William Hall Quotes

But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.

Is that one of your go to lines when a girl asks for something more than a twenty-four hour Jude furlough?" Tapping the back of the wall with his heel, he looked down the hall. "No, that's what I answer when a girl I'm falling hard for, the only girl I've fallen hard for, wants to be in a relationship with someone like me.

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

You lie, in faith; for you are call'd plain Kate, And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst; But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate, For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate, Take this of me, Kate of my consolation; Hearing thy mildness praised in every town, Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded, Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs, Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." Thanatopsis

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room. Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure. If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it.... It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me. I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun. We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took. And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things. They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums. Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me. If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe. Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius... and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.

Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness. So

Bertram!” Jackaby patted him on the arm affably as he bustled past him into the front hall. “It’s been ages, how are the kids?” “I remain unmarried, Mr. Jackaby, and I’m afraid you can’t be seen just now.” “Nonsense. Miss Rook, can you see me?” “Certainly, sir.” “Well, there you have it. You must have your eyes checked, Bertram. Now

One fast more or I'm gone', I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline you take, or Peyote goop up with-- That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bent back mudman monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere, the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up to your waist in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds left in it--The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so hagged and awful with sorrow you can't even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it's like William Seward Burroughs' 'Stranger' suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror- Enough! 'One fast move or I'm gone' so I jump up, do my headstand first to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run out throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street...I've got to escape or die...

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal. And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank,

When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl, To-whit! To-who!—a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. When all aloud the wind doe blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw, When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl, To-whit! To-who!—a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

How dare you?' Bayar began, but his voice had lost some of its force. 'How dare you come into this sacred hall, flinging accusations?' 'I have not yet made any accusations,' Willo said. 'Perhaps it is our own guilt clamoring in your ears.

Because I barely survived Shane Hall. I barely survived myself. It was a dark time. My home life was traumatic. I was a chaotic, angry kid. Why reminisce?

I wonder what I’ve married into,” Morgan Williams says. But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder.

He spoke to her, though, if only through his verse. One night in the banqueting hall, just before a ball, he responded to requests for a verse by raising his glass high. Though he spoke to them all his eyes were on her. "Tis not that I am weary grown Of being yours, and yours alone, But with what face can I incline To damn you to be only mine?" She walked out before she heard the rest.

Watching the lecture hall fill for a while longer, Rummings picked up the gun, rested the barrel on the parapet and waited expectantly. A senior mining executive walked up to a rostrum and began to talk to the waiting audience. Rummings took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. A large hole appeared in the curtain glazing surrounding the building and the executive staggered sideways. After pumping a few more bullets into the dying man’s body, Rummings abandoned the rifle, ran back to the exit door, paused long enough to strip off the coveralls and then raced down the stairs. Once in the corridor, he deliberately slowed himself down, calmly called a lift and went down to the ground floor again.

When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster--but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down.

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.

The greatest threat to climate change is humanity' Iain Cameron Williams, 2019

Writing is 90% struggle. The other 10% is up to you.

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn’t tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

A few moments later they witnessed the miracle. The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.

For fifty years I've watched the grandfather clock in the hall, William. After it is wound I can predict to the hour when it will stop. Old people are no different. They can feel the machinery slow down and the last weights shift.

His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woolen bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking.

At night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older.

It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

Old courtiers have resigned, rather than serve Anne; the new comptroller of the household is Sir William Paulet,

It was a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it.

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.

Woman, the queen feared, “would become the most hateful, heartless, and disgusting of human beings,” were she allowed to have the same political and social rights as men. Similarly, Elizabeth Wordsworth, the first warden of Lady Margaret Hall and great-niece of poet William Wordsworth, saw no need for women to have a role in parliamentary politics. Miss Wordsworth would

To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;— Go forth, under the open sky, and list To Nature’s teachings, while from all around— Earth and her waters, and the depths of air— Comes a still voice— Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould. Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings, The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods—rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,— Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, Are shining on the sad abodes of death, Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness, Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there: And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years began, have laid them down In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone. So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw In silence from the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breathe Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glide away, the sons of men, The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes In the full strength of years, matron and maid, The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man— Shall one by one be gathered to thy side, By those, who in their turn shall follow them. So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

By its nature, government was either small and personal, something on the level of a town hall meeting, or it was tyranny, with the few ruling the many for their own benefit, no matter how representational that government might be in theory.

passed through the entry hall, Karras heard footsteps coming up rapidly behind him. “Father Karras!” Karras turned and saw Karl with his sweater. “Very sorry,” said the houseman as he handed it over. “I was thinking to finish much before. But I forget.” He handed

He watched the newly arrived commuters as they stepped into the carriage, pushed their way down the tube, the odours from their damp clothes mingling, giving off varying degrees of mustiness: London grime, or smoke from airless offices. A woman wearing a blue swing coat glanced along the carriage, casting around for an empty seat. Her pale skin, the searching green eyes, reminded him of Emma. Briefly, he felt his breath catch; he stood, clambered back over his neighbour and indicated for her to take his seat. And so his mind stayed with Emma when he knew he should be working out a strategy for telling Dorothy of his news. But Emma was never far away; like the glitter balls in dance halls, she would slowly rotate in his memory, different facets reappearing, as the hues changed in her auburn hair.

Diminishing their intellect was yet another way to justify enslaving African Americans, and it had the added benefit of preserving some types of work for whites, and creating and maintaining clear social and economic boundaries between blacks and whites. In an explicit challenge to African Americans’ intellect, eighteen prominent Massachusetts white men—including John Hancock and Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of the colony—examined Phillis Wheatley in Boston’s Town Hall in 1772 to determine whether she could possibly have produced the poetry she claimed to have written.

Whilst ladies persist in maintaining the strictly defensive condition, men must naturally, as it were, take the oppposite line, that of attack; otherwise, if both parties held aloof, there would be no more marriages; and the two hosts would die in their respective inaction, without ever coming to a battle. Thus it is evident that as the ladies will not, the men must take the offensive... Is it not time that the ladies should take an innings? Let us widowers and bachelors form an association to declare that for the next hundred years we will make love no longer. Let the young women come and make love to us; let them write us verses; let them ask us to dance, get us ices and cups of tea, and help us on with our cloaks at the hall-door; and if they are eligible, we may perhaps be induced to yield and say, 'La, Miss Hopkins - I really never - I am so agitated - Ask papa!

Churchill, aware of Hitler’s use of astrologers, once summoned one himself. In a what-the-hell moment, he asked the surprised fortune-teller to tell him what Hitler’s fortune-teller was telling Hitler. Churchill told his friend Kay Halle the story years later with the caveat that “this is just between us.

And cannot it be added that it was one of the world’s misfortunes that so many in the interwar years either ignored or laughed off the Nazi aims which Hitler had taken the pains to put down in writing? Surely the anti-Semitic points of the program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the evening of February 24, 1920, constituted a dire warning.

I began this path with a sense that an individual should be able to live in freedom among his neighbors, and not as a host for parasites, even if those parasites were endowed with power by the state. I had a sense that the individual should not be at the mercy of the bully or the mob, even if the bully or the mob was sanctioned by the state. I had a sense that if an individual was the target of aggression and I stood with him, or her, or them, I would have the satisfaction of knowing I had opposed villainy, and if others who shared my beliefs would join in the fight, then perhaps a measure at a time, evil would not prosper. I believed that each time malevolence and iniquity were thwarted the chances were increased that I could live in freedom … that I would not be at the mercy of the aggression of others.” He captured them as he looked them in the eyes across the silent hall. “The measure of success from acting on these simple truths is all around us, hangs above us in the sky, pervades the system of our sun … and may now be found among the stars.”

¡Oh, corazón mío, no pierdas tu sensibilidad! ¡Que el alma de Nerón no halle cabida en este firme pecho! ¡Sea yo cruel, más no inhumano! ¡No usaré del puñal, aunque puñales serán para ella mis palabras! ¡Que mi lengua, como mi alma, sean en esto hipócritas, y por mucho que la amenace y la zahiera con mis execraciones, no consientas, alma mía, en sellarlas con la acción!

For she thought that she glimpsed through the dust of the years, a faint flicker of the girl who had lingered in the lanes when the young man Williams and she had been courting. And looking at Williams as he stood before her twitching and bowed, she thought that she glimpsed a faint flicker of the youth, very stalwart and comely, who had bent his head downwards and sideways as he walked and whispered and kissed in the lanes.

The National Revolution has begun!” Hitler shouted. “This building is occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. No one may leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.

It’s our bad luck to have teachers in this world, but since we’re stuck with them, the best we can do is hope to get a brand-new one instead of a mean old fart. New teachers don’t know the rules, so you can get away with things the old-timers would squash you for. That was my theory. So I was feeling pretty excited to start fifth grade, since I was getting a rookie teacher—a guy named Mr. Terupt. Right away, I put him to the test. If the bathroom pass is free, all you have to do is take it and go. This year, the bathrooms were right across the hall. It’s always been an easy way to get out of doing work. I can be really sneaky like that. I take the pass all the time and the teachers never notice. And like I said, Mr. Terupt was a rookie, so I knew he wasn’t going to catch me. Once you’re in the bathroom, it’s mess-around time. All the other teachers on our floor were women, so you didn’t have to worry about them barging in on you. Grab the bars to the stalls and swing. Try to touch your feet to the ceiling. Swing hard. If someone’s in the stall, it’s really funny to swing and kick his door in, especially if he’s a younger kid. If you scare him bad enough, he might pee on himself a little. That’s funny. Or if your buddy’s using the urinal, you can push him from behind and flush it at the same time. Then he might get a little wet. That’s pretty funny, too. Some kids like to plug the toilets with big wads of toilet paper, but I don’t suggest you try doing that. You can get in big trouble. My older brother told me his friend got caught and he had to scrub the toilets with a toothbrush. He said the principal made him brush his teeth with that toothbrush afterward, too. Mrs. Williams is pretty tough, but I don’t think she’d give out that kind of punishment. I don’t want to find out, either. When I came back into the classroom after my fourth or fifth trip, Mr. Terupt looked at me and said, “Boy, Peter, I’m gonna have to call you Mr. Peebody, or better yet, Peter the Pee-er. You do more peein’ than a dog walking by a mile of fire hydrants.

At last he went back to his old habit of spending most of his time at his office in Jesse Hall. He told himself that he should be grateful for the chance of reading on his own, free from the pressures of preparing for particular classes, free from the predetermined directions of his learning. He tried to read at random, for his own pleasure and indulgence, many of the things that he had been waiting for years to read. But his mind would not be led where he wished it to go; his attention wandered from the pages he held before him, and more and more often he found himself staring dully in front of him, at nothing; it was as if from moment to moment his mind were emptied of all it knew and as if his will were drained of its strength. He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something—even pain—to pierce him, to bring him alive. He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter. Once, late, after his evening class, he returned to his office and sat at his desk, trying to read. It was winter, and a snow had fallen during the day, so that the out-of-doors was covered with a white softness.

Now shall the hard war-helm bedight with the gold Be bereft of its plating; its polishers sleep, They that the battle-mask erewhile should burnish: Likewise the war-byrny, which abode in the battle O'er break of the war-boards the bite of the irons, Crumbles after the warrior; nor may the ring'd byrny After the war-leader fare wide afield On behalf of the heroes: nor joy of the harp is, No game of the glee-wood; no goodly hawk now Through the hall swingeth; no more the swift horse Beateth the burg-stead. Now hath bale-quelling A many of life-kin forth away sent.

seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.

So, that’s it, I guess,” Ava said. “I’m officially out of your life.” “No.” I shook my head. “Unfortunately, you’re still in my sight.” “Would it kill you to wish me the best? To at least tell me good luck?” “Seeing as though you’re going back to prison, I guess that would be appropriate.” I shrugged. “Good luck. The authorities are outside waiting for you, so take all the time you need. There’s even a vending machine down the hall if you want to taste freedom one last time…Although, since you’ll be locked up with plenty of women, I’m sure eating pu**y after the lights go out will taste just as good.

Sunday after church, all the sisters, sisters-in-law, wives kissing and patting, swatting at each other's children and at the same time loving them and rubbing their little round heads, women comparing and swapping babies, and all the men gathering and talking business, wool, yarn, lengths, shipping, bloody Flemings, fishing rights, brewing, annual turnover, nice timely information, favour-for-favour, little sweeteners, little retainers, my attorney says … That's what it should be like, married to Morgan Williams, with the Williamses being a big family in Putney … But somehow it's not been like that. Walter has spoiled it all.

The Nazi infiltration into the armed services became serious enough to compel General Groener, now the Minister of Defense, to issue an order of the day on January 22, 1930, which recalled a similar warning to the Army by General von Seeckt on the eve of the Beer Hall Putsch seven years before. The Nazis, he declared, were greedy for power. “They therefore woo the Wehrmacht. In order to use it for the political aims of their party, they attempt to dazzle us [into believing] that the National Socialists alone represent the truly national power.” He requested the soldiers to refrain from politics and to “serve the state” aloof from all party strife.

Roosevelt fought hard for the United States to host the opening session [of the United Nations]; it seemed a magnanimous gesture to most of the delegates. But the real reason was to better enable the United States to eavesdrop on its guests. Coded messages between the foreign delegations and their distant capitals passed through U.S. telegraph lines in San Francisco. With wartime censorship laws still in effect, Western Union and the other commercial telegraph companies were required to pass on both coded and uncoded telegrams to U.S. Army codebreakers. Once the signals were captured, a specially designed time-delay device activated to allow recorders to be switched on. Devices were also developed to divert a single signal to several receivers. The intercepts were then forwarded to Arlington Hall, headquarters of the Army codebreakers, over forty-six special secure teletype lines. By the summer of 1945 the average number of daily messages had grown to 289,802, from only 46,865 in February 1943. The same soldiers who only a few weeks earlier had been deciphering German battle plans were now unraveling the codes and ciphers wound tightly around Argentine negotiating points. During the San Francisco Conference, for example, American codebreakers were reading messages sent to and from the French delegation, which was using the Hagelin M-209, a complex six-wheel cipher machine broken by the Army Security Agency during the war. The decrypts revealed how desperate France had become to maintain its image as a major world power after the war. On April 29, for example, Fouques Duparc, the secretary general of the French delegation, complained in an encrypted note to General Charles de Gaulle in Paris that France was not chosen to be one of the "inviting powers" to the conference. "Our inclusion among the sponsoring powers," he wrote, "would have signified, in the eyes of all, our return to our traditional place in the world." In charge of the San Francisco eavesdropping and codebreaking operation was Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Rowlett, the protégé of William F. Friedman. Rowlett was relieved when the conference finally ended, and he considered it a great success. "Pressure of work due to the San Francisco Conference has at last abated," he wrote, "and the 24-hour day has been shortened. The feeling in the Branch is that the success of the Conference may owe a great deal to its contribution." The San Francisco Conference served as an important demonstration of the usefulness of peacetime signals intelligence. Impressive was not just the volume of messages intercepted but also the wide range of countries whose secrets could be read. Messages from Colombia provided details on quiet disagreements between Russia and its satellite nations as well as on "Russia's prejudice toward the Latin American countries." Spanish decrypts indicated that their diplomats in San Francisco were warned to oppose a number of Russian moves: "Red maneuver . . . must be stopped at once," said one. A Czechoslovakian message indicated that nation's opposition to the admission of Argentina to the UN. From the very moment of its birth, the United Nations was a microcosm of East-West spying. Just as with the founding conference, the United States pushed hard to locate the organization on American soil, largely to accommodate the eavesdroppers and codebreakers of NSA and its predecessors.

Given the central place that technology holds in our lives, it is astonishing that technology companies have not put more resources into fixing this global problem. Advanced computer systems and artificial intelligence (AI) could play a much bigger role in shaping diagnosis and prescription. While the up-front costs of using such technology may be sizeable, the long-term benefits to the health-care system need to be factored into value assessments. We believe that AI platforms could improve on the empirical prescription approach. Physicians work long hours under stressful conditions and have to keep up to date on the latest medical research. To make this work more manageable, the health-care system encourages doctors to specialize. However, the vast majority of antibiotics are prescribed either by generalists (e.g., general practitioners or emergency physicians) or by specialists in fields other than infectious disease, largely because of the need to treat infections quickly. An AI system can process far more information than a single human, and, even more important, it can remember everything with perfect accuracy. Such a system could theoretically enable a generalist doctor to be as effective as, or even superior to, a specialist at prescribing. The system would guide doctors and patients to different treatment options, assigning each a probability of success based on real-world data. The physician could then consider which treatment was most appropriate.

stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. Merrin went calmly up the staircase, a slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister. Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan’s bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then abruptly the demon laughed hideously and Merrin swiftly exited the room, closed the door, then moved quickly down the hall while behind him the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him with an odd expression on her face. Merrin descended the staircase rapidly and put out his hand to the waiting Karras.

Yea, and thy deeds shall thou know, and great shall thy gladness be; As a picture all of gold thy life-days shalt thou see, And know that thou too wert a God to abide through the hurry and haste; A God in the golden hall, a God on the rain-swept waste, A God in the battle triumphant, a God on the heap of the slain: And thine hope shall arise and blossom, and thy love shall be quickened again: And then shalt thou see before thee the face of all earthly ill; Thou shalt drink of the cup of awakening that thine hand hath holpen to fill; By the side of the sons of Odin shalt thou fashion a tale to be told In the hall of the happy Baldur: nor there shall the tale grow old Of the days before the changing, e'en those that over us pass. So harden thine heart, O brother, and set thy brow as the brass!

You don’t have to be here,” William offered with his trademark quiet solemnity. I shook my head but kept my eyes fixed on the closed doors at the end of the hall. “No. I wouldn’t miss it.” Would rather be home in my slippers watching Judge Judy, sure, but duty calls. That was my style of party these days. Throw in a slice of Battenberg and some Werther’s Originals and I could go wild on a sugar high. But no, today was William’s birthday, so I was going to try and keep my grumpy old man behavior to a minimum. Try being the operative word. No promises. My teammate, and the guest of honor for this particular party, tugged on the sleeve of my suit jacket and brought us to a stop. “Hey. Seriously. You’re eighteen months sober.” “Has it been eighteen months already?” I stroked the stubble on my chin and cracked a grin. “Time flies when you’re killing house plants.

No, so God help me, they spake not a word; But, like dumb statues or breathing stones, Star'd each on other, and look'd deadly pale. Which when I saw, I reprehended them, And ask'd the Mayor what meant this wilfull silence. His answer was, the people were not used To be spoke to but by the Recorder. Then he was urg'd to tell my tale again. 'Thus saith the Duke, thus hath the Duke inferr'd'- But nothing spoke in warrant from himself. When he had done, some followers of mine own At lower end of the hall hurl'd up their caps, And some ten voices cried 'God save King Richard!' And thus I took the vantage of those few- 'Thanks, gentle citizens and friends,' quoth I 'This general applause and cheerful shout Argues your wisdoms and your love to Richard.' And even here brake off and came away. GLOUCESTER. What, tongueless blocks were they? Would they not speak?

Gay men were at the forefront of that community of misfits, happy to have found in Garland a performer whose tragedy and resilience (like their own) went hand in hand. Those “boys in the tight trousers,” her “ever-present little bluebirds” 10 as Time magazine euphemistically referred to them at the time (William Goldman was not so kind, outright talking about the “flutter of fags” 11 that filled up Garland’s closing night at The Palace in 1967), were drawn to Garland precisely because she spoke their language. As queer theorist David M. Halperin notes in his cheekily titled book How to Be Gay, this had little to do with a synchronous identification: Garland “wasn’t a gay man,” he writes, “but in certain respects she could express gay desire, what gay men want, better than a gay man could. That is, she could actually convey something even gayer than gay identity itself.” 12

They reached the eastern outskirts of the Dimmerskog on the afternoon of the next day. Although the forest was covered in a thick blanket of white snow, it nevertheless seemed, as Binabik had named it, a place of shadows. The company did not pass beneath its eaves, and might have chosen not to even had their path lain that way, so thick with foreboding was the wood’s atmosphere. The trees, despite their size—and some of them were huge indeed—seemed dwarfish and twisted, as though they squirmed bitterly beneath their burden of needled branches and snow. The open spaces between the contorted trunks seemed to bend away crazily like tunnels dug by some huge and drunken mole, leading at last to dangerous, secretive depths. Passing in near silence, his horse’s hooves crunching softly in the snow, Simon imagined following the gaping pathways into the bark-pillared, white-roofed halls of Dimmerskog, coming at last to—who could guess? Perhaps to the dark, malicious heart of the forest, a place where the trees breathed together and passed endless rumors with the scaly rub of branch on branch, or the malicious exhalation of wind through twigs and frozen leaves. They camped that night in the open again, even though the Dimmerskog crouched only a short distance away like a sleeping animal. None of them wanted to spend a night beneath the forest’s branches—especially Sludig, who had been raised on stories of the ghastly things that stalked the wood’s pale corridors. The Sithi did not seem to care, but Jiriki spent part of the evening oiling his dark witchwood sword. Again the company huddled around a naked fire, and the east wind razored past them all the long evening, sending great powdery spouts of snow whirling all around, and sporting among the Dimmerskog’s upper reaches. When they lay down that night to sleep it was to the sound of the forest creaking, and the wind-ridden branches sawing one against the other.

You know, Micah, that first night, when I saw you on Bridge Street, I wanted to kill you. I wanted to cut your throat and watch your blood soak into the dirt. I wanted to wrap a strangle cord around your neck and throttle you while you kicked and messed yourself." "I'm shaking in my boots," Micah said, looking Han dead in the eyes. Han stood and took a step toward him. "I'm what's hiding in the side street when you walk home from The Four Horses," he said. "I'm the shadow in Greystone Alley when you go out to take a piss. I'm the foot pad in the corridor when you visit the girlie at Grievous Hall." Micah's eyes narrowed, his self-assurance wilting a bit. Han could tell he was going back over a hundred suspicious sights and sounds. "You've been following me?" "I can come and go from your room, any time I want," Han said. "I can tell you what you say when you talk in your sleep. I know what your down low girlie whispers in your ear." He laughed... Michah licked his lips. "Perhaps you take some kind of perverse pleasure in stalking me...

... The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was felt less through their paintings than through a book, The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Moxon and wonderfully illustrated by Rossetti and Millais. The influence on Maeterlinck stems less from the poems themselves than from the illustrations. The revival of illustrated books in the last two years of the century derives from this Tennyson, the books printed at William Morris' press, the albums of Walter Crane. These last two and the ravishing little books for children by Kate Greenaway were heralded by Huysmans as early as 1881. Generally speaking, it is the English Aesthetic Movement rather than the Pre-Raphaelites which influenced the Symbolists, a new life-style rather than a school of painting. The Continent, passing through the Industrial Revolution some fifty years after England, found valuable advice on how to escape from materialism on the other side of the Channel. Everything that one heard about the refinements practised in Chelsea enchanted Frenchmen of taste: furniture by Godwin, open-air theatricals by Lady Archibald Campbell, the Peacock Room by Whistler, Liberty prints. As the pressure of morality was much less pronounced in France than in England, the ideal of Aestheticism was not a revolt but a retreat towards an exquisite world which left hearty good living to the readers of the magazine La Vie Parisienne ('Paris Life') and success to the readers of Zola. If one could not write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, one could always choose materials or arrange bouquets of flowers. Aesthetic ardour smothered the anglophobia in the Symbolist circle. The ideal of a harmonious life suggested in Baudelaire's poem L' Invitation au Voyage seemed capable of realization in England, whose fashions were brought back by celebrated travellers: Mallarmé after 1862, Verlaine in 1872. Carrière spent a long time in London, as did Khnopff later on. People read books by Gabriel Mourey on Swinburne, and his Passé le Détroit ('Beyond the Channel') is particularly important for the artistic way of life ... Thus England is represented in this hall of visual influences by the works of Burne-Jones and Watts, by illustrated books, and by objets d'art ...

WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY

was a commonplace among his colleagues—especially the younger ones—that he was a “dedicated” teacher, a term they used half in envy and half in contempt, one whose dedication blinded him to anything that went on outside the classroom or, at the most, outside the halls of the University. There were mild jokes: after a departmental meeting at which Stoner had spoken bluntly about some recent experiments in the teaching of grammar, a young instructor remarked that “To Stoner, copulation is restricted to verbs,” and was surprised at the quality of laughter and meaningful looks exchanged by some of the older men. Someone else once said, “Old Stoner thinks that WPA stands for Wrong Pronoun Antecedent,” and was gratified to learn that his witticism gained some currency. But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak. And though he looked upon them with apparent impassivity, he was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade when many men’s faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect

The Gates of Eden,” as he called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic and reason. Like “It’s Alright, Ma,” the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake’s disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery. After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan’s listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to “Gates of Eden,” it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the “utopian hermit monks” riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desire; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by “the gray flannel dwarf”); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much or even exist inside the gates of Eden. The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation—and that at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It’s a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn’t saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? (“All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan’s song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the “New Vision,” two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who got it. I

Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard E. Byrd. Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih. It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates, comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermit-only chat groups. My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time. Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.

[Description of the behind-the-scenes situation of the Beer Hall Putsch] The crowd began to grow so sullen that Goering felt it necessary to step to the rostrum and quiet them. “There is nothing to fear,” he cried. “We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no cause to grumble, you’ve got your beer!” And he informed them that in the next room a new government was being formed. It was, at the point of Adolf Hitler’s revolver. Once he had herded his prisoners into the adjoining room, Hitler told them, “No one leaves this room alive without my permission.” He then informed them they would all have key jobs either in the Bavarian government or in the Reich government which he was forming with Ludendorff. With Ludendorff? Earlier in the evening Hitler had dispatched “Scheubner-Richter to Lud-wigshoehe to fetch the renowned General, who knew nothing of the Nazi conspiracy, to the beerhouse at once. The three prisoners at first refused even to speak to Hitler. He continued to harangue them. Each of them must join him in proclaiming the revolution and the new governments; each must take the post he, Hitler, assigned them, or “he has no right to exist.” Kahr was to be the Regent of Bavaria; Lossow, Minister of the National Army; Seisser, Minister of the Reich Police. None of the three was impressed at the prospect of such high office. They did not answer. Their continued silence unnerved Hitler. Finally he waved his gun at them. “I have four shots in my pistol! Three for my collaborators, if they abandon me. The last bullet for myself!” Pointing the weapon to his forehead, he cried, “If I am not victorious by tomorrow afternoon, I shall be a dead man!” (...) Not one of the three men who held the power of the Bavarian state in their hands agreed to join him, even at pistol point. The putsch wasn’t going according to plan. Then Hitler acted on a sudden impulse. Without a further word, he dashed back into the hall, mounted the tribune, faced the sullen crowd and announced that the members of the triumvirate in the next room had joined him in forming a new national government. “The Bavarian Ministry,” he shouted, “is removed…. The government of the November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new national government will be named this very day here in Munich. Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Hitler had told a masterful lie, and it worked. When the gathering heard that Kahr, General von Lossow and Police Chief von Seisser had joined Hitler its mood abruptly changed. There were loud cheers, and the sound of them impressed the three men still locked up in the little side room. (...) He led the others back to the platform, where each made a brief speech and swore loyalty to each other and to the new regime. The crowd leaped on chairs and tables in a delirium of enthusiasm. Hitler beamed with joy.

Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg, wrote a report questioning the evidence of global warming.15 They were soon invited to the White House to brief the Bush administration. One member of the Cabinet Affairs Office said of the report: “Everyone has read it. Everyone takes it seriously.”16 It wasn’t just the Bush administration that took these claims seriously; the mass media did, too. Respected media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and many others repeated these claims as if they were a “side” in a scientific debate. Then the claims were repeated again and again and again—as in an echo chamber—by a wide range of people involved in public debate, from bloggers to members of the U.S. Senate, and even by the president and the vice president of the United States. In all of this, journalists and the public never understood that these were not scientific debates—taking place in the halls of science among active scientific researchers—but misinformation, part of a larger pattern that began with tobacco.

There is one good thing about New York City.” “What’s that?” “Carnegie Hall. Many people believe it has the greatest acoustics in the world. I can’t say for sure because I have never been there, but I do know it was designed by an architect named William Tuthill in 1890. He was an amateur cellist who had what many people called a golden ear, which meant that he could hear things other people couldn’t.” “Kind of like you.

William Tuthill met Andrew Carnegie. He’s the person who gave William Tuthill the money to build the hall, which is why it’s called Carnegie Hall.

Hall is an older Baptist pastor who lives in Arnsby, near Leicester,” said Skinner. Hall had developed arguments from verses 13 and 14 of Isaiah 57: ‘he that putteth his trust in me shall possess the land, and shall inherit my holy mountain; And shall say, Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way, take up the stumblingblock out of the way of my people.’ Hall dealt with stumblingblocks to faith in Christ. But he also criticized the extreme Calvinism that paralyzed many churchmen in an attitude that God had so predestined every happening that men had few choices of their own.

William and Dolly had still not come to terms with infant baptism. So baby Ann remained unbaptized. It was clear William was leaning toward the beliefs of the Baptists. And why not? Although the Anglican Scott was a major influence, most of William’s spiritual mentors were Baptists, like Skinner and Hall. And as William’s own reputation as a churchman spread, who most enthusiastically welcomed him? Baptists. The congregation of Baptists at Earls Barton, east of Northampton, even persuaded him to preach there every other week. It was a four-hour round trip on foot, so it was no small commitment for such a busy young married man. One day he told Dolly, “A group of Dissenters has asked me to lead their service once a month. And guess where? At Paulerspury!

In Towcester he listened to Thomas Skinner. Skinner was a Dissenter called a Baptist. One of the ways Baptists differed from other denominations was that they did not believe infants should be baptized. They believed only a person who could make a mature judgment should be baptized. That ordinance about baptism was the source of their name. Thomas Skinner loaned Willy a book by Robert Hall called Help to Zion’s Travellers.

The Midnite Show Red-Wigglers, Night-Crawlers & Other Worms look out into the crapulous moonlight: figures of women cascading through the Sunday night; no beer in sight. I remember the Night-blooming Cereus by Dr. Thornton, Engraver, Blake’s patron, it hangs in the hall outside the bedroom swaying hungrily like these giant white goddesses of the dark grotto… there are touring cars and men with large guns singing through the woods behind us.

Of all the compass points from which terror might emanate, there was one which held the greatest dread. This was not just because the sea had repeatedly disgorged boatloads of child-snatchers and hall-burners from precisely this direction, nor indeed because empirical observation demonstrated that this was the horizon over which the most wretched weather tended to hurtle, but because the Anglo-Saxons already knew full well that it was here that Satan had set his throne. This was the medieval world’s heart of darkness: the North.

I learned early on in SEAL training the value of teamwork, the need to rely on someone else to help you through the difficult tasks. For those of us who were “tadpoles” hoping to become Navy frogmen, a ten-foot rubber raft was used to teach us this vital lesson. Everywhere we went during the first phase of SEAL training we were required to carry the raft. We placed it on our heads as we ran from the barracks, across the highway, to the chow hall. We carried it in a low-slung position as we ran up and down the Coronado sand dunes. We paddled the boat endlessly from north to south along the coastline and through the pounding surf, seven men, all working together to get the rubber boat to its final destination. But we learned something else on our journey with the raft. Occasionally, one of the boat crew members was sick or injured, unable to give it 100 percent. I often found myself exhausted from the training day, or down with a cold or the flu. On those days, the other members picked up the slack. They paddled harder. They dug deeper. They gave me their rations for extra strength. And when the time came, later in training, I returned the favor. The small rubber boat made us realize that no man could make it through training alone. No SEAL could make it through combat alone and by extension you needed people in your life to help you through the difficult times.

I don’t want to achieve immortality by being inducted into the Hall of Fame. I want to achieve immortality by not dying.” —William De Morgan

If I can claim to be an actor at all, it’s because I give the impression of being spontaneous.

I WANDER THE film criticism district, formulating theories, grinding axes; it keeps me sane in these insane times to return to my roots, to praise those films and filmmakers worthy of an audience’s attention, to destroy those filmmakers who loose self-satisfied garbage onto the world. Consider Stranger Than Fiction, I say to my imagined lecture hall full of cinephiles: a wonderfully quirky film starring William Ferrell and the always adorkable Zooey Deschanel. The work done here by director Marc Forster (who directed the unfortunately misguided, misogynistic, and racistic Monster’s Ball) and screenwriter Zachary H. Elms is stellar in that all the metacinematic techniques work, its construction analogous to that of a fine Swiss watch (no accident that a wristwatch figures so prominently into the story!). Compare this to any mess written by Charlie Kaufman. Stranger Than Fiction is the film Kaufman would’ve written if he were able to plan and structure his work, rather than making it up as he goes along, throwing in half-baked concepts willy-nilly, using no criterion other than a hippy-dippy “that’d be cool, man.” Such a criterion might work if the person making that assessment had even a shred of humanism within his soul. Kaufman does not, and so he puts his characters through hellscapes with no hope of them achieving understanding or redemption. Will Ferrell learns to live fully in the course of Stranger Than Fiction. Dame Emily Thomson, who plays his “author,” learns her own lessons about compassion and the value and function of art. Had Kaufman written this film, it would have been a laundry list of “clever” ideas culminating in some unearned emotional brutality and a chain reaction of recursional activity wherein it is revealed that the author has an author who has an author who has an author who has an author, et chetera, thus leaving the audience depleted, depressed, and, most egregiously, cheated. What Kaufman does not understand is that such “high concepts” are not an end in themselves but an opportunity to explore actual mundane human issues. Kaufman is a monster, plain and simple, but a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude (Dunning and Kruger could write a book about him!). Kaufman is Godzilla with dentures, Halloween’s Mike Myers with a rubber knife, Pennywise the Clown with contact dermatitis from living in a sewer. He is a pathetic—

Therefore we see that our corporeal life Needs little, altogether, and only such As takes the pain away, and can besides Strew underneath some number of delights. More grateful ’tis at times (for nature craves No artifice nor luxury), if forsooth There be no golden images of boys Along the halls, with right hands holding out The lamps ablaze, the lights for evening feasts, And if the house doth glitter not with gold Nor gleam with silver, and to the lyre resound No fretted and gilded ceilings overhead, Yet still to lounge with friends in the soft grass Beside a river of water, underneath A big tree’s boughs, and merrily to refresh Our frames, with no vast outlay — most of all If the weather is laughing and the times of the year Besprinkle the green of the grass around with flowers. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things ___Trans: William Ellery Leonard

The sun had sunk behind the lonely western seas; Ulva, and Lunga, and the Dutchman's Cap had grown dark on the darkening waters; and the smooth Atlantic swell was booming along the sombre caves; but up here in Castle Dare, on the high and rocky coast of Mull, the great hall was lit with such a blaze of candles as Castle Dare had but rarely seen.

When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal. And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank.

Joan Joyce is the real deal, a fierce competitor and one of the greatest athletes and coaches in sports history. Tony Renzoni’s moving tribute to Joan shows us why she is a champion in sports and in life. —Billie Jean King, sports icon and equality pioneer The story is all true. Joan Joyce was a tremendous pitcher, as talented as anyone who ever played. [responding to a newspaper account of his early 1960s match-ups against Joan Joyce] —Ted Williams, Hall of Famer and Boston Red Sox great, December 30, 1999 Joan Joyce is truly the greatest female athlete in sports history. And a great coach as well. Tony Renzoni’s well-researched book is a touching tribute to this phenomenal athlete. I highly recommend this book! —Bobby Valentine, former MLB player and manager Quotes for Historic Connecticut Music Venues: From the Coliseum to the Shaboo: I would like to thank Tony Renzoni for giving me the opportunity to write the foreword to his wonderful book. I highly recommend Connecticut Music Venues: From the Coliseum to Shaboo to music lovers everywhere! —Felix Cavaliere, Legendary Hall of Famer (Young Rascals/Rascals, Solo) As the promoter of the concerts in many of the music venues in this book, I hope you enjoy living the special memories this book will give you. —Jim Koplik, Live Nation president, Connecticut and Upstate New York Tony Renzoni has captured the soul and spirit of decades of the Connecticut live music scene, from the wild and wooly perspective of the music venues that housed it. A great read! —Christine Ohlman, the “Beehive Queen,” recording artist/songwriter Tony Renzoni has written a very thoughtful and well-researched tribute to the artists of Connecticut, and we are proud to have Gene included among them. —Lynne Pitney, wife of Gene Pitney Our Alice Cooper band recorded the Billion Dollars Babies album in a mansion in Greenwich. Over the years, there have been many great musicians from Connecticut, and the local scene is rich with good music. Tony Renzoni’s book captures all of that and more. Sit back and enjoy the ride. —Dennis Dunaway, hall of famer and co-founder of the Alice Cooper band. Rock ’n’ Roll music fans from coast to coast will connect to events in this book. Strongly recommended! —Judith Fisher Freed, estate of Alan Freed

Tughluk was far too free in shedding blood,’ writes Battuta. ‘Every day hundreds of people—chained, pinioned and fettered—were brought to [the sultan’s hall] and those who were for execution were executed, those for torture tortured, and those for beating beaten. It was but seldom that the entrance to his palace was without a corpse. One day as I arrived at the palace my horse shied at the sight of a white fragment on the ground. I asked what it was and one of my companions said: "It is the torso of a man who was [this morning] cut into three pieces.

The Merlin Quartet, Mary Stewart The four volumes are: The Crystal Cave (William Morrow, 1970) The Hollow Hills (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973) The Last Enchantment (G.K. Hall & Company, 1979) The Wicked Day (Ballantine Books, 1983)

Idiot,” Stefan mutters, and catches Aaron looking at him strangely for a moment, before the boy returns to his stubborn breakfast. “So,” Aaron says, around a mouthful of dry Weetabix, “are you ready to tell me your crimes, yet?” “Are you?” “I feel like you’ll judge me. Will you judge me?” “Yeah, probably,” Stefan admits. “Hah! You really are like Raph. He judges me a lot, too, but I’m, like, seventy-to-eighty percent certain he’s knocked a bunch of women around, which is way more extreme than my thing. Except getting him to admit it is like pulling Goslafin implants out of Declan’s stomach.” “It’s Goserelin, you fucking imbecile!” Will shouts, from the other end of the table. “You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?” Stefan whispers. Aaron replies, with a finger to his lips, “Ssshhh. Watch.” Stefan looks back over. Adam’s put a hand on Will’s wrist, to quiet him, and Will waits a second before shaking it off. Adam looks put out for a moment, but rests his hand on the table next to Will’s, just centimetres apart. Their conversation resumes. “What do you think?” Aaron says quietly. “Closet cases? Or just really, really repressed? Adam’s from this freaky Christian sect, the New Church of Something-or-Other, and William is a truly massive wanker.” “The idea that all homophobes are closeted gay people is just a myth,” Stefan says. “A couple of big-name arseholes getting exposed doesn’t make it a pattern.” “Whatever. I think they want to touch dicks.” He slaps his hands against each other a few times. “That’s not how gay men have sex, Aaron.” “Sounds fun, though, right?” Aaron says, grinning, and then adds, “Boarding school,” by way of explanation, and shovels more dry Weetabix into his mouth. “Why haven’t you put milk on? Wouldn’t it make it easier to eat?” “It’s oat milk. And this is Weetabix. I won’t pour oats onto oats. It’s perverse!” “Weetabix is made of wheat, Aaron. It’s in the name. There’s even an oat version. Called Oatibix.” “Oh. Never mind, then. Don’t tell Will I said that.” “I heard, idiot,” Will says.

Popery, in the ordinary state of its profession, combines the form of godliness with a total denial of its power. A heap of unmeaning ceremonies, adapted to fascinate the imagination, and engage the senses; implicit faith in human authority, combined with an utter neglect of divine teaching; ignorance the most profound, joined to dogmatism the most presumptuous; a vigilant exclusion of Biblical knowledge, together with a total extinction of free inquiry—present the spectacle of religion lying in state, surrounded with all the silent pomp of death. The very absurdities of such a religion, render it less unacceptable to men whose decided hostility to truth inclines them to view with complacency whatever obscures its beauty, or impedes its operation. Of all the corruptions of Christianity which have prevailed to any considerable extent, Popery presents the most numerous points of contrast to the simple doctrines of the Gospel; and just in proportion as it gains ground, the religion of Christ must decline.—Robert Hall

A remarkable treatise on manners dating from the late twelfth century – Daniel of Beccles’ Book of the Civilised Man – gives some insight into how nobles were expected to behave in a medieval great hall. In this public milieu, a measure of decorum was advised. Nobles were warned not to comb their hair, clean their nails, scratch themselves or look for fleas in their breeches. As a rule, shoes should not be removed and urinating was to be avoided, unless of course you were a lord in his own hall, in which case it was permissible.

My first and lasting impression of the Connecticut River Valley is its serene beauty, especially in the autumn months. Deep River was a near picture-perfect New England village. When I arrived there, the town was a typical working-class place, nothing like the trendy upper-income enclave it became. The town center had a cluster of shops, a movie theater open only on weekends, several white-steepled churches (none of them Catholic), the town hall, and a Victorian library. It was small, even by Ansonia standards.

Occam’s razor is summarized for our purposes in this way: Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.

The foundries were vast, dark castles built for efficiency, not comfort. Even in the mild New England summers, when the warm air combined with the stagnant heat from the machines or open flames in the huge melting rooms where the iron was cast, the effects were overwhelming. The heat came in unrelenting waves and sucked the soul from your body. In the winter, the enormous factories were impossible to heat and frigid New England air reigned supreme in the long halls. The work was difficult, noisy, mind-numbing, sometimes dangerous and highly regulated. Bathroom and lunch breaks were scheduled down to the second. There was no place to make a private phone call. Company guards, dressed in drab uniforms straight out of a James Cagney prison film [those films were in black and white, notoriously tough, weren’t there to guard company property. They were there to keep an eye on us. No one entered or the left the building without punching in or out on a clock, because the doors were locked and opened electronically from the main office.

After leaping from a motorcade car and rushing into the Depository, a reporter asks for directions to the nearest pay phone. Helpful employee Lee Harvey Oswald points him down the hall.

Focusing on the public school system, former Secretary of Education, William Bennett explains the moral crisis in that institution by contrasting the concerns of teachers in two different eras: 'Over the years teachers have been asked to identify the top problems in America's schools. In 1940 teachers identified them as talking out of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the hall; cutting in line; dress code infractions; and littering. When asking the same question in 1990, teachers identified drug abuse; alcohol abuse; pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault.' During the thirty-year period of 1960 to 1990, 'there has been a 560 percent increase in violent crime; more than a 400 percent increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorces; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of 75 points in the average SAT scores of high-school students.' We do not believe it is a coincidence that the increase of moral mayhem described by Bennett corresponds with an increased acceptance of moral relativism. In fact, relativism has been officially incorporated in the educational curriculum, known as values clarification.

and Mrs. William Hayes Fogg. New gifts from Forbes and others were so numerous by 1912 that plans were made for a new museum adjacent to Harvard Yard on Quincy Street. As director, Forbes conceived of the new Fogg as a laboratory of learning, accommodating galleries, lecture halls, curatorial offices, conservation, and a research library all under the same roof. He closely oversaw the architectural plans by Charles Coolidge – from the outside, a simple brick neocolonial; inside, a spacious, skylit courtyard modeled, down to the last detail, on a High Renaissance facade in Montepulciano, in Tuscany, creating a sanctuary from the day-to-day bustle of Cambridge. Forbes insisted that this be finished, like the original, in travertine, at the then-extraordinary cost of $56,085. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell balked. A simple plaster finish would cost about $8,500. The travertine was not only expensive, Lowell asserted, it was ostentatious. But Forbes was

They realized that belief of whatever sort-whether it was the faith in History and the State, as in the shattered halls of communism, or faith in a particular theology-at least made it possible to get through the day. And if one felt better in the belief that one's life made sense in these terms, then what was wrong with that? Was it weakness to allow oneself the pleasure of thinking that one counted in some way? And did this engagement not result, on balance, in greater human happiness? No, said the atheists, it did not. And yet where, William wondered, were the great works of those who believed in nothing at all? We had to believe, he thought, whether it was in some power beyond us, or in love, or art, or beauty. The need to believe was always there, and it would find expression, even if it attached itself to something paltry and shallow such as celebrity culture. And for many millions that was where their spiritual energy went-into a fascination with fashion and the lives of narcissistic entertainers. Viewed in this light, he considered Hello! magazine was a religious tract, a work of theology.

How dare you?' Bayar began, but his voice had lost some of its force. 'How dare you come into this sacred hall, flinging accusations?' 'I have not yet made any accusations,' Willo said. 'Perhaps it is your own guilt clamoring in your ears.

By the time I returned to Albany that fall, I was committed to turning things around. I marched into the career-planning office and began researching the firms at which I might still have a shot. Most did their main recruiting from the second-year, not the third-year, class, so I was late to the party, and I knew it. One firm, however, did stand out: Bickel & Brewer. They were based in Dallas, with smaller satellite offices in Washington, DC, New York, and Chicago. They liked to hire third-year law students, and at New York salaries. William Brewer bears a decent resemblance to a young Robert Redford. He walks with a strong gait and wears a tan Burberry trench coat over perfectly tailored navy or gray suits. He was also legendary in the halls of Albany Law School, where he had studied law. I researched him and his firm with vigor and soon found that Brewer’s looks weren’t the only thing attractive about this firm. The term “Rambo litigation” was coined there. They took no prisoners. You hired them when you wanted a fight. At twenty-three years old, I loved that. Kill or be killed! We’re not here to make friends, we’re here to win! You sue my client? F— you and your request for an extension! You want a settlement conference? Pound sand! Our offer is screw you! Looking back, this feels a little silly, but as a young gun it sounded very sexy to me. I could enter a frat or a brotherhood of sorts. The bravado naturally appealed to me, given the protective armor I’d built up since being bullied, not to mention the fact that I’d probably always had a bit more testosterone than most girls. Going on the offensive was thrilling, and the more I acted tough, the tougher I felt. Being a litigator was the perfect job; it not only let me hide my insecurities, it felt like a tool for conquering them.

[…] Under such auspices, in 1835, he went to Canaan Academy, at Canaan, New Hampshire, Rev. William Scales, principal; he was kindly received into the family of George Kimball, Esq. There he first met Miss Julia Williams, formerly a pupil of Miss Prudence Crandall, Canterbury, Connecticut, who was imprisoned for teaching colored girls; Miss Williams subsequently became his wife. Among the pupils at the Academy were his old schoolmates, Alexander Crummell and Thomas S. Sydney. They joyfully entered upon their studies, penetrated with the hopes of a race to whom the higher branches of human learning had hitherto been a sealed book. But the spirit of caste, which we have already spoken of, as being, in the rural districts, still stronger against the education of colored youth than in the cities, soon concentrated its malign influence upon this Academy. In August of the same year (1835) a mob assembled in Canaan, and with the aid of ninety-five yoke of oxen and two days’ hard labor, finally succeeded in removing the Academy from its site and afterwards they destroyed it by fire. The same mob surrounded the house of Mr Kimball and fired shot into the room occupied by Garnet: to add to the mean atrocity of the act, he was at that time, in consequence of increasing lameness, obliged to use a crutch in walking, and was confined to his room by a fever. But neither sickness, nor infirmity, nor the howling of the mob could subdue his fiery spirit; he spent most of the day in casting bullets in anticipation of the attack, and when the mob finally came he replied to their fire with a double-barrelled shot-gun, blazing from his window, and soon drove the cowards away. Henry Highland Garnet, A memorial discourse; delivered in the hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865. With an introduction by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), pp 29-30 [The quote is from Smith's biographical sketch of Garnet]

During his two-year term, Hunt introduced the inspections of tenement houses, appointed school nurses, provided food inspection and dental services for school children, closed illegal gambling halls, introduced a plan to improve city sewers, introduced the regulation of loan sharks who preyed on the poor, and settled several strikes.