Wine Country Quotes

The letter had been crumpled up and tossed onto the grate. It had burned all around the edges, so the names at the top and bottom had gone up in smoke. But there was enough of the bold black scrawl to reveal that it had indeed been a love letter. And as Hannah read the singed and half-destroyed parchment, she was forced to turn away to hide the trembling of her hand. —should warn you that this letter will not be eloquent. However, it will be sincere, especially in light of the fact that you will never read it. I have felt these words like a weight in my chest, until I find myself amazed that a heart can go on beating under such a burden. I love you. I love you desperately, violently, tenderly, completely. I want you in ways that I know you would find shocking. My love, you don't belong with a man like me. In the past I've done things you wouldn't approve of, and I've done them ten times over. I have led a life of immoderate sin. As it turns out, I'm just as immoderate in love. Worse, in fact. I want to kiss every soft place of you, make you blush and faint, pleasure you until you weep, and dry every tear with my lips. If you only knew how I crave the taste of you. I want to take you in my hands and mouth and feast on you. I want to drink wine and honey from you. I want you under me. On your back. I'm sorry. You deserve more respect than that. But I can't stop thinking of it. Your arms and legs around me. Your mouth, open for my kisses. I need too much of you. A lifetime of nights spent between your thighs wouldn't be enough. I want to talk with you forever. I remember every word you've ever said to me. If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you. You would say it's too soon to feel this way. You would ask how I could be so certain. But some things can't be measured by time. Ask me an hour from now. Ask me a month from now. A year, ten years, a lifetime. The way I love you will outlast every calendar, clock, and every toll of every bell that will ever be cast. If only you— And there it stopped.

Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.

If she fell, if she broke, you'd find a million fragments in the morning. Bright crystal and clear wine on the parquet flooring, that's all you'd see at dawn.

Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” It’s nostalgia for studying abroad that one semester. Travel is realizing that “age thirty” should be shed of its goddamn stigma.

But you can live in the most democratic country on earth, and if you're lazy, obtuse or servile within yourself, you're not free.

At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were - not particuarly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less - and spits out the monsters we are becoming. Our friends despise us. We are an epic. Everything is grand, crashing, brilliant, blinding. It's the Golden Age of Hollywood, and we are a legend in our own minds, and no one outside can fail to see that we are headed for hell, and we won't listen, we say they don't understand, we pour more wine, go to the parties, we sparkle, fly all over the country, we're on an adventure, unstoppable, we've found each other and we race through our days like Mr. Toad in his yellow motorcar, with no idea where the brakes are and to hell with it anyway, we are on fire, drunk with something we call love.

Look, you can’t take your pussy with you,” I said. “Use it. Enjoy it. Fuck, fuck, fuck, until you run out of dicks. Travel to other countries and have sex. Explore the full range of everything, and feel zero shame. Don’t let society’s narrow scope about what they think you should do with your vagina determine what you do with your vagina.

The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy, at a great price, bad wine made in Boston...

She will be busy writing novels. As soon as she had has gotten far enough away from this frighteningly puritanical country, her mind will be set free, and she will be able to turn all of her observations in richly drawn characters and intricately themed stories.” “But what will she eat, dear Grass?” Barnard leaned against the wall, his arms crossing his chest skeptically. “Baguette and red wine, pure art, filthy air. Look at her, she is made of rose petals, and the world will take good care of her. And if it does not, we will have our hearts moved by such an exquisitely gorgeous tragedy.

The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild . . .savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical.

Spend sunny afternoons writing. Take weekends in the country. Dream. Drink good wine, eat fabulous cheese and great bread. Make the kind of love that destroys the bed.

Do you know that high fever which invades us in our cold suffering, that aching for a land we do not know, that anguish of curiosity? There is a country which resembles you, where everything is beautiful, sumptuous, authentic, still, where fantasy has built and adorned a western China, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wed to silence. That is where to live, that is where to die!" - Invitation to a Voyage

The stamps on the envelope were English. One was the head of a statesman engraved in purple and the others were motorcars engraved in blue. It seemed like every country in the world had stamps of statesmen and motorcars. Where were the stamps of the elevator boys and hapless housewives? Of the six-story walk-ups and soured wine?

We are often given pills or fluids to help remedy illness, yet little has been taught to us about the power of smell to do the exact same thing. It is known that the scent of fresh rosemary increases memory, but this cure for memory loss is not divulged by doctors to help the elderly. I also know that the most effective use of the blue lotus flower is not from its dilution with wine or tea – but from its scent. To really maximize the positive effects of the blue lily (or the pink lotus), it must be sniffed within minutes of plucking. This is why it is frequently shown being sniffed by my ancient ancestors on the walls of temples and on papyrus. Even countries across the Orient share the same imagery. The sacred lotus not only creates a relaxing sensation of euphoria, and increases vibrations of the heart, but also triggers genetic memory - and good memory with an awakened heart ushers wisdom.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking. Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.

Your love doesn't end because you find out that he's not related to you by blood. I believe that love transcends such small details as family lineage.

My mother told me that it didn't matter who you were born to, what mattered was the family you made for yourself.

To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine,” he said.

News spoils quick, friend, like milk.’ ‘I say it gets better if carefully kept, like wine.’ ‘I’m glad you like the vintage, but I ain’t buying yesterday’s news.

They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers past abandoned way stations empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a summer country.

Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations.

Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the country, lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge.

Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move.

... I've a thirst on me I wouldn't sell for half a crown. - Give it a name, citizen, says Joe. - Wine of the country, says he. - What's yours? says Joe. - Ditto MacAnaspey, says I. - Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how's the old heart, citizen? says he.

She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic - who forgot the candles, who broke the wine glasses, who forgot the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick ankled girl. Not bad-looking. Not special. But when she was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded. She had never before met a man who spoke of the workd - of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it - in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach. Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country, into the vast extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them - as though it lay before thm like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.

And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman's Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.

Had I realized while on Earth," he said, "that Hell was such a delightful place, I should have put more faith in the teachings of religion. As it was, I actually doubted its existence. A foolish error, cherie. I am pleased to say that you have converted me completely." "I, too," observed Mr. Hamilton, helping himself to wine, "was something of an unbeliever in my time, and while never quite an atheist, like my arch-enemy Jefferson, I was still inclined to look upon Satan as merely a myth. Imagine my satisfaction to find him ruling a monarchy! You know I spent the greater part of my earthly existence fighting Mr. Jefferson and his absurd democratic ideas and now look at the damn country! Run by morons!

Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four ' faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

Even in the Moment of Our Earliest Kiss Even in the moment of our earliest kiss, When sighed the straitened bud into the flower, Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this; And that I knew, though not the day and hour. Too season-wise am I, being country-bred, To tilt at autumn or defy the frost: Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did, I say with them, "What’s out tonight is lost." I only hoped, with the mild hope of all Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree, A fairer summer and a later fall Than in these parts a man is apt to see, And sunny clusters ripened for the wine: I tell you this across the blackened vine.

The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a change, all of the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion; leaf, shrub, star, and meadow grass ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbs’s heart. And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way station, a single traveler reading a dim newspaper under a solitary naked bulb, might raise up his head, listen, and think, What’s that? and decide, Only a woodchuck, surely, beating on a hollow log. But it was Lavinia Nebbs, it was most surely the heart of Lavinia Nebbs.

If instead of having wars, we just sent large groups of people to each other’s countries to drink loads of their wine and aimlessly wander around their towns on a regular basis, then the world would probably be a much, much happier place. Although now I’ve written that, it occurs to me that’s essentially what the EU is.

Making wine and drinking wine is not new to African Americans and others in the Diaspora. South Africa has a three-century history in growing, harvesting and distilling grapes as wine. The entire continent of Africa has a history in wine-making. In this country, slaves cultivated the vineyards owned by Thomas Jefferson and other vintners.

She had suggested that I open one of the bottles of wine we’d brought from the London flat, but I made do with water. Wine was for sharing.

And she couldn't bear the idea of seeing pity in his dark eyes. She didn't need to add to his already difficult load.

For why should not the wine of their own country satisfy men’s desires, unless they were to import water also, like the foolish Persian kings?

We are very self-centered: the rest of the universe exists only to consume our wines and produce soccer teams we can beat.

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendour of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights and colours spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call 'the breath of angels'...

A different day. – Even if the experiment of Biblical times supported the argument that it is the abuse of light wines and beer, not their use, which is reprehensible, we must remember that we are dealing with a modern problem. In the time of Jesus in Palestine filth that is now disposed of through modern sewerage systems was tossed from the windows into the street. Shallow wells spread disease, and water was considered positively dangerous, as it to-day in some countries where similar social conditions exist. It may be that to run the risk of typhoid by drinking water contaminated by filth; but to-day in America pure water may be had in abundance.(1926)

I drank the dregs of the wine to what remained of my health. I gave the last of my fervor for what remained of my hope. I cannot say for sure that this country is cursed, Honey flows with the milk, and the milk might curdle. Eli7

One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Not all at once, but gradually, over the months, another revelation came to me: None of that other stuff, much as I'd loved it, was what made a marriage. Not restaurant dinners or romantic vacations. Not walks on the beach or visits to wine country in the Boxster. Not oysters and martinis or moonlight over the Bay Bridge." "This was a marriage. As uncomfortable and inconvenient and devastating as it might be to live as we did now, we inhabited this place together.

Soon you catch your first glimpse of a vineyard basking in the sun, its broad leaves silently turning sunlight into sugar, ripening vitis vinifera, the European grapes that make the world’s finest wines. For a moment you might imagine you’ve been mysteriously wafted to the French countryside, but no, this is the East End of Long Island, the most exciting new wine region in North America. You’ve reached your destination, but your journey of discovery has barely begun

All of us together were of a generation born of old country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old country way, and peeled apples and pears after dinner.

Black vintners in this country make some really great wines. Explore a wine list and you will find at least one of our wines in the best restaurants. Buy a bottle for your table, and let management know you appreciate them including a Black winemaker in their stock.

It was only after you that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment.

Sleeping in her still room, she gave Him the sleep of the child in the cradle, the sleep of the young man rocked in the storm-tossed boat. Breaking and eating the bread, drinking the wine of the country, she gave Him His flesh and blood; she prepared the Host for the Mass.

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

That Tío Félix had not enjoyed the bottomless wine service and microwaved dinner and dessert. He’d wanted to be scattered, not with his mother, not where his wife and daughter would eventually be buried, but in a country he’d never set foot in. Who was she to question his final wish?

The first thing we offer a visitor is a tecito, an agüita, or a vinito, a “nice little drink” of tea, water, or wine. We always add the diminutive -ito to our words, almost as an apology for offering, in accord with our desire not to be noticed and our horror of putting on airs, even with words.

All the values of the temperate landscape were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars.

It was easy to tell who at Ortolan was once an actor and was now a career waiter. The careerists were older, for one, and precise and fussy about enforcing Findlay’s rules, and at staff dinners they would ostentatiously swirl the wine that the sommelier’s assistant poured them to sample and say things like, “It’s a little like that Linne Calodo Petite Sirah you served last week, José, isn’t it?” or “Tastes a little minerally, doesn’t it? This a New Zealand?” It was understood that you didn’t ask them to come to your productions—you only asked your fellow actor-waiters, and if you were asked, it was considered polite to at least try to go—and you certainly didn’t discuss auditions, or agents, or anything of the sort with them. Acting was like war, and they were veterans: they didn’t want to think about the war, and they certainly didn’t want to talk about it with naïfs who were still eagerly dashing toward the trenches, who were still excited to be in-country. Findlay

He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, especially if it be in things indifferent.

Other than involving yourself with ungrateful vegetable matter, colour, vigour and fascination can be imparted into a small outdoor space by several other methods. In the 18th century, the inclusion of a hermit on one's estate was regarded as the epitome of country house style. There is absolutely no reason why today's dandy should not avail himself of the same privilege. It's a straightforward enough matter to entice a hopelessly drunk vagrant back to your premises using the simple lure of an opened bottle of wine. Once there, dress him in a bed sheet, wreathe his head in foliage and invite him to take up residence in an old barrel with the promise of unlimited alcohol, tobacco and scraps from your table in return for a sterling display of relentless solitude. Such a move not only provides the disadvantaged with ideal employment opportunities, but also enhances your reputation for stylish romanticism. Watch your friends gape in wonderment at the picturesque spectacle as your hermit sporadically peers out the top of the barrel and matters a few enigmatic words of wisdom.

I will say this about the upper echelon in France: they know how to spend money. From what I saw living in America, wealth is dedicated to elevating the individual experience. If you’re a well-off child, you get a car, or a horse. You go to summer camps that cost as much as college. And everything is monogrammed, personalized, and stamped, to make it that much easier for other people to recognize your net worth. …The French bourgeois don’t pine for yachts or garages with multiple cars. They don’t build homes with bowling alleys or spend their weekends trying to meet the quarterly food and beverage limit at their country clubs: they put their savings into a vacation home that all their family can enjoy, and usually it’s in France. They buy nice food, they serve nice wine, and they wear the same cashmere sweaters over and over for years. I think the wealthy French feel comfortable with their money because they do not fear it. It’s the fearful who put money into houses with even bedrooms and fifteen baths. It’s the fearful who drive around in yellow Hummers during high-gas-price months becasue if they’re going to lose their money tomorrow, at least other people will know that they are rich today. The French, as with almost all things, privilege privacy and subtlety and they don’t feel comfortable with excess. This is why one of their favorite admonishments is tu t’es laisse aller. You’ve lost control of yourself. You’ve let yourself go.

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn’t deprive herself, but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork. In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate. I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it. I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so. Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional. As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast. She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit." It was the same with his parents; as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking making space for the entrance of men into their lives not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave. I have been taught accommodation. My brother never thinks before he speaks. I have been taught to filter. “How can anyone have a relationship to food?" He asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs. I want to tell say: we come from difference, Jonas, you have been taught to grow out I have been taught to grow in you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much I learned to absorb I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters and I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits that’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades. We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit weaving silence in between the threads which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house, skin itching, picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again, Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled. Deciding how many bites is too many How much space she deserves to occupy. Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her, And I don’t want to do either anymore but the burden of this house has followed me across the country I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry". I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza a circular obsession I never wanted but inheritance is accidental still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

Consumable commodities, it is said, are soon destroyed; whereas gold and silver are of a more durable nature, and, were it not for this continual exportation, might be accumulated for ages together, to the incredible augmentation of the real wealth of the country. Nothing, therefore, it is pretended, can be more disadvantageous to any country, than the trade which consists in the exchange of such lasting for such perishable commodities. We do not, however, reckon that trade disadvantageous which consists in the exchange of the hard-ware of England for the wines of France; and yet hard-ware is a very durable commodity, and were it not for this continual exportation, might too be accumulated for ages together, to the incredible augmentation of the pots and pans of the country.

XII. If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped, the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness? Tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. XIII. As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, Stood stupified, however he came there: Thrust out past service from the devil's stud! XIV. Alive? he might be dead for aught I knew, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain. And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. XV. I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart, As a man calls for wine before he fights, I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, Ere fitly I could hope to play my part. Think first, fight afterwards, the soldier's art: One taste of the old time sets all to rights. XVI. Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face Beneath its garniture of curly gold, Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold An arm to mine to fix me to the place, The way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace! Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold. XVII. Giles then, the soul of honour - there he stands Frank as ten years ago when knighted first, What honest man should dare (he said) he durst. Good - but the scene shifts - faugh! what hangman hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst! XVIII. Better this present than a past like that: Back therefore to my darkening path again! No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain. Will the night send a howlet or a bat? I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. XIX. A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof - to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. XX. So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. XXI. Which, while I forded - good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, Each step, of feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! - It may have been a water-rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek. XXII. Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Now for a better country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage, Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage - XXIII. The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque, What penned them there, with all the plain to choose? No footprint leading to that horrid mews, None out of it. Mad brewage set to work Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

Everything I’ve worked for is this!’ Ramy exclaimed. ‘What, you think I came to Babel because I want to be a translator for the Queen? Birdie, I hate it in this country. I hate the way they look at me, I hate being passed around at their wine parties like an animal on display. I hate knowing that my very presence at Oxford is a betrayal of my race and religion, because I’m becoming just that class of person Macaulay hoped to create.

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth - danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger's mouth - and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age - comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunset over water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two. There is his own distant youth, that daily humiliation of rinsing out your one good shirt and putting on your onw good smile, along with the daily rush of newness: new pleasures, new people, new reflections of yourself. There is Robert's middle age of selecting his vices as carefully as tiles in a Paris shop, napping in the sunlight on an afternoon and getting up from a chair and hearing the creak of death. The city of youth, the country of age. But in between, where Less is living - that exurban existence? How has he never learned to live it?

What, you think I came to Babel because I want to be a translator for the Queen? Birdie, I hate it in this country. I hate the way they look at me, I hate being passed around at their wine parties like an animal on display. I hate knowing that my very presence at Oxford is a betrayal of my race and religion, because I’m becoming just that class of person Macaulay hoped to create. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like Hermes since I got here—

You’ll definitely find one or two of the maids walking about tomorrow morning with their hands over their eyes for fear they’ll see the wrong man before they meet up with their sweethearts.” He gestured to Gabe. “That joker there likes to ask them to pick something up, just to see if they can do it with their eyes closed. He’s a devil that way.” “It serves them right to be thwarted if they’re foolish enough to participate in such a ridiculous superstition.” Mrs. Plumtree said with a snort. “I’d never let any of my servants do it. It smacks of country ignorance.” “I think it’s romantic,” Celia said dreamily. “You let Fate choose your mate. The stars align, and suddenly you’re confronted with the man of your dreams.” “Or the man of your nightmares,” Maria bit out, thinking of how Fate had thrown her into Oliver’s power a week ago. “Fate can be rather fickle in that respect, if you ask me. I wouldn’t trust Fate with my future.” Minerva eyed her over her glass of wine. “Probably a wise policy.

Renee: “The Greek government doesn’t know that I found anything that day in the temple. And they for sure wouldn’t want to know about the little mess I left behind.” She grimaced. Trout: “Little mess? You started a freakin’ cave in, you moron. Nice work by the way. Way to keep up international relations. ‘Uh, yeah, hi, I’m Renée, I’m an American. I’m here to, you know, like, drink all your wine, trash the joint, steal all your valuable shit and then bolt the country.’ Why didn’t you just drop your shorts and pee in the Parthenon?

Moreover, although Persians are termed the French of the East, it would be more apt to compare them with the Spaniards, whose customs and whole manner of life are akin to the Persian. This is partly due to similarity in the physical conditions of the two countries. But there is some actual blood connection too ; for the Spaniards are in part descended from Persians who accompanied the Arab conquerors of the Iberian peninsula. These founded a Shiraz in distant Spain, and there made the wine which, as the familiar Sherry, still preserves the Persian name. The

Keep the creepy messages coming, is what I say. We’ll eat like kings!” “Who the fuck wants to eat goat?” Tank said, lip curled. “I’ll have you know that goat is a delicacy in many countries,” Viking said. “Heard it washes down well with a nice savory red wine.” “Yeah, ’cause you drink red wine,” Tank said, shaking his head. Viking leaned forward. “I may have the body of a Greek god with flaming red locks, but I’ll have you know I’m a sensitive and cultured fucker too.” “The only culture you got is growing in a petri dish in a doctor’s office,” Tank shot back.

Suppose you are particularly rich and well-to-do, and say on that last day, 'I am very rich; I am tolerably well known; I have lived all my life in the best society, and, thank Heaven, come of a most respectable family. I have served my King and country with honour. I was in Parliament for several years, where, I may say, my speeches were listened to, and pretty well received. I don't owe any man a shilling: on the contrary, I lent my old college friend, Jack Lazarus, fifty pounds, for which my executors will not press him. I leave my daughters with ten thousand pounds a piece--very good portions for girls: I bequeath my plate and furniture, my house in Baker Street, with a handsome jointure, to my widow for her life; and my landed property, besides money in the Funds, and my cellar of well-selected wine in Baker Street, to my son. I leave twenty pound a year to my valet; and I defy any man after I am gone to find anything against my character.' Or suppose, on the other hand, your swan sings quite a different sort of dirge, and you say, 'I am a poor, blighted, disappointed old fellow, and have made an utter failure through life. I was not endowed either with brains or with good fortune: and confess that I have committed a hundred mistakes and blunders. I own to having forgotten my duty many a time. I can't pay what I owe. On my last bed I lie utterly helpless and humble: and I pray forgiveness for my weakness, and throw myself with a contrite heart at the feet of the Divine Mercy.' Which of these two speeches, think you, would be the best oration for your own funeral? Old Sedley made the last; and in that humble frame of mind, and holding by the hand of his daughter, life and disappointment and vanity sank away from under him.

That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.

Chinese Pot Roast 1 chuck roast, about 4 lb. 2 garlic cloves, minced A dash of nutmeg and cinnamon 2 tbsp. brown sugar 1 tbsp. sherry or red wine ¼ cup soy sauce 1¼ cups water 3 peeled and sliced carrots 3 potatoes, peeled and cubed 1 celery stalk, sliced 2 tbsp. cornstarch   Marinate the meat in the next six ingredients for at least 3 hours. Place the meat in a roasting pan at 325 degrees for 2 hours. Add the vegetables 45 minutes before cooking time ends. Voila!   Tory Simmons’ Simmering Family Cookbook Chapter 14   Tory was putting a Chinese pot roast in the oven when she heard a car pull into the drive.

I love this country. I loved it the first time I came here, back in 1963. I love it because it’s free. My mother escaped from Nazi Germany; the rest of her family never made it. The first thing Hitler did was take over the press and make it subservient to the government. Lenin did the same.” Jasper had drunk a few glasses of wine, and as a result he was a shade more candid. “America is free because it has disrespectful newspapers and television shows to expose and shame presidents who fuck the Constitution up the ass.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to the free press. Here’s to disrespect. And God bless America.

Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple. Eyes shut to let his nose wander, he snuffed deeply. He moved in the hell-fire steams and sudden baking-powder flurries of snow in this miraculous climate where Grandma, with the look of the Indies in her eyes and the flesh of two warm hens in her bodice, Grandma of the thousand arms, shook, basted, whipped, beat, minced, diced, peeled, wrapped, salted, stirred. Blind, he touched his way to the pantry door. A squeal of laughter rang from the parlor, teacups tinkled. But he moved on into the cool underwater green and wild-persimmon country where the slung and hanging odor of creamy bananas ripened silently and bumped his head. Gnats fizzed angrily about vinegar cruets and his ears. He opened his eyes. He saw bread waiting to be cut into slices of warm summer cloud, doughnuts strewn like clown hoops from some edible game. The faucets turned on and off in his cheeks. Here on the plum-shadowed side of the house with maple leaves making a creek-water running in the hot wind at the window he read spice-cabinet names.

Long Live King Peter! Long Live Queen Susan! Long Live King Edmund! Long Live Queen Lucy!” “Once a King or Queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen. Bear it well, Sons of Adam! Bear it well, Daughters of Eve!” said Aslan. And through the eastern door, which was wide open, came the voices of the mermen and the mermaids swimming close to the castle steps and singing in honor of their new Kings and Queens. So the children sat in their thrones and scepters were put into their hands and they gave rewards and honors to all their friends, to Tumnus the Faun, and to the Beavers, and Giant Rumblebuffin, to the leopards, and the good centaurs and the good dwarfs, and to the lion. And that night there was a great feast in Cair Paravel, and revelry and dancing, and gold flashed and wine flowed, and answering to the music inside, but stranger, sweeter, and more piercing, came the music of the sea-people. But amid all these rejoicings Aslan himself quietly slipped away. And when the Kings and Queens noticed that he wasn’t there, they said nothing about it. For Mr. Beaver had warned them. “He’ll be coming and going,” he had said. “One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down--and of course he has other countries to attend to. It’s quite all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.

Well, as for slavery…it is true that I should not like to be one myself, yet Nelson was in favour of it and he said that the country’s shipping would be ruined if the trade were put down. Perhaps it comes more natural if you are black…but come, I remember how you tore that unfortunate scrub Bosville to pieces years ago in Barbados for saying that the slaves liked it – that it was in their masters’ interest to treat them kindly – that doing away with slavery would be shutting the gates of mercy on the negroes. Hey, hey! The strongest language I have ever heard you use. I wonder he did not ask for satisfaction.’ ‘I think I feel more strongly about slavery than anything else, even that vile Buonaparte who is in any case one aspect of it…Bosville…the sanctimonious hypocrite…the silly blackguard with his “gates of mercy”, his soul to the Devil – a mercy that includes chains and whips and branding with a hot iron. Satisfaction. I should have given it him with the utmost good-will: two ounces of lead or a span of sharp steel; though common ratsbane would have been more appropriate.’ ‘Why, Stephen, you are in quite a passion.’ ‘So I am. It is a retrospective passion, sure, but I feel it still. Thinking of that ill-looking flabby ornamented conceited self-complacent ignorant shallow mean-spirited cowardly young shite with absolute power over fifteen hundred blacks makes me fairly tremble even now – it moves me to grossness. I should have kicked him if ladies had not been present.

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.

She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race", imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgement of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws. This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.

From the bonny bells of heather, They brewed a drink long syne, Was sweeter far than honey, Was stronger far than wine. They brewed it and they drank it, And lay in blessed swound, For days and days together, In their dwellings underground. There rose a King in Scotland, A fell man to his foes, He smote the Picts in battle, He hunted them like roes. Over miles of the red mountain He hunted as they fled, And strewed the dwarfish bodies Of the dying and the dead. Summer came in the country, Red was the heather bell, But the manner of the brewing, Was none alive to tell. In graves that were like children’s On many a mountain’s head, The Brewsters of the Heather Lay numbered with the dead. The king in the red moorland Rode on a summer’s day; And the bees hummed and the curlews Cried beside the way. The King rode and was angry, Black was his brow and pale, To rule in a land of heather, And lack the Heather Ale. It fortuned that his vassals, Riding free upon the heath, Came on a stone that was fallen And vermin hid beneath. Roughly plucked from their hiding, Never a word they spoke: A son and his aged father – Last of the dwarfish folk. The king sat high on his charger, He looked down on the little men; And the dwarfish and swarthy couple Looked at the king again. Down by the shore he had them: And there on the giddy brink – “I will give thee life ye vermin, For the secret of the drink.” There stood the son and father And they looked high and low; The heather was red around them, The sea rumbled below. And up spoke the father, Shrill was his voice to hear: “I have a word in private, A word for the royal ear. “Life is dear to the aged, And honour a little thing; I would gladly sell the secret”, Quoth the Pict to the King. His voice was small as a sparrow’s, And shrill and wonderful clear: “I would gladly sell my secret, Only my son I fear. “For life is a little matter, And death is nought to the young; And I dare not sell my honour, Under the eye of my son. Take him, O king, and bind him, And cast him far in the deep; And it’s I will tell the secret That I have sworn to keep.” They took the son and bound him, Neck and heels in a thong, And a lad took him and swung him, And flung him far and strong And the sea swallowed his body, Like that of a child of ten; And there on the cliff stood the father, Last of the dwarfish men. “True was the word I told you: Only my son I feared; For I doubt the sapling courage, That goes without the beard. But now in vain is the torture, Fire shall not avail: Here dies in my bosom The secret of the Heather Ale.

I am an urchin, standing in the cold, elbowed aside by the glossy rich visitors in their fur coats and ostentatious jewellery, being fussed into the hotel by pompous-looking doormen. 'No problem. I'd better get home, actually Mr – Gustav. A drink is very tempting, but maybe not such a good idea after all.' I pat my pockets. 'And I'm skint.' 'Pavements not paved with gold yet, eh?' He moves on along the facade of the grand hotel to the corner, and waits. He's staring not back at me but down St James Street. I wage a little war with myself. He's a stranger, remember. The newspaper headlines, exaggerated by the time they reach the office of Jake's local rag: Country girl from the sticks raped and murdered in London by suave conman. Even Poppy would be wagging her metaphorical finger at me by now. Blaming herself for not being there, looking out for me. But we're out in public here. Lots of people around us. He's charming. He's incredibly attractive. He's got a lovely deep, well spoken voice. And he's an entrepreneur who must be bloody rich if he owns more than one house. What the hell else am I going to do with myself when everyone else is out having fun? One thing I won't tell him is that my pockets might be empty, but my bank account is full. 'One drink. Then I must get back.' He doesn't answer or protest, but with a courtly bow he crooks his elbow and escorts me down St James. We turn right and into the far more subtle splendour of Dukes Hotel. 'Dress code?' I ask nervously, wiping my feet obediently on the huge but welcoming doormat and drifting ahead of him into the smart interior where domed and glassed corridors lead here and there. The foyer smells of mulled wine and candles and entices you to succumb to its perfumed embrace.

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth— danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two. There is his own distant youth, that daily humiliation of rinsing out your one good shirt and putting on your one good smile, along with the daily rush of newness: new pleasures, new people, new reflections of yourself. There is Robert’s late middle age of selecting vices as carefully as ties in a Paris shop, napping in the sunlight on an afternoon and getting up from a chair and hearing the creak of death. The city of youth, the country of age. But in between, where Less is living— that exurban existence? How has he never learned to live it?

I believe that sake and wine are the only drinks in the world that have achieved the level of being forms of art. Wine is made from grapes. Grapes have a lot of sugar in them to start with. Although it's a gross simplification, if you crushed the grapes and put them in a barrel they'd naturally ferment and turn into wine. But that's not the case with sake. In order for fermentation to occur, the starch in the rice has to be converted into sugar. And that involves a far more complex and difficult process than what's involved in making wine. In the entire world, no other country has developed such a refined drink out of cereal grains. What you usually get out of cereal grains is something like beer, which has a low proof... ... or a distilled liquor like whiskey, which has a high one. I want you to understand what a wonderful and unique thing sake is... ... and to appreciate the amazing skill it takes to create a drink that is practically an art form out of plain rice.

The wine is one of those big, noble wines that Brandon favours, and Chapuys drinks appreciatively and says I don't understand it, nothing do I understand in this benighted country. Is Cranmer Pope now? Or is Henry Pope? Perhaps you are Pope? My men who were among the press today say they heard few voices raised for the concubine, and plenty who called upon God to bless Katherine, the rightful queen. Did they? I don't know what city they were in. Chapuys sniffs: they may well wonder. These days it is nothing but Frenchmen about the king, and she, Boleyn, she is half-French herself, and wholly bought by them; her entire family are in the pocket of Francis. But you, Thomas, you are not taken in by these Frenchmen, are you? He reassures him: my dear friend, not for one instant. Chapuys weeps; it's unlike him: all credit to the noble wine. 'I have failed my master the Emperor. I have failed Katherine.' 'Never mind.' He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.

[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.

The Lord’s Prayer Expanded Our Father, Holy Father, Abba Father, in the heavens, Hallowed, holy, sacred be your name. From the rising of the sun, to the going down of the same, The name of the Lord is to be praised. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts, The whole earth is full of your glory. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty, Who was and is and is to come. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Thy government come, thy politics be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Thy reign and rule come, thy plans and purposes be done, On earth as it is in heaven. May we be an anticipation of the age to come. May we embody the reign of Christ here and now. Give us day by day our daily bread. Provide for the poor among us. As we seek first your kingdom and your justice, May all we need be provided for us. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Transform us by the Holy Spirit into a forgiving community of forgiven sinners. Lead us not into trouble, trial, tribulation or temptation. Be mindful of our frame, we are but dust, We can only take so much. Lead us out of the wilderness into the promised land that flows with milk and honey, Lead us out of the badlands into resurrection country. Deliver us from evil and the evil one. Save us from Satan, the accuser and adversary. So that no weapon formed against us shall prosper. So that every tongue that rises against us in accusation you will condemn. So that every fiery dart of the wicked one is extinguished by the shield of faith. So that as we submit to you and resist the devil, the devil flees. So that as we draw near to Jesus Christ lifted up, His cross becomes for us the axis of love expressed in forgiveness, That refounds the world; And the devil, who became the false ruler of the fallen world, Is driven out from among us. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen

He pulled a battered red photo album from his truck’s glove compartment and showed me pictures of green Azorean fields divided by hedges of lilac-colored hydrangeas. He showed me waves crashing against black volcanic rock and his ancient stone house next to the sea, the home where he returned every summer. “Over there the air is so clean, so nice. The ocean is right there. The fish are fresh, you catch and eat them, and the potatoes are so good, you won’t believe it. “We make wine. Put on shorts and get in there and smash grapes, and when you drink right away is sweet like juice. Every year when we get back from there, we’re fat,” Morais said. He loved his island house in the Azores so much that at the end of each summer, when he left, he had to have someone else close the door for him. “I’m a guy that came from the old country. I never go to school five minutes in this country, and still I work and I do good. I love my money. God bless this country,” he said. “But when I leave to close my door over there, I cry like a baby. I try so hard not to, but I cry.

It was a season of grand ballooning experiments in Paris; word of the flights, including a manned one in November 1783, spread rapidly.3 Jefferson sensed the revolutionary possibilities of human control of the air.4 “What think you of these balloons? They really begin to assume a serious face,” he wrote. Reports had people flying six miles in twenty minutes at three thousand feet. He took a jocular tone, but his words were prescient. “This discovery seems to threaten the prostration of fortified works unless they can be closed above, the destruction of fleets and what not. The French may now run over their laces, wines etc. to England duty free. The whole system of British statutes made on the supposition of goods being brought into some port must be revised. Inland countries may now become maritime states unless you choose rather to call them aerial ones as their commerce is in [the] future to be carried on through that element. But jesting apart I think this discovery may lead to things useful.” Ten years later, in Philadelphia, Jefferson saw the first successful manned balloon flight in America.5 His

lived a poor tailor, who had a son called Aladdin, a careless, idle boy who would do nothing but play all day long in the streets with little idle boys like himself. This so grieved the father that he died; yet, in spite of his mother's tears and prayers, Aladdin did not mend his ways. One day, when he was playing in the streets as usual, a stranger asked him his age, and if he were not the son of Mustapha the tailor. "I am, sir," replied Aladdin; "but he died a long while ago." On this the stranger, who was a famous African magician, fell on his neck and kissed him, saying: "I am your uncle, and knew you from your likeness to my brother. Go to your mother and tell her I am coming." Aladdin ran home, and told his mother of his newly found uncle. "Indeed, child," she said, "your father had a brother, but I always thought he was dead." However, she prepared supper, and bade Aladdin seek his uncle, who came laden with wine and fruit. He presently fell down and kissed the place where Mustapha used to sit, bidding Aladdin's mother not to be surprised at not having seen him before, as he had been forty years out of the country.

The Swedish royal family’s legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, the then king, Gustav IV Adolf—by all accounts as mad as a hamburger—left for exile. To fill his throne and, it is thought, as a sop to Napoleon whose help Sweden hoped to secure against Russia in reclaiming Finland, the finger of fate ended up pointing at a French marshal by the name of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (who also happened to be the husband of Napoleon’s beloved Desirée). Upon his arrival in Stockholm, the fact that Bernadotte had actually once fought against the Swedes in Germany was quickly forgotten, as was his name, which was changed to Charles XIV John. This, though, is where the assimilation ended: the notoriously short-tempered Charles XIV John attempted to speak Swedish to his new subjects just the once, meeting with such deafening laughter that he never bothered again (there is an echo of this in the apparently endless delight afforded the Danes by the thickly accented attempts at their language by their current queen’s consort, the portly French aristocrat Henri de Monpezat). On the subject of his new country, the forefather of Sweden’s current royal family was withering: “The wine is terrible, the people without temperament, and even the sun radiates no warmth,” the arriviste king is alleged to have said. The current king is generally considered to be a bit bumbling, but he can at least speak Swedish, usually stands where he is told, and waves enthusiastically. At least, that was the perception until 2010, when the long-whispered rumors of his rampant philandering were finally exposed in a book, Den motvillige monarken (The Reluctant Monarch). Sweden’s tabloids salivated over gory details of the king’s relationships with numerous exotic women, his visits to strip clubs, and his fraternizing with members of the underworld. Hardly appropriate behavior for the chairman of the World Scout Foundation. (The exposé followed allegations that the father of the king’s German-Brazilian wife, Queen Silvia, was a member of the Nazi party. Awkward.) These days, whenever I see Carl Gustaf performing his official duties I can’t shake the feeling that he would much prefer to be trussed up in a dominatrix’s cellar. The

Who has not known you, O deep joys of wine? Whoever has had some remorse to appease, a memory to evoke, a sorrow to drown, a castle to build in Spain, in fact all men have invoked you, mysterious god concealed in the tendrils of the vine. Wine is like man himself: one never knows to what extent one may esteem or despise him, love or hate him, nor of what sublime actions or monstrous crimes he is capable. Let us not then be crueller towards wine than towards ourselves, let us treat him as an equal. Sometimes I think I can hear wine speak (he speaks with his soul, the spiritual voice heard only by the spirit) and he says: “Man, my beloved, I would pour out for you, in spite of my prison of glass and fetters of cork, a song full of brotherhood, a song full of joy, light and hope. I am no ingrate; I know that I owe you my life. I know what it cost you in toil, your back under the burning sun. You gave me life and I shall reward you for it. I am the soul of your country. I am half-lover, half-soldier. I shall light up your aged wife’s eyes, the old companion of your everyday cares and your oldest hopes. I shall soften her glance and drop into the pupil of her eye the lightning-flash of her youth. Our close reunion will create poetry. Between us we shall make a god. This is what wine sang in its mysterious language.

I am tied to old ways, which I learned in a hard house. It was a loving house even as it was besieged by its country, but it was hard. Even in Paris, I could not shake the old ways, the instinct to watch my back at every pass, and always be ready to go. A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it. And more, was this all some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me? My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left I made sure he walked out first. He wanted to show me one of those old buildings that seem to be around every corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me, I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of … what, exactly? But my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonne soiree, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.

To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need to be in charge of your life, to be in control of who you want to be, and be able to make the appropriate changes if you are not. This cannot merely be a perception, a slogan like the American Dream (the United States came way down on the LSE's social mobility scale, incidentally). In Scandinavia it is a reality. These are the real lands of opportunity. There is far greater social mobility in the Nordic countries than in the United States or Britain and, for all the collectivism and state interference in the lives of the people who live here, there is far greater freedom to be the person you want to be, and do the things you want to do, up here in the north. In a recent poll by Gallup, only 5 percent of Danes said they could not change their lives if they wanted to. In contrast, I can think of many American states in which it would probably be quite an uncomfortable experience to declare yourself an atheist, for example or gay, or to be married yet choose not to have children, or to be unmarried and have children, or to have an abortion, or to raise your children as Muslims. Less significantly, but still limiting, I don't imagine it would be easy being vegetarian in Texas, for instance, or a wine buff in Salt Lake City, come to that. And don't even think of coming out as a socialist anywhere! In Scandinavia you can be all of these things and no one will bat an eye (as long as you wait and cross on green). Crucial to this social mobility are the schools. The autonomy enabled by a high-quality, free education system is just as important as the region's economic equality and extensive welfare safety nets, if not more so. In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. This is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.

DICAEOPOLIS Why, what has happened? AMPHITHEUS I was hurrying to bring your treaty of truce, but some old dotards from Acharnae(1) got scent of the thing; they are veterans of Marathon, tough as oak or maple, of which they are made for sure—rough and ruthless. They all started a-crying: "Wretch! you are the bearer of a treaty, and the enemy has only just cut our vines!" Meanwhile they were gathering stones in their cloaks, so I fled and they ran after me shouting. f(1) The deme of Acharnae was largely inhabited by charcoal-burners, who supplied the city with fuel. DICAEOPOLIS Let 'em shout as much as they please! But HAVE you brought me a treaty? AMPHITHEUS Most certainly, here are three samples to select from,(1) this one is five years old; take it and taste. f(1) He presents them in the form of wines contained in three separate skins. DICAEOPOLIS Faugh! AMPHITHEUS Well? DICAEOPOLIS It does not please me; it smells of pitch and of the ships they are fitting out.(1) f(1) Meaning, preparations for war. AMPHITHEUS Here is another, ten years old; taste it. DICAEOPOLIS It smells strongly of the delegates, who go around the towns to chide the allies for their slowness.(1) f(1) Meaning, securing allies for the continuance of the war. AMPHITHEUS This last is a truce of thirty years, both on sea and land. DICAEOPOLIS Oh! by Bacchus! what a bouquet! It has the aroma of nectar and ambrosia; this does not say to us, "Provision yourselves for three days." But it lisps the gentle numbers, "Go whither you will."(1) I accept it, ratify it, drink it at one draught and consign the Acharnians to limbo. Freed from the war and its ills, I shall keep the Dionysia(2) in the country. f(1) When Athens sent forth an army, the soldiers were usually ordered to assemble at some particular spot with provisions for three days. f(2) These feasts were also called the Anthesteria or Lenaea; the Lenaem was a temple to Bacchus, erected outside the city. They took place during the month Anthesterion (February).

We had a second date that night, then a third, and then a fourth. And after each date, my new romance novel protagonist called me, just to seal the date with a sweet word. For date five, he invited me to his house on the ranch. We were clearly on some kind of a roll, and now he wanted me to see where he lived. I was in no position to say no. Since I knew his ranch was somewhat remote and likely didn’t have many restaurants nearby, I offered to bring groceries and cook him dinner. I agonized for hours over what I could possibly cook for this strapping new man in my life; clearly, no mediocre cuisine would do. I reviewed all the dishes in my sophisticated, city-girl arsenal, many of which I’d picked up during my years in Los Angeles. I finally settled on a non-vegetarian winner: Linguine with Clam Sauce--a favorite from our family vacations in Hilton Head. I made the delicious, aromatic masterpiece of butter, garlic, clams, lemon, wine, and cream in Marlboro Man’s kitchen in the country, which was lined with old pine cabinetry. And as I stood there, sipping some of the leftover white wine and admiring the fruits of my culinary labor, I was utterly confident it would be a hit. I had no idea who I was dealing with. I had no idea that this fourth-generation cattle rancher doesn’t eat minced-up little clams, let alone minced-up little clams bathed in wine and cream and tossed with long, unwieldy noodles that are difficult to negotiate. Still, he ate it. And lucky for him, his phone rang when he was more than halfway through our meal together. He’d been expecting an important call, he said, and excused himself for a good ten minutes. I didn’t want him to go away hungry--big, strong rancher and all--so when I sensed he was close to getting off the phone, I took his plate to the stove and heaped another steaming pile of fishy noodles onto his plate. And when Marlboro Man returned to the table he smiled politely, sat down, and polished off over half of his second helping before finally pushing away from the table and announcing, “Boy, am I stuffed!” I didn’t realize at the time just how romantic a gesture that had been.

Ionic is the ‘opposites attract’ chemical bond,” Elizabeth explained as she emerged from behind the counter and began to sketch on an easel. “For instance, let’s say you wrote your PhD thesis on free market economics, but your husband rotates tires for a living. You love each other, but he’s probably not interested in hearing about the invisible hand. And who can blame him, because you know the invisible hand is libertarian garbage.” She looked out at the audience as various people scribbled notes, several of which read “Invisible hand: libertarian garbage.” “The point is, you and your husband are completely different and yet you still have a strong connection. That’s fine. It’s also ionic.” She paused, lifting the sheet of paper over the top of the easel to reveal a fresh page of newsprint. “Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move. “That brings us to the third bond,” Elizabeth said, pointing at another set of molecules, “the hydrogen bond—the most fragile, delicate bond of all. I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you, ladies—a chemical reminder that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.” She walked

I love this, and I wish we could keep on driving,” Ivy said, the wind whipping a few loose strands of hair back from her forehead that had blown from her ponytail “I haven’t seen the Monterrey Peninsula or the Bay area in years. Or the wine country. I’ve been gone too long.

That’s what’s wrong with this country. You’ve got food banks in the north and down here in Hampstead there are people who don’t think twice about spending a fortune on a fucking bottle of wine. It doesn’t make sense.

Southern resistance, had made the contest an “Abolition war.” Northern Democrats and white Southerners denounced “abolition war” as the inhumane path to sanguinary race war. Both sides felt something deeply sacred at stake, and no one more than Douglass. Yes, he acknowledged, the war was for Union and for the Constitution, but it must be a wholly new Union, and a new Constitution to replace the old one now torn and tattered. The country must not “put old wine in new bottles,” he argued, nor make “new cloth into old garments.” Douglass warned that liberal and open-minded people such as abolitionists themselves were rarely as unified as the forces of reaction and darkness. But in this historic moment, they had to be. “That old union,” he shouted, “whose canonized bones we saw hearsed in death and inurned under the frowning battlements of Sumter, we shall never see again while the world standeth.” Stop fighting for a “dead past,” Douglass urged his auditors, and instead fight “for the living present.”9 Here flowed a set of rebirth metaphors flaming, bloody, and much bolder than the succinct, if beautiful, suggestion in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “Mission of the War” stood as Douglass’s radical

The kingdom of poetry" This is like light. This is light, Useful as light, as charming And enchanting… …Poetry is certainly More interesting, more valuable, and certainly more charming Than Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Atlantic Ocean And other much admired natural phenomena. It is useful as light, and as beautiful It is preposterous Precisely, making it possible to say One cannot carry a mountain, but a poem can be carried all over. It is monstrous. Pleasantly, for poetry can say, seriously or in play: “Poetry is better than hope, “For poetry is patience of hope, and all hope’s vivid pictures, “Poetry is better than excitement, it is far more delightful, “Poetry is superior to success, and victory, it endures in serene blessedness “Long after the most fabulous feat like fireworks has mounted and fallen. “Poetry is far more powerful and far more enchanting animal “Than any wood, jungle, ark, circus or zoo possesses.” For poetry magnifies and heighten reality: Poetry says of reality that if it is magnificent, it is also stupid: For poetry is, in a way, omnipotent; For reality is various and rich, powerful and vivid, but it is not enough Because it is disorderly and stupid or only at times, and erratically, intelligent: For without poetry, reality is speechless or incoherent: It is inchoate, like the pomp and the bombast of thunder: Its peroration verge upon the ceaseless oration of the ocean: For reality glows and glory, without poetry, Fake, like the red operas of sunset The blue rivers and the windows of morning. The arts of poetry makes it possible to say: Pandemonium. For poetry is gay and exact. It says: “The sunset resembles a bull-fight. “A sleeping arm feels like soda, fizzing.” Poetry resurrect the past from the sepulchre, like Lazarus. It transforms a lion into a sphinx and a girl. It gives a girl the splendor of Latin. It transforms the water into wine at each marriage in Cana of Galilee. For it is true that poetry invented the unicorn, the centaur and the phoenix. Hence it is true that poetry is an everlasting Ark. An omnibus containing, bearing and begetting all the mind’s animals. Whence it is that poetry gave and gives tongue to forgiveness Therefore a history of poetry would be a history of joy, and a history of the mystery of love For poetry provides spontaneously, abundantly and freely The petnames and the diminutives which love requires and without which the mystery of love cannot be mastered. For poetry is like light, and it is light. It shines over all, like the blue sky, with the same blue justice. For poetry is the sunlight of consciousness: It is also the soil of the fruits of knowledge In the orchards of being: It shows us the pleasures of the city. It lights up the structures of reality. It is a cause of knowledge and laughter: It sharpens the whistles of the witty: It is like morning and the flutes of morning, chanting and enchanted. It is the birth and the rebirth of the first morning forever. Poetry is quick as tigers, clever as cats, vivid as oranges, Nevertheless, it is deathless: it is evergreen and in blossom; long after the Pharaohs and the Caesars have fallen, It shines and endures more than diamonds, It is because poetry is the actuality of possibility, it is The reality of the imagination, The throat of exaltation, The processions of possessions, The motion of meaning and The meaning of morning and The mastery of meaning. The praise of poetry is like the clarity of the heights of the mountains. The heights of poetry are like the exaltation of the mountains. It is the consummation of consciousness in the country of the morning!

Champagne mixes with salt. Rain mixes with sea. Am I dead myself? How long have I been here and gone at once? I feel something inside my heart, something that reminds me of someone I used to know, long ago, in a city no one remembers but me. I feel old things running around this place, like we’re in the center of the smoke of a burning book of wonders, as though all the pages have gotten stuck together and now it’s a world of everything at once, a pitcher of water in my hands, a stand of trees somewhere in the middle of a desert, a bed of white linen sheets, above me the moon crescented, stars I don’t know, wine in a cup, smooth wet sand around me packed down, a cave, a tomb, a room, a rock rolling across the entrance, a stick made of old wood. And here, a country of claws, a mob of monsters. Look at them as we fly and look at us, all of us, the desperate desiring humans of this place, no longer. The story is shifting, things are changing. All is well and will be well.

CHAP. LXVII.—WEEKLY WORSHIP OF THE CHRISTIANS. And we afterwards continually remind each other of these things. And the wealthy among us help the needy; and we always keep together; and for all things wherewith we are supplied, we bless the Maker of all through His Son Jesus Christ, and through the Holy Ghost. And on the day called Sunday,[145] all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability,[146] and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given,[147] and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succours the orphans and widows, and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds, and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead.

Be generous—with your money, of course. But more important, give of yourself. Take an interest in people. Get to know people. Get to know what they’ve been through before you pass judgment. That’s essential. Read history. By all means read history. We are all where we are, each of us, because others helped. As my friend Dr. Samuel Proctor, former pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, likes to say, “If you see a turtle sitting on a stump, you know it didn’t get there on its own.” Read books. Try to understand the reason why things happen, why they are as they are. If you see only the surface phenomena, then the world becomes extremely confusing, ever more unsettling. But if the reasons are understood there’s a kind of simplicity that emerges. Sometime, somewhere along the line, memorize a poem. Sometime, somewhere along the line, go out in a field and paint a picture, for your own pleasure. Sometime, somewhere along the line, plant a tree, buy your father a good bottle of New York state wine, write your mother a letter. And sometime, somewhere along the line, do something for your country.

Plato—“No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God.

You would not search the woodside gay To pick a springtime flower When all the shuddering country groans Before the North Wind's power. Nor would you seek with greedy hand To pluck your vines in May; The wine god gives his gift of grapes When Autumn's on the way. For God has fixed the season's tasks And each receives its own: No power is free to disarray The order God has shown.

money, I’d take what odd tasks came to hand.” Anything had seemed better than turning his steps toward home. And then…one day, it hadn’t, anymore. “I met Lord Hetwar when he was on an embassy to the king of Darthaca.” His desperate contrivances to win access to the sealmaster, he didn’t think worth recounting. “He was curious how a Wealding kinsman should be serving strangers so far from home, so I told him my tale. He was not daunted by my wolf and gave me a place in his guard that I might work my way back to my own country. I made myself useful during some incidents on the road, and he was pleased to make my place permanent. I rose in his household thereafter.” Ingrey’s mouth firmed in tight pride. “By my merits.” He applied himself to his spiced meat, sopping up the last of its gingery gravy with the inn’s good bread. Ijada had stopped eating a little while ago and sat solemn with thought, running her finger around the rim of her empty wine beaker. When she looked up and caught his eye, she managed a wan smile. Hallana waved away her maid’s attempt to feed her a second apple tart, and Hergi rolled up the stained napkin and bundled it away. The sorceress eyed Ingrey. “Feeling better now?” “Yes,” he admitted reluctantly. “Do you have any idea who laid this

Oliver paused. “American Indians or Indian Indians?” “The ones from your country, the ones you all killed.” His hand slid down between her thighs. “I’m sure I certainly didn’t kill a single Indian. But I can’t say I personally know any, either.” Zoya looked into her glass of wine. “But it’s funny, don’t you think? The way you Americans killed them. I read about it in a book once. How you would make treaties, yes? And then you would break the treaties so they would get upset and make war, and so you would kill them, and then there were new treaties? And you kept going and going, the same trick, over and again, until there weren’t any more Indians.” “Well, they’re not all dead,” Oliver said, shaking his head. “But, of course, it was appalling.” “Yes, a tragedy, but rather clever too, no?” she said. “You almost made it appear to be an accident. Sloppy and offhand, like spilling red wine on a rug. It was the same way Stalin killed, a few here, a million there, a few sips of vodka in between. That is the way to do it. Now, Nazis, they were serious and efficient about it, so German and well organized, that it could not be ignored. If they were more like you perhaps they would have gotten away with killing all those Jews. But the Germans were simply too obvious and clear in their purpose.

Day drinking with a broken heart is like selling loose Cuban cigars like Newports, tryna leave the country without passports, and putting yourself in a situation you can’t handle.

The weather must have made all of this even more unpleasant. England was far hotter in the tenth and eleventh centuries than it is now, with London enjoying the same climate as central France does today. There were almost forty vineyards in the south of Britain, spread as far north as Suffolk, not considered by wine buffs today as great grape country.

Like many of his townsmen, Brunetti never tired of studying the city, every so often delighting himself by discovering something he had never noticed before. Over the course of the years, he had worked out a system that allowed him to reward himself for each discovery: a new window earned him a coffee; a new statue of a saint, however small, got him a glass of wine; and once, years ago, he had noticed on a wall he must have passed five times a week since he was a child a lapidary stone that commemorated the site of the Aldine Publishing House, the oldest in Italy, founded in the fourteenth century. He had gone right around the corner and into a bar in Campo San Luca and ordered himself a Brandy Alexander, though it was ten in the morning and the barman had given Brunetti a strange look when he placed the glass in front of him.

Ramequins au Fromage (SWISS CHEESE FONDUE) YIELD: 4 SERVINGS THIS IS an interpretation of the famous Swiss cheese fondue (French for “melted”) as we made it in the Lyon–Bourg-en-Bresse area. Traditional Swiss fondue is a combination of melted Gruyère and Emmenthaler cheeses, white wine, and nutmeg, boiled together and lightly thickened with cornstarch, then finished with kirschwasser. My version uses a lot of garlic, no thickening agent, and no kirsch. The cheese tends to thicken in the bottom of the pot (an enameled cast-iron pot is best), and the flavored white wine comes to the top. As diners drag their bread cubes gently through the fondue, the liquid on the surface and the thicker mixture underneath combine. Only crusty, country-type French bread should be used. If it falls off your fork into the cheese, custom requires that you buy a round of drinks for everyone at the table. Fondue is usually made in the kitchen at the last moment, then brought to the dining room and kept hot over a Sterno or gas burner set in the center of the table. My father always warned against drinking cold white wine with the fondue, claiming it would cause the stomach to swell, but I have drunk my wine throughout without any ill effects. Fondue is a meal in itself at our house and is usually followed by a salad and fruit for dessert.

He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, especially if it be in things indifferent.

Of all the countries Fairchild had visited, Japan struck him as the most advanced on matters of horticulture. He learned about Japanese miniature gardens, the art of Japanese papermaking, and the superior qualities of Japanese fruits and vegetables that didn't grow anywhere else in the world. Wealthy people introduced him to foods of affluence, like raw fish, seaweed, and a bean cheese they called tofu. He thought it impossible to eat with two narrow sticks held in one hand, but after a few tries, he got the feel for it. It was in Japan that Fairchild picked up a yellow plum known as a loquat and an asparagus-like vegetable called udo. And a so-called puckerless persimmon that turned sweet in sake wine casks. One of the most unrecognized discoveries of Fairchild, a man drawn to edible fruits and vegetables, was zoysia grass, a rich green lawn specimen attractive for the thickness of its blades and its slow growth, which meant it required infrequent cutting. And then there was wasabi, a plant growing along streambeds in the mountains near Osaka. It had edible leaves, but wasabi's stronger quality was its bitter root's uncanny ability to burn one's nose. Wasabi only lasted in America until farmers realized that its close relative the horseradish root grew faster and larger and was more pungent than the delicate wasabi (which tends to stay pungent only fifteen minutes after it's cut). Small American farms still grow Fairchild's wasabi, but most of the accompaniment to modern sushi is in fact horseradish---mashed, colored, and called something it's not.

What happened in 1970 in Los Angeles was the worst economic episode I’ve ever had to fight through. Unlike the post–Cold War Recession, we did not have the waves of in-migration from Mexico, nor were drug sales as great. I believe the underground economy was a silent savior of Los Angeles during 1990–94. The Kent State Massacre and the Pentagon Papers scandal didn’t help the 1970 scene. Furthermore, things didn’t get better in the early 1970s. The sharp recession of 1970 was followed by a sudden inflation caused by Vietnam spending. Nixon “slammed the gold window shut.” From 1945 to 1971, the U.S., under the Bretton Woods Agreement, had agreed to back its currency to a limited extent with gold at $35 per ounce. Other nations’ central banks were withdrawing our gold so fast that Nixon had to renege on the promise. This was followed in 1973 by the end of fixed currency exchange rates. The dollar plummeted. Traveling to the wine country of France in the summer of 1973, I was unable to cash American Express dollar-denominated traveler’s checks. Inflation jumped with the 1973 Energy Crisis. Nixon imposed wage and price controls. Then Watergate, accompanied by the Dow Jones hitting bottom in 1974. Three Initiatives to Turn the Tide Against all this, Trader Joe’s mounted three initiatives. In chronological order: We launched the Fearless Flyer early in 1970. We broke the price of imported wines in late 1970 thanks to a loophole in the Fair Trade law. Most importantly, in 1971, we married the health food store to the Good Time Charley party store, which had been the 1967–70 version of Trader Joe’s. Together these three elements comprised the second version of Trader Joe’s, Whole Earth Harry.

We’ve been through this, Ma. Beer isn’t booze. Wine isn’t booze. If it ruins lives and inspires Irish poetry, country music, and soviet land wars, then it’s probably booze. Get me something with Kentucky written on the bottle.

It was a beautiful fall day at the soccer fields when I met Stacy for the first time. The game had just begun when she arrived carrying homemade pumpkin spice muffins with cream cheese frosting for everyone, photos of the jack-o’-lantern she had elaborately carved earlier that morning into the shape of a witch stirring a bubbling cauldron with the rising steam spelling out the word “Boo,” enough material and glue for each of the siblings not playing soccer to make adorable “easy no-sew” bat wings as a fun craft to fill their time, as well as little gift bags for every mother full of Halloween-themed wine charms and sleep masks that were embroidered with “Sleeping for a spell.” Besides her generous gifts, she also looked terrific. She was wearing the perfect fall outfit with just the right number of layers and textures and cool boots. Her hair was beautifully twisted into a loose braid casually thrown over one shoulder. While everyone sat in their lawn chair and screamed at their kid to “attack the ball,” Stacy ran up and down the sidelines taking (no doubt fabulous) photos of her son and overseeing the siblings’ craft bonanza. At this point I should also mention, in case you don’t feel bad enough about yourself, that Stacy has a full-time job outside the home. Like a really important one. I’m not sure what she does exactly, but from the thirty seconds that she slowed down long enough to talk to me, I learned that she works fifty hours a week or so and travels around the country every few days and then comes home and makes her kids pancakes in the shape of clovers for breakfast, because it’s International Clover Day or some shit like that.

Most Italians consume alcohol every day, but it’s not what we call drinking. For Americans and northern Europeans alcoholic beverages are mind-altering drugs, used as tranquilizers, sleeping potions, inhibition-looseners (“Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker”—Ogden Nash), or roads to inebriation. That is to say, to getting tipsy, high, drunk, plastered, smashed, sloshed, sozzled, soused, crocked, wrecked, juiced, stinko, tight, pie-eyed, crosseyed, shit-faced, blitzed, fried, wasted, gassed, polluted, pissed, tanked up, ripped, loaded, pickled, bombed, blasted, blooey, blotto, blind drunk, roaring drunk, dead drunk, falling down drunk, drunk as a lord, stewed to the gills, or feeling no pain—and that’s just my own personal vocabulary. Italians reach that state so infrequently that their language provides only a few tame options—ubriaco (drunk), brillo (tipsy), alticcio (high), sbronzo (drunk)—with at most perso (lost) or fradicio (rotten) tacked on for a touch of color. They don’t even have a proper word for a hangover, though if pressed they’ll come up with the stately postumi della sbornia, aftereffects of overindulgence. For Italians, wine and beer are foods. If they provide a little buzz that’s just a pleasant side benefit, improving the sparkle of the conversation. When I first traveled in Italy, parents regularly fed wine-laced water to their kids (“acquavino”), vaccinating them against later dipsomania. And at lunchtime in the cafeteria of my Nuovo Regina Margherita Hospital the docs would jostle to sit at the chaplain’s table, because he’d always bring a bottle of good country wine. Even the harder stuff fits into a culinary protocol: a seven p.m. Campari is meant to whet the appetite, and the cognac or amaro at the end of a large meal to aid digestion. Which is why, in proportion, Italy has one-tenth as many problem drinkers as America.

This wasn't the France I knew, which had always been as much about swimming in the sea as about anything else, about languorous holiday sunshine and whole days spent drinking wine and staring up at the clouds. No, this country seemed to be offering something dark and strange and new to me, in an entirely different language. If only I could learn to understand it.

The chef stepped out of the kitchen for a chat with Aomame and noted that the wine would be on the house. “Sorry, it’s already been uncorked, and one tasting’s worth is gone. A customer complained about the taste yesterday and we gave him a new bottle, but in fact there is absolutely nothing wrong with this wine. The man is a famous politician who likes to think he’s a wine connoisseur, but he doesn’t know a damn thing about wine. He did it to show off. ‘I’m afraid this might have a slight edge,’ he says. We had to humor him. ‘Oh, yes, you may be right about that, sir. I’m sure the importer’s warehouse is at fault. I’ll bring another bottle right away. But bravo, sir! I don’t think another person in the country could have caught this!’ That was the best way to make everybody happy, as you can imagine. Now, I can’t say this too loudly, but we had to inflate the bill a little to cover our loss. He was on an expense account, after all. In any case, there’s no way a restaurant with our reputation could serve a returned bottle.

This is why tourists come to wine country, not just to get tipsy from tiny pours of Cabernet Sauvignon, but to be inside this world, where every surface mirrors back the sun.

Strong food in these parts is chickens’ heads, ham fat, pig’s blood pudding, raw peppers and garlic, chumbos (prickly pear), stale bread and wine. A great deal of manly merit accrues from the eating of strong food and the merit increases the earlier it is taken in the day. Thus a man who can stomach a burnt chicken’s head and a hot pepper with a hunk of stale country bread and wash it down with a couple of glasses of costa – and do so with relish at breakfast – is a man to be reckoned with.

If you're in wine country, find out where the winemakers eat and go there.

Drinks included in the French-Italian family all contain vermouths, either sweet, dry, or both, or sometimes brand-named products, such as Lillet, an aperitif wine that’s closely related to vermouth. The name of this family of drinks is derived from the fact that people used to call sweet vermouth “Italian” and dry vermouth “French,” referring to their countries of origin (regardless of where specific bottlings were actually produced).

I was into third guesses with Theo and Maddy. Anyway, that's one of the reasons I opted to buy the van and drive cross-country instead of dumping us all in a plane. It gave us some time. Nothing like a three-thousand-mile drive in an enclosed vehicle to cement a family unit—if you live through it." "It was very brave of you." "You want to talk courage?" He drove easily up the lane to the villa. "I've been chief taste-tester on this wine experiment Maddy's conducting. It's brut

was

she’s in search of Wine Country pleasures to share with Frommer’s readers. She also remains subservient to her owners—two Siamese cats and most recently

the drink of choice is not present, this RC cola will do.  In this part of the country, it’s the house wine.

Kotov looked like an abandoned statue on the beach in the Plaza de Cataluna. The spring was at is height and the warm un bathed the city. The adviser, with his face slightly raised, was receiving the heat like a lizard slothful from the rays that were injecting him with life. He had even taken off his jacket and the printed kerchief he regularly wore after Ramon sat down at his side. 'What a marvelous country!' he said at last, and smiled. 'I could live here for the rest of my life.' 'Despite the Spaniards?' 'Precisely because of you. Where I come from, the people are like stones. You are all flowers. My country smells like smoked herring and hops; here it smells of olive oil and wine.' 'Your pals say we're primitive and practically dumb.' 'Don't pay too much attention to those lunatics. They confuse ideology with mysticism, and they are no more than walking machines - worse still, they're fanatics. Here they make themselves look tough, but you should see them when Moscow calls for them... Na khuy. They shit themselves. Don't look to them as an example; you don't want to be like them. You can be so much more.' p. 162

But there’s a cheaper way to enjoy the con, and that is to take advantage of all the other factors that “trick” us into enjoying wine more. Like Troy Carter, you can ride to Napa and walk the vineyards before you buy a bottle. If you don’t live near wine country, you can talk to the manager of a wine store about the wines she loves. A nice pair of wine glasses, candles, and a picnic in a beautiful park all lend wine a refined air. All these strategies take advantage of the psychological biases that lead us to enjoy the same wine more than we would in other circumstances. And they do so without the rarefied price tag.

These connections between food and wine and people has taught me the largest lesson in my life, one that I have made my culinary life’s quest: the difference between taste and flavor. We experience taste in a number of ways through our senses—what food feels like in our mouths, what it smells like, looks, feels, and even sounds like. Flavor, for me, is more allusive. As I braise a Don Watson lamb

Get to know your favorite producers, share their stories at the table, surround that table with those you love, and you, too, will discover flavor like no other.

For the Rothschilds of Château Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux, it meant fleeing the country before the Germans took over their property.

Bernard was stunned. He knew the Germans had hauled away millions of bottles of wine from his country; he had even seen some of it stolen from the village where he once worked, but a wine cellar on top of a mountain seemed incredible. To be the one who would open it was almost overwhelming.

In Argentina, such as in most of the New World wine producing countries, there is no controlled designation of origin system, although some winemakers are working towards establishing a structure where the region in which wines are made can become more distinguished. Argentina is the fifth largest wine producing country in the world, and has three main wine regions: the northern region which includes Salta, Catamarca and la Rioja; the central region, where San Juan, Mendoza and Córdoba are located; and the south, with Río Negro and Neuquén. More than 50% of Argentina's wine is produced in Mendoza.

About the Author Native San Franciscan Erika Lenkert fled the dot-community to find respite and great food and wine in Napa Valley. When she’s not writing about food, wine, and travel for the likes of Four Seasons Magazine or InStyle, or promoting her book The Last-Minute Party Girl: Fashionable, Fearless, and Foolishly Simple Entertaining, she’s in search of Wine Country pleasures to share with Frommer’s readers. She also remains subservient to her owners—two Siamese cats and most recently, her new daughter Viva. In addition to this guide, Erika authors and co-authors a number of other Frommer’s guides to California, including Frommer’s California and Frommer’s San Francisco

Alexander said as soon as it got cold, they would leave. September came and it was still warm; he liked that. Better still, not only was Tatiana making them a little money, she was drinking some sparkling wine, some Bisol Brut, for which she developed a bit of a taste. After work, she would sit with Anthony, have bread and cheese, and a glass of sparkler. She closed the winery, counted the money, played with the boy, waited for Alexander to finish work, and sipped her drink. By the time they drove to the B&B, had dinner, chocolate cake, more wine, a bath, put Anthony to bed, and she fell down onto the goose down covers, arms flung above her head, Tatiana was so bubbled up, so pliant, so agreeable to all his relentless frenzies, and so ceaselessly and supernally orgasmic that Alexander would not have been a mortal man if he allowed anything to come between his wife and her Bisol Brut. Who would do a crazy thing like quit to go into dry country? This country was flowing with foaming wine, and that is just how they both liked it. He started whispering to her again, night by night, little by little. Tania . . . you want to know what drives me insane? Yes, darling, please tell me. Please whisper to me. When you sit up straight like this with your hands on your lap, and your breasts are pushed together, and your pink nipples are nice and soft. I lose my breath when your nipples are like that. The trouble is, as soon as I see you looking at me, the nipples stop being nice and soft. Yes, they are quite shameful, he whispers, his breath lost, his mouth on them. But your hard nipples also drive me completely insane, so it’s all good, Tatia. It’s all very very good. Anthony was segregated from them by an accordion room partition. A certain privacy was achieved, and after a few nights of the boy not being woken up, they got bolder; Alexander did unbelievable things to Tatiana that made her sparkler-fueled moaning so extravagant that he had to invent and devise whole new ways of sustaining his usually impeccable command over his own release. Tell me what you want. I’ll do anything you want, Tania. Tell me. What can I do—for you? Anything, darling . . . anything you want, you do . . . There was nothing Gulag about their consuming love in that enchanted bed by the window, the bed that was a quilted down island with four posters and a canopy, with pillows so big and covers so thick . . . and afterward he lay drenched and she lay breathless, and she murmured into his chest that she should like a soft big bed like this forever, so comforted was she and so very pleased with him. Once she asked in a breath, Isn’t this better than being on top of the hard stove in Lazarevo? Alexander knew she wanted him to say yes, and he did, but he didn’t mean it, and though she wanted him to say it, he knew she didn’t want him to mean it either. Could anything come close to crimson Lazarevo where, having been nearly dead, without champagne or wine or bread or a bed, without work or food or Anthony or any future other than the wall and the blindfold, they somehow managed for one brief moon to live in thrall sublime? They had been so isolated, and in their memories they still remained near the Ural Mountains, in frozen Leningrad, in the woods of Luga when they had been fused and fevered, utterly doomed, utterly alone. And yet!—look at her tremulous light— as if in a dream—in America—in fragrant wine country, flute full of champagne, in a white quilted bed, her breath, her breasts on him, her lips on his face, her arms in rhapsody around him are so comforting, so true—and so real.

I desperately needed to find a hotel. The Jag’s seat started to sodomize me in the most peculiar ways while the country music was making the grey matter of my brain leak right out of my ears into a pool of whiskey and wine. Oh Jesus, even my brain can’t stop the cheesy country metaphors.

Made in the Jura Mountains of eastern France, Comté is one of that country’s bestselling cheeses.

Jackson was an American. Though he’d never actually verbalized this information, his accent and dearth of civilized manners—as well as his lack of appreciation for both good tailoring and excellent wine—clearly indicated his country of origin.

If you ask me, the whole Reformation can be blamed on strong beer,” he opined. “Wine is a perfect Catholic drink. It makes people sleepy and complicit. Beer just makes them argumentative. And look at the countries that drink a lot of beer. They’re mainly Protestant. And the countries where they drink a lot of wine? Roman Catholic.” “What about the Russians?” I asked. “They drink vodka.” “That’s a drink to help you find oblivion,” said Father Bandolini. “Nothing to do with God at all.

Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra - 'Either I can beat him or the police.' I understood it all - the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. This is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one wold be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race,' imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.

From the Bridge” Celebrating “La Navidad Cubana” Before the fall of Batista, Cuba was considered to be a staunch Catholic Nation. As in other Christian countries, Christmas was considered a religious holiday. In 1962, a few years after the revolution, Cuba became an atheist country by government decree. Then In 1969, Fidel Castro thinking that Christmas was interfering with the production of sugar cane, totally removed the holiday from the official calendar. Of course Christmas was still celebrated by Cubans in exile, many of whom live in South Florida and Union City, NJ. However it was still was celebrated clandestinely in a subdued way on the island. It was said, if it is to believed, that part of the reason for this was due to the fact that Christmas trees do not grow in Cuba. Now that Christianity and Christmas have both been reestablished by the government, primarily due to the Pope’s visits to Cuba, Christmas as a holiday has been reinstated. Many Christmas traditions have been lost over the past five decades and are still not observed in Cuba, although the Cuban Christmas feast is highlighted by a festive “Pig Roast,” called the “Cena de Navidad” or Christmas dinner. Where possible, the dinner includes Roast Pork done on a spit, beans, plantains, rice and “mojo” which is a type of marinade with onions, garlic, and sour orange. Being a special event, some Cubans delight in serving the roasted pork, in fancier ways than others. Desserts like sweet potatos, “turrones” or nougats, “buñuelos” or fritters, as well as readily available tropical fruits and nuts hazelnuts, guava and coconuts, are very common at most Christmas dinners. Beverages such as the “Mojito” a drink made of rum, sugar cane juice, lime, carbonated water and mint, is the main alcoholic drink for the evening, although traditionally the Christmas dinner should be concluded by drinking wine. This grand Christmas dinner is considered a special annual occasion, for families and friends to join together. Following this glorious meal, many Cubans will attend Misa de Gallo or mass of the rooster, which is held in most Catholic churches at midnight. The real reason for Christmas in Cuba, as elsewhere, is to celebrate the birth of Christ. Churches and some Cuban families once again, display manger scenes. Traditionally, children receive presents from the Three Wise Men and not from Santa Claus or the parents. Epiphany or “Three King’s Day,” falls on January 6th. Christmas in Cuba has become more festive but is not yet the same as it used to be. Although Christmas day is again considered a legal holiday in Cuba, children still have to attend school on this holiday and stores, restaurants and markets stay open for regular business. Christmas trees and decorations are usually only displayed at upscale hotels and resorts.

Once, standing in an open space, he’d seen a commercial airliner pass overhead, on its way from one country to another, the sun golden upon its wings. It seemed incredible to him that there were people inside, drinking wine and eating from plastic trays, pressing a button for the hostess. Did they have any idea what was going on directly below them, a nation devouring itself? He felt like a drowning man watching a ship sail by.

These beliefs were mainly Protestant but not yet petty middle-class puritanism: there remained still an element fairly high stepping and wide gestured in its personal conduct. The petty middle class of fundamentalists who saw no difference between wine-drinking, dancing, card-playing, and adultery, had not yet got altogether the upper hand in that part of the country - in fact, never did except in certain limited areas; but it was making a brave try.

Now our father lived in a world where we didn’t belong, with a needy girlfriend who didn’t look much older than Henri, a saltwater pool in need of daily skimming, and a flashy Porsche that needed to be raced around the roads of wine country. Fortunately, we didn’t need him either—that’s what Henri said.

I love you. I love you desperately, violently, tenderly, completely. I want you in ways that I know you would find shocking. I want to kiss every soft place of you, make you blush and faint, pleasure you until you weep, and dry every tear with my lips. If you only knew how I crave the taste of you. I want to take you in my hands and mouth and feast on you. I want to drink wine and honey from you. I want you under me. On your back. I'm sorry. You deserve more respect than that. But I can't stop thinking of it. Your arms and legs around me. Your mouth, open for my kisses. I need too much of you. A lifetime of nights spent between your thighs wouldn't be enough. I want to talk with you forever. I remember every word you've ever said to me. If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you. You would say it's too soon to feel this way. You would ask how I could be so certain. But some things can't be measured by time. Ask me an hour from now. Ask me a month from now. A year, ten years, a lifetime. The way I love you will outlast every calendar, clock, and every toll of every bell that will ever be cast.

You know that you are not a hero and that you never wanted to be the one. You have never wanted to die for your nation, or for freedom, or for anything else, for that matter: the fates of Winkelried and Ordon [legendary heroes who died for their countries, which were overwhelmed by superior enemies] have never tempted you. You have always wanted to be alive, to live like a normal person, to have respect for yourself and for your friends. You have always enjoyed the moral comfort that allows you to take pleasure in your inner freedom, in beautiful women, and in wine. This war surprised you in the company of a pretty woman, not while you were plotting an assault on the Central Committee headquarters. Nevertheless, they did declare this war on you and over thirty million other people, and so you are forced to recognise that amid the street roundups, the ignoble court sentences, the despicable radio programs, and the distribution of leaflets by underground Solidarity you will not regain the normalcy that was based on respect for yourself. Now you must choose between moral and material stability, because you know that today's "normalcy" will have the bitter taste of self-defeat. And you will not, for the sake of life's enjoyments, give in to the tempting offers of freedom made by the policeman, who seeks to delude you with promises of happiness but really brings suffering and inner hell instead. No, this is not heroism. It is mere common sense.

In another place, in another life, Camrose Rose might have been an innkeeper, an antiques dealer, a sommelier or tea monger; nothing less than a man of elegance and quiet sophistication. The type of individual who stands out against their chosen backdrop – be it a quaint little coastal community nestled along the East Coast or deep in the heart of California wine country – someone you might read about in an airline magazine or in the lifestyles section of your local newspaper. And you might, just maybe, envy him.

When I was your age we had men in the church—don’t frown, it makes me want to clout you—men I say—make what you like of the word-heads of a parish, masters, my boy, rulers.  They could hold a whole country together, that sort could—with a mere lift of the chin.  Oh, I know what you’re going to say: they fed well, drank good wine and didn’t object to a game of cards.  Well, what of it?

In the deep sauté, she has made a stew: eggplant and tomatoes, onions and summer squash, a sort of ratatouille, tiella, samfina, pisto, there are as many names for it as countries, and she has stopped caring for all the names of things. She has made stew, and there are ripe peaches and cream for dessert, a few bottles of wine to choose from.

But it wasn’t our differences that I wanted to focus on. So I parked in one of the visitors’ spots and pulled out the GPS I had taken to carrying in my backpack when I went running. I switched it on so I could pinpoint my coordinates, the longitude and latitude that placed me here and nowhere else in the world. The problem was, inside the car, the device couldn’t locate the satellites, so I unrolled the window, stuck my hand out and held the device to the sun. As soon as it calibrated, I grabbed my notebook from my backpack, ripped out a random page, and wrote my position on the paper. As I folded the sheet in half, I caught sight of my meager notes from the lecture about Fate Maps all those months ago. Genetics might be our first map, imprinted within us from the moment the right sperm meets the right egg. But who knew that all those DNA particles are merely reference points in our own adventures, not dictating our fate but guiding our future? Take Jacob’s cleft lip. If his upper lip had been fused together the way it was supposed to be inside his mother’s belly, he’d probably be living in a village in China right now. Then there was me with my port-wine stain. I lifted my eyes to the rearview mirror, wondering what I would have been like had I never been born with it. My fingers traced the birthmark landlocked on my face, its boundary lines sharing the same shape as Bhutan, the country neighboring Tibetans call the Land of the Dragon. I liked that; the dragons Dad had always cautioned me about had lived on my face all this time. Here be dragons, indeed. I leaned back in my seat now, closing my eyes, relishing the feel of the sun warming my face. No, I wouldn’t trade a single experience — not my dad or my birthmark — to be anyone but me, right here, right now. At last, at 3:10, I open my door. I don’t know how I’ll find Jacob, only that I will. A familiar loping stride ambles out of the library. Not a Goth guy, not a prepster, just Jacob decked in a shirt as unabashedly orange as anything in Elisa’s Beijing boutique. This he wore buttoned to the neck and untucked over jeans, sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned arms. For the first time, I see his aggressively modern glasses, deathly black and rectangular. His hair is the one constant: it’s spiked as usual. What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I’ve ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.

He stretched out on the floor with another mug of wine and imagined a federal law ordering everybody to switch parents at a certain age. Then butter-fingered Elizabeth, her family's cross, could come sustain his mother forever and mend all her possessions, and he could go south and live a happy thoughtless life assisting Reverend Abbott at Sunday vespers. There would be a gigantic migration of children across the country all cutting the old tangled threads and picking up new ones when they found the right niche, free forever of other people's notions about them.

These experiments ceased abruptly as far as Picasso was concerned: not only was there the threat of entering the creative artist’s hell forever, but one day the inhabitants of the Bateau-Lavoir found poor Wiegels dead, hanging by the neck from a beam in his studio: opium, said some, ether-drinking, hashish, said others. Picasso was appalled, and one of the reasons for his decision to spend his summer in the uncongenial damp, fungus-smelling north French country was the crippling depression that came down on him after this suicide. Another was his health, a source of constant worry all his life. He smoked far too much, at first a pipe and then Gauloises for the rest of his days, and in the mornings he had a smoker’s cough: he was persuaded that this was the onset of consumption, and when one night his coughing broke a small blood-vessel so that he spat red, the mortal disease became a certainty—he was near his end. He was seized with panic, and André Salmon ran for a doctor, a nearby friend. The medical man inspected his patient, laughed, and said, “He is as sound as a bell.” Picasso did not believe him, and from that time onwards his diet grew more abstemious still and his apéritifs were replaced by mineral water, though he never abandoned either wine or tobacco.

What seemed to be the entire staff of the place turned out, all bowing and scurrying, to make our debarkation as easy as possible. As I watched this--from beneath the rain canopy that two eager young inn-helpers held over our heads--I couldn’t help remember last spring’s sojourn at various innyards, as either a prisoner or a fugitive, and it was hard not to laugh at the comparison. We had a splendid dinner in a private room overlooking the river. From below came the merry sounds of music, about as different from the haunting rhythms of the Hill Folk’s music as can be, yet I loved it too. When we had finished, Nee said, “Come! Let’s go dance.” “Not me,” Bran said. He lolled back on his cushions and grabbed for his mulled wine. “In the saddle all day. I’ll finish this, then I’m for bed.” “I’ll go with you,” I said to Nee, rising to my feet. Nee turned to Shevraeth, who sat with both hands round his goblet. “Lord Vidanric? Will you come with us?” I looked out the window, determined to say nothing. But I was still angry, convinced as I was that he had been spying on me. “Keep me company,” Bran said. “Don’t want to drink by myself.” The Marquis said to Nee, “Another time.” I kept my face turned away to hide the relief I was sure was plain to see, and Nee and I went downstairs to the common room, which smelled of spicy drinks and braised meats and fruit tarts. In one corner four musicians played, and the center of the room was clear save for a group of dancers, the tables and cushions having been pushed back to make space. Nee and I went to join, for we had come in on a circle dance. These were not the formal Court dances with their intricate steps, where each gesture has to be just so, right down to who asks for a partner and how the response is made. These were what Nee called town dances, which were based on the old country dances--line dances for couples, and circles either for men or for women--that people had stamped and twirled and clapped to for generations. Never lacking for partners, we danced until we were hot and tired, and then went up to the spacious bedrooms. I left my windows wide open and fell asleep listening to the sound of the river.

There was no whimsical ‘sip of wine at Thanksgiving’ for us kids while we were still teenagers. This was the Clinton era, and my parents were already worried about the moral deterioration of the country.

Okay, so we know that someone at your place of work hacked into this laptop. That's what we know, that's all we know; let's not jump to conclusions...yet." "Unless...it's backward...

Jessica smiled thoughtfully, swirling her wine around the glass. “In New York, we can have the best of everything. It’s a city with limitless options. So we get accustomed to thinking that there’s always something better out there, because there usually is: a better apartment, a better job, a better meal at a better restaurant around the corner. We’re never satisfied. This city trains us to worry about the possibility of something better, so we’re unable to recognize when we actually have The One. Why do you think New Yorkers get married later than the rest of the country?

feeling faint,” she said, setting her basket down on the

The satanic spirit of the secret sect will push the Church to the brink of collapse. Apostasies will occur, from the secret sect that has influenced education by monetary support, in countries of the western world. Contempt for the sacred will include, trying to eliminate consecration of the bread and the wine from the Holy Mass. This is still an ultimate goal of the Freemasonry/Illuminati.

SUFISM is not different from the mysticism of all religions. Mysticism comes from Adam (God’s Peace upon him). It has assumed different shapes and forms over many centuries, for example, the mysticism of Jesus (God’s Peace upon him), of monks, of hermits, and of Muhammed (God’s Peace and Blessings upon him). A river passes through many countries and each claims it for its own. But there is only one river.

France’s national image was the product of a collaboration between a king with a vision and some of the most brilliant artists, artisans, and craftspeople of all time—men and women who were the founding geniuses in domains as disparate as wine making, fashion accessorizing, jewelry design, cabinetry, codification of culinary technique, and hairstyling. There was a second collaboration: between Louis XIV and a series of brilliant inventors, the creators of everything from a revolutionary technology for glassmaking to a visionary pair of boots. Each of these areas seems modest enough in and of itself. All together, however, they added up to an amazingly powerful new entity. Thanks to Louis XIV, France had acquired a reputation as the country that had written the book on elegant living.

I think of the self-proclaimed agrarian farmer and scholar Victor Davis Hanson who in his book Fields Without Dreams, wrote sneeringly but also with grief: 'They [city people] no longer care where or how they get their food, as long as it is firm, fresh, and cheap. They have no interest in preventing the urbanization of their farmland as long as parks, Little League fields and an occasional bike lane are left amid the concrete, stucco, and asphalt. They have no need of someone who they are not, who reminds them of their past and not their future. Their romanticism for the farmer is just that, an artificial and quite transient appreciation of his rough-cut visage against the horizon the stuff of a wine commercial, cigarette ad, or impromptu rock concert.' People in the cities don't see farmers clearly. The farmers are overlooked, and instead of being seen as recognizably real, the farmer is romanticized.

One hundred million Americans drink wine. About eleven million of these do so daily, and another forty-five million imbibe at least once a week. Per capita wine consumption has increased each year since 1994, even during the severe recession of 2007–9. Total wine consumption in the United States is now higher than in any other country in the world, but per capita consumption still lags behind thirty-two other wine-consuming nations, which suggests that there is plenty of room for the industry to grow in the future.

While successful young business people sipped their fine wine at $200 a bottle in some fancy restaurant in San Francisco, poor children in Flint, Michigan, were drinking lead-poisoned water, which caused brain damage. While Wall Street executives received millions in bonuses, minimum-wage workers in West Virginia were struggling with opioid addiction or dying of heroin overdoses. While CEOs of large corporations retired in gated communities in Arizona, half of older workers in our country had nothing in the bank as they faced retirement. Meanwhile, as the very rich got much richer while almost everybody else became poorer, the political system became more and more corrupt.

As communal and composite creatures, we human beings often symbolize our important relationships in physical ways. Nations create flags to represent their country, and pledging allegiance to those flags displays and reinforces the patriotism of its citizens. Couples exchange rings during a wedding ceremony, embodying their commitments to each other into wearable symbols that become a part of everything they do from then on. These symbols not only help us stay mindful of the fundamental relationships that shape our activity, they actually make those relationships stronger. That same dynamic, then, can be seen in the way sacraments function in the church's worship of God. First through the waters of baptism and thereafter through the bread and the wine of communion, we express and extend our devotion to God in physical ways. To be entirely devoted to God, we must make God a part of everything that we do. What better way to symbolize that than by eating and drinking the representations (i.e., “presenting to us again”) of Christ's broken body and shed blood. Sanctification is about living as a representation of Christ, and we become more mindful that Christ fills us and empowers us spiritually when we celebrate that filling and empowering physically. By recognizing our dependance on God in this way, we demonstrate to ourselves and others how important God is to us; we “worth-ship” God. Because this is an act of “communion,” the very same sacrament that celebrates our dependance on Christ also celebrates our interdependence on one another. It is hard to imagine a better medicine for sin-sick, self-addicted people to take than one that celebrates how much God loves them and calls them to love one another.

Hello all, Why must we be confused by all this online scammers when we all know that there has never been any other oracle apart from the the great spell casters called lama lama oracle temple, The great oracle and also i my self called kuq ya that is greatest of all, Kuq ya means GREATEST AMONG ALL THE SPELL CASTERS. This oracle has been in existence for so many years even before i was born i inherited it from my great grand father. Since we have been existing we have never failed in solving any kind of problem anyone must have been having cos we know the spirits that we serve we never lets us down, We perform various sacrifice to this spirits from time to time to make our powerful and doings effective. This temple is out on the internet to tell all of you that is wasting your time and also your hard earned money dealing with all this hungry souls that called themselves spell casters by bring cause to themselves by claiming to be what they are not, We advise you all that you should stop it as it is not right to do such, Because those spell casters that called themselves different names / temples are scammers,You will do this greatest oracle good by doing that.They are scammers and all those testimony there are posted by them also and not the people they have help,They are doing all this to get money to fed there-self and there family members !!! BE WARNED ALL OF YOU THAT NEED HELP FROM SPELL CASTERS AS IT IS BECAUSE OF ALL OF YOU WE HAVE DECIDED TO COME ONLINE TO REDUCE AND STOP ALL THIS FAKE SPELL CASTERS, AS WE GOT PERMISSION FROM THE FBI !!.. I have made so many of them online that are spoiling this great temple good work go back to the sea and some blind. I am Dr Kuq Ya the messenger to the great oracle of Nigeria,Indian,Indonesia,Singapore,UK,USA,Uganda,japan,Spain,Germany,Paris,Dubai,South Africa. To mention but a few..We are know well there as the great temple that has helped them get many of there ANCESTRAL problems solve in recent times. But we are also extending this great offer to those that have any kind of problem, when i mean any kind of problem i mean any problem at all you might be having in this life,Such as getting your lover back,you want to be rich, you feel like using charms on someone to get something you like from him or her or getting your scam many back, wining a lottery, to mention but a few. KUQ YA IS HERE FOR YOUR SERVICES AND PLEASE STOP DEALING WITH THOSE SO CALLED SPELL CASTERS THAT HAVE REALLY MESSED UP THIS WORK ONLINE. I HAVE NEVER BEEN ONLINE,BUT THE PRESIDENTS OF THE ABOVE COUNTRIES CALLED ME ON PHONE AND ALSO PERSONALLY HOLD A MEETING AND THEY ASK ME THE MESSENGER TO START ADVERTING AND TELL ALL ABOUT THIS GREATEST ORACLE THAT IS SO DURABLE, PERFECT, MARVELOUS, AND GOOD WORKS TO AVOID THIS SCAMMING THAT IS GOING ON ONLINE. I WILL BE ENDING HERE NOW, IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING BOTHERING YOUR MIND AND YOU NEED PERMANENT SOLUTION TO IT WITHOUT ANY SIDE EFFECT OR HARM, KINDLY SEND AN EMAIL TO THE FOLLOWING EMAIL ADDRESS: great.spellcaster@yahoo.com Thanks and may the spirits guide you to read and understand what i said and also we will be awaiting response from you all that have problems that want it solve at once.Thanks for your patronage as you come. To enhance fast communication, Kindly send down your Name : Country: State: Address: More about the kind of help you want here: Phone number: Age: Gender : Job: and any other information's you know it will be so helpful on the kind of work and help you wish for here. Because we solve any kind of problem in this life. NOTE : MY GMAIL ACCOUNT IS NOW BAD AS YOU CAN ONLY GET ME ON THIS EMAIL : great.spellcaster@yahoo.com. So don't contact me via me gmail account. And also our spell casting here has no side effect, As it is just to grant you your heart desires without any problem.

For different reasons, pork is also a poor choice in meat. Owing to the pig's omnivorous diet, pork is even more acidifying than other meats. Pork is also very hard on the liver, largely because lard is difficult to digest. Researchers in Canada have established a close link between cirrhosis of the liver and pork consumption in sixteen countries studied. In countries where pork is consumed together with alcohol (beer and sausage, wine and schnitzel, etc.), the likelihood of liver cirrhosis rises by a factor of 1,000.

Europe’s earliest cookbook came from ancient Rome. In it, the writer Epicius described the recipes for dishes such as stuffed dormouse, and snails soaked in wine and oil. Food fashions may have changed, but many Italians still take great pride in their cooking. Regional Italian dishes have become familiar in countries around the world. They include bolognaise sauce from Bologna, cassata siciliana (an ice-cream dessert) from Sicily, and from Parma, the smoked parma ham which is often served thinly sliced with fresh figs. Italian restaurants are found in towns and cities in many other countries. Traditionally, the midday meal is the main meal of the day, and a family event. Fresh ingredients are usually used, and packaged “convenience foods” are less common than in many other countries. Fresh raw vegetables, sliced very thinly and arranged in a colorful display, are often served as an appetizer. Common drinks are wine (though often watered down for children) and mineral water. For dessert there is usually fresh fruit and more Italian specialties, ice cream and espresso coffee.

Italy’s climate is well suited to growing a variety of crops. However, in such a mountainous country, flat and fertile land is in short supply. Wheat is the main cereal crop and is grown in the lowlands of central and northern Italy. Sugar beet, potatoes, and maize also are cultivated, and some rice is grown in the Po valley. The majority of Italy’s farms are small, averaging only 17 acres in size. Each farm is usually run by one family. Tractors and other farm machinery have become more common in the past 20 years, and bullock carts are now rarely seen. Since the 1950s the government has paid for ways to improve farmland by irrigating dry areas and draining swampy ones. Despite these problems, Italy is the world’s leading producer of both olive oil and wine. More than half the farms in the country grow at least some grapes, and each region has its own special wine. Fishing ports are dotted all around Italy’s long coastline. There are still some small, family-owned fishing boats. But the fishing industry is becoming more mechanized, with fleets of large boats.

North and Central America have thirty species of Vitis; China has another thirty. But Eurasia has only V. vinifera. And Eurasia is where wine was born. From Chardonnay to Pinot Noir, Syrah to Viognier, all wine—no matter what the label says, what color it is, or where it comes from—is made from the same species of grape, probably originating somewhere in the Transcaucasian Highland connecting the Black and Caspian Seas, in what’s now the country Georgia, and then spreading south to the Fertile Crescent and Egypt.

What Sadiq found when he reached the welcoming shores of the United States was a history of institutional racism and Asian exclusion laws for which he was unprepared. White nationalism would already be working against the Mufti’s message. Later he would write that if Jesus Christ comes to America and applies for admission to the United States under the immigration laws, [he] would not be allowed to enter this country because: 1. He comes from a land which is out of the permitted zone. 2. He has no money with him. 3. He is not decently dressed. 4. His hands have holes in the palms. 5. He remains bare-footed, which is a disorderly act. 6. He is against fighting for the country. 7. He believes in making wine when he thinks necessary. 8. He has no credential to show that he is an authorized preacher. 9. He believes in practicing the Law of Moses [polygamy].7

Now, I will drink no German beer. The white wine of the country, with a little soda-water; perhaps occasionally a glass of Ems or potash. But beer, never — or, at all events, hardly ever.” It is a good and useful resolution, which I recommend to all travellers. I

Well, hang it all,’ he said, ‘he was only an atheist.’ ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,’ said the Inspector, politely. ‘He only wanted to abolish God,’ explained Father Brown in a temperate and reasonable tone. ‘He only wanted to destroy the Ten Commandments and root up all the religion and civilization that had made him, and wash out all the common sense of ownership and honesty; and let his culture and his country be flattened out by savages from the ends of the earth. That’s all he wanted. You have no right to accuse him of anything beyond that. Hang it all, everybody draws the line somewhere! And you come here and calmly suggest that a Mandeville Man of the old generation (for Craken was of the old generation, whatever his views) would have begun to smoke, or even strike a match, while he was still drinking the College Port, of the vintage of ’08 — no, no; men are not so utterly without laws and limits as all that! I was there; I saw him; he had not finished his wine, and you ask me why he did not smoke! No such anarchic question has ever shaken the arches of Mandeville College Funny place, Mandeville College. Funny place, Oxford. Funny place, England.’ ‘But you haven’t anything particular to do with Oxford?’ asked the doctor curiously. ‘I have to do with England,’ said Father Brown. ‘I come from there. And the funniest thing of all is that even if you love it and belong to it, you still can’t make head or tail of it.’ The

FOR MONTHS FOLLOWING THE AMERICANS’ DEAL WITH DARLAN, European exiles gathered at the White Tower, York Minster, and other favored restaurants and pubs in London to smoke endless cigarettes and discuss the agreement’s implications. The Free French were the ones most directly affected, of course. But the other émigrés—Norwegians, Poles, Czechoslovaks, Belgians, and Dutch—were also worried about what the deal might mean for the future. The Nazis had invaded and occupied their countries, too. When the time came for those nations to be liberated, would the Americans cooperate with traitors like Darlan? Most of the Europeans meeting over wine-stained tablecloths that winter had escaped to London in the chaos-filled spring of 1940, when German troops conquered Norway and Denmark, then rolled through France and the Low Countries. Every other day, it seemed, George VI and Winston Churchill had been summoned to one of the city’s train stations to welcome yet another king, queen, president, or prime minister. As the only country in Europe still holding out against Hitler, Britain was, as Polish troops put it, the “Last Hope Island” for émigrés who wanted to continue the fight. And London, which housed de Gaulle’s movement and six governments-in-exile, had become the de facto capital of free Europe. The

country that doesn’t grow its own wine grapes has no claim to civilisation.

THOUGH I WENT to a very artsy private high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I wasn’t raised by parents with a liberal attitude toward alcohol. There was no whimsical “sip of wine at Thanksgiving” for us kids while we were still teenagers, like we were in a Noah Baumbach movie. That was for the cool Jewish kids. This was the Clinton era, and my parents were already worried about the moral deterioration of the country. So I drank skim milk with dinner, and did so pretty much every night until I was a story editor at The Office.

With World War I over, the decade prior to my birth was universally recognized as the “Roaring Twenties.” Many rejoiced, with mostly young, wealthy people indulging in wine, women and song. Promiscuous sexual behavior and the social use of alcohol became normal to the liberal thinkers who gathered in the bohemian sections of the world’s leading cities. Although political unrest still existed, most people enjoyed the peaceful years that followed the horror of World War I. The United States, however, has always been a more structured, puritanical and religious country. From the time of the Pilgrims, spirituality and moderation has prevailed. In the United States, the concept of abstinence was advanced by the American Temperance Society, also known as the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance. This activist group was established on February 13, 1826, in Boston, Massachusetts, and considered the concept of outlawing alcohol to be progressive. The United States Senate first proposed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, with the intent of banning the use of alcohol. After passage by the House and Senate, on December 18, 1917, the proposed amendment was submitted to the states for ratification. On January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, with an effective date one year later on January 17, 1920. The Volstead Act, passed on October 28, 1919, specified the details for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment. A total of 1,520 Federal Prohibition agents, having police powers, were assigned to enforce this unpopular law. Many people, ignoring this new law, partied at the many renowned illegal speakeasies, many of which were run by the Mafia. This ban on alcohol proved to be contentious, difficult to enforce, and an infringement on people’s personal rights. Still, due to political pressure, it continued until March 22, 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Constitution, known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, which allowed for the manufacture and sale of watery 3.2% beer. It took over a decade from its inception before the Eighteenth Amendment was finally repealed on December 5, 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution was adopted.

We are all masters of our own destiny, my mother used to tell me. Even though we can’t always choose what happens to us, we can choose how we respond. In the end, she said, the way we handle the tough things life throws at us—adversity, loss, hardship, rejection—is what defines each of us as a human being. Whether we face them with courage and grace and honesty or choose to feel sorry for ourselves, blame someone else, lash out at life’s injustices with anger and cruelty—that’s what makes us who we are.

Building with Its Face Blown Off How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city, how the blue and white striped wallpaper of a second story bedroom is now exposed to the lightly falling snow as if the room had answered the explosion wearing only its striped pajamas. Some neighbors and soldiers poke around in the rubble below and stare up at the hanging staircase, the portrait of a grandfather, a door dangling from a single hinge. And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed by its uncovered ochre walls, the twisted mess of its plumbing, the sink sinking to its knees, the ripped shower curtain, the torn goldfish trailing bubbles. It's like a dollhouse view as if a child on its knees could reach in and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture. Or it might be a room on a stage in a play with no characters, no dialogue or audience, no beginning, middle, and end– just the broken furniture in the street, a shoe among the cinder blocks, a light snow still falling on a distant steeple, and people crossing a bridge that still stands. And beyong that–crows in a tree, the statue of a leader on a horse, and clouds that look like smoke, and even farther on, in another country on a blanket under a shade tree, a man pouring wine into two glasses and a woman sliding out the wooden pegs of a wicker hamper filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.

The Golden Gate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich retiree living out in wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. The Bay Bridge is—was—San Francisco’s workhorse bridge.

GABLE’S CHEESE FONDUE Reduce white wine and crushed garlic, add grated Gruyère and Emmentaler cheese, whisk over medium heat until melted. Stir in cornstarch slurry, more wine to taste, and reheat (do not boil) until fondue is creamy and thick. Serve with lightly toasted, cubed country bread.

In this latter sense the Buddha has defined trivial talk. He said: If the mind of a monk inclines to talking, he should think thus: “I shall not engage in the low kind of talk that is vulgar, worldly and unprofitable; that does not lead to detachment, dispassionateness, cessation, tranquility, direct knowledge, enlightenment, Nirvana; namely talk about kings, thieves, ministers, armies, famine and war; about eating, drinking, clothing and lodgings; about garlands, perfumes, relatives, vehicles, villages, towns, cities and countries; about women and wine, the gossip of the street and the well, talk about ancestors, about various trifles, tales about the origins of the world and the sea, talk about things being so or otherwise, and similar matters.” Thus he has clear comprehension. “But talk that is helpful for leading the austere life, useful for mental clarity, that leads to complete detachment, dispassionateness, cessation, tranquility, direct knowledge, enlightenment and Nibbana; that is talk on frugality, contentedness, solitude, seclusion, application of energy, virtue, concentration, wisdom, deliverance and on the knowledge and vision bestowed by deliverance—in such talk shall I engage.” Thus he has clear comprehension.

It got this hot in the south of France, but it was a dry heat, cooled and tempered by the mistral and scented with the powerful fragrances of lavender, thyme, and rosemary. Here the air was so thick I could practically see it and the smell was the dank chemical odor of soil and plants and grass decomposing

Country folk are the most genuine. Even though they don't have anything compared to city folk. They will treat you to the most lavish meals, the finest wine–they're the most likely to take care of you.

GAZPACHO Blend country bread, ripe tomatoes, and seeded cucumber in a food processor with a splash of red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, and cumin. Process until smooth. Push liquid through a medium sieve for a velvety consistency. Chill and served with diced green pepper, cucumber, and white onion.

You know that you are no hero and that you never wanted to be the one. You have never wanted to die for your nation, or for freedom, or for anything else, for that matter: the fates of Winkelried and Ordon [legendary heroes who died for their countries, which were overwhelmed by superior enemies] have never tempted you. You have always wanted to be alive, to live like a normal person, to have respect for yourself and for your friends. You have always enjoyed the moral comfort that allows you to take pleasure in your inner freedom, in beautiful women, and in wine. This war surprised you in the company of a pretty woman, not while you were plotting an assault on the Central Committee headquarters. Nevertheless, they did declare this war on you and over thirty million other people, and so you are forced to recognise that amid the street roundups, the ignoble court sentences, the despicable radio programs, and the distribution of leaflets by underground Solidarity you will not regain the normalcy that was based on respect for yourself. Now you must choose between moral and material stability, because you know that today's "normalcy" will have the bitter taste of self-defeat. And you will not, for the sake of life's enjoyments, give in to the tempting offers of freedom made by the policeman, who seeks to delude you with promises of happiness but really brings suffering and inner hell instead. No, this is not heroism. It is mere common sense.

I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me raound the bed. And smoked, me, spliffs and choked my neck until I said I was dead. I met a man who took me for walks. Long ones in the country. I offer up. I offer up in the hedge. I met a man I met with her. She and me and his friend to bars at night and drink champagne and bought me chips at every teatime. I met a man with condoms in his pockets. Don't use them. He loves children in his heart. No. I met a man who knew me once. who saw me around when I was a child. Who said you're a fine looking woman now. Who said come back marry me live on my farm. No. I met a man who was a priest I didn't I did. Just as well as many another one would. I met a man. I met a man. who said he'd pay me by the month. who said he'd keep me up in style and I'd be waiting when he arrived. No is what I say. I met a man who hit me a smack. I met a man who cracked my arm. I met a man who said what are you doing out so late at night. I met a man. I met a man. And wash my mouth out with soap. I wish I could. That I did then. I met a man. A stupid thing. I met a man. Should have turned on my heel. I thought. I didn't know to think. I didn't even know to speak. I met a man. I kept on walking. I met a man. I met a man. And I lay down. And slapped and cried and wined and dined. I met a man and many more and I didn't know you at all.

I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. And smoked, me, spliffs and choked my neck until I said I was dead. I met a man who took me for walks. Long ones in the country. I offer up. I offer up in the hedge. I met a man I met with her. She and me and his friend to bars at night and drink champagne and bought me chips at every teatime. I met a man with condoms in his pockets. Don't use them. He loves children in his heart. No. I met a man who knew me once. who saw me around when I was a child. Who said you're a fine looking woman now. Who said come back marry me live on my farm. No. I met a man who was a priest I didn't I did. Just as well as many another one would. I met a man. I met a man. who said he'd pay me by the month. who said he'd keep me up in style and I'd be waiting when he arrived. No is what I say. I met a man who hit me a smack. I met a man who cracked my arm. I met a man who said what are you doing out so late at night. I met a man. I met a man. And wash my mouth out with soap. I wish I could. That I did then. I met a man. A stupid thing. I met a man. Should have turned on my heel. I thought. I didn't know to think. I didn't even know to speak. I met a man. I kept on walking. I met a man. I met a man. And I lay down. And slapped and cried and wined and dined. I met a man and many more and I didn't know you at all.

Grant placed a glass of wine into Emily's hand and tapped her glass with his. "Here's to the remarkable woman who races across the country on Monday to save her company and turns out a beautiful meal on a moment's notice on Friday." Down the Aisle

Each day the traders are kidnapping our people—children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family. . . . This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. . . . We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. . . . It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.

I want to live in America!' This was met with protests. 'Will you leave us all behind?' asked his mother. 'I want you to come too.' Said Luke. But nobody wanted to go. 'America is a fine country, no question.' Said Monsieur Gascon expansively. 'They have everything there, big cities, not like Paris of course, but great lakes and mountains and prairies as far as the eye can see. If your own country is not so good, if you're English or German or Italian, unless you're rich, milor, it's probably better in America. But in France, we have everything. We have mountains, the Alps and the Pyrénées. We have great rivers like the Seine and the Rhone. We have huge farmlands and forests. We have cities and cathedrals, and Roman ruins in the south. We have every kind of climate. We have the greatest wines in the world and we have 300 cheeses. What more do you want?

Members of Congress would no doubt have been furious had they learned that DARPA—ostensibly a defense agency—was wining and dining professors of computer science as they theorized about chip design. But it was efforts like these that shrank transistors, discovered new uses for semiconductors, drove new customers to buy them, and funded the subsequent generation of smaller transistors. When it came to semiconductor design, no country in the world had a better innovation ecosystem.

This is beef short ribs marinated in miso. First you mix hatchō miso and Sendai's red miso with sake. Then you place the short ribs in the mixture; they should be left to marinate for a day or so. Then you take the ribs out and grill them over a charcoal fire." "Miso and beef are a great match, aren't they? It's a pity that people in other countries don't know about miso.

You know, success in anything you do is doing what you love. Going to a job that is different every day is better than going to a cookie cutter job like so many folks have.

There was a strong, vocal movement against Coca-Cola bottling plants being built in the country, and the term “coca-colonization” had been coined to describe this supposed insidiousness of the beverage company and its attempt to overtake French beverages in market share. Even vintners saw the soda pop as a direct competitor to their wines and brandies.

What do you want, Rachel?” he asks. “I want the world,” I reply. “I want to sail around Phuket Island, topless on a yacht. I want to fuck in the gardens at Versailles and get chased out by French police. I want to eat pizza by the hour and drink wine straight from the bottle, stumbling around the streets of Rome at two in the morning. I want to dance in a fountain, Jake. I want to be a doctor and travel the country watching men at the top of their game play hazardous sports. I want to feel their sweat and smell their blood on the ice. I want to live. And I never want to turn an opportunity down out of fear that I’m not conforming to that dream of normal. Because I’m not normal, Jake. We’re not normal. We’re extraordinary. Be extraordinary with me.

regularly plundered the country for livestock, steel, textiles, corn, coal, and wine to feed and supply the fatherland. In similar fashion, it requisitioned

If you wait till the white man leaves and ask about that space, the space between white and black folks in South Carolina, the black folks say, “Oh, it ain’t nothing. Such-and-so is my friend. I’ve known him forty years. We all get along here.” Only at night, when they get home, when the lights are down and all the churchin’ is done and the singing is over and the TV is off and the wine is flowing and tongues are working freely, only within the safety of home and family does the talk change, and then the buzz is no longer a buzz. It’s a roaring cyclone of fury laced with distaste and four hundred years of pent-up bitterness. There is not a single marker for James Brown in this place, they say. No spot to commemorate his birth, no building named after him, no school, no library, no statue, no nothing. And even when they do name something after him, or celebrate him in the state legislature or some such thing, it doesn’t matter. They smile about it during the day, but at night they cuss that thing so hard it’ll curl up on its own and crawl away like a snake. There’s not even a marker at the spot where the greatest soul singer this country ever knew came from. Why would they put one there? They hate him.

One thing I hate most in this world, next to arrogance, is hypocrisy. Privileged teenagers hysterically yelling about climate action with no tangible contribution on their part - privileged celebrities flying in private jets, sipping fine wine, while barking about equal pay in a room full of other privileged celebrities - all these ain't activism, it's entitled lunacy. When you're struggling with your last ounce of strength to put food on the table, to keep a roof over your family, and still have some generosity left for your neighbors, that's the highest form of human rights struggle there is. The world of justice looks very different depending on which side of disparity you belong to. For the everyday commoner, struggle for human rights is the natural way of life, whereas for privileged egomaniacs, activism is a publicity stunt. Send these entitled bunch of buffoons to labor in the streets of the developing parts of the world, and all their activism will fly out the window. It's this simple. Before you start shouting about rights, equality and justice, have the decency and common sense to step out of the lap of privilege and luxury. Remember, there is no difference between a barking dog with golden platter and barking activist with a silver spoon. Struggle in the streets, struggle in the beaches, only then you shall know, what suits the humans, what suits the leeches.

I believe that we shocked each other by how swiftly we went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of the most mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived. But it was vital to my survival to have a one bedroom of my own i saw the aprtment almost as a sanatorium a hospice clinci for my own recovery I painted the walls in the warmest colors i could find and bought myself flowers every week as if i were visiting myself in the hospital is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty why are you studying Italian so that just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again and is actually successful this time? ciao comes from if you must know it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval venetians as an intimate salutation Sono il Suo Schiavo meaning i am your slave. om Naamah Shivaya meaning I honor the divinity that resides whin me. I wanted to experience both , I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence the dual glories of a human life I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos the singular balance of the good and he beautiful I'd been missing both during these last hard years because both pleasure and devotion require a stress free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety , As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion. four feet on the ground a head full of foliage looking at the world through the heart. it was more than I wanted to toughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. same guatemalan musicians are always playing id rather be a sparrow than a snail on their bamboo windpipes oh how i want italian to open itself up to me i havent felt so starved for comprehension since then dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontanana dolce sitl nuovo Dante wrote his divine comedy in terza rima triple rhyme a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating here times every five lines. lamor che move il sole e laltre stelle we are the masters of bel far niente larte darrangiarsi The reply in italy to you deserve a break today would probably be yeah no duh that's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon to go over to your house and sleep with your wife, I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch i peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all,)I put some olives on the plate too and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the fromagerie down the street tend two slices of pink oily salmon for dessert a lovely peach which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm form the roman sunlight for the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing finally when i had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal i went and sat in apatch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bit of it with my fingers while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian happiness inhabited my every molecule. I am inspired by the regal self assurance of this town so grounded and rounded so amused and monumental knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history i would like to be like rome when i am an old lady. I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in

I want the world,” I reply. “I want to sail around Phuket Island, topless on a yacht. I want to fuck in the gardens at Versailles and get chased out by French police. I want to eat pizza by the hour and drink wine straight from the bottle, stumbling around the streets of Rome at two in the morning. I want to dance in a fountain, Jake. I want to be a doctor and travel the country watching men at the top of their game play hazardous sports. I want to feel their sweat and smell their blood on the ice. I want to live. And I never want to turn an opportunity down out of fear that I’m not conforming to that dream of normal. Because I’m not normal, Jake. We’re not normal. We’re extraordinary. Be extraordinary with me.

It wasn't tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not to swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor. His face was ferocious and sublime in this moment, cracked open; I saw it briefly behind the mask. He was a man who knew the gradations of pleasure because he knew, like me, the calculus of its loss. To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't? I raised my glass to the memory of my drunk in the British market. I imagined him sat across the table, calmed at last, sane among the sane. He would have tasted in that wine the starch of a laundered sheet, perhaps, or the clean smooth shot of his dignity. My employer decanted these deepest longings, mysterious to each diner until it flooded the palate: a lost child's yeasty scalp, the morning breath of a lover, huckleberries, onion soup, the spice of a redwood forest gone up in smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country's purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.

I can see now that I was hungry for love that summer. For something to love: a bite, a dream, a person, a meal, a field, a piece of a world worth believing in. Not for me the solace of boeuf bourguignon; not for me red wine and browned butter, that unctuousness proximate to rot or burning that stickied a diner's tongue. I had lived too long in the low country. I had tasted bitter gray. Only ashes and lost empires in the crust of a kouign amann that would never shatter the same way again.

At the bottom of the passage, behind thick steel doors, I witnessed the true wealth of that country. Others have estimated the value in those rooms of grains, of nuts, of beans; of the millions in canned foie and white asparagus; of the greenhouses under their orange lights, and the vast spice grottos. I can't quote numbers. I can only say what happened when I pressed my face to a wheel of ten-year Parmigiano, how in a burst of grass and ripe pineapple I stood in some green meadow that existed only in the resonance, like a bell's fading peal, of that aroma. I can tell you how it was to cradle wines and vinegars older than myself, their labels crying out the names of lost traditions. And I can tell you of the ferocious crack in my heart when I walked into the deep freezer to see chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars hung two by two. No more boars roamed the world above, no Öland geese, no sharks; the day I climbed the mountain, there vanished wild larks. I knew, then, why the storerooms were guarded as if they held gold, or nuclear armaments. They hid something rarer still: a passage back through time. The animal carcasses were left unskinned. In the circulating air, the extinct revolved on their hooks to greet me.

Columbus tried to pour the wine of civilisation into very old bottles; you, more wisely, are trying to pour the old wine of our country into new bottles. Yet there is no great unlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter of bottling; the vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as punctual as the sun and the seasons. It was Columbus’s weakness as an administrator that he thought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care for the vintage, and labour to preserve its flavour and soft fire. Yours,