her sealed—off experience from which she was shouting for assistance. Because of his resistance, he was not providing her the support and guidance she so desperately needed, and he was not facilitating her working through the abuse and hurt that were continuing to impact her life. As he was confronted about this at one point in the conference, he stated tearfully: "I'm afraid if I help her move into her memories. I will have to go with her, and if I go with her, my view of the world as a basically good and safe place will be shattered. I'm not sure I can handle that for myself, or be able to think about the fact that my wife and kids may be more vulnerable living in this world than I can be comfortable believing" (Means 1995, 299).

Madison described the state of play well in May 1798: “The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views.…22 Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.” Extreme measures

Her partner now drew near, and said, "That gentleman would have put me out of patience, had he stayed with you half a minute longer. He has no business to withdraw the attention of my partner from me. We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness for the space of an evening, and all our agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time. Nobody can fasten themselves on the notice of one, without injuring the rights of the other. I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours." But they are such very different things!" -- That you think they cannot be compared together." To be sure not. People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour." And such is your definition of matrimony and dancing. Taken in that light certainly, their resemblance is not striking; but I think I could place them in such a view. You will allow, that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both, it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution; that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbours, or fancying that they should have been better off with anyone else. You will allow all this?" Yes, to be sure, as you state it, all this sounds very well; but still they are so very different. I cannot look upon them at all in the same light, nor think the same duties belong to them." In one respect, there certainly is a difference. In marriage, the man is supposed to provide for the support of the woman, the woman to make the home agreeable to the man; he is to purvey, and she is to smile. But in dancing, their duties are exactly changed; the agreeableness, the compliance are expected from him, while she furnishes the fan and the lavender water. That, I suppose, was the difference of duties which struck you, as rendering the conditions incapable of comparison." No, indeed, I never thought of that." Then I am quite at a loss. One thing, however, I must observe. This disposition on your side is rather alarming. You totally disallow any similarity in the obligations; and may I not thence infer that your notions of the duties of the dancing state are not so strict as your partner might wish? Have I not reason to fear that if the gentleman who spoke to you just now were to return, or if any other gentleman were to address you, there would be nothing to restrain you from conversing with him as long as you chose?" Mr. Thorpe is such a very particular friend of my brother's, that if he talks to me, I must talk to him again; but there are hardly three young men in the room besides him that I have any acquaintance with." And is that to be my only security? Alas, alas!" Nay, I am sure you cannot have a better; for if I do not know anybody, it is impossible for me to talk to them; and, besides, I do not want to talk to anybody." Now you have given me a security worth having; and I shall proceed with courage.

Michael Talbot yet lives, Mr. Black,” Simon Peter said to the dark entity before him. Mr. Black produced a large dark ledger from his robes. He spent a moment shifting through the voluminous pages. “Ah, here it is. That is impossible. I collected him on October 11th at 3:33 am. I can most assuredly tell you he is where he should be.” Simon Peter swept his arm, a vision of a small ranch home came into view, more importantly the lone figure sitting on the couch reading the Bible.

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

To bring home conviction to crowds it is necessary first of all to thoroughly comprehend the sentiments by which they are animated, to pretend to share these sentiments, then to endeavour to modify them by calling up, by means of rudimentary associations, certain eminently suggestive notions, to be capable, if need be, of going back to the point of view from which a start was made, and, above all, to divine from instant to instant the sentiments to which one’s discourse is giving birth.

From my chair I had a clear view of Hobie’s Noah’s Ark: paired elephants, zebras, carven beasts marching two by two, clear down to tiny hen and rooster and the bunnies and mice bringing up the rear. And the memory was located there, beyond words, a coded message from that first afternoon: rain streaming down the skylights, the homely file of creatures lined on the kitchen counter waiting to be saved. Noah: the great conservator, the great caretaker. “And—” he’d gotten up to make some coffee—“I

My Childhood Home I See Again by Abraham Lincoln My childhood home I see again, And sadden with the view; And still, as memory crowds my brain, There's pleasure in it too. O Memory! thou midway world 'Twixt earth and paradise, Where things decayed and loved ones lost In dreamy shadows rise, And, freed from all that's earthly vile, Seem hallowed, pure, and bright, Like scenes in some enchanted isle All bathed in liquid light. As dusky mountains please the eye When twilight chases day; As bugle-notes that, passing by, In distance die away; As leaving some grand waterfall, We, lingering, list its roar-- So memory will hallow all We've known, but know no more. Near twenty years have passed away Since here I bid farewell To woods and fields, and scenes of play, And playmates loved so well. Where many were, but few remain Of old familiar things; But seeing them, to mind again The lost and absent brings. The friends I left that parting day, How changed, as time has sped! Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray, And half of all are dead. I hear the loved survivors tell How nought from death could save, Till every sound appears a knell, And every spot a grave. I range the fields with pensive tread, And pace the hollow rooms, And feel (companion of the dead) I'm living in the tombs.

Grey refused to shy away from the intensity heating in Sirus's eyes to charcoal. As he waited for the man to roll over, Grey watched, unwavering, challenging the fire burning hot in Sirus's gaze. Sirus lifted up to his elbows, but didn't make any effort to shift his position. In fact, he looked downright defiant, and Grey's pulse started to race. "I want a nice view of my cock taking your sweet ass." "You want me to flip you over and hold you down, fuck you that way?" "Yeah, you want it." Grey said to Sirus. "But is it the fucking that has you leaking so damn hard, or is it the thought of force?" "Don't try to overtake me," Sirus bit Grey's lower lip and tugged, letting it pull through his teeth until it released, "unless you're ready to be the one who ends up on the bottom, with my cock buried in your ass." Grey wrapped his hand around Sirus's throat, yanked the man's head back and took his mouth in a hard, thrusting kiss, going deep and aggressive enough to make Sirus jerk and go compliant. An almost silent whimper escaped the man, begging without words for more. Knowing he was in charge fully once again, Grey reached between their bodies, positioned the head of his cock and drove his length home.

At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity--like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.

Martin: Yes, I'd like to go home and do some work. I'm writing a novel about women from the women's point of view.

Once I’d thought that love was the sum of its parts, the result of a collection of traits and experiences, like a structure steadily built from bricks layered over bricks. If you collect enough of them, there is love. But that had been a child’s view of the world. The bricks were important, but what they created was more than just a pile of stones. It was the difference between a house and a home. If the building burns down, something is still there that makes it home. If the memories are gone, something is still there that makes it love.

As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion —usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you.

I returned from the West, and brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, imprudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe.

When I visited George Bernard Shaw, in 1948, at his home in Aylot, a suburb of London, he was extremely anxious for me to tell him all that I knew about Ingersoll. During the course of the conversation, he told me that Ingersoll had made a tremendous impression upon him, and had exercised an influence upon him probably greater than that of any other man. He seemed particularly anxious to impress me with the importance of Ingersoll's influence upon his intellectual endeavors and accomplishments. In view of this admission, what percentage of the greatness of Shaw belongs to Ingersoll? If Ingersoll's influence upon so great an intellect as George Bernard Shaw was that extensive, what must have been his influence upon others? What seed of wisdom did he plant into the minds of others, and what accomplishments of theirs should be attributed to him? The world will never know. What about the countless thousands from whom he lifted the clouds of darkness and fear, and who were emancipated from the demoralizing dogmas and creeds of ignorance and superstition? What will be Ingersoll's influence upon the minds of future generations, who will come under the spell of his magic words, and who will be guided into the channels of human betterment by the unparalleled example of his courageous life? The debt the world owes Robert G. Ingersoll can never be paid.

For he did not, he would have said, care for women; he never felt at home or at ease with them; and that monstrous creature beginning to be talked about, the New Woman of the nineties, filled him with horror. He was a quiet, conventional person, and the world, viewed from the haven of Brookfield, seemed to him full of distasteful innovations; there was a fellow named Bernard Shaw who had the strangest and most reprehensible opinions; there was Ibsen, too, with his disturbing plays; and there was this new craze for bicycles which was being taken up by women equally with men. Chips did not hold with all this modern newness and freedom. He had a vague notion, if he ever formulated it, that nice women were weak, timid, and delicate, and that nice men treated them with a polite but rather distant chivalry.

In a universe devoid of life, any life at all would be immensely meaningful. We ARE that meaning. “And what we see, “says the poet Mary Oliver, “is the world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish.” As though life itself is the great, universal, unrequited love of all time. But there is even more to this. Deep mystery. We are the universe aware of itself. We let the miracle get lost in distractions. On a planet so rich with living companions, much of humanity sentences itself to solitary confinement. Late at night, I used to lie in my boat listening to radio calls from ships to families ashore. There was only one conversation, and it boils down to, “I love you and I miss you: come home safe.” Connections make us individuals. Ironic, isn’t it? The more connected, the more unique our life becomes…

A man has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of view, and before Selden left for college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it.

Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. [...] Any man can say things that are true of Abraham Lincoln, but no man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln. His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than are those of any other man of his age. He was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him. Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounced in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him, and patient under reproaches. [...] I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless.[...] Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln. Delivered at the Unveiling of The Freedmen’s Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.

Something in her was changing as she read the books. Life after life flashed before her eyes, yet she stayed safe from misery. And the urge to act things out onstage could be satisfied cheaply, and at home, and without the annoyance of other members of an acting company. Her ambition to leave faded and a kind of contentment set in. She hadn't exactly feared the word contentment, but had always associated it with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer a thing. To be restless, striving. That view was romantic. In truth, she was finding out, life was better lived in a tranquil pattern. As long as she could read, she never tired of the design of her days.

Now as I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how rather glorious it was that in two thousand years of human activity the only thing that had stirred the notice of the outside world even briefly was the finding of a Roman phallic pendant. The rest was just centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused- and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things. Even Einstein will have spent large parts of his life thinking about his holidays o new hammock or how dainty was the ankle on the young lady alighting from the tram across the street. These are the sort of things that fill our life and thoughts, and yet we treat them as incidental and hardly worthy of serious consideration. I don't know how many hours of my school years were spent considering the Missouri Compromise or the War of the Roses, but it was vastly more than I was ever encouraged or allowed to give to the history of eating. sleeping, having sex and endeavoring to be amused.

It was becoming more and more evident that Salem was a town that celebrated individuality, a real live-and-let-live kind of place. Melody felt a gut punch of regret. Her old nose would have fit in here. "Look!" She pointed at the multicolored car whizzing by. Its black door were from a Mercedes coupe, the white hood from a BMW; the silver trunk was Jaguar, the red convertible top was Lexus, the whitewall tires were Bentley, the sound system was Bose, and the music was classical. A hood ornament from each model dangled from the rear view mirror. Its license plate appropriately read MUTT. "That car looks like a moving Benton ad." "Or a pileup on Rodeo drive." Candace snapped a picture with her iPhone and e-mailed to her friends back home. They responded instantly with a shot of what they were doing. It must have involved the mall because Candace picked up her pace and began asking anyone under the age of fifty where the cool people hung out.

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn’t come until after a long chain of wins, until you’ve accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants—they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing about the illusion of control shouldn’t discourage you from attempting to carve a space for yourself out of whatever field you want to tackle. After all, doing nothing guarantees no results. But as you do so, remember most of the future is unforeseeable. Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it. Some things are predictable and manageable, but the farther away in time an event occurs, the less power you have over it. The farther away from your body and the more people involved, the less agency you wield. Like a billion rolls of a trillion dice, the factors at play are too complex, too random to truly manage. You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.

One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris. We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a "gap year" or by studying abroad. If more Americans worked for a summer teaching English at a school like Mukhtar's in Pakistan, or working at a hospital like HEAL Africa in Congo, our entire society would have a richer understanding of the world around us. And the rest of the world might also hold a more positive view of Americans.

I don't know what happens, what line gets crossed that transitions a girl from seeing her dad as the entirety of her world to viewing him as an embarrassment. For years, we were best friends. Fishing, the movies he slept through, cooking on the grill outside when he was home in the summers. I was his little girl, and he was everything. And then, he wasn't. I woke one day to realize that to be liked, I had to give up the one person who loved me. That's a pretty shitty way to introduce a girl to growing up.

She seemed less my wife and more a woman in her own right, more self-reliant and independent. I felt I was looking at her in the round, so to speak, as one views a statue, from all sides, not merely a bas-relief with the figure partially imprisoned in the stone.

I know this may be a disappointment for some of you, but I don’t believe there is only one right person for you. I think I fell in love with my wife, Harriet, from the first moment I saw her. Nevertheless, had she decided to marry someone else, I believe I would have met and fallen in love with someone else. I am eternally grateful that this didn’t happen, but I don’t believe she was my one chance at happiness in this life, nor was I hers. Another error you might easily make in dating is expecting to find perfection in the person you are with. The truth is, the only perfect people you might know are those you don’t know very well. Everyone has imperfections. Now, I’m not suggesting you lower your standards and marry someone with whom you can’t be happy. But one of the things I’ve realized as I’ve matured in life is that if someone is willing to accept me—imperfect as I am—then I should be willing to be patient with others’ imperfections as well. Since you won’t find perfection in your partner, and your partner won’t find it in you, your only chance at perfection is in creating perfection together. There are those who do not marry because they feel a lack of “magic” in the relationship. By “magic” I assume they mean sparks of attraction. Falling in love is a wonderful feeling, and I would never counsel you to marry someone you do not love. Nevertheless—and here is another thing that is sometimes hard to accept—that magic sparkle needs continuous polishing. When the magic endures in a relationship, it’s because the couple made it happen, not because it mystically appeared due to some cosmic force. Frankly, it takes work. For any relationship to survive, both parties bring their own magic with them and use that to sustain their love. Although I have said that I do not believe in a one-and-only soul mate for anyone, I do know this: once you commit to being married, your spouse becomes your soul mate, and it is your duty and responsibility to work every day to keep it that way. Once you have committed, the search for a soul mate is over. Our thoughts and actions turn from looking to creating. . . . Now, sisters, be gentle. It’s all right if you turn down requests for dates or proposals for marriage. But please do it gently. And brethren, please start asking! There are too many of our young women who never go on dates. Don’t suppose that certain girls would never go out with you. Sometimes they are wondering why no one asks them out. Just ask, and be prepared to move on if the answer is no. One of the trends we see in some parts of the world is our young people only “hanging out” in large groups rather than dating. While there is nothing wrong with getting together often with others your own age, I don’t know if you can really get to know individuals when you’re always in a group. One of the things you need to learn is how to have a conversation with a member of the opposite sex. A great way to learn this is by being alone with someone—talking without a net, so to speak. Dates don’t have to be—and in most cases shouldn’t be—expensive and over-planned affairs. When my wife and I moved from Germany to Salt Lake City, one of the things that most surprised us was the elaborate and sometimes stressful process young people had developed of asking for and accepting dates. Relax. Find simple ways to be together. One of my favorite things to do when I was young and looking for a date was to walk a young lady home after a Church meeting. Remember, your goal should not be to have a video of your date get a million views on YouTube. The goal is to get to know one individual person and learn how to develop a meaningful relationship with the opposite sex.

Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic party protected racial segregation and stymied all antilynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

I had spent enough time in France to know that the words 'chez moi' meant something a thousand times more profound than one's current home. 'Chez moi' was the place your parents came from, or maybe even the region of your parents' parents. The food you ate at Christmas, your favorite kind of cheese, your best childhood memories of summer vacation -- all of these derived from 'chez moi.' And even if you had never lived there, 'chez moi' was knitted into your identity; it colored the way you viewed the world and the way the world viewed you.

when shall I cease to regret you!—when learn to feel a home elsewhere!—Oh! happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence, perhaps, I may view you no more!—And you, ye well-known trees!—but you will continue the same. No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer!—No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade!—But who will remain to enjoy you?

CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR (1) Year of the Whopper (2) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (3) Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar (4) Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken (5) Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster (6) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic) (7) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (8) Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (9) Year of Glad 78

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring - I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my best poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it. Drips from the roof are plopping into the water-butt by the back door. The view through the windows above the sink is excessively drear. Beyond the dank garden in the courtyard are the ruined walls on the edge of the moat. Beyond the moat, the boggy ploughed fields stretch to the leaden sky. I tell myself that all the rain we have had lately is good for nature, and that at any moment spring will surge on us. I try to see leaves on the trees and the courtyard filled with sunlight. Unfortunately, the more my mind's eye sees green and gold, the more drained of all colour does the twilight seem. It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchen fire, near which my sister Rose is ironing - though she obviously can't see properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown. (I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularly fetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has a pink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but I have a neatish face. I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic - two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself was built in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to a fourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The whole of our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers in it. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at their full height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by. But I won't attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now. I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel - I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.

One little, two little, three little Indians” is not simply a familiar children’s nursery rhyme, it is also a celebration of North American genocide. This little ditty, many Indian militants argue, captures in lyrical form the belief held during the last century by most in­formed Americans that Indians were vanishing from the face of the earth. This view was popularly symbolized earlier in this century by a small figurine showing an exhausted warrior on horseback, head slumped over and bowed, entitled “End of the Trail,” which adorned the mantlepiece of many white homes. The

By using the idea of sweaty concepts, I am also trying to show how descriptive work is conceptual work. A concept is worldly, but it is also a reorientation to a world, a way of turning things around, a different slant on the same thing. More specifically, a sweaty concept is one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world. By this I mean description as angle or point of view: a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it. Sweat is bodily; we might sweat more during more strenuous and muscular activity. A sweaty concept might come out of a bodily experience that is trying. The task is to stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty. We might need not to eliminate the effort or labor from the writing. Not eliminating the effort or labor becomes an academic aim because we have been taught to tidy our texts, not to reveal the struggle we have in getting somewhere. Sweaty concepts are also generated by the practical experience of coming up against a world, or the practical experience of trying to transform a world.6

And so of course we won't define 'biblical womanhood' well using a list of chores or a job description, a schedule or income level. After all, healthy God-glorifying homes look as different as the image bearers that entered into the covenant, biblical doesn't mean a baptized version of any culture, ancient or modern. No, I am a biblical woman because I live and move and have my being in the daily reality of being a follower of Jesus, living in the reality of being loved, in full trust of my Abba. I am a biblical woman because I follow in the footsteps of all the biblical women who cam before me. Biblical womanhood isn't so different from biblical personhood. Biblical personhood becomes a dead list of rules when it becomes a law to keep. If we have a long list of rules—Put others first! Be generous! Give money! Believe this! Do that!— it's a dead religion from a glorified rule book.

In the early months of World War II, San Francisco's Fill-more district, or the Western Addition, experienced a visible revolution. On the surface it appeared to be totally peaceful and almost a refutation of the term “revolution.” The Yakamoto Sea Food Market quietly became Sammy's Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yashigira's Hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Beauté owned by Miss Clorinda Jackson. The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern Blacks. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. The Asian population dwindled before my eyes. I was unable to tell the Japanese from the Chinese and as yet found no real difference in the national origin of such sounds as Ching and Chan or Moto and Kano. As the Japanese disappeared, soundlessly and without protest, the Negroes entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just-released animosities and the relief of escape from Southern bonds. The Japanese area became San Francisco's Harlem in a matter of months. A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers' cabins. But the sensations of common relationship were missing. The Black newcomer had been recruited on the desiccated farm lands of Georgia and Mississippi by war-plant labor scouts. The chance to live in two-or three-story apartment buildings (which became instant slums), and to earn two-and even three-figured weekly checks, was blinding. For the first time he could think of himself as a Boss, a Spender. He was able to pay other people to work for him, i.e. the dry cleaners, taxi drivers, waitresses, etc. The shipyards and ammunition plants brought to booming life by the war let him know that he was needed and even appreciated. A completely alien yet very pleasant position for him to experience. Who could expect this man to share his new and dizzying importance with concern for a race that he had never known to exist? Another reason for his indifference to the Japanese removal was more subtle but was more profoundly felt. The Japanese were not whitefolks. Their eyes, language and customs belied the white skin and proved to their dark successors that since they didn't have to be feared, neither did they have to be considered. All this was decided unconsciously.

Some of his [Chester Bowles's] friends thought that his entire political career reflected his background, that he truly believed in the idea of the Republic, with an expanded town-hall concept of politics, of political leaders consulting with their constituency, hearing them out, reasoning with them, coming to terms with them, government old-fashioned and unmanipulative. Such governments truly had to reflect their constituencies. It was his view not just of America, but of the whole world. Bowles was fascinated by the political process in which people of various countries expressed themselves politically instead of following orders imposed by an imperious leadership. In a modern world where most politicians tended to see the world divided in a death struggle between Communism and free-world democracies, it was an old-fashioned view of politics; it meant that Bowles was less likely to judge a country on whether or not it was Communist, but on whether or not its government seemed to reflect genuine indigenous feeling. (If he was critical of the Soviet leadership, he was more sympathetic to Communist governments in the underdeveloped world.) He was less impressed by the form of a government than by his own impression of its sense of legitimacy. ... He did not particularly value money (indeed, he was ill at ease with it), he did not share the usual political ideas of the rich, and he was extremely aware of the hardships with which most Americans lived. Instead of hiring highly paid consultants and pollsters to conduct market research, Bowles did his own canvassing, going from door to door to hundreds of middle- and lower-class homes. That became a crucial part of his education; his theoretical liberalism became reinforced by what he learned about people’s lives during the Depression.

There are situations in life which are beyond one. The sensible man realizes this, and slides out of such situations, admitting himself beaten. Others try to grapple with them, but it never does any good. When affairs get in a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says "All right," and goes to sleep in his arm-chair. One's attitude towards Life's Little Difficulties should be that of the gentleman in the fable, who sat down on an acorn one day and happened to doze. The warmth of his body caused the acorn to germinate, and it grew so rapidly that, when he awoke, he found himself sitting in the fork of an oak sixty feet from the ground. He thought he would go home, but, finding this impossible, he altered his plans. "Well, well," he said, "if I cannot compel circumstances to my will, I can at least adapt my will to circumstances. I decide to remain here." Which he did, and had a not unpleasant time. The oak lacked some of the comforts of home, but the air was splendid and the view excellent. Today's Great Thought for Young Readers. Imitate this man.

Today, she is standing at the top of a mountain and appreciating the majestic panoramic view of mesmerizing Himalaya. As a kid, she used to look up in the sky and wish for wings to fly up to the mountains. And now after a long wait of many years, she is standing here and living her dream. It’s the moment when she can’t believe her eyes because what she always dreamed of has come alive. She looks with amazement as if she’s witnessing a miracle. It is the moment of her life. She just wants to feel it. There are beautiful clouds below her and there are snow clad mountain peaks emerging from those clouds. The white peaks shining in blue sky among white clouds look like glittering diamonds to her. The view of the large lush green meadow surrounded by mountains under blue sky with a rainbow circling the horizon has put her in a state of tranquility. As the sun starts drowning in the horizon, the sky begins to boast his mystical colours. The beautiful mix of pink, orange and red looks like creating a twilight saga. She opens her both arm and takes a deep breath to entwine with the nature. The glimmering rays of the moon are paying tribute to her by kissing her warm cheeks and her eyes twinkle in bright moon light. She raises her face towards the moon and senses the flood of memories which she wants to unleash. The cool breeze lifts her ruffled hair and blows her skirt up. She closes her eyes and breathes deep as if she wants to let her know that she is finally here and then she opens her eyes and finds herself on the same wheelchair inside a room with an empty wall in front of her eye. Tears rolls down from her eye but these are the tears of Joy because she is living her dreams today. The feelings comes to her mind while waiting for her daughter who is coming back home today after her first expedition of a high range mountain ~ AB

On Turgenev: He knew from Lavrov that I was an enthusiastic admirer of his writings; and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit to Antokolsky's studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazarov. I frankly replied, 'Bazaraov is an admirable painting of the nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as mush as you did your other heroes.' 'On the contrary, I loved him, intensely loved him,' Turgenev replied, with an unexpected vigor. 'When we get home I will show you my diary, in which I have noted how I wept when I had ended the novel with Bazarov's death.' Turgenev certainly loved the intellectual aspect of Bazarov. He so identified himself with the nihilist philosophy of his hero that he even kept a diary in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazarov's point of view. But I think that he admired him more than he loved him. In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the history makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one or the other of these characters. 'Analysis first of all, and then egotism, and therefore no faith,--an egotist cannot even believe in himself:' so he characterized Hamlet. 'Therefore he is a skeptic, and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote, who fights against windmills, and takes a barber's plate for the magic helmet of Mambrino (who of us has never made the same mistake?), is a leader of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions, march straight forward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which is seen, perhaps, by no one but themselves. They search, they fall, but they rise again and find it,--and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a skeptic, and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates it; Evil and Deceit are his enemies; and his skepticism is not indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume his will.' These thought of Turgenev give, I think, the true key for understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved Hamlet, and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazarov. He represented his superiority admirably well, he understood the tragic character of his isolated position, but he could not surround him with that tender, poetical love which he bestowed as on a sick friend, when his heroes approached the Hamlet type. It would have been out of place.

Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and fraught with the effects of moments from the past. My mom knew this and wanted me to know it too. On one visit home, I found an essay from the Washington Post by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen that had been cut out and left on my desk. My mom, and her mom before her, loved clipping newspaper articles and cartoons from the paper to send to Barbara and me. This article was different. Above it, my mom had written a note: “Dear Benny”—I was “Benny” from the time I was a toddler; the family folklore was that when we were babies, a man approached my parents, commenting on their cute baby boys, and my parents played along, pretending our names were Benjamin and Beauregard, later shorted to Benny and Bo. In her note, my mom confessed to doing many things that the writer of this piece had done: checking my hair, my appearance. As a teenager, I was continually annoyed by some of her requests: comb your hair; pull up your jeans (remember when low-rise jeans were a thing? It was not a good look, I can assure you!). “Your mother may assume it goes without saying that she is proud of you,” Deborah Tannen wrote. “Everyone knows that. And everyone probably also notices that your bangs are obscuring your vision—and their view of your eyes. Because others won’t say anything, your mother may feel it’s her obligation to tell you.” In leaving her note and the clipping, my mom was reminding me that she accepted and loved me—and that there is no perfect way to be a mother. While we might have questioned some of the things our mother said, we never questioned her love.

After this Daisy was never at home, and Winterbourne ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintances, because, as he perceived, these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too far. They ceased to invite her, and they intimated that they desired to express observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative - was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal. Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned towards her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness of innocence or from her being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class. It must be admitted that holding oneself to a belief in Daisy's "innocence" came to see Winterbourne more and more a matter of fine-spun gallantry. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was angry at finding himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady; he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal. From either view of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late.

That what happens in la frontera is so problematic is shocking. Viewed from the border itself, the conflict is not between two countries; it’s an argument between neighbors that occupy the same land but don’t share the same privileges, and it’s an argument often policed by people who don’t even live anywhere near that neighborhood.

What is classical education? It is language-intensive—not image-focused. It demands that students use and understand words, spoken and written, rather than communicating primarily through images. It is history-intensive, providing students with a comprehensive view of human endeavor from the beginning until now. It trains the mind to analyze and draw conclusions. It both requires and develops self-discipline—the ability to tackle a difficult task that doesn’t promise an immediate reward, for the sake of future gain. It produces literate, curious, intelligent students who have a wide range of interests and the ability to follow up on them. The Well-Trained Mind

When I stopped viewing girls as potential girlfriends and started treating them as sisters in Christ, I discovered the richness of true friendship. When I stopped worrying about who I was going to marry and began to trust God’s timing, I uncovered the incredible potential of serving God as a single. . . . I believe the time has come for Christians, male and female, to own up to the mess we’ve left behind in our selfish pursuit of short-term romance. Dating may seem an innocent game, but as I see it, we are sinning against each other. What excuse will we have when God asks us to account for our actions and attitudes in relationships? If God sees a sparrow fall (Matthew 10:29), do you think He could possibly overlook the broken hearts and scarred emotions we cause in relationships based on selfishness? Everyone around us may be playing the dating game. But at the end of our lives, we won’t answer to everyone. We’ll answer to God. . . . Long before Seventeen magazine ever gave teenagers tips on dating, people did things very differently. At the turn of the twentieth century, a guy and girl became romantically involved only if they planned to marry. If a young man spent time at a girl’s home, family and friends assumed that he intended to propose to her. But shifting attitudes in culture and the arrival of the automobile brought radical changes. The new “rules” allowed people to indulge in all the thrills of romantic love without having any intention of marriage. Author Beth Bailey documents these changes in a book whose title, From Front Porch to Backseat, says everything about the difference in society’s attitude when dating became the norm. Love and romance became things people could enjoy solely for their recreational value. Though much has changed since the 1920s, the tendency of dating relationships to move toward intimacy without commitment remains very much the same. . . . Many of the attitudes and practices of today’s dating relationships conflict with the lifestyle of smart love God wants us to live.

Romance Of A Youngest Daughter" Who will wed the Dowager’s youngest daughter, The Captain? filled with ale? He moored his expected boat to a stake in the water And stumbled on sea-legs into the Hall for mating, Only to be seduced by her lady-in-waiting, Round-bosomed, and not so pale. Or the thrifty burgher in boots and fancy vest With considered views of marriage? By the tidy scullery maid he was impressed Who kept that house from depreciation and dirt, But wife does double duty and takes no hurt, So he rode her home in his carriage. Never the spare young scholar antiquary Who was their next resort; They let him wait in the crypt of the Old Library And found him compromised with a Saxon book, Claiming his truelove Learning kept that nook And promised sweet disport. Desirée (of a mother’s christening) never shall wed Though fairest child of her womb; “We will have revenge,” her injured Ladyship said, “Henceforth the tightest nunnery be thy bed By the topmost stair! When the ill-bred lovers come We’ll say, She is not at home.

Dear, dear Norland!" said Marianne, as she wandered alone before the house, on the last evening of their being there; "when shall I cease to regret you? -- when learn to feel a home elsewhere? -- Oh happy house! could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! -- And you, ye well-known trees! -- but you will continue the same. -- No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! -- No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade! -- But who will remain to enjoy you?

as I [Eve] was the only cook in all Christendom at the time, the idea of not coming home to dinner never occurred to Adam... It is true that at times he criticised my cooking, but in view of certain ancestral limitations from which he suffered, I never had to sit quietly and listen to an exasperating disquisition on the Pies That Mother Used To Make...

...So speaks Man-Creating. Then, instantly, it all changes, and from Man-Creating I become simply Man-Alive--a member of society, a friend and neighbor, a son and brother of the human race. And when I look at what I have done from this point of view, suddenly I feel lower than a dog. I see all the pain and anguish I have caused to people I know, and I wonder how I could have done it, and how there could possibly be any justification for it--yes, even if what I wrote had been as great as "Lear," as eloquent as "Hamlet"...For what integrity is there that is not tainted with human frailty? If only I could tell myself that every word and phrase and incident in the book had been created at the top of my bent and with the impartial judgment of unrancorous detachment! But I know it is not true. So many words came back to me, so many whip-lash phrases, that must have been written in a spirit that had nothing to do with art or my integrity. We are such stuff that dust is made of, and where we fail--we fail! Is there, then, no such thing as a pure spirit in creation?

I once heard someone describe good instructors as those who bring oxygen into a room. I love that phrase, and I believe it applies artists as well. When we make art, we bring oxygen into the room. We give people something true and beautiful to breathe in. What if we stopped viewing creativity as something that takes away from our families and viewed it as something that breathes life into our families instead-through the meals we make, the pictures we take, the homes we decorate, the music we play, the stories we write, the gardens we grow? What if, instead of deeming creativity as trivial or selfish, we viewed our personal creativity as a gift, an offering, a contribution capable of blessing everyone around us?

Some foreigners wanted to make Afghanistan a better place, viewed Afghanistan as a home rather than a party, and even genuinely liked Afghans. But they were in the minority, and many had left, driven out by the corruption and the inability to accomplish anything. For most, Afghanistan was Kabul High, a way to get your war on, an adrenaline rush, a résumé line, a money factory. It was a place to escape, to run away from marriages and mistakes, a place to forget your age, your responsibilities, your past, a country in which to reinvent yourself. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but the motives of most people were not likely to help a fragile and corrupt country stuck somewhere between the seventh century and Vegas.

I think of the view from a favorite arroyo in the late afternoon, the east slope still bathed in sunlight, the far slope already full of dark shade and lengthening shadows. A cool breeze, as one can look across the plains, out over miles of homes and trees, and hear the faraway hum of traffic on the high-ways and see the golden light filtering through the mist-laden air.

Many religious fundamentalists around the world would like to see the establishment of theocracies — states where religion and government are closely intertwined. While some just reject separation of [name of place of worship] and state, others go further and insist that one religion’s tenets be made law. The normal arguments for a theocracy are that, for example, it would lend a greater sense of morality to the making and enforcement of laws. Or that as our laws were originally derived from some moral commandments in a particular religion, it makes sense to enthrone this religion as chief in the state. Basically, theocrats can talk until the cows come home about how great it would be if we were ruled by God, how great it would be if our laws followed God’s laws, and so forth. But this vision of theocracy will never come to be, and should never come to be. The fundamental problem with every theocracy is that is innately unfair. Not just unfair to those who do not follow the state religion, but also unfair to those who do not follow the state religion as it is understood and interpreted by the humans who run the state. After all, who really believes that all the Muslims in any of the Islamic theocracies we have today are happy? Those who believe the wrong things about Islam from one particular point of view are mercilessly vilified — the present civil war in Iraq is an excellent example. Why a theocracy would be unfair to those who don’t practice the state religion should be very apparent. Whatever flowery talk there may be of equality, if the laws are derived from one religion, then the laws will favour that religion, like it or not. At this point, supporters of theocracy often get riled up. This is because they can point topassages in their holy book which they argue justify their claims that their religion would be fair to all. On occasion they will also argue that their particular God’s laws are perfect.

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst.

If the change be not from outward circumstances, it must be from within; it must be nature, man’s nature, which has done the business for Captain Benwick.’ ‘No, no, it is not man’s nature. I will not allow it to be more man’s nature than woman’s to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather.’ ‘Your feelings may be the strongest,’ replied Anne, ‘but the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer-lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments. Nay, it would be too hard upon you, if it were otherwise. You have difficulties, and privations, and dangers enough to struggle with. You are always labouring and toiling, exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home, country, friends, all quitted. Neither time, nor health, nor life, to be called your own. It would be to hard indeed if woman’s feelings were to be added to all this…

Not one of those worlds will be identical to Earth. A few will be hospitable; most will appear hostile. Many will be achingly beautiful. In some worlds there will be many suns in the daytime sky, many moons in the heavens at night, or great particle ring systems soaring from horizon to horizon. Some moons will be so close that their planet will loom high in the heavens, covering half the sky. And some worlds will look out onto a vast gaseous nebula, the remains of an ordinary star that once was and is no longer. In all those skies, rich in distant and exotic constellations, there will be a faint yellow star—perhaps barely seen by the naked eye, perhaps visible only through the telescope—the home star of the fleet of interstellar transports exploring this tiny region of the great Milky Way Galaxy. The themes of space and time are, as we have seen, intertwined. Worlds and stars, like people, are born, live and die. The lifetime of a human being is measured in decades; the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. In all those other worlds in space there are events in progress, occurrences that will determine their futures. And on our small planet, this moment in history is a historical branch point as profound as the confrontation of the Ionian scientists with the mystics 2,500 years ago. What we do with our world in this time will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully determine the destiny of our descendants and their fate, if any, among the stars.

There is no man,’ he began, ‘however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grand sons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming that one is a painter—extracted something that goes beyond them.

But the issue of children and who looks after them has become, in my view, profoundly political, and so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood without explaining to some degree how I found the time to write it. For the first six months of Albertine’s life I looked after her at home while my partner continued to work. This experience forcefully revealed to me something to which I had never given much thought: the fact that after a child is born the lives of its mother and father diverge, so that where before they were living in a state of some equality, now they exist in a sort of feudal relation to each other. A day spent at home caring for a child could not be more different from a day spent working in an office. Whatever their relative merits, they are days spent on opposite sides of the world.

Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time. We were born grasping after freedom, in a house that could not hold us; every day we get closer and closer to our destination, until our features come into view. Soon, everyone further on down the family line can see us from their seats at the table; we’re coming home.

Mrs. Weston's friends were all made happy by her safety; and if the satisfaction of her well-doing could be increased to Emma, it was by knowing her to be the mother of a little girl. She had been decided in wishing for a Miss Weston. She would not acknowledge that it was with any view of making a match for her, hereafter, with either of Isabella's sons; but she was convinced that a daughter would suit both father and mother best. It would be a great comfort to Mr. Weston, as he grew older— and even Mr. Weston might be growing older ten years hence—to have his fireside enlivened by the sports and the nonsense, the freaks and the fancies of a child never banished from home; and Mrs. Weston— no one could doubt that a daughter would be most to her; and it would be quite a pity that any one who so well knew how to teach, should not have their powers in exercise again.

THE MEETING" "Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn, That August nightfall, as I crossed the down Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited Motionless in the mist, with downcast head And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name And why he lingered at so lonely a place. “I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock. No fences barred our progress and we’d travel Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top To find a missing straggler or set snares By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs. “I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts, Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead, Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song Of lark and pewit melodied my toil. I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint. “And then I was a carter. With my skill I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time, My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days On this same slope where you now stand, my friend, I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields. “My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts Few folk remember me: and though you stare Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team. Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers: Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble, On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur, In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.” My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme; From far across the down a barn owl shouted, Circling the silence of that summer evening: But in an instant, as I stepped towards him Striving to view his face, his contour altered. Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.

First I smell that smell and am overcome with a sensation of elation. Like a tight faucet turned open, everything floods from me. I scan the view, take a deep breath, and inevitably utter, "God, I love it here." I stride quickly to where the sand is still wet from the previous tide and then, and then I am gone. There is no thinking, just being. I have no awareness of time or of myself. If I am searching for glass, it is rote, with no more or less consciousness than a jellyfish searching for sustenance. It is not mindlessness or oblivion, as I am wholly aware, but in a way that preempts any reality outside of the moment. There I am seaweed, I am water, I am stone, I am fish. I am a grain of sand, warm in the sun. I am reduced to nothing, but part of everything. I am home, I am free, I am one with the sea, I am the primordial me, and the glass is just my excuse to be there.

And then, sir,' he added, 'you would oblige me infinitely by marrying us, if you have the leisure.' Captain Broke paused for a moment: was this a strangely-timed pleasantry? Judging from the Doctor's demeanour and his pale, determined face, it was not. Should he wish him joy of the occasion? Perhaps, in view of Jack's silence and Maturin's cool, matter-of-fact, unfestive manner, that might be inappropriate. He remembered his own wedding-day and the desperate feeling of being caught on a leeshore in a gale of wind, unable to claw off, tide setting hard against him, anchors coming home. He said, 'I should be very happy, sir. But I have never performed the manoeuvre -that is, the ceremony - and I am not sure of the forms nor of the extent of my powers. You will allow me to consult the Printed Instructions, and let you know how far I may be of service to you and the lady.' Stephen bowed and walked off.

One lovely twilight, with the near garden in riotous bloom, Genji stepped onto a gallery that gave him a view of the sea, and such was the supernal grace of his motionless figure that he seemed in that setting not to be of this world at all. Over soft white silk twill and aster 49 he wore a dress cloak of deep blue, its sash only very casually tied; and his voice slowly chanting “I, a disciple of the Buddha Shakyamuni…” 50 was more beautiful than any they had ever heard before. From boats rowing by at sea came a chorus of singing voices. With a pang he watched them, dim in the offing, like little birds borne on the waters, and sank into a reverie as cries from lines of geese on high mingled with the creaking of oars, until tears welled forth, and he brushed them away with a hand so gracefully pale against the black of his rosary that the young gentlemen pining for their sweethearts at home were all consoled.

Dear lady, ... dear gentleman, reader, [it's] not right ... to put down this writer on his writing ... And I'll tell you why, too: it hurts, that's why.... People try to understand why writers commit suicide by jumping off boats or by alcoholism or by being heroic continuously or by rope or gun or drug or knife or water, and ... I can tell you straight out, ... it is reading slurring remarks about their writing that drives writers to the grave. Dirty remarks passed by ... dirty but damned nicely educated and very highly-paid ladies and gentlemen have the effect of killing writers. Yes, that's right. Dirty words ... in slick paper magazines read by smart people do assassinate writers. ... And boy let me tell you I am all for it, even when by some ... misunderstanding the dirty words are directed to me rather than to the party really deserving them. Accidents happen, dear clever reviewer or critic, and let it not be said that William Saroyan is one not to see a situation from the point of view of the other party, ... and I shall be the first to defend your right to be critical and even sarcastic, knowing full well that it is not about me and my writing, although my name is by mistake taken in vain by you. ... But go on, go on, do your good clever writing, every one of you, I am home, your are home, and we are each of us not yet on Variety's Necrology list, so if we can't take it, who can?

You’ve been wandering about Juarez like a zombie in a though experiment, an experiment in collective guilt, where the zombie is shown the morgue-slab photos, and responds by saying “I’m truly sorry”, and making out a check to Amnesty International, or Nuestra Hijas de Regreso a Casa, or maybe Save the Children or Habitat for Humanity, and then sealing the whole deal by forging his own signature. What’s that you say? You didn’t know it was forged? No wonder the authorities are beginning to get suspicious. We’re sorry to be the ones to break this to you, but the violence that man is doing to his home is not some sort of thought experiment, and the last thing on earth the world needs now is yet another anonymous onlooker, trying to get the picture; our drawing isn’t a drawing exactly, it’s more of a kind of framing device, and you, mon frère, so slow to get the picture, are not only under suspicion, but about to be framed. We didn’t exactly select you at random, and you’re not precisely The Viewer in the abstract sense, and we’re not about to give you a bird’s eye view of anything, or a view of Juarez from high atop a smelting stack; we’re about to put you back exactly where you belong, wearing Douchebag’s shoes, in the middle of the picture, because while Douchebag isn’t you in any literal sense, you appear to be standing in Douchebag shoes, and Douchebag, unfortunately, is now your problem.

My name is Lev," said Lev. "My name is Lydia," said the woman. And they shook hands, Lev's hand holding the scrunched-up kerchief and Lydia's hand rough with salt and smelling of egg, and then Lev asked, "What are you planning to do in En gland?" and Lydia said, "I have some interviews in London for jobs as a translator." "That sounds promising." "I hope so. I was a teacher of English at School 237 in Yarbl, so my language is very colloquial." Lev looked at Lydia. It wasn't difficult to imagine her standing in front of a class and writing words on a blackboard. He said, "I wonder why you're leaving our country when you had a good job at School 237 in Yarbl?" "Well," said Lydia, "I became very tired of the view from my window. Every day, summer and winter, I looked out at the schoolyard and the high fence and the apartment block beyond, and I began to imagine I would die seeing these things, and I didn't want this. I expect you understand what I mean?

Suppose we say that wilderness invokes nostalgia, a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia for the lost America our forefathers knew. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit. Romance—but not to be dismissed on that account. The romantic view, while not the whole of truth, is a necessary part of the whole truth. But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need—if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us—if only we were worthy of it.

Not unlike Saul, many leaders in our homes, corporations, and churches are more concerned with their goals than with their offspring. Because of this attitude, these leaders view God’s people as resources to serve their vision instead of seeing the vision as the vehicle to serve the people. The success of the vision justifies the cost of wounded lives and shattered people. Justice, mercy, integrity, and love are compromised for success. Decisions are based on money, numbers, and results.

The more I know you, the more I wonder who you are.” He counted off her qualities on his fingers. “You have the accent of a lady. You dress like a peasant. You shoot like a marksman. You view the world cynically, yet you venerate Miss Victorine. Your face and body would be the envy of a young goddess, yet you sport an air of innocence. And that innocence hides a criminal mind and the cheek to pull off the most outrageous of felonies.” “So I’m Athena, the goddess of war.” “Definitely not Diana, the goddess of virginity.” As the last shot hit home, he saw Amy’s mask slip. Blood rushed to her face. She bit her lip and looked toward the stairs as if only now realizing she could have—should have—left this whole discussion behind. He laughed softly, triumphantly. “Or perhaps I’m mistaken. Perhaps you have more in common with Diana than I thought.” “Pray remember, sir, that Diana was also the goddess of the hunt.” Amy leaned across the table, intent on making her point—but the blush still played across her cheeks. “She carried a bow and arrow, and she always bagged her quarry. Have a look at the bullet hole in the rock behind you and remember my skill and my cynicism. For we do know things about each other. I know that if you escape, you’ll make sure I’m hung from a gibbet. You know that if I catch you escaping, I’ll shoot you through the heart. Remember that as you cast longing glances toward the window.” With a flourish, she picked up the breakfast tray and walked up the stairs. Jermyn had learned something else about Amy. She liked to have the last word.

This would not have come as news to Jason Fried, cofounder of the web application company 37signals. For ten years, beginning in 2000, Fried asked hundreds of people (mostly designers, programmers, and writers) where they liked to work when they needed to get something done. He found that they went anywhere but their offices, which were too noisy and full of interruptions. That’s why, of Fried’s sixteen employees, only eight live in Chicago, where 37signals is based, and even they are not required to show up for work, even for meetings. Especially not for meetings, which Fried views as “toxic.” Fried is not anti-collaboration—37signals’ home page touts its products’ ability to make collaboration productive and pleasant. But he prefers passive forms of collaboration like e-mail, instant messaging, and online chat tools. His advice for other employers? “Cancel your next meeting,” he advises. “Don’t reschedule it. Erase it from memory.” He also suggests “No-Talk Thursdays,” one day a week in which employees aren’t allowed to speak to each other.

The fireside is an emblem of the future heavenly home...To obtain the highest conception of the calling of a man and a woman in the capacity of parents, one must look upon them from an educational point of view, for from no other does the grandeuer of this sacred relationship so well present itself to the mind with all its intricate complexity. The home is the sanctuary of the human race, where each generation is consecrated for its life's mission. The parents are the high priests, responsible to God for the spirit of their ministry.

We needed coffee but we'd got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we retuned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind

The core components of high EQ are the following: The ability to self-soothe. The key to managing emotion is to allow, acknowledge, and tolerate our intense emotions so that they evaporate, without getting stuck in them or taking actions we’ll later regret. Self-soothing is what enables us to manage our anxiety and upsets, which in turn allows us to work through emotionally charged issues in a constructive way. Emotional self-awareness and acceptance. If we don’t understand the emotions washing over us, they scare us, and we can’t tolerate them. We repress our hurt, fear, or disappointment. Those emotions, no longer regulated by our conscious mind, have a way of popping out unmodulated, as when a preschooler socks his sister or we (as adults) lose our tempers or eat a pint of ice cream. By contrast, children raised in a home in which there are limits on behavior but not on feelings grow up understanding that all emotions are acceptable, a part of being human. That understanding gives them more control over their emotions. Impulse control. Emotional intelligence liberates us from knee-jerk emotional reactions. A child (or adult) with high EQ will act rather than react and problem-solve rather than blame. It doesn’t mean you never get angry or anxious, only that you don’t fly off the handle. As a result, our lives and relationships work better. Empathy. Empathy is the ability to see and feel something from the other’s point of view. When you’re adept at understanding the mental and emotional states of other people, you resolve differences constructively and connect deeply with others. Naturally, empathy makes us better communicators.

Hi Liz! You're home!" I replied, my voice louder than it probably should've been. "Hey, how's it going?" she asked, her eyes narrowing and moving shiftily from me to Peter and back. "It's going good. Even better. Is it? Yeah, I guess. Good. Really good. Totally better," I babbled, while Peter could only manage a raised hand in greeting and a weird phrase like, "Down the basement." Liz rolled her eyes and trudged off, calling back as she vanished from view, "I want the results of pregnancy tests from both of you by the time I get out of the shower!

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

You shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You CAN go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

When an independent company undertakes to travel across the plains, they are generally too independent for their own safety and good. There never was and never will be a people in heaven nor on earth, in time nor in eternity, that can be considered truly and entirely independent of counsel and direction. Our independent companies entertain the same mistaken views of independence as people generally do of the independence of a Republican Government. Man in his ignorance is impatient of control, and when he finds himself from under its influence he supposes that he is then independent, or, in other words, that he is a free man. Independence so viewed and so employed, either individually or collectively, religiously or politically, must open a wide arena of action for all the evil, selfish and malignant qualities of depraved men, introducing distraction into every ramification of society, destroying confidence, checking the onward progress of industry and universal prosperity, and bringing in famine, pestilence and destruction everywhere. . . . Individual self-government lies at the root of all true and effective government, whether in heaven or on earth. Those who govern should be wiser and better than the governed, that the lesser may be blessed of the greater. Were this so, then the people would willingly repose their dearest interests to the trusts of their rulers or leaders, and with a feeling of pleasure bow to and carry out to the letter their instructions and conclusions on all matters that pertained to the general good. This will apply to great kingdoms and mighty nations, to small companies of immigrants crossing the plains, or to the home circle. A Republican Government in the hands of a wicked people must terminate in woe to that people, but in the hands of the righteous it is everlasting, while its power reaches to heaven.

...spirit was wrenched from its organic origins, separated from the body - the mother {woman} and the goddess - the mother Earth or Earth Goddess. The new manifestation of spirit, projected in hierarchical terms, emanated from the father in whom the 'spirit of life' as sperm was ejected as minuscule baby into the womb {viewed as nutrient value only}. The father as reflected in early patriarchal mythology and later patriarchal science was believed the sole parent. The cosmic dimension of the same movement ripped spirit from its earth people origin and placed it above the people, in the sky as originating in an all-powerful Father - or male God. In patriarchal religious ritual spirit came to be owned and controlled as property in the one and same manner as women were owned. Patriarchs usurped the exclusive right to define, interpret, and evoke the spirit out of their experience and project it onto women and children, as they deemed that women and children 'should' experience it. The moving verb 'transcending' {synonymous with breath and spirit} changed to a static noun, 'transcendence,' separated from the body and woman. The hierarchical direction assumed ultimacy - 'down from up above' instead of the former direction of 'up from down under.

People shouldn't be boxed and sorted like goods in a store. We have no right to label or judge others. Assume whether someone is good or bad from the point of view of the subjectivity. Because no one likes to be treated like that. But society gossiped, was busy judging and talking about other people. So many worries that eventually lead to unrest. All of that cannot be separated from our mindset, point of view, knowledge and also our concern for others. We cannot let other people dictate our lives. We don't want other people to come into our homes and break into our bedrooms and mess up our kitchen, dining table and refrigerator.

Getting Started Setting up your Kindle Oasis Kindle controls Status indicators Keyboard Network connectivity VoiceView screen reader Special Offers and Sponsored Screensavers Chapter 2 Navigating Your Kindle The Kindle Home screen Toolbars Tap zones Chapter 3 Acquiring & Managing Kindle Content Shop for Kindle and Audible content anytime, anywhere Recommended content Managing your Kindle Library Device and Cloud storage Removing items from your Kindle Chapter 4 Reading Kindle Documents Understanding Kindle display technology Customizing your text display Comic books Children's books Images Tables Interacting with your content Navigating a book Chapter 5 Playing Audible Books Pairing a Bluetooth audio device Using the Audible Player Audiobook bookmarks Downloading Audible books Audiobook Library Management Chapter 6 Features X-Ray Word Wise Vocabulary Builder Amazon FreeTime (Amazon Fire for Kids in the UK) Managing your Amazon Household Goodreads on Kindle Time to Read Chapter 7 Getting More from Your Kindle Oasis Carrying and reading personal documents Reading Kindle content on other devices Sharing Using your Kindle with your computer Using the Experimental Web Browser Chapter 8 Settings Customizing your Kindle settings The Settings contextual menu Chapter 9 Finding Additional Assistance Appendix A Product Information

Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit—just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await the next transit in 1769. With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments, and had everything in a state of perfect readiness. On the morning of the second transit, June 4, 1769, he awoke to a fine day, but, just as Venus began its pass, a cloud slid in front of the Sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit: three hours, fourteen minutes, and seven seconds. Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year. Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship. It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast. When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.

Silence is also a form of speaking. They’re exactly alike. It’s a basic component of language. We’re always selecting what we say and what we don’t. Why do we say one thing and not the other? And we do this instinctively, too, because no matter what we’re talking about, there’s more that doesn’t get said than does. And this isn’t always to hide things—it’s simply part of an instinctive selection in our speech. This selection varies from one person to the next, so that no matter how many people describe the same thing, the descriptions are different, the point of view is different. And even if there is a similar viewpoint, people make different choices as to what is said or not said. This was very clear to me, coming from the village, since the people there never said more than they absolutely needed to. When I was fifteen and went to the city, I was amazed at how much people talked and how much of that talk was pointless. And how much people talked about themselves—that was totally alien to me. For me, silence had always been another form of communication. After all, you can tell so much just by looking at a person. At home we always knew about each other even if we didn’t talk about ourselves all the time. I encountered a lot of silence elsewhere as well. There was the silence that was self-imposed, because you could never say what you really thought.

What about you, Mr. Shaw?" she asked. "Are your affections engaged by someone back home?" He shook his head at once. "I'm afraid that I share McKenna's rather skeptical view of the benefits of marriage." "I think you will fall in love someday." "Doubtful. I'm afraid that particular emotion is unknown to me..." Suddenly his voice faded into silence. He set his cup down as he stared off into the distance with sudden alertness. "Mr. Shaw?" As Aline followed his gaze, she realized what he had seen- Livia, wearing a pastel flower-printed walking dress as she headed to one of the forest trails leading away from the manor. A straw bonnet adorned with a sprig of fresh daisies swung from her fingers as she held it by the ribbons. Gideon Shaw stood so quickly that his chair threatened to topple backward. "Pardon," he said to Aline, tossing his napkin to the table. "The figment of my imagination has reappeared- and I'm going to catch her." "Of course," Aline said, struggling not to laugh. "Good luck, Mr. Shaw." "Thanks." He was gone in a flash, descending one side of the U-shaped stone staircase with the ease of a cat. Once he reached the terraced gardens, he cut across the lawn with long, ground-eating strides, just short of breaking into a run. Standing to better her view of his progress, Aline couldn't suppress a mocking grin. "Why, Mr. Shaw... I thought there was nothing in life you wanted badly enough to chase after it.

As the person who is principally interested in any event is pleased with our sympathy, and hurt by the want of it, so we, too, seem to be pleased when we are able to sympathize with him, and to be hurt when we are unable to do so. We run not only to congratulate the successful, but to condole with the afflicted; and the pleasure which we find in the conversation of one whom in all the passions of his heart we can entirely sympathize with, seems to do more than compensate the painfulness of that sorrow with which the view of his situation affects us. On the contrary, it is always disagreeable to feel that we cannot sympathize with him, and instead of being pleased with this exemption from sympathetic pain, it hurts us to find that we cannot share his uneasiness. If we hear a person loudly lamenting his misfortunes, which, however, upon bringing the case home to ourselves, we feel, can produce no such violent effect upon us, we are shocked at his grief; and, because we cannot enter into it, call it pusillanimity and weakness. It gives us the spleen, on the other hand, to see another too happy or too much elevated, as we call it, with any little piece of good fortune. We are disobliged even with his joy; and, because we cannot go along with it, call it levity and folly. We are even put out of humour if our companion laughs louder or longer at a joke than we think it deserves; that is, than we feel that we ourselves could laugh at it.

I know that a brighter view may be taken, and if the sadder has been emphasized in these letters, it is only because we feel you know less about it. For more has been written about the successes than about the failures, and it seems to us that it is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. We are not winning them as we should, because the fact of the reverses is so little realized, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be if the position were thoroughly understood. Reinforcements of men and women are needed, but, far above all, reinforcements of prayer. And so we have tried to tell you the truth the uninteresting, unromantic truth about the heathen as we find them, the work as it is. More workers are needed. No words can tell how much they are needed, how much they are wanted here. But we will never try to allure anyone to think of coming by painting coloured pictures, when the facts are in black and white. What if black and white will never attract like colours ? We care not for it ; our business is to tell the truth. The work is not a pretty thing, to be looked at and admired. It is a fight. And battlefields are not beautiful. But if one is truly called of God, all the difficulties and discouragements only intensify the Call. If things were easier there would be less need. The greater the need, the clearer the Call rings through one, the deeper the conviction grows: it was God s Call. And as one obeys it, there is the joy of obedience, quite apart from the joy of success. There is joy in being with Jesus in a place where His friends are few ; and sometimes, when one would least expect it, coming home tired out and disheartened after a day in an opposing or indifferent town, suddenly how, you can hardly tell such a wave of the joy of Jesus flows over you and through you, that you are stilled with the sense of utter joy. Then, when you see Him winning souls, or hear of your comrades victories, oh ! all that is within you sings, I have more than an overweight of joy !

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

As a displaced community, Tibetans often speak of learning to look to the future without forsaking tradition. And as Tibetans continue their flight from Tibet to India or Nepal and then scatter farther and farther away from the physical land of Tibet, the conversations on identity and culture become more crucial and complex. As the distance increases so does the desperation in keeping Tibet as the eventual home, our aspired home. Yet it is the loss of Tibet and its very distance that also awakens us to view patriotism and identity in new ways that are not guided solely by Buddhist philosophy. Self-assertion- an approach avoided in the past because of the Buddhist aspiration to prevent focus on the self- enters our identity as Tibetans.

The traveler, alas, is at the mercy of his aesthetic sensations. A fine evening, a seat under a plant tree, the smile of a peasant girl, the scent of orange flower, a view over mountains or river—and he feels at home. His country is not the land where his friends live, but the wider territory of beautiful things—the territory where, if one agrees with Stendhal, he collects those promissory notes of happiness which give a precious fraction of their value when they are pocketed. He is therefore continually subject to accidents. An ugly town, a rainy day, and unsympathetic hotel, and he is at once a double exile—equally far from his native land and from that ideal country which he has set out to visit. The only recourse left is a bottle of wine.

In a sky swarming with uncountable stars, clouds endlessly flowing, and planets wandering, always and forever there has been just one moon and one sun. To our ancestors, these two mysterious bodies reflected the female and the male essences. From Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, people attributed the Sun’s constancy and power to his masculinity; the Moon’s changeability, unspeakable beauty, and monthly cycles were signs of her femininity. To human eyes turned toward the sky 100,000 years ago, they appeared identical in size, as they do to our eyes today. In a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon fits so precisely over that of the sun that the naked eye can see solar flares leaping into space from behind. But while they appear precisely the same size to terrestrial observers, scientists long ago determined that the true diameter of the sun is about four hundred times that of the moon. Yet incredibly, the sun’s distance from Earth is roughly four hundred times that of the moon’s, thus bringing them into unlikely balance when viewed from the only planet with anyone around to notice.22 Some will say, “Interesting coincidence.” Others will wonder whether there isn’t an extraordinary message contained in this celestial convergence of difference and similarity, intimacy and distance, rhythmic constancy and cyclical change. Like our distant ancestors, we watch the eternal dance of our sun and our moon, looking for clues to the nature of man and woman, masculine and feminine here at home.

This scroll, five hundred years old and more, had been inspired by her favorite, the great Wang Wei, master of landscape art, who had painted the scenes from his own home, where he lived for thirty years before he died. Now behind the palace walls on this winter’s day, where she could see only sky and falling snow, Tzu His gazed upon the green landscapes of continuing spring. One landscape melted into another as slowly she unrolled the scroll, so that she might dwell upon every detail of tree and brook and distant hillside. So did she, in imagination, pass beyond the high walls which enclosed her, and she traveled through a delectable country, beside flowing brooks and spreading lakes, and following the ever-flowing river she crossed over wooden bridges and climbed the stony pathways upon a high mountainside and thence looked down a gorge to see a torrent fed by still higher springs, and breaking into waterfalls as it traveled toward the plains. Down from the mountain again she came, past small villages nestling in pine forests and into the warmer valleys among bamboo groves, and she paused in a poet’s pavilion, and so reached at last the shore where the river lost itself in a bay. There among the reeds a fisherman’s boat rose and fell upon the rising tide. Here the river ended, its horizon the open sea and the misted mountains of infinity. This scroll, Lady Miao had once told her, was the artist’s picture of the human soul, passing through the pleasantest scenes of earth to the last view of the unknown future, far beyond.

The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender...The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband...The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. 1872

ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible. “Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination. As Iceland proves, misery has its own tasty appeal. A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely. The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: “Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise.” We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed each morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. Every now and then, though, my travels resurface and in unexpected ways. My iPod crashed the other day. I lost my entire music collection, nearly two thousand songs. In the past, I would have gone through the roof with rage. This time, though, my anger dissipated like a summer thunderstorm and, to my surprise, I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try my best to squelch it before it grows. I don’t take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can recognize a genuine smile from twenty yards. I have a newfound appreciation for fresh fruits and vegetables. Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura,

The entire idea of it was arrogant and defiant and grandiose. Anna loved it. As she walked across a wide empty plain of steel that should have been covered in topsoil and crops, she thought that this audaciousness was exactly what humanity had lost somewhere in the last couple of centuries. When ancient maritime explorers had climbed into their creaking wooden ships and tried to find ways to cross the great oceans of Earth, had their voyage been any less dangerous than the one the Mormons had been planning to attempt? The end point any less mysterious? But in both cases, they’d been driven to find out what was on the other side of the long trip. Driven by a need to see shores no one else had ever seen before. Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it. A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there. Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.

Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the work he does in his office or factory as essential to the har­monious functioning of the world. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be, and he laughs at the idea that he might equally well be wearing a Roman toga or medieval armor. He respects and envies a minister of state or a bank director, and regards the possession of a considerable amount of money the main guarantee of peace and security. He cannot believe that one day a rider may appear on a street he knows well, where cats sleep and chil­dren play, and start catching passers-by with his lasso. He is accustomed to satisfying those of his physio­logical needs which are considered private as dis­creetly as possible, without realizing that such a pattern of behavior is not common to all human so­cieties. In a word, he behaves a little like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, bustling about in a shack poised precariously on the edge of a cliff. His first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes his faith in the "naturalness" of his world. The wind scatters papers from hastily evacuated offices, papers labeled "Con­fidential" or "Top Secret" that evoke visions of safes, keys, conferences, couriers, and secretaries. Now the wind blows them through the street for anyone to read; yet no one does, for each man is more urgently concerned with finding a loaf of bread. Strangely enough, the world goes on even though the offices and secret files have lost all meaning. Farther down the street, he stops before a house split in half by a bomb, the privacy of people's homes-the family smells, the warmth of the beehive life, the furniture preserving the memory of loves and hatreds-cut open to public view. The house itself, no longer a rock, but a scaffolding of plaster, concrete, and brick; and on the third floor, a solitary white bath­ tub, rain-rinsed of all recollection of those who once bathed in it. Its formerly influential and respected owners, now destitute, walk the fields in search of stray potatoes. Thus overnight money loses its value and becomes a meaningless mass of printed paper. His walk takes him past a little boy poking a stick into a heap of smoking ruins and whistling a song about the great leader who will preserve the nation against all enemies. The song remains, but the leader of yesterday is already part of an extinct past.

If mind belongs to humans alone, then stones, trees, and streams become mere objects of human tinkering. We can plunder the earth's resources with impunity, treating creeks and mountaintops in Kentucky or rivers in India or forests in northwest America as if they existed only for economic development. Systems of land and river become inert chunks of lifeless mud or mechanical runs of H2O rather than the living, breathing bodies upon which we and all other creatures depend for our very lives. Not to mention what 'nature as machine' has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being. When we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well as the delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation -- a lonely spot indeed. Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts become the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams -- if we attend to them at all -- are but the cast-offs of yesterday's overactive brain. Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exingencies of mud or leaf, shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not, like rocks, made of soil. And then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own view of reality has sunk us into an unbearable solipsism, an agony of separateness -- from loved ones, from other creatures, from rich but unruly emotions, in short, from our ability to connect, through senses and feeling and imagination, with the world that is our home.

Harman was right: those pictures were worse. But, leaving aside the fact that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don't get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily reside in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent in large part because they have a terrible reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols. Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man being tortured to death⁠—or more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of Christ's savage death are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, with his battered flesh scabbed and bleeding and bloated and discolored beneath the pitiless Judean desert sun, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes, or to wear an icon of a man being executed around their necks as as an emblem of peace and hope and human fellowship? Photography is too frank to allow for the notion of suffering as noble and ennobling...

The thing I remember from the Letters Page in those antique days was the way the OBs signed off. There was Yours faithfully, Yours sincerely, and I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. But the ones I always looked for - and which I took to be the true sign of an Old Bastard - simply ended like this: Yours etc. And then the newspaper drew even more attention to the sign-off by printing it: Yours &c. Yours &c. I used to muse about that. What did it mean? Where did it come from? I imagined some bespatted captain of industry dictating his OB’s views to his secretary for transmission to the Newspaper of Record which he doubtless referred to with jocund familiarity as ‘The Thunderer’. When his oratorical belch was complete, he would say ‘Yours, etc,’ which Miss ffffffolkes would automatically transcribe into, ‘I have the honour to be, sir, one of the distinguished Old Bastards who could send you the label off a tin of pilchards and you would still print it above this my name,’ or whatever, and then it would be, ‘Despatch this instanter to The Thunderer, Miss ffffffolkes.’ But one day Miss ffffffolkes was away giving a handjob to the Archbishop of York, so they sent a temp. And the temp wrote Yours, etc, just as she heard it and The Times reckoned the OB captain a very gusher of wit, but decided to add their own little rococo touch by compacting it further to &c., whereupon other OBs followed the bespatted lead of the captain of industry, who claimed all the credit for himself. There we have it: Yours &c. Whereupon, as an ardent damp-ear of sixteen, I took to the parodic sign-off: Love, &c. Not all my correspondents unfailingly seized the reference, I regret to say. One demoiselle hastened her own de-accessioning from the museum of my heart by informing me with hauteur that use of the word etc., whether in oral communication or in carven prose, was common and vulgar. To which I replied, first, that ‘the word’ et cetera was not one but two words, and that the only common and vulgar thing about my letter - given the identity of its recipient - was affixing to it the word that preceded etc. Alack, she didn’t respond to this observation with the Buddhistic serenity one might have hoped. Love, etc. The proposition is simple. The world divides into two categories: those who believe that the purpose, the function, the bass pedal and principal melody of life is love, and that anything else - everything else - is merely an etc.; and those, those unhappy many, who believe primarily in the etc. of life, for whom love, however agreeable, is but a passing flurry of youth, the pattering prelude to nappy-duty, but not something as solid, steadfast and reliable as, say, home decoration. This is the only division between people that counts.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

You’re itching to be on your own. You don’t want anybody telling you what time you have to be in at night or how to raise your baby. You’re going to leave your mother’s big comfortable house and she won’t stop you, because she knows you too well. But listen to what she says: When you walk out of my door, don’t let anybody raise you—you’ve been raised. You know right from wrong. In every relationship you make, you’ll have to show readiness to adjust and make adaptations. Remember, you can always come home. You will go home again when the world knocks you down—or when you fall down in full view of the world. But only for two or three weeks at a time. Your mother will pamper you and feed you your favorite meal of red beans and rice. You’ll make a practice of going home so she can liberate you again—one of the greatest gifts along with nurturing your courage, that she will give you. Be courageous, but not foolhardy. Walk proud as you are.

The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows. “You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die? “Or one might take the tip of a pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil-tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become leagues, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity. “If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?

AUTHOR’S NOTE Dear reader: This story was inspired by an event that happened when I was eight years old. At the time, I was living in upstate New York. It was winter, and my dad and his best friend, “Uncle Bob,” decided to take my older brother, me, and Uncle Bob’s two boys for a hike in the Adirondacks. When we left that morning, the weather was crisp and clear, but somewhere near the top of the trail, the temperature dropped abruptly, the sky opened, and we found ourselves caught in a torrential, freezing blizzard. My dad and Uncle Bob were worried we wouldn’t make it down. We weren’t dressed for that kind of cold, and we were hours from the base. Using a rock, Uncle Bob broke the window of an abandoned hunting cabin to get us out of the storm. My dad volunteered to run down for help, leaving my brother Jeff and me to wait with Uncle Bob and his boys. My recollection of the hours we spent waiting for help to arrive is somewhat vague except for my visceral memory of the cold: my body shivering uncontrollably and my mind unable to think straight. The four of us kids sat on a wooden bench that stretched the length of the small cabin, and Uncle Bob knelt on the floor in front of us. I remember his boys being scared and crying and Uncle Bob talking a lot, telling them it was going to be okay and that “Uncle Jerry” would be back soon. As he soothed their fear, he moved back and forth between them, removing their gloves and boots and rubbing each of their hands and feet in turn. Jeff and I sat beside them, silent. I took my cue from my brother. He didn’t complain, so neither did I. Perhaps this is why Uncle Bob never thought to rub our fingers and toes. Perhaps he didn’t realize we, too, were suffering. It’s a generous view, one that as an adult with children of my own I have a hard time accepting. Had the situation been reversed, my dad never would have ignored Uncle Bob’s sons. He might even have tended to them more than he did his own kids, knowing how scared they would have been being there without their parents. Near dusk, a rescue jeep arrived, and we were shuttled down the mountain to waiting paramedics. Uncle Bob’s boys were fine—cold and exhausted, hungry and thirsty, but otherwise unharmed. I was diagnosed with frostnip on my fingers, which it turned out was not so bad. It hurt as my hands were warmed back to life, but as soon as the circulation was restored, I was fine. Jeff, on the other hand, had first-degree frostbite. His gloves needed to be cut from his fingers, and the skin beneath was chafed, white, and blistered. It was horrible to see, and I remember thinking how much it must have hurt, the damage so much worse than my own. No one, including my parents, ever asked Jeff or me what happened in the cabin or questioned why we were injured and Uncle Bob’s boys were not, and Uncle Bob and Aunt Karen continued to be my parents’ best friends. This past winter, I went skiing with my two children, and as we rode the chairlift, my memory of that day returned. I was struck by how callous and uncaring Uncle Bob, a man I’d known my whole life and who I believed loved us, had been and also how unashamed he was after. I remember him laughing with the sheriff, like the whole thing was this great big adventure that had fortunately turned out okay. I think he even viewed himself as sort of a hero, boasting about how he’d broken the window and about his smart thinking to lead us to the cabin in the first place. When he got home, he probably told Karen about rubbing their sons’ hands and feet and about how he’d consoled them and never let them get scared. I looked at my own children beside me, and a shudder ran down my spine as I thought about all the times I had entrusted them to other people in the same way my dad had entrusted us to Uncle Bob, counting on the same naive presumption that a tacit agreement existed for my children to be cared for equally to their own.

According to the current view, the maintenance of sound monetary conditions is only possible with a 'credit balance of payments'. The confutation of this and related objections is implicit in the Quantity Theory and in Gresham's Law. The Quantity Theory shows that money can never permanently flow abroad from a country in which only metallic money is used (the 'purely metallic currency' of the Currency Principle). The tightness in the domestic market called forth by the efflux of part of the stock of money reduces the prices of commodities, and so restricts importation and encourages exportation, until there is once more enough money at home. The precious metals which perform the function of money are distributed among individuals, and consequently among separate countries, according to the extent and intensity of the demand of each for money. State intervention to assure to the community the necessary quantity of money by regulating its international nlovements is supererogatory.

But Hock Seng doesn’t contest the foreigner’s words. He’ll put out the bounty, regardless. If the cats are allowed to stay, the workers will start rumors that Phii Oun the cheshire trickster spirit has caused the calamity. The devil cats flicker closer. Calico and ginger, black as night—all of them fading in and out of view as their bodies take on the colors of their surroundings. They shade red as they dip into the blood pool.  Hock Seng has heard that cheshires were supposedly created by a calorie executive—some PurCal or AgriGen man, most likely—for a daughter’s birthday. A party favor for when the little princess turned as old as Lewis Carroll’s Alice.  The child guests took their new pets home where they mated with natural felines, and within twenty years, the devil cats were on every continent and Felis domesticus was gone from the face of the world, replaced by a genetic string that bred true ninety-eight percent of the time. The Green Headbands in Malaya hated Chinese people and cheshires equally, but as far as Hock Seng knows, the devil cats still thrive there. 

In the case of Islam, there are today certainly religious extremists of different kinds, but they do not define the mainstream, or center, of Islam. That center belongs to traditional Islam. And that center is the one against which one should view fanatical religious extremism, on the one side, and the rabid secularist modernism found in most Islamic countries, but especially in such places as Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, on the other. Traditional Islam is not opposed to what the West wishes to do within its own borders, but to the corrosive influences emanating from modern and postmodern Western culture, now associated so much with what is called globalization, that threaten Islamic values, just as they threaten Christian and Jewish values in the West itself. But the philosophy of defense of traditional Islam has always been to keep within the boundaries of Islamic teachings. Its method of combat has been and remains primarily intellectual and spiritual, and when it has been forced to take recourse to physical action in the form of defense of its home and shelter, its models have been the Amīr ‘Abd al-Qādirs and Imām Shāmils, not the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution or homegrown models of Che Guevara.

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head—useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there—in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow¬ capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, star¬ing out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot—no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Lands¬man recognizes the expression on Dick's face. It's the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motor¬cycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.

Space Rockets as Power Symbols The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.

From Tomorrow to Yesterday The tree trunks move in time with the rhythm of her rubber soles on the wet path, where the air is still cool after the night rain. The woodland floor is white with anemones; in one place, growing close to the roots of an ancient tree, they make her think of an old, wrinkled hand. She could go on and on without getting tired, without meeting anyone or thinking of anything in particular, and without coming to the edge of the woods. As if the town did not begin just behind the trees, the leafy suburb with its peaceful roads and its houses hidden behind close-trimmed hedges. She doesn't want to think about anything, and almost succeeds; her body is no more than a porous, pulsating machine. The sun breaks through the clouds as she runs back, its light diffused on the gravel drive and the magnolia in front of the kitchen window. His car is no longer parked beside hers, he must have left while she was in the woods. He hadn't stirred when she rose, and she'd already been in bed when he came home late last night. She lay with her back turned, eyes closed, as he undressed, taking care not to wake her. She leans against one of the pillars of the garage and stretches, before emptying the mailbox and letting herself into the house. She puts the mail on the kitchen table. The little light on the coffeemaker is on; she switches it off. Not so long ago, she would have felt a stab of irritation or a touch of tenderness, depending on her mood. He always forgets to turn off that machine. She puts the kettle on, sprinkles tea leaves into the pot, and goes over to the kitchen window. She observes the magnolia blossoms, already starting to open. They'll have to talk about it, of course, but neither of them seems able to find the right words, the right moment. She pauses on her way through the sitting room. She stands amid her furniture looking out over the lawn and the pond at the end of the garden. The canopies of the trees are dimly reflected in the shining water. She goes into the bathroom. The shower door is still spotted with little drops. As time went on they have come to make contact during the day only briefly, like passing strangers. But that's the way it has been since the children left home, nothing unusual in that. She takes off her clothes and stands in front of the mirror where a little while ago he stood shaving. She greets her reflection with a wry smile. She has never been able to view herself in a mirror without this moue, as if demonstrating a certain guardedness about what she sees. The dark green eyes and wavy black hair, the angularity of her features. She dyes her hair exactly the color it would have been if she hadn't begun to go gray in her thirties, but that's her only protest against age.

Mine was, probably, the easiest imaginable kind of arrest. It did not tear me from the embrace of kith and kin, nor wrench me from a deeply cherished home life. One pallid European February it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea, where, depending on one's point of view, either we had surrounded the Germans or they had surrounded us, and it deprived me only of my familiar artillery battery and the scenes of the last three months of war. The brigade commander called me to his headquarters and asked me for my pistol; I turned it over without suspecting any evil intent, when suddenly, from a tense, immobile suite of staff officers in the corner, two counterintelligence officers stepped forward hurriedly, crossed the room in a few quick bounds, their four hands grabbed simultaneously at the star on my cap, my shoulder boards, my officer's belt, my map case, and they shouted theatrically: "You are under arrest!" Burning and prickling from head to toe, all I could explain was, "Me? What for?" Across the sheer gap separating me from those left behind, across that quarantine line not event a sound dared penetrate, came the unthinkable magic words of the brigade commander: "Sholzhenitsyn. Come back here." "You have ..." he asked weightily, "a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?" I knew instantly I had been arrested because of my correspondence with a school friend and understood what direction to expect danger.

We can all endeavor to do the same, pursuing the facts of the matter, especially about the past of our own country. Facts are impressively dual in their effects. “Truth and reconciliation” meetings in Argentina, South Africa, and in parts of Spain’s Basque country have demonstrated that facts are marvelously effective tools—they can rip down falsehoods but can also lay the foundations for going forward. For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly. The accurate view almost always will, at first, be a minority position. Those in power often will want to divert people from the hard facts of a given matter, whether in Russia, Syria, or indeed at home. Why did it take so long for white Americans to realize that our police often treat black Americans as an enemy to be intimidated, even today? Why do we allow political leaders who have none of Churchill’s fealty to traditional institutions to call themselves “conservatives”? The struggle to see things as they are is perhaps the fundamental driver of Western civilization. There is a long but direct line from Aristotle and Archimedes to Locke, Hume, Mill, and Darwin, and from there through Orwell and Churchill to the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” It is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it, and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter.

This is an art I can enjoy. There is a kind of sorcery in all cooking; in the choosing of ingredients, the process of mixing, grating, melting, infusing, and flavoring, the recipes taken from ancient books, the traditional utensils- the pestle and mortar with which my mother made her incense turned to a more homely purpose, her spices and aromatics giving up their subtleties to a baser, more sensual magic. And it is partly the transience of it delights me; so much loving preparation, so much art and experience, put into a pleasure that can last only a moment, and which only a few will ever fully appreciate. My mother always viewed my interest with indulgent contempt. To her, food was no pleasure but a tiresome necessity to be worried over, a tax on the price of our freedom. I stole menus from restaurants and looked longingly into patisserie windows. I must have been ten years old- maybe older- before I first tasted real chocolate. But still the fascination endured. I carried recipes in my head like maps. All kinds of recipes: torn from abandoned magazines in busy railway stations, wheedled from people on the road, strange marriages of my own confection. Mother with her cards, her divinations, directed our mad course across Europe. Cookery cards anchored us, placed landmarks on the bleak borders. Paris smells of baking bread and croissants; Marseille of bouillabaisse and grilled garlic. Berlin was Eisbrei with sauerkraut and Kartoffelsalat, Rome was the ice cream I ate without paying in a tiny restaurant beside the river.

The street sprinkler went past and, as its rasping rotary broom spread water over the tarmac, half the pavement looked as if it had been painted with a dark stain. A big yellow dog had mounted a tiny white bitch who stood quite still. In the fashion of colonials the old gentleman wore a light jacket, almost white, and a straw hat. Everything held its position in space as if prepared for an apotheosis. In the sky the towers of Notre-Dame gathered about themselves a nimbus of heat, and the sparrows – minor actors almost invisible from the street – made themselves at home high up among the gargoyles. A string of barges drawn by a tug with a white and red pennant had crossed the breadth of Paris and the tug lowered its funnel, either in salute or to pass under the Pont Saint-Louis. Sunlight poured down rich and luxuriant, fluid and gilded as oil, picking out highlights on the Seine, on the pavement dampened by the sprinkler, on a dormer window, and on a tile roof on the Île Saint-Louis. A mute, overbrimming life flowed from each inanimate thing, shadows were violet as in impressionist canvases, taxis redder on the white bridge, buses greener. A faint breeze set the leaves of a chestnut tree trembling, and all down the length of the quai there rose a palpitation which drew voluptuously nearer and nearer to become a refreshing breath fluttering the engravings pinned to the booksellers’ stalls. People had come from far away, from the four corners of the earth, to live that one moment. Sightseeing cars were lined up on the parvis of Notre-Dame, and an agitated little man was talking through a megaphone. Nearer to the old gentleman, to the bookseller dressed in black, an American student contemplated the universe through the view-finder of his Leica. Paris was immense and calm, almost silent, with her sheaves of light, her expanses of shadow in just the right places, her sounds which penetrated the silence at just the right moment. The old gentleman with the light-coloured jacket had opened a portfolio filled with coloured prints and, the better to look at them, propped up the portfolio on the stone parapet. The American student wore a red checked shirt and was coatless. The bookseller on her folding chair moved her lips without looking at her customer, to whom she was speaking in a tireless stream. That was all doubtless part of the symphony. She was knitting. Red wool slipped through her fingers. The white bitch’s spine sagged beneath the weight of the big male, whose tongue was hanging out. And then when everything was in its place, when the perfection of that particular morning reached an almost frightening point, the old gentleman died without saying a word, without a cry, without a contortion while he was looking at his coloured prints, listening to the voice of the bookseller as it ran on and on, to the cheeping of the sparrows, the occasional horns of taxis. He must have died standing up, one elbow on the stone ledge, a total lack of astonishment in his blue eyes. He swayed and fell to the pavement, dragging along with him the portfolio with all its prints scattered about him. The male dog wasn’t at all frightened, never stopped. The woman let her ball of wool fall from her lap and stood up suddenly, crying out: ‘Monsieur Bouvet!

My favourite part of my new book so far: Chapter 48: Creatures of The Night A figure stood in the stairwell beneath the Smoke's Poutinerie close to Simcoe Street and Adelaide Street West. He munched his pulled pork poutine and watched the strange object glide through the fog that engulfed the tall blue R.B.C. building. “Nice night for a stroll,” smiled The Rooster. Upon heading North, Fred had decided to take a detour and glide the exact opposite way: South. It was why he was now flying through the fog that suspended over the R.B.C. building. Through the billowing cloud he sailed and higher up into the air as he was heading towards the business district of Toronto where all the skyscrapers were. As Fred got closer, he understood why they were labeled as skyscrapers: they basically scraped the sky. But the view from up here was fantastic. It was a rainy and cold night, but Fred felt very warm in his upgraded suit. Soon, he was zooming past the green windowed T.D. building and back towards the North side of Yonge Street. However, as he sailed home, he began to worry about Allen. The Rooster had already cut up his ex-girlfriend so what would he do to Allen? Allen had been a friend to Fred when no one else had been there. Of course, he used to have many friends in preschool, elementary school, and high school but no one he clicked with. Allen McDougal was really the only family he had left and he didn't want The Rooster to kill his old friend in any way. I must radio him, thought Fred as he shot past Dundas Square. But when he pressed the button on the helmet that alerted his Butler's phone, there was no answer. Damn it. They've already got him.

Making good use of that room?” Lucius asked them, having a laugh with the trollop at his side. Oscar stood unwavering in the center of the hall, forcing Lucius to skirt around him. “You’re a pig,” Camille replied, but he only squealed and snorted like a sow. “Either of you figure out yet how we’re going to get home?” Lucius asked. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m perfectly content here for the time being.” A pair of sloppy-looking men stumbled through the front door, obviously drunk, and howling like wolves. Oscar stepped up beside Camille, blocking her from their view. His shoulders and chest were the perfect shield against whatever misguided attentions the men might show her. “When did you become concerned about the three of us sticking together?” she asked Lucius. “We haven’t set eyes on you since you disappeared into the orlop deck of the Londoner.” Lucius nodded over his shoulder. “I’m being nursed back to health, can’t you see?” She glared at him. Why someone like Lucius had survived the shipwreck instead of a worthier person like her father angered her. Maybe she really was cursed. “You don’t have a plan, do you?” Lucius asked Oscar, who continued to block Camille from the two men anxiously waiting by the front door for someone to greet them. Lucius snorted a laugh. “Should’a guessed as much.” Oscar took a step forward, pressing Camille between his chest and Lucius’s. “What do you mean by that?” Lucius laced his fingers together and bowed them, cracking his knuckles. “Just that everyone knew you were only good for dishing out orders that came from someone else.” Camille placed one hand on Oscar’s chest and the other on Lucius and shoved them apart. “Stop it,” she said. “I liked it better when you were out of sight, Lucius.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

To prove to an indignant questioner on the spur of the moment that the work I do was useful seemed a thankless task and I gave it up. I turned to him with a smile and finished, 'To tell you the truth we don't do it because it is useful but because it's amusing.' The answer was thought of and given in a moment: it came from deep down in my mind, and the results were as admirable from my point of view as unexpected. My audience was clearly on my side. Prolonged and hearty applause greeted my confession. My questioner retired shaking his head over my wickedness and the newspapers next day, with obvious approval, came out with headlines 'Scientist Does It Because It's Amusing!' And if that is not the best reason why a scientist should do his work, I want to know what is. Would it be any good to ask a mother what practical use her baby is? That, as I say, was the first evening I ever spent in the United States and from that moment I felt at home. I realised that all talk about science purely for its practical and wealth-producing results is as idle in this country as in England. Practical results will follow right enough. No real knowledge is sterile. The most useless investigation may prove to have the most startling practical importance: Wireless telegraphy might not yet have come if Clerk Maxwell had been drawn away from his obviously 'useless' equations to do something of more practical importance. Large branches of chemistry would have remained obscure had Willard Gibbs not spent his time at mathematical calculations which only about two men of his generation could understand. With this trust in the ultimate usefulness of all real knowledge a man may proceed to devote himself to a study of first causes without apology, and without hope of immediate return.

Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.

I flip the lock back in place and turn, hitting a concrete wall of a man. “What’s he made of? Concrete and sex?” I whisper into the phone like the man in front of me can’t hear me. “Good, he’s already there,” I hear Elle say as my eyes travel up and up an endless span of chest. Up, up, up, until my eyes finally land on a hard face with a clenched jaw. He’s hot in that oh-my-God-he-could-crush-me way. Wait, is that hot? “Listen here, Hulk. You can take your incredible body and vacate my home. I won’t be needing your services.” “I’m standing in the middle of your apartment, and you didn't so much as scream. This is despite you knowing someone has been stalking you. I could have been that someone. Fuck. I could be that someone.” I snort and roll my eyes. “Yeah right, Hulk-man.” I pat him on the chest before resting my hand there. I start to rub. I only meant to do a quick pat, but now I can’t seem to remove my hand. I like the feel of him. I don’t think I’ve ever liked the feel of a man before. I don’t think I’ve ever had the urge to touch one before. “You think I couldn’t hurt you?” He grabs my wrist, pulling it away from his chest. The action makes me frown. Oh, I know he could hurt me, but someone like him would never stalk me. That just didn’t add up to me. If anything, I’d end up stalking him. “Oh, I’m sure you could Hulk smash me.” Now that I’m not touching him, I bring my other hand up to his chest and continue doing what I was doing before, but he just grabs that wrist, too. “Then why aren’t you worried?” His words are hard and laced with anger. So unlike the soft hold he has on my wrist. I could easily pull away with one good tug. Maybe. “Someone like you wouldn’t stalk me.In fact, I don’t see anyone stalking me. There has to be a mi...” His mouth hits mine, cutting off my words. He gives a little tug on my wrist, and I fall into him, gasping when I feel his erection press into me. He takes the opening and pushes his tongue into my mouth. I let my eyes close as he devours me. My body feels like I’m buzzing. I push further into him, wanting to be closer. I deepen the kiss. He goes to pull back, but I wrap my hands around his neck, not even noticing that I’m eye level with him and that my feet are no longer on the floor as I pull him back to me. I move against him, needing the friction. His cock is settled against my core, and I move my hips against him, taking what I want. What I need. Everything else is forgotten, my mind just shuts off. He growls into my mouth, and I swear the sound vibrates through my whole body and goes straight to where I need it. My body explodes. A moan falls from my lips as I finally pull them from his. I let my head drop back and enjoy the sensations rocking through my whole body. I feel like I’m floating. When I finally come back down, I realize I kind of am. My legs are wrapped around his waist and I’ve somehow ended up with my back to a wall. I feel his tongue come out and lick my neck, making my body jerk. “I wanna do that again,” I say lazily. I think I could do that over and over again. “Your place isn’t secure. Come to mine and I’ll do it over and over again.” “Mmkay,” is all I say. I’d probably go anywhere he asked me at the moment. “Holy shit.” I roll my head to the side and see my sister standing in the doorway. A man stands beside her with a shocked looked on his face, mirroring Elle’s expression. I’m guessing that’s her guard. “I’m keeping this one,” I say, locking my arms around him, not wanting to do a trade. “Fuck,” Hart says, placing me on the floor. I regretfully let my arms fall from around his neck. He steps in front of me, blocking my view of my sister and the other man. “I don’t think you should be her guard, Hart,” I hear the other man say. His words make my heart drop. “I’m moving in with him,” I retort, popping my head out from behind him. Elle giggles.

hold of people’s minds and actually control them. View a corporate stronghold like the giant squid that attacked Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, waiting for people to swim near so it could wrap its tentacles about them. Whenever people begin to think in certain ways, principalities can maneuver appropriate corporate strongholds into position to clamp about them and actually rob them of the freedom to think. While individual strongholds serve as lodgings for local ruling demons, corporate strongholds offer a home to what Paul referred to: Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:11–12, italics mine Corporate strongholds are wielded by principalities, rulers, demonic archangels that use them to imprison the minds and control the thoughts of entire peoples—nations, cities, denominations, local churches, political parties, even philanthropic groups. If you have ever asked, “How could principalities become world rulers of this present darkness?” the foremost answer lies here—by means of corporate strongholds. The function of a corporate stronghold is to imprison the minds of a people or group, to take away their freedom to think anything— including cold, hard facts and logic—contrary to the mindset of the stronghold. It hypnotizes whomever its spell overshadows, so that they cannot see portions of the Word of God (or even secular truths) that might set them free from its delusive grip. But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 2 Corinthians 3:14–16, italics mine That veil, to me, is a corporate stronghold of

I continued my explorations in a cobbled yard overlooked by broken doors and cracked windows. Pushing open a swollen door into a storeroom, I found a stream running across paving stones and a carpet of slippery green moss. My explorations took me beneath a gateway surmounted by a clock face, standing with hands fixed permanently at eleven o'clock. Beyond stood derelict stables; then the park opened up in an undulating vista, reaching all the way to a swathe of deep forest on the horizon. In the distance was the twinkle of the river that I realized must border my own land at Whitelow. The grass was knee-high and speckled with late buttercups, but I was transported by that first sight of the Delafosse estate. In its situation alone, the Croxons had chosen our new home well. I dreamed for a moment of myself and Michael making a great fortune, and no longer renting Delafosse Hall but owning every inch of it, my inheritance spinning gold from cotton. Turning back to view the Hall I took a sharp breath; it was as massive and ancient as a child's dream of a castle, the bulk of its walls carpeted in greenery, the diamond-leaded windows sparkling in picturesque stone mullions. True, the barley-twist chimneys leaned askew, and the roofs sagged beneath the weight of years, but the shell of it was magnificent. It cast a strange possessive mood upon me. I remembered Michael's irritation at the house the previous night, and his eagerness to leave. Somehow I had to entice Michael into this shared dream of a happy life here, beside me. Determined to explore the park, I followed the nearest path. After walking through a deep wood for a good while I emerged into the sunlight by a round hill surmounted by a two-story tower. A hunting lodge, Mrs. Croxon had called it, but I thought it more a folly. It had a fantastical quality, with four miniature turrets, each topped with a verdigris-tarnished dome. Above the doorway stood a sundial drawn upon a disc representing a blazing sun. It was embellished with a script I thought might be Latin: FERREA VIRGA EST, UMBRATILIS MOTUS. I wondered whether Michael might know the meaning, or Anne's husband perhaps. As for the sundial's accuracy, the morning light was too weak to cast a line of shadow.

Quanta. On Yom Kippur Eve, the quanta went to ask Einstein for his forgiveness. “I'm not home,” Einstein yelled at them from behind his locked door. On their way back, people swore loudly at them through the windows, and someone even threw a can. The quanta pretended not to care, but deep in their hearts they were really hurt. Nobody understands the quanta, everybody hates them. “You parasites,” people would shout at them as they walked down the road. “Go serve in the army.” “We wanted to, actually,” the quanta would try to explain, “but the army wouldn't take us because we're so tiny.” Not that anyone listened. Nobody listens to the quanta when they try to defend themselves, but when they say something that can be interpreted negatively, well, then everyone's all ears. The quanta can make the most innocent statement, like “Look, there's a cat!” and right away they're saying on the news how the quanta were stirring up trouble and they rush off to interview Schrödinger. All in all, the media hated the quanta worse than anybody, because once the quanta had spoken at an IBM press conference about how the very act of viewing had an effect on an event, and all the journalists thought the quanta were lobbying to keep them from covering the Intifada. The quanta could insist as much as they wanted that this wasn't at all what they meant and that they had no political agenda whatsoever, but nobody would believe them anyway. Everyone knew they were friends of the government's Chief Scientist. Loads of people think the quanta are indifferent, that they have no feelings, but it simply isn't true. On Friday, after the program about the bombing of Hiroshima, they were interviewed in the studio in Jerusalem. They could barely talk. They just sat there facing the open mike and sniffling, and all the viewers at home, who didn't know the quanta very well, thought they were avoiding the question and didn't realize the quanta were crying What's sad is that even if the quanta were to write dozens of letters to the editors of all the scientific journals in the world and prove beyond a doubt that people had taken advantage of their naiveté, and that they'd never ever imagined it would end that way, it wouldn't do them any good, because nobody understands the quanta. The physicists least of all.

Let’s say a man really loves a woman; he sees her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn’t even see, she falls ill, out of his caste, and turns into an untouchable. He may know her as confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening of self-abuse. He knows her as mature; she comes home with a failed haircut, weeping from a vexation she is ashamed even to express. He knows her as prudent; she goes without winter boots because she spent half a week’s paycheck on artfully packaged mineral oil. He knows her as sharing his love of the country; she refuses to go with him to the seaside until her springtime fast is ended. She’s convivial; but she rudely refuses a slice of birthday cake, only to devour the ruins of anything at all in a frigid light at dawn. Nothing he can say about this is right. He can’t speak. Whatever he says hurts her more. If he comforts her by calling the issue trivial, he doesn’t understand. It isn’t trivial at all. If he agrees with her that it’s serious, even worse: He can’t possibly love her, he thinks she’s fat and ugly. If he says he loves her just as she is, worse still: He doesn’t think she’s beautiful. If he lets her know that he loves her because she’s beautiful, worst of all, though she can’t talk about this to anyone. That is supposed to be what she wants most in the world, but it makes her feel bereft, unloved, and alone. He is witnessing something he cannot possibly understand. The mysteriousness of her behavior keeps safe in his view of his lover a zone of incomprehension. It protects a no-man’s-land, an uninhabitable territory between the sexes, wherever a man and a woman might dare to call a ceasefire. Maybe he throws up his hands. Maybe he grows irritable or condescending. Unless he enjoys the power over her this gives him, he probably gets very bored. So would the woman if the man she loved were trapped inside something so pointless, where nothing she might say could reach him. Even where a woman and a man have managed to build and inhabit that sand castle—an equal relationship—this is the unlistening tide; it ensures that there will remain a tag on the woman that marks her as the same old something else, half child, half savage.

Sitting with some of the other members of the Scholastic Decathlon team, quiet, studious Martha Cox heard snatches of the lunchtime poetry. Her ears instantly pricked up. "What's going on?" she asked, her eyes bright. Betty Hong closed her book and leaned close. "Taylor McKessie told me all about it," she whispered. Betty told Martha about next week's poetry-reading assembly and how Taylor was trying to help half the starting basketball team locate their muse. "That's totally fresh!" Martha cried. "Too bad I'm not in Ms Barrington's English class." Betty made a face. "You like poetry stuff? I thought you were into maths and science." "I like it all," Martha replied. "I love astronomy and hip-hop-" Betty rolled her eyes. "Not hip-hop again." "Word, girl," Martha replied. "You know I've been bustin' out kickin' rhymes for years. It helps me remember lessons, like last night's astronomy lecture." "No," Betty said. "You didn't make up a rap to that." "Just watch," Martha cried. Leaping out of her chair, she began to chant, freestyle: "At the centre of our system is the molten sun, A star that burns hot, Fahrenheit two billion and one. But the sun, he ain't alone in the heavenly sphere, He's got nine homeys in orbit, some far, some near. Old Mercury's crowding in 'bout as close as he can, Yo, Merc's a tiny planet who loves a tan.... Some kids around Martha heard her rap. They really got into it, jumping up from their tables to clap and dance. The beat was contagious. Martha started bustin' some moves herself. She kept the rap flowing, and more kids joined the party.... "Venus is next. She's a real hot planet, Shrouded by clouds, hot enough to melt granite. Earth is the third planet from the sun, Just enough light and heat to make living fun. Then comes Mars, a planet funky and red. Covered with sand, the place is pretty dead. Jupiter's huge! The largest planet of all! Saturn's big, too, but Uranus is small. So far away, the place is almost forgotten, Neptune's view of Earth is pretty rotten. And last but not least, Pluto's in a fog, Far away and named after Mickey's home dog. Yo, that's all the planets orbiting our sun, But the Milky Way galaxy is far from done!" When Martha finished her freestyle, hip-hop flow, the entire cafeteria burst into wild applause. Troy, Chad, Zeke, and Jason had been clapping and dancing, too. Now they joined in the whooping and hollering. "Whoa," said Chad. "Martha's awesome.

Scripture and Tradition Scriptural exegesis was no mere school exercise. The New Testament text became the battleground for the fierce debates over the nature of Jesus, God and man, that were waged in the fifth century and exegesis was the weapon that all the combatants wielded with both skill and conviction.23 The scriptural witness, often couched in familiar, popular, and even homely language, had to be converted into the abstract and learned currency of theology, the language of choice of the Church’s intelligentsia. Scripture, as it turned out, was merely the starting point. The steering mechanism was exegesis, and behind the exegesis, the helmsman at the rudder, stood another elemental principle: tradition.24 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each possessed a Scripture that was, by universal consent, a closed Book. But God’s silence was a relative thing, and his providential direction of the community could be detected and “read” in other ways. Early within the development of Christianity, for example, one is aware of a subtle balance operating between appeals to Scripture and tradition. It was not a novel enterprise. By Jesus’ time the notion of an oral tradition separate from but obviously connected to the written Scriptures was already familiar, if not universally accepted, in Jewish circles. Jesus and the Pharisees debated the authority of the oral tradition more than once, and though he does not appear to have denied the premise, Jesus, his contemporaries remarked, “taught on his own authority,” not on that of some other sage. He substituted his authority for the tradition of the Fathers. Thus Jesus was proposing himself as the source of a new tradition handed on to his followers and confirmed by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The Christian view that there was a tradition distinct from the Scriptures may have begun with the early understanding of Scripture as synonymous with the Bible—serious exegetical attention did not begin to be paid to the Gospels until the end of the second century—whereas the “tradition” was constituted of the teachings and redemptive death of Jesus, both of which Jesus himself had placed in their true “scriptural” context.25 Thus, even when parts of Jesus’ teachings and actions had been committed to writing in the Gospels, and so began to constitute a new, specifically Christian Scripture, the distinction between Scripture in the biblical sense and tradition in the Christian sense continued to be felt in the Christian community.26

Driscoll preached a sermon called “Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon,” which he followed up with a sermon series and an e-book, Porn-again Christian (2008). For Driscoll, the “good bits” amounted to a veritable sex manual. Translating from the Hebrew, he discovered that the woman in the passage was asking for manual stimulation of her clitoris. He assured women that if they thought they were “being dirty,” chances are their husbands were pretty happy. He issued the pronouncement that “all men are breast men. . . . It’s biblical,” as was a wife performing oral sex on her husband. Hearing an “Amen” from the men in his audience, he urged the ladies present to serve their husbands, to “love them well,” with oral sex. He advised one woman to go home and perform oral sex on her husband in Jesus’ name to get him to come to church. Handing out religious tracts was one thing, but there was a better way to bring about Christian revival. 13 Driscoll reveled in his ability to shock people, but it was a series of anonymous blog posts on his church’s online discussion board that laid bare the extent of his misogyny. In 2006, inspired by Braveheart, Driscoll adopted the pseudonym “William Wallace II” to express his unfiltered views. “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified,” before America became a “pussified nation.” In that vein, he offered a scathing critique of the earlier iteration of the evangelical men’s movement, of the “pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship . . .” where men hugged and cried “like damn junior high girls watching Dawson’s Creek.” Real men should steer clear. 14 For Driscoll, the problem went all the way back to the biblical Adam, a man who plunged humanity headlong into “hell/ feminism” by listening to his wife, “who thought Satan was a good theologian.” Failing to exercise “his delegated authority as king of the planet,” Adam was cursed, and “every man since has been pussified.” The result was a nation of men raised “by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Women served certain purposes, and not others. In one of his more infamous missives, Driscoll talked of God creating women to serve as penis “homes” for lonely penises. When a woman posted on the church’s discussion board, his response was swift: “I . . . do not answer to women. So, your questions will be ignored.” 15

When I get back, I decide to listen to a talk Ram Dass once gave about what happens after death. When you die, where your consciousness is at the moment of death is a reflection of your level of evolution. If you are ready for the transformation that occurs at the moment of death, when there is a dissolving of the control mechanism and an intensification of all the energies, and you are not identified with all that so that you have equanimity through it, you can witness from a place of presence. You can witness the entire process of dying, and your consciousness doesn’t flicker. Most people, however, are attached to some way of looking at the world, and when that starts to dissolve at the moment of death, they go unconscious. They go through the process unconsciously and pick up the thread later on, because it happens too fast and requires letting go too fast. So the art is to let go before you die, so that when you die, there is no letting go required. That’s the most evolved state. They say in the literature that one who sees the way in the morning can gladly die in the evening. Die before you die, so that when you die you need not die. There is a great quote from Kabir: ‘If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive’—that is, if you don’t break the identification with your body and your personality while you’re alive—‘do you think that ghosts will do it after?’ The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten, that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you’ll simply end up with an apartment in the city of death. But if you make love with the Divine now, then in the next life, you will have the face of satisfied desire. So plunge into the truth. Find out who your teacher is. Believe in the great sound. In other words, do your sadhana so that you can break the identification now. Then, at the moment of transformation, you can just go. If you have fear, you will be met and guided and protected. There will be beings that are there, who are on other planes, available to give meaning to this transformation for you. So the least conscious beings go unconscious and get reprogrammed. The next more conscious beings meet other beings who guide them and help them. The most conscious beings just let go completely at the moment of death, and they don’t go through more incarnations. The meaning of the wheel of birth and death is that as you get more and more evolved, there is less likelihood that you will keep taking rebirth. From the soul’s point of view, you take rebirth only to work your way out of the illusion of your own separateness.

Don’t look so grim. When you get home, I’m sure Randall will buy you all the rings you want. One for every day of the week,” Oscar said, thick with sarcasm, as they walked back toward the harbor. “I don’t care about the ring!” Camille shouted. She stopped walking and turned to Oscar. “I’m sorry, it’s just that…” Oscar patiently waited for her to finish her sentence. Camille looked away, embarrassed. She had scraped Randall’s skin with the ring, too. It had been one of their rare moments alone. He’d run his fingers down her back, nibbled on her neck, and she’d waited for her legs to turn to warm butter. She’d waited to feel the desire to kiss him. But the feelings hadn’t come. Camille had swept her hand up to stop him, and the ring had left a puffy red scratch on his arm. Oscar watched her fumble for words, his expression one of concern. “Never mind,” she said quickly and stepped up onto a raised sidewalk, out of the mud. “Never mind what?” “It’s private.” He continued walking in the street, his head level with hers. “Private between who?” “Between me and Randall. You wouldn’t understand,” she said and lifted her skirt as she descended back down into the muddy street where the sidewalk ran out. “And why is that?” he asked, sounding put off. Daphne’s place came into view. The air smelled of bitter salt water and of wood smoke curling up from the kitchen chimney. “Oh, Oscar, you’re a man of the sea. What could you possibly know about relationships?” He’d never courted a woman as far as Camille knew. She slowed her pace. Or had he? Oscar stopped in the middle of the cobblestoned walkway leading to Daphne’s front door. His eyes blazed with hurt and resentment. “I do apologize, Miss Rowen, I forgot mere sailors aren’t worthy of marriage. Isn’t that what your father always said?” Camille’s cheeks seared with heat. It was a stance her father had never parted from, but she hadn’t known he’d also impressed it upon Oscar. She fidgeted with her hands and fumbled for an apology. “No, that’s not what I meant. You’re a bachelor, that’s all.” Oscar shook his head, unable to meet her eyes. She’d sounded so patronizing. Oscar was handsome, young, and single, and for a man of his class, he made a decent living. Enough to attract an equally decent amount of attention from women, she supposed. Why hadn’t she ever thought of that? He retreated to the street. “I’m going for a walk.” “Oscar, wait-“ He pivoted on his heel. “You know, you’re wrong, Camille. And your father was wrong, too.” Oscar turned and disappeared behind the boxwood hedges. Camille clenched two fistfuls of her skirt and stomped up the steps, aggravated over her careless words. She’d been pompous and arrogant, and she hated that she’d hurt him. She cringed at the wounded way he’d looked at her.

Back in Tahoe, when he had broken the news to her that they had to go home, he had been put on the defensive by the fact that he was the one who’d had personal contact with a murdered woman. He had the feeling now that she was never going to forgive him for what she viewed as rape, and this latest incident had only fueled her fire. For the first time in their married lives, she’d stood up to him and rejected his excuses. He was beginning to think she’d known about his dalliances for years but for her own reasons had chosen to play dumb. But when she’d learned that the police wanted to question him regarding Marsha Benton’s murder, her days of playing dumb seemed to have ended. Penny feigned interest in her magazine, but inside, her thoughts were tumbling wildly. Last night while Mark was in the shower, she’d called Ken Walters, their lawyer. Ken had started off by claiming he couldn’t divulge his conversations with Mark, at which point she promptly reminded him that the money in their house was hers first, not Mark’s, and if he wanted to stay on retainer for the Presley Corporation, he’d better start talking. So he did. Learning that Marsha had been pregnant when she was murdered had nearly sent her to her knees. Knowing that her body had been found on their oil lease outside Tyler only made what she was thinking worse. She’d known Mark was devious, but she’d never believed him capable of murder. Now she wasn’t so sure. What she was certain of was that she wasn’t going to be dragged down with him if he fell. Tonight they were back in Dallas in what had been her father’s home first and was now hers. This was her territory, and she wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Mark glanced up from the chair where he’d been reading, watching the casual attitude with which Penny was sipping her drink. She was flipping through the pages of the magazine in her lap and humming beneath her breath as if nothing was wrong. It was unnerving. As he watched, he began to realize Penny wasn’t her father’s daughter by birth alone. There seemed to be more of the old man in her than he would have believed. Ever since he’d put his hands around her neck back in Tahoe, she had been cold and unyielding, even when he’d apologized profusely. Then, when he’d had to tell her that the police demanded his presence back in Dallas for questioning regarding Marsha Benton’s death, she’d been livid. He’d tried to explain, but she wasn’t having any of it. He didn’t want to lose her. He couldn’t lose her. Even though the world assumed that Mark Presley was the reigning power behind the Presley Corporation, it was really Penny. Mark had the authority simply because Penny was his wife. If she kicked his ass to the curb, the only thing he would be taking with him were the bruises.

A strange structure untangled itself out of the background like a hallucination, not part of the natural landscape. It was a funny-shaped, almost spherical, green podlike thing woven from living branches of trees and vines. A trellis of vines hung down over the opening that served as a door. Wendy was so delighted tears sprang to her eyes. It was her Imaginary House! They all had them. Michael wanted his to be like a ship with views of the sea. John had wanted to live like a nomad on the steppes. And Wendy... Wendy had wanted something that was part of the natural world itself. She tentatively stepped forward, almost swooning at the heavy scent of the door flowers. Languorously lighting on them were a few scissorflies, silver and almost perfectly translucent in the glittery sunlight. Their sharp wings made little snickety noises as they fluttered off. Her shadow made a few half-hearted attempts to drag back, pointing to the jungle. But Wendy ignored her, stepping into the hut. She was immediately knocked over by a mad, barking thing that leapt at her from the darkness of the shelter. "Luna!" Wendy cried in joy. The wolf pup, which she had rescued in one of her earliest stories, stood triumphantly on her chest, drooling very visceral, very stinky dog spit onto her face. "Oh, Luna! You're real!" Wendy hugged the gray-and-white pup as tightly as she could, and it didn't let out a single protest yelp. Although... "You're a bit bigger than I imagined," Wendy said thoughtfully, sitting up. "I thought you were a puppy." Indeed, the wolf was approaching formidable size, although she was obviously not yet quite full-grown and still had large puppy paws. She was at least four stone and her coat was thick and fluffy. Yet she pranced back and forth like a child, not circling with the sly lope Wendy imagined adult wolves used. You're not a stupid little lapdog, are you?" Wendy whispered, nuzzling her face into the wolf's fur. Luna chuffed happily and gave her a big wet sloppy lick across the cheek. "Let's see what's inside the house!" As the cool interior embraced her, she felt a strange shudder of relief and... welcome was the only way she could describe it. She was home. The interior was small and cozy; plaited sweet-smelling rush mats softened the floor. The rounded walls made shelves difficult, so macramé ropes hung from the ceiling, cradling halved logs or flat stones that displayed pretty pebbles, several beautiful eggs, and what looked like a teacup made from a coconut. A lantern assembled from translucent pearly shells sat atop a real cherry writing desk, intricately carved and entirely out of place with the rest of the interior. Wendy picked up one of the pretty pebbles in wonder, turning it this way and that before putting it into her pocket. "This is... me..." she breathed. She had never been there before, but it felt so secure and so right that it couldn't have been anything but her home. Her real home. Here there was no slight tension on her back as she waited for footsteps to intrude, for reality to wake her from her dreams; there was nothing here to remind her of previous days, sad or happy ones. There were no windows looking out at the gray world of London. There was just peace, and the scent of the mats, and the quiet droning of insects and waves outside. "Never Land is a... mishmash of us. Of me," she said slowly. "It's what we imagine and dream of- including the dreams we can't quite remember.

THE VISION EXERCISE Create your future from your future, not your past. WERNER ERHARD Erhard Founder of EST training and the Landmark Forum The following exercise is designed to help you clarify your vision. Start by putting on some relaxing music and sitting quietly in a comfortable environment where you won’t be disturbed. Then, close your eyes and ask your subconscious mind to give you images of what your ideal life would look like if you could have it exactly the way you want it, in each of the following categories: 1. First, focus on the financial area of your life. What is your ideal annual income and monthly cash flow? How much money do you have in savings and investments? What is your total net worth? Next . . . what does your home look like? Where is it located? Does it have a view? What kind of yard and landscaping does it have? Is there a pool or a stable for horses? What does the furniture look like? Are there paintings hanging in the rooms? Walk through your perfect house, filling in all of the details. At this point, don’t worry about how you’ll get that house. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying, “I can’t live in Malibu because I don’t make enough money.” Once you give your mind’s eye the picture, your mind will solve the “not enough money” challenge. Next, visualize what kind of car you are driving and any other important possessions your finances have provided. 2. Next, visualize your ideal job or career. Where are you working? What are you doing? With whom are you working? What kind of clients or customers do you have? What is your compensation like? Is it your own business? 3. Then, focus on your free time, your recreation time. What are you doing with your family and friends in the free time you’ve created for yourself? What hobbies are you pursuing? What kinds of vacations do you take? What do you do for fun? 4. Next, what is your ideal vision of your body and your physical health? Are you free of all disease? Are you pain free? How long do you live? Are you open, relaxed, in an ecstatic state of bliss all day long? Are you full of vitality? Are you flexible as well as strong? Do you exercise, eat good food, and drink lots of water? How much do you weigh? 5. Then, move on to your ideal vision of your relationships with your family and friends. What is your relationship with your spouse and family like? Who are your friends? What do those friendships feel like? Are those relationships loving, supportive, empowering? What kinds of things do you do together? 6. What about the personal arena of your life? Do you see yourself going back to school, getting training, attending personal growth workshops, seeking therapy for a past hurt, or growing spiritually? Do you meditate or go on spiritual retreats with your church? Do you want to learn to play an instrument or write your autobiography? Do you want to run a marathon or take an art class? Do you want to travel to other countries? 7. Finally, focus on the community you’ve chosen to live in. What does it look like when it is operating perfectly? What kinds of community activities take place there? What charitable, philanthropic, or volunteer work? What do you do to help others and make a difference? How often do you participate in these activities? Who are you helping? You can write down your answers as you go, or you can do the whole exercise first and then open your eyes and write them down. In either case, make sure you capture everything in writing as soon as you complete the exercise. Every day, review the vision you have written down. This will keep your conscious and subconscious minds focused on your vision, and as you apply the other principles in this book, you will begin to manifest all the different aspects of your vision.

Olive,’ Mum said, stroking my fringe. ‘I need you to listen to me, and I need you to be brave.’ Opening my eyes again, I swallowed nervously. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘Your sister didn’t arrive at work today.’ Sukie was a typist for an insurance company in Clerkenwell. She said it was the dullest job ever. ‘Isn’t today Saturday, though?’ I asked. ‘She was due in to do overtime. No one’s seen her since she was with you and Cliff last night. She’s missing.’ ‘Missing?’ I didn’t understand. Mum nodded. The nurse added rather unhelpfully: ‘We’ve had casualties from all over London. It’s been chaos. All you can do is keep hoping for the best.’ It was obvious what she meant. I glanced at Mum, who always took the opposite view in any argument. But she stayed silent. Her hands, though, were trembling. ‘Missing isn’t the same as dead,’ I pointed out. Mum grimaced. ‘That’s true, and I’ve spoken to the War Office: Sukie’s name isn’t on their list of dead or injured but-’ ‘So she’s alive, then. She must be. I saw her in the street talking to a man,’ I said. ‘When she realised I’d followed her she was really furious about it.’ Mum looked at me, at the nurse, at the bump on my head. ‘Darling, you’re concussed. Don’t get overexcited now.’ ‘But you can’t think she’s dead.’ I insisted. ‘There’s no proof, is ther?’ ‘Sometimes it’s difficult to identify someone after…’ Mum faltered. I knew what she couldn’t say: sometimes if a body got blown apart there’d be nothing left to tie a name tag to. It was why we’d never buried Dad. Perhaps if there’d been a coffin and a headstone and a vicar saying nice things, it would’ve seemed more real. This felt different, though. After a big air raid the telephones were often down, letters got delayed, roads blocked. It might be a day or two before we heard from Sukie, and worried though I was, I knew she could look after herself. I wondered if it was part of Mum being ill, this painting the world black when it was grey. My head was hurting again so I lay back against the pillows. I was fed up with this stupid, horrid war. Eighteen months ago when it started, everyone said it’d be over before Christmas, but they were wrong. It was still going on, tearing great holes in people’s lives. We’d already lost Dad, and half the time these days it felt like Mum wasn’t quite here. And now Sukie – who knew where she was? I didn’t realise I was crying again until Mum touched my cheek. ‘It’s not fair,’ I said weakly. ‘War isn’t fair, I’m afraid,’ Mum replied. ‘You only have to walk through this hospital to see we’re not the only ones suffering. Though that’s just the top of the iceberg, believe me. There’s plenty worse going on in Europe.’ I remembered Sukie mentioning this too. She’d got really upset when she told me about the awful things happening to people Hitler didn’t like. She was in the kitchen chopping onions at the time so I wasn’t aware she was crying properly. ‘What sort of awful things?’ I’d asked her. ‘Food shortages, people being driven from their homes.’ Sukie took a deep breath, as if the list was really long. ‘People being attacked for no reason or sent no one knows where – Jewish people in particular. They’re made to wear yellow stars so everyone knows they’re Jews, and then barred from shops and schools and even parts of the towns where they live. It’s heartbreaking to think we can’t do anything about it.’ People threatened by soldiers. People queuing for food with stars on their coats. It was what I’d seen on last night’s newsreel at the cinema. My murky brain could just about remember those dismal scenes, and it made me even more angry. How I hated this lousy war. I didn’t know what I could do about it, a thirteen-year-old girl with a bump on her head. Yet thinking there might be something made me feel a tiny bit better.

My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it. For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’. Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme.