World Translation Day Quotes

My mother died yesterday, yesterday many years ago. You know, what amazed me the most the next day after her leaving was the fact that the buildings were still in place, the streets were still full of cars running, full of people who were walking, seemingly ignoring that my whole world has just disappeared." (rough translation)

If I told you that I wanted to spend my days and nights with you, live with you, as my partner, because out there, in Hell, I realised that you mean the world to me? That you are my sanity, my laughter, my lust, my love, my comfort, my day and my night, my heat and cold and everything? If I told you that, would you think that translates to 'convenient'?

As in you bury me. A rough translation for the way I want to leave this world before you because I can’t imagine having to go through a single day without you in it.

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.

Success demands singleness of purpose. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects. It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in this world. Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results. The ONE Thing shows up time and again in the lives of the successful because it’s a fundamental truth. More than anything else, expertise tracks with hours invested. The pursuit of mastery bears gifts. When people look back on their lives, it is the things they have not done that generate the greatest regret...People’s actions may be troublesome initially; it is their inactions that plague them most with long-term feelings of regret. Make sure every day you do what matters most. When you know what matters most, everything makes sense. When you don’t know what matters most, anything makes sense.

Tell me about it. Despite all the changes in the twenty-first century, it seems that the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor. There are still countless people in the world who starve every day, and it’s not because they’re anorexic or fasting. It’s because they can’t afford food while the rich waste money all the time on trivial things. Every time I hear about famine, I ask myself if we’ve learned nothing from the past- from the revolutions, all the wars. All they did was ruin thousands of lives. (Danger) Chronia apostraph, anthrice mi achi. (Alexion) What is that? (Danger) It’s Atlantean. Something Acheron says a lot. Roughly translated, it means ‘time moves on, people do not.’ (Alexion)

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.

He went back to his first morning in Oxford: climbing a sunny hill with Ramy, picnic basket in hand. Elderflower cordial. Warm brioche, sharp cheese, a chocolate tart for dessert. The air that day smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and he was falling in love. 'It's so odd,' Robin said. Back then they'd already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. 'It's like I've known you forever.' 'Me too,' Ramy said. 'And that makes no sense,' said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. 'Because I've known you for less than a day, and yet...' 'I think,' said Ramy, 'its' because when I speak, you listen.' 'Because you are fascinating.' 'Because you're a good translator.' Ramy leaned back on his elbows. 'That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. [from, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming]

From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque. He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! ("A Tough Tussle")

The Hebrew word Shabbat means ‘to stop.’ But it can also be translated ‘to delight.’ It has this dual idea of stopping and also of joying in God and our lives in his world. The Sabbath is an entire day set aside to follow God’s example, to stop and delight.

Thus it was up to God, to Him alone in His own ways - by one or both, I say - to give man back his whole life and perfection. But since a deed done is more prized the more it manifests within itself the mark of the loving heart and goodness of the doer, the Everlasting Love, whose seal is plain on all the wax of the world was pleased to move in all His ways to raise you up again. There was not, nor will be, from the first day to the last night, an act so glorious and so magnificent, on either way. For God, in giving Himself that man might be able to raise himself, gave even more than if he had forgiven him in mercy. All other means would have been short, I say, of perfect justice, but that God's own Son humbled Himself to take on mortal clay. -Paradiso, Canto VII

Every human being is bound to taste death: and you shall receive your rewards in full on the Day of Resurrection. He who is kept away from the Fire and is admitted to Paradise, will surely triumph; for the life of this world is nothing but an illusory enjoyment.

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

que ferais-je sans ce monde que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions où être ne dure qu'un instant où chaque instant verse dans le vide dans l'oubli d'avoir été sans cette onde où à la fin corps et ombre ensemble s'engloutissent que ferais-je sans ce silence gouffre des murmures haletant furieux vers le secours vers l'amour sans ce ciel qui s'élève sur la poussieère de ses lests que ferais-je je ferais comme hier comme aujourd'hui regardant par mon hublot si je ne suis pas seul à errer et à virer loin de toute vie dans un espace pantin sans voix parmi les voix enfermées avec moi Translation... what would I do without this world what would I do without this world faceless incurious where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been without this wave where in the end body and shadow together are engulfed what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love without this sky that soars above its ballast dust what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before peering out of my deadlight looking for another wandering like me eddying far from all the living in a convulsive space among the voices voiceless that throng my hiddenness

Call it the Human Mission-to be all and do all God sent us here to do. And notice-the mission to be fruitful and conquer and hold sway is given both to Adam and to Eve. 'And God said to them...' Eve is standing right there when God gives the world over to us. She has a vital role to play; she is a partner in this great adventure. All that human beings were intended to do here on earth-all the creativity and exploration, all the battle and rescue and nurture-we were intended to do together. In fact, not only is Eve needed, but she is desperately needed. When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo. 'It is not good for the man to be alone, I shall make him [an ezer kenegdo]' (Gen. 2:18 Alter). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, who has spent years translating the book of Genesis, says that this phrase is 'notoriously difficult to translate.' The various attempts we have in English are "helper" or "companion" or the notorious "help meet." Why are these translations so incredibly wimpy, boring, flat...disappointing? What is a help meet, anyway? What little girl dances through the house singing "One day I shall be a help meet?" Companion? A dog can be a companion. Helper? Sounds like Hamburger Helper. Alter is getting close when he translates it "sustainer beside him" The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately.

If the world allows the people of Darfur to be removed forever from their land and their way of life, then genocide will happen elsewhere because it will be seen as something that works. It must not be allowed to work. The people of Darfur need to go home now. I write this for them, and for that day, ... and for those still living who might yet have beautiful lives on the earth.

And then one day he realised that of course he was always staring at his hand when he wrote, was always watching the pen as it moved along, gripped by his fingers, his fingers floating there in front of his eyes just above the words, above that single white sheet, just above these words i’m writing now, his fingers between him and all that, like another person, a third person, when all along you thot it was just the two of you talking and he suddenly realized it was the three of them, handling it on from one to the other, his hand translating itself, his words slipping thru his fingers into the written world. You.

To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.

A man says to her: Inti zay el amar. You are like the moon. Again, translation fails. There is no English equivalent to the lineage of this phrase, a lineage that runs through generations of old movies and love songs and family gatherings. Listen to the sly setting joy and pleading, raw pleading that carries the words as this man tells the girl who lived when so many others died that she is beautiful beyond the bounds of this world.

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. Yet most lives are the same, 95 percent of the time. And most lives aren't extrinsically meaningful, unless you're delusionally self-absorbed or authentically Born Again. So here's where we find the creeping melancholy of modernity: The one thing all people are supposed to inherently deserve- a daily subsistence that's both meaningful and unpredictable-- tends to be an incredibly rare commodity. If it's not already there, we cannot manufacture it.

One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child. When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.

It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite—a labyrinth not of octagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms....I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.

What’s the use of having a great book if you have a lousy life? These days, especially, having a great life can easily translate into a great book.

Behind a man are his actions and before him is the Day of Reckoning. Life, in other words, is a journey from the world of actions towards the world of results.

If the heart longs for nothing but to be new and unlimited, the world is instantly the same as on the day of its creation and infinite.

A Japanese woman friend whose infant son died seven days into his life - no detectable reason - just the small breathing becoming nothing until it disappeared, told me that in Japan, there is a two-term word - “mizugo” - which translates loosely to “water children.” Children who did not live long enough to enter the world as we live in it. In Japan, there are rituals for mothers and families, practices and prayers for the water children. There are shrines where a person can visit and deliver words and love and offerings to the water children.

In our day everyone wants to appear intelligent, one would prefer to be accused of crime than of naiveté if the accompanying risks could be avoided. But since intelligence cannot be drawn from the void, subterfuge are resorted to, one of the most prevalent being the mania for "demystification", which allows an air of intelligence to be conveyed at small cost, for all one need do is assert that the normal response to a particular phenomenon is "prejudiced" and that it is high time it was cleared of the "legends" surrounding it; if the ocean could be made out to be a pond or the Himalayas a hill, it would be done. Certain writers find it impossible to be content with taking note of the fact that a particular thing or person has a particular character or destiny, as everyone had done before them; they must always begin by remarking that "it has too often been said", and go on to declare that the reality is something quite different and has at last been discovered, and that up till now all the world has been "living a lie". This strategy is applied above all to things that are evident and universally known, it would doubtless be too naive to acknowledge in so many words that a lion is a carnivore and that he is not quite safe to meet.

ALAS,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up. Translated

The ancients prized this way in the days of old   It wasn’t because the Tao is the source of all good or the cure for evil   But because it is the most noble thing to do thus making it the greatest treasure in the universe

In the Book of Genesis, God creates the world in six days and seals his covenant with humanity on the seventh. Because of this, the Hebrew verb used for swearing a covenant oath is, literally translated, “to seven oneself.

Why? The answer is central to any understanding of media. Why does a child like to chatter about the events of its day, however jerkily? Why do we prefer novels and movies about familiar scenes and characters? Because for rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness. The press repeats the excitement we have in using our wits, and by using our wits we can translate the outer world into the fabric of our own beings.

People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes. We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health.

If Urton is right, khipu were unique. They were the world’s sole intrinsically three-dimensional written documents (Braille is a translation of writing on paper) and the only ones to use a “system of coding information” that “like the coding systems used in present-day computer language, was structured primarily as a binary code.

I phone Mima every day. She always called me hijito de me vida. Little son of my life. It didn’t have the same ring to it in English. Sometimes things just don’t translate. Maybe that’s why there were so many misunderstandings in the world. On the other hand, if everyone spoke only one language, the world would be a pretty sad place.

84 When We made a covenant with you, We said, ‘You shall not shed each other’s blood, nor turn your people out of their homes.’ You consented to this and bore witness. 85 Yet, here you are, slaying one another and driving some of your own people from their homelands, aiding one another against them, committing sin and aggression; but if they came to you as captives, you would ransom them. Surely their very expulsion was unlawful for you. Do you believe in one part of the Book and deny another part of it? Those of you who act thus shall be rewarded with disgrace in this world and with a severe punishment on the Day of Resurrection. God is never unaware of what you do.

He went back to his first morning in Oxford: climbing a sunny hill with Ramy, picnic basket in hand. Elderflower cordial. Warm brioche, sharp cheese, a chocolate tart for dessert. The air that day smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and he was falling in love. 'It's so odd,' Robin said. Back then they'd already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. 'It's like I've known you forever.' 'Me too,' Ramy said. 'And that makes no sense,' said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. 'Because I've known you for less than a day, and yet...' 'I think,' said Ramy, 'it's because when I speak, you listen.' 'Because you are fascinating.' 'Because you're a good translator.' Ramy leaned back on his elbows. 'That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.

As a form of body language, when the mind is receptive to the sensory experience, writing speaks the truth about all thoughts and feelings. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood here because this isn’t a special talent or skill. It’s present in all of us. The trick is to discover it, cultivate it and translate it from an internal state to an expressive sensuality. It is truly a creative impulse that unconsciously expresses emotions and can also arouse emotion in the person reading the book. The beauty and harmony of the writer never gets old and there are as many new things to learn each day, as there are varieties of adjectives, nouns and verbs in the world. It is the ultimate way to communicate with your reader.

But you ˹Israelites˺ turned away—except for a few of you—and were indifferent. 84. And ˹remember˺ when We took your covenant that you would neither shed each other’s blood nor expel each other from their homes, you gave your pledge and bore witness. 85. But here you are, killing each other and expelling some of your people from their homes, aiding one another in sin and aggression; and when those ˹expelled˺ come to you as captives, you still ransom them—though expelling them was unlawful for you.28 Do you believe in some of the Scripture and reject the rest? Is there any reward for those who do so among you other than disgrace in this worldly life and being subjected to the harshest punishment on the Day of Judgment? For God is never unaware of what you do.

When you have done some programming then you'll know how satisfying it can be to use a program that you made yourself, one that does exactly what you want it to do. Creating a Sugar Activity takes that enjoyment to the next level. A useful Sugar Activity can be translated by volunteers into every language, be downloaded hundreds of times a week and used every day by students all over the world.

The English word Atonement comes from the ancient Hebrew word kaphar, which means to cover. When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and discovered their nakedness in the Garden of Eden, God sent Jesus to make coats of skins to cover them. Coats of skins don’t grow on trees. They had to be made from an animal, which meant an animal had to be killed. Perhaps that was the very first animal sacrifice. Because of that sacrifice, Adam and Eve were covered physically. In the same way, through Jesus’ sacrifice we are also covered emotionally and spiritually. When Adam and Eve left the garden, the only things they could take to remind them of Eden were the coats of skins. The one physical thing we take with us out of the temple to remind us of that heavenly place is a similar covering. The garment reminds us of our covenants, protects us, and even promotes modesty. However, it is also a powerful and personal symbol of the Atonement—a continuous reminder both night and day that because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we are covered. (I am indebted to Guinevere Woolstenhulme, a religion teacher at BYU, for insights about kaphar.) Jesus covers us (see Alma 7) when we feel worthless and inadequate. Christ referred to himself as “Alpha and Omega” (3 Nephi 9:18). Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Christ is surely the beginning and the end. Those who study statistics learn that the letter alpha is used to represent the level of significance in a research study. Jesus is also the one who gives value and significance to everything. Robert L. Millet writes, “In a world that offers flimsy and fleeting remedies for mortal despair, Jesus comes to us in our moments of need with a ‘more excellent hope’ (Ether 12:32)” (Grace Works, 62). Jesus covers us when we feel lost and discouraged. Christ referred to Himself as the “light” (3 Nephi 18:16). He doesn’t always clear the path, but He does illuminate it. Along with being the light, He also lightens our loads. “For my yoke is easy,” He said, “and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). He doesn’t always take burdens away from us, but He strengthens us for the task of carrying them and promises they will be for our good. Jesus covers us when we feel abused and hurt. Joseph Smith taught that because Christ met the demands of justice, all injustices will be made right for the faithful in the eternal scheme of things (see Teachings, 296). Marie K. Hafen has said, “The gospel of Jesus Christ was not given us to prevent our pain. The gospel was given us to heal our pain” (“Eve Heard All These Things,” 27). Jesus covers us when we feel defenseless and abandoned. Christ referred to Himself as our “advocate” (D&C 29:5): one who believes in us and stands up to defend us. We read, “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler” (Psalm 18:2). A buckler is a shield used to divert blows. Jesus doesn’t always protect us from unpleasant consequences of illness or the choices of others, since they are all part of what we are here on earth to experience. However, He does shield us from fear in those dark times and delivers us from having to face those difficulties alone. … We’ve already learned that the Hebrew word that is translated into English as Atonement means “to cover.” In Arabic or Aramaic, the verb meaning to atone is kafat, which means “to embrace.” Not only can we be covered, helped, and comforted by the Savior, but we can be “encircled about eternally in the arms of his love” (2 Nephi 1:15). We can be “clasped in the arms of Jesus” (Mormon 5:11). In our day the Savior has said, “Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in the arms of my love” (D&C 6:20). (Brad Wilcox, The Continuous Atonement, pp. 47-49, 60).

I SEEK SOLACE IN THE CRIMSON SUNRISE, That splashes the east with beauty; I am captivated by the azure skies, Which follow with an air of serenity! I watch the color of the seas That paints the canvas of my heart; I brush my thoughts with the elegant breeze That translates my ideas to art! The dainty garden of beauteous flowers - Red, yellow, lilac and white - Toss and frolic in breezy hours Spreading the waves of lucid delight. The hills covered with foliage green, And the faded ones, blue and grey, Enthrall me as my eyes glean Their glimpses while I move away. Each speck of dust, each grain of rice, And the farms reflect life and mirth; Colors of nature, at ease, entice, Bringing the sweet scent of earth. I chase the mesmerizing butterflies Laden with hues of heaven, Solitude becomes a joyous exercise. When by beauty, I am madly driven! The world is filled with colors galore, Each day is a colorful festivity; Every moment you amass more and more, There is no end to beauty!

And what were the democracies fighting for? “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” he said. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. He closed on a note of realistic hope. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” Roosevelt said. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

What the Daodejing has to offer, on the other hand, is much simpler. It encourages the cultivation of a disposition that is captured in what we have chosen to call its wu-forms. The wu-forms free up the energy required to sustain the abstract cognitive and moral sensibilities of technical philosophy, allowing this energy, now unmediated by concepts, theories, and contrived moral precepts, to be expressed as those concrete feelings that inspire the ordinary business of the day. It is through these concrete feelings that one is able to know the world and to optimize the human experience.

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

The British Bible translator J. B. Phillips, after completing his work on this section of Scripture, could not help reflecting on what he had observed. In the 1955 preface to his first edition of Acts, he wrote: It is impossible to spend several months in close study of the remarkable short book … without being profoundly stirred and, to be honest, disturbed. The reader is stirred because he is seeing Christianity, the real thing, in action for the first time in human history. The newborn Church, as vulnerable as any human child, having neither money, influence nor power in the ordinary sense, is setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through Christ…. Yet we cannot help feeling disturbed as well as moved, for this surely is the Church as it was meant to be. It is vigorous and flexible, for these are the days before it ever became fat and short of breath through prosperity, or muscle-bound by overorganization. These men did not make ‘acts of faith,’ they believed; they did not ‘say their prayers,’ they really prayed. They did not hold conferences on psychosomatic medicine, they simply healed the sick. But if they were uncomplicated and naive by modern standards, we have ruefully to admit that they were open on the God-ward side in a way that is almost unknown today.1

LOOKING The world goes by, and what have I to do with it? I merely observe how the geese stretch their necks towards the orange rim of sky. I watch how light fades and children make their way home, hungry and tired. The bushes outside become ghosts while baths run and kitchen windows steam up with the cooking. This is the smell of our home, where I have a place in the wrinkled hours making beds and hugging boys awake. This is the sound of the house where I feel out lives into words, translate ragged nights and days into something whole, or try to. You may look if you wish..... The world goes by, and what have you or I to do with it, except perhaps for looking... ?

Ya'aburnee1. As in you bury me. A rough translation for the way I want to leave this world before you because I can’t imagine having to go through a single day without you in it. If this last week was a preview of that kind of life, then I can assure you it isn’t a life worth living. You’re my wife and my best friend. The future mother of my children and the one place that truly feels like home. You’re the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, not because you signed a contract, but because you love me enough to stay without one. “I want to be the kind of man who is worthy of a woman like you—if it’s even possible. I promise to work every damn day to make sure you don’t regret marrying someone as miserable as me. Because when I’m with you, I’m not miserable at all. You make me happy in a way that makes me afraid to blink just in case it all disappears.” The vulnerability of his words tugs at every single one of my heartstrings. “I’ll give you anything you want—anything at all—so long as you give me a chance to make you as happy as you make me. A dog. A family. A home. I want it all. These are my terms and conditions, take it or leave it because I’m not open to negotiations.” “Only you could make a proposal sound like a business acquisition and get away with it.” “Marry me,” he orders with a smile that could make me agree to just about anything.

After the mother tongue follows French, for it is the most widely spoken and indispensable language of Europe; according to our present-day standards it is the most cultivated; fine style and the expressions of taste have been for the most part formed in this language and translated from it into others; it is the simplest and most uniform of languages from which to obtain a foretaste of philosophical grammar; it is the most suitable for the purposes of narrative, logic and reasoning. It must therefore, by the standards of our modern world, follow immediately after the mother tongue and precede every other, even Latin. I would like even the scholar to know French better than Latin!

Dodge looked up and saw me in the window, then lay down in front of the door. Protecting me, I realized. After that, I started watching Dodge all the time. I saw the way he knew by scent alone when Colette's bread was done cooking, or a squirrel was a hundred feet away, or the wind had changed direction. Before he even saw them, he recognized each of the five fishermen who kept their boats in the cove. Most he would go greet, tail wagging, but one he stayed away from. Over the following days, Dodge became my translator of the world outside the house. Through his nose it became safer, and soon I found myself wanting to inhale the air around me as he did, as something pure and alive and full of messages.

Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity. This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience kinship implies. And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology. Sadly, modern science is too often unable or unwilling to visualize or feel what others experience. Certainly science's "objective" gambit can be helpful in understanding parts of nature and in freeing us from some cultural preconceptions. Our modern scientific taste for dispassion when analyzing animal behaviour formed in reaction to the Victorian naturalists and their predecessors who saw all nature as an allegory confirming their cultural values. But a gambit is just an opening move, not a coherent vision of the whole game. Science's objectivity sheds some assumptions but takes on others that, dressed up in academic rigor, can produce hubris and callousness about the world. The danger comes when we confuse the limited scope of our scientific methods with the true scope of the world. It may be useful or expedient to describe nature as a flow diagram or an animal as a machine, but such utility should not be confused with a confirmation that our limited assumptions reflect the shape of the world. Not coincidentally, the hubris of narrowly applied science serves the needs of the industrial economy. Machines are bought, sold, and discarded; joyful cousins are not. Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Forest Service opened to commercial logging three hundred thousand acres of old growth in the Tongass National Forest, more than a billion square-meter mandalas. Arrows moved on a flowchart, graphs of quantified timber shifted. Modern forest science integrated seamlessly with global commodity markets—language and values needed no translation. Scientific models and metaphors of machines are helpful but limited. They cannot tell us all that we need to know. What lies beyond the theories we impose on nature? This year I have tried to put down scientific tools and to listen: to come to nature without a hypothesis, without a scheme for data extraction, without a lesson plan to convey answers to students, without machines or probes. I have glimpsed how rich science is but simultaneously how limited in scope and in spirit. It is unfortunate that the practice of listening generally has no place in the formal training of scientists. In this absence science needlessly fails. We are poorer for this, and possibly more hurtful. What Christmas Eve gifts might a listening culture give its forests? What was the insight that brushed past me as the squirrels basked? It was not to turn away from science. My experience of animals is richer for knowing their stories, and science is a powerful way to deepen this understanding. Rather, I realized that all stories are partly wrapped in fiction—the fiction of simplifying assumptions, of cultural myopia and of storytellers' pride. I learned to revel in the stories but not to mistake them for the bright, ineffable nature of the world.

One day a good fortune befell him, for he hit upon Lane's translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night. He was captured first by the illustrations, and then he began to read, to start with, the stories that dealt with magic, and then the others; and those he liked he read again and again. He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.

But Alfonso was no mere historian. Living long before the modern divide into “two cultures”—the sciences and the humanities—he was a renaissance man avant la lettre, multifaceted and as committed to the sciences as to the arts, and it is here, above all, that the deepest roots of the image of the Wise King are revealed. Muslim models of rulership largely inspired his fascination with the “philosophy of nature,” especially with the related fields of astronomy, astrology, and magic. Some of these models were very old, harkening back to the golden days of the caliphate in Baghdad. There, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty—anxious to soak up the ancient Greek learning of the Hellenistic world that they were conquering—had founded a school of translation that came to be known as the House of Wisdom.

Before my last breath is drawn and the curtain falls and the last flower falls on me I want to live to love to be In this grey world and time of catastrophe this hostile existence with people who need me and whom I nee I would learn to value to discover to be astonished I want to learn who I am who I can be who I would like to be so that the days don’t go unused the hours have goals and the minutes value Whenever I laugh or cry or am silent on my journey to you to myself to God where the ways are uneven and thorny and scarcely known to me I want to set out have already embarked and don’t want to turn back now without having seen the blooming of flowers or heard the rippling of waters having been amazed for life is beautiful Then Friend Death may come and I can say I have lived Translated by Katharine Fournier

What we are faced with in our culture is the post-Christian version of the doctrine of original sin: all human endeavor is radically flawed, and the journalists who take delight in pointing this out are simply telling over and over again the story of Genesis 3 as applied to today’s leaders, politicians, royalty and rock stars. And our task, as image-bearing, God-loving, Christshaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to the world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion. So the key I propose for translating Jesus’ unique message to the Israel of his day into our message to our contemporaries is to grasp the parallel, which is woven deeply into both Testaments, between the human call to bear God’s image and Israel’s call to be the light of the world. Humans were made to reflect God’s creative stewardship into the world. Israel was made to bring God’s rescuing love to bear upon the world. Jesus came as the true Israel, the world’s true light, and as the true image of the invisible God. He was the true Jew, the true human. He has laid the foundation, and we must build upon it. We are to be the bearers both of his redeeming love and of his creative stewardship: to celebrate it, to model it, to proclaim it, to dance to it. “As the Father sent me, so I send you; receive the Holy Spirit; forgive sins and they are forgiven, retain them and they are retained.” That last double command belongs exactly at this point. We are to go out into the world with the divine authority to forgive and retain sins. When Jesus forgave sins, they said he was blaspheming; how then can we imagine such a thing for ourselves? Answer: because of the gift of the Holy Spirit. God intends to do through us for the wider world that for which the foundation was laid in Jesus. We are to live and tell the story of the prodigal and the older brother; to announce God’s glad, exuberant, richly healing welcome for sinners, and at the same time God’s sorrowful but implacable opposition to those who persist in arrogance, oppression and greed. Following Christ in the power of the Spirit means bringing to our world the shape of the gospel: forgiveness, the best news that anyone can ever hear, for all who yearn for it, and judgment for all who insist on dehumanizing themselves and others by their continuing pride, injustice and greed.

Lieberman began calculating temperatures, speed, and body weight. Soon, there it was before him: the solution to the Running Man mystery. To run an antelope to death, Lieberman determined, all you have to do is scare it into a gallop on a hot day. “If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers’ worth of running, it will go into hyperthermia and collapse.” Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they gallop. “We can run in conditions that no other animal can run in,” Lieberman realized. “And it’s not even hard. If a middle-aged professor can outrun a dog on a hot day, imagine what a pack of motivated hunter-gatherers could do to an overheated antelope.” It

In conjunction with his colleagues, Frantisek Baluska from the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany at the University of Bonn is of the opinion that brain-like structures can be found at root tips. In addition to signaling pathways, there are also numerous systems and molecules similar to those found in animals. When a root feels its way forward in the ground, it is aware of stimuli. The researchers measured electrical signals that led to changes in behavior after they were processed in a "transition zone." If the root encounters toxic substances, impenetrable stones, or saturated soil, it analyzes the situation and transmits the necessary adjustments to the growing tip. The root tip changes direction as a result of this communication and steers the growing root around the critical areas. Right now, the majority of plant researchers are skeptical about whether such behavior points to a repository for intelligence, the faculty of memory, and emotions. Among other things, they get worked up about carrying over findings in similar situations with animals and, at the end of the day, about how this threatens to blur the boundary between plants and animals. And so what? What would be so awful about that? The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself: the former photosynthesizes and the latter eats other living beings. Finally, the only other big difference is in the amount of time it takes to process information and translate it into action. Does that mean that beings that live life in the slow lane are automatically worth less than ones on the fast track? Sometimes I suspect we would pay more attention to trees and other vegetation if we could establish beyond a doubt just how similar they are in many ways to animals.

The Meaning of Birds Of the genesis of birds we know nothing, save the legend they are descended from reptiles: flying, snap-jawed lizards that have somehow taken to air. Better the story that they were crab-apple blossoms or such, blown along by the wind; time after time finding themselves tossed from perhaps a seaside tree, floated or lifted over the thin blue lazarine waves until something in the snatch of color began to flutter and rise. But what does it matter anyway how they got up high in the trees or over the rusty shoulders of some mountain? There they are, little figments, animated---soaring. And if occasionally a tern washes up greased and stiff, and sometimes a cardinal or a mockingbird slams against the windshield and your soul goes oh God and shivers at the quick and unexpected end to beauty, it is not news that we live in a world where beauty is unexplainable and suddenly ruined and has its own routines. We are often far from home in a dark town, and our griefs are difficult to translate into a language understood by others. We sense the downswing of time and learn, having come of age, that the reluctant concessions made in youth are not sufficient to heat the cold drawn breath of age. Perhaps temperance was not enough, foresight or even wisdom fallacious, not only in conception but in the thin acts themselves. So our lives are difficult, and perhaps unpardonable, and the fey gauds of youth have, as the old men told us they would, faded. But still, it is morning again, this day. In the flowering trees the birds take up their indifferent, elegant cries. Look around. Perhaps it isn't too late to make a fool of yourself again. Perhaps it isn't too late to flap your arms and cry out, to give one more cracked rendition of your singular, aspirant song.

It is now late August 2005. He has interrupted work on his ninth book to go to Sweden with his beautiful fiancee, Kimberly, and right now he is standing with his Swedish translator, getting ready to deliver a rousing bilingual speech to a crowd of hundreds at a grandstand next to the Baltic Sea. How far will this ride take him? If he had just checked off his bird list and gone home, the ride would have ended long ago. That’s the main thing I’ve learned from the young man I once was and from his still-continuing adventures. Yes, it’s good to go on a quest, but it’s better to go with an open mind. The most significant we find may not be the thing we were seeking. That is what redeems the crazy ambivalence of birding, As trivial as our listing pursuit may be, it gets us out there in the real world, paying attention, hopeful and awake. Any day could be a special day, and probably will be, if we just go out to look.

What I wish I could have told him then is that at that moment I believed no one in the entire world knew me better than he did. That with him I did not have to pretend. I did not have to shield myself from his concern or bewilderment. I did not have to translate. And violence demands translation. I will never have the words to explain what it is like to be shot, to lose the ability to return home or to give up on everything I expected my life to be, or why it felt as though I had died that day in St. James's Square, and through some grotesque accident, been reborn into the hapless shoes of an eighteen-year-old castaway, stranded in a foreign city where he knew no one and could be little use to himself, that all he could just about manage was to march through each day, from beginning to end, and then do it again. I did not know how to say such things then, I still do not, and the inarticulacy filled my mouth. This, I now know, is what is meant by grief...

From *the form of time and of the single dimension* of the series of representations, on account of which the intellect, in order to take up one thing, must drop everything else, there follows not only the intellect’s distraction, but also its *forgetfulness*. Most of what it has dropped it never takes up again, especially as the taking up again is bound to the principle of sufficient reason, and thus requires an occasion which the association of ideas and motivation have first to provide. Yet this occasion may be the remoter and the smaller, the more our susceptibility to it is enhanced by interest in the subject. But, as I have already shown in the essay *On the Principle of Sufficient Reason*, memory is not a receptacle, but a mere faculty, acquired by practice, of bringing forth any representations at random, so that these have always to be kept in practice by repetition, otherwise they are gradually lost. Accordingly, the knowledge even of the scholarly head exists only *virtualiter* as an acquired practice in producing certain representations. *Actualiter*, on the other hand, it is restricted to one particular representation, and for the moment is conscious of this one alone. Hence there results a strange contrast between what a man knows *potentia* and what he knows *actu*, in other words, between his knowledge and his thinking at any moment. The former is an immense and always somewhat chaotic mass, the latter a single, distinct thought. The relation is like that between the innumerable stars of the heavens and the telescope’s narrow field of vision; it stands out remarkably when, on some occasion, a man wishes to bring to distinct recollection some isolated fact from his knowledge, and time and trouble are required to look for it and pick it out of that chaos. Rapidity in doing this is a special gift, but depends very much on the day and the hour; therefore sometimes memory refuses its service, even in things which, at another time, it has ready at hand. This consideration requires us in our studies to strive after the attainment of correct insight rather than an increase of learning, and to take to heart the fact that the *quality* of knowledge is more important than its quantity. Quantity gives books only thickness; quality imparts thoroughness as well as style; for it is an *intensive* dimension, whereas the other is merely extensive. It consists in the distinctness and completeness of the concepts, together with the purity and accuracy of the knowledge of perception that forms their foundation. Therefore the whole of knowledge in all its parts is permeated by it, and is valuable or troubling accordingly. With a small quantity but good quality of knowledge we achieve more than with a very great quantity but bad quality." —from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne in two volumes: volume II, pp. 139-141

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb..

You will tell me that there always exists a chasm between the world depicted in novels and films and the world that people actually live in. It is the chasm between the world mediated by art and the world unmediated by art, formless and drab. You are absolutely right. The gap that my mother felt was not necessarily any deeper than the gap felt by a European girl who loved books and films. Yet there is one critical difference. For in my mother's case, the chasm between the world of art and real life also symbolized something more: the asymmetrical relationship I mentioned earlier—the asymmetrical relationship between those who live only in a universal temporality and those who live in both a universal and a particular one. To make this discussion a little more concrete, let me introduce a character named Francoise. Francoise is a young Parisienne living before World War II. Like my mother, she loves reading books and watching films. Also like my mother, she lives in a small apartment with her mother, who is old, shabby looking, and illiterate. One day Francoise, full of artistic aspirations, writes an autobiographical novel. It is the tale of her life torn between the world of art and the world of reality. (Not an original tale, I must say.) The novel is well received in France. Several hundred Japanese living in Japan read this novel in French, and one of them decides to translate it into Japanese. My mother reads the novel. She identifies with the heroine and says to herself, "This girl is just like me!" Moved, my mother, also full of artistic aspirations, writes her own autobiography. That novel is well received in Japan but is not translated into French—or any other European language, for that matter. The number of Europeans who read Japanese is just too small. Therefore, only Japanese readers can share the plight of my mother's life. For other readers in the world, it's as if her novel never existed. It's as if she herself never existed. Even if my mother had written her novel first, Francoise would never have read it and been moved by it.

Well, this is a rare context where boringness is something special: it implies that the individual men who did the scoring are likewise predictable, centered, and, above all, unbiased. And when you consider the supermodels, the porn, the cover girls, the Lara Croft– style fembots, the Bud Light ads, and, most devious of all, the Photoshop jobs that surely these men see every day, the fact that male opinion of female attractiveness is still where it’s supposed to be is, by my lights, a small miracle. It’s practically common sense that men should have unrealistic expectations of women’s looks, and yet here we see it’s just not true. In any event, they’re far more generous than the women, whose votes go like this: The red chart is centered barely a quarter of the way up the scale; only one guy in six is “above average” in an absolute sense. Sex appeal isn’t something commonly quantified like this, so let me put it in a more familiar context: translate this plot to IQ, and you have a world where the women think 58 percent of men are brain damaged.

Για την Παγκόσμια Ημέρα της Γυναίκας Οφείλουμε να δείχνουμε σεβασμό σε όλες τις γυναίκες - μανάδες - συζύγους - κόρες - εργαζόμενες ... Σε αυτές που αγωνίζονται με σθένος και καρτερία σε έναν κόσμο γεμάτο αντιξοότητες και αδικίες. Σε ένα κόσμο όπου ακόμα και σήμερα θεωρούνται πολίτες β΄ κατηγορίας. Σε αυτές που σε αυτόν τον τραχιά γι αυτές πλασμένο κόσμο πασχίζουν να προσδώσουν λίγη γλυκύτητα - σαν το πρωινό φιλί της μάνας που το θυμόμαστε ακόμα κι όταν σβήσει για πάντα από τα χείλη της. Ας τις σεβόμαστε κάθε μέρα και ας είμαστε αρωγοί τους. Διότι εκ γυναικός ερρυη τα κρειττω!! On the International Women's Day We must show respect to all women - mothers - wives - daughters - workiers ... To those who fight with vigor and courage in a world full of adversity and injustice. In a world where even today they are considered second-class citizens. To those who, in this rough world, strive to give a little sweetness - like the morning kiss of the mother that we remember even after it disappears forever from her lips. Let us respect all women every day and let us be their supoprt. Because from a woman comes all the best! Quote and translation by Irene Doura-Kavadia

His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it." There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer's little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what's up, he says triumphantly 'The bull's busted out and he's eating the strawberry bed'. Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you'd got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, "the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn't foresee it a long time ago." Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: "Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?

…illuminates the flow of my writing, perhaps too nervous for a future reader to decipher. Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death, when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations, and some words and expressions I use normally will seem outdated and of ambiguous meaning. In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and grammar, isolate sentences and transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world’s intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurk in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as accidental obstacles to understanding what I write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seem elusive to him, who setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that I convey to him the effort I am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.

He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one - especially after so many years - without losing a good deal in the translation. The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato's four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place. 'Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking around the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls - which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel “T hey shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23 ESV). This is perhaps our oldest Christmas carol. Historians say its roots go back to the 8th century. In its earliest form, it was a “plain song” or a chant and the monks sang it a cappella. It was sung or chanted in Latin during the seven days leading up to Christmas. Translated into English by John Mason Neale in 1851, we sing it to the tune “Veni, Emmanuel,” a 15th-century melody. Many churches sing it early in the Advent season because of its plaintive tone of expectant waiting. Traditionally Advent centers on the Old Testament preparation for the coming of the Messiah who will establish his kingdom on the earth. When the words form a prayer that Christ will come and “ransom captive Israel,” we ought to remember the long years of Babylonian captivity. Each verse of this carol features a different Old Testament name or title of the coming Messiah: “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” “O come, Thou Wisdom from on high.” “O come, Thou Rod of Jesse.” “O come, Thou Day-spring.” “O come, Thou Key of David.” “O come, Thou Lord of Might.” “O come, Desire of Nations.” This carol assumes a high level of biblical literacy. That fact might argue against singing it today because so many churchgoers don’t have any idea what “Day-spring” means or they think Jesse refers to a wrestler or maybe to a reality TV star. But that argument works both ways. We ought to sing this carol and we ought to use it as a teaching tool. Sing it—and explain it! We can see the Jewish roots of this carol in the refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. But Israel’s Messiah is also our Savior and Lord. What Israel was waiting for turns out to be the long-expected Jesus. So this carol rightly belongs to us as well. The first verse suggests the longing of the Jewish people waiting for Messiah to come: O come, O come, Emmanuel And ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of God appears The second verse pictures Christ redeeming us from hell and death: O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free Thine own from Satan’s tyranny From depths of Hell Thy people save And give them victory o’er the grave This verse reminds us only Christ can take us home to heaven: O come, Thou Key of David, come, And open wide our heavenly home; Make safe the way that leads on high, And close the path to misery. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. Let’s listen as Selah captures the Jewish flavor of this carol. Lord, we pray today for all those lost in the darkness of sin. We pray for those who feel there is no hope. May the light of Jesus shine in their hearts today. Amen.

To our amazement Jimmy received a letter, dated August 20, 1963, from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher and peace activist, saying “I have recently finished your remarkable book The American Resolution” and “have been greatly impressed with its power and insight.” The letter goes on to ask for Jimmy’s views on whether American whites “will understand the negro [sic] revolt because “the survival of mankind may well follow or fail to follow from political and social behavior of Americans in the next decades.” On September 5 Jimmy wrote back a lengthy reply saying among other things that “so far, with the exception of the students, there has been no social force in the white population which the Negroes can respect and a handful of liberals joining in a demonstration doesn’t change this one bit.” Russell replied on September 18 with more questions that Jimmy answered in an even longer letter dated December 22. Meanwhile, Russell had sent a telegram to the November 21 Town Hall meeting in New York City at which Jimmy was scheduled to speak, warning Negroes not to resort to violence. In response Jimmy said at the meeting that “I too would like to hope that the issues of our revolt might be resolved by peaceful means,” but “the issues and grievances were too deeply imbedded in the American system and the American peoples so that the very things Russell warned against might just have to take place if the Negroes in the U.S.A. are ever to walk the streets as free men.” In his December 22 letter Jimmy repeats what he said at the meeting and then patiently explains to Russell that what has historically been considered democracy in the United States has actually been fascism for millions of Negroes. The letter concludes: I believe that it is your responsibility as I believe that it is my responsibility to recognize and record this, so that in the future words do not confuse the struggle but help to clarify it. This is what I think philosophers should make clear. Because even though Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, in fact democracy is what they are struggling against. This exchange between Jimmy and Russell has to be seen to be believed. In a way it epitomizes the 1960s—Jimmy Boggs, the Alabama-born autoworker, explaining the responsibility of philosophers to The Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., in his time probably the West’s best-known philosopher. Within the next few years The American Revolution was translated and published in French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. To this day it remains a page-turner for grassroots activists because it is so personal and yet political, so down to earth and yet visionary.

Immediate experience requires that the concrete particulars themselves are the objects of knowledge. Such particulars are not mediated but are grasped immediately in the sense that the experience of them is simply had. The structures that permit the having of experience and that determine its significance are the cultivated habits that dispose one toward that experience. The language of taste and of appreciation is relevant. The notion of Being that implies a contrast between essence and existence privileges mediation and, therefore, conceptual, generic, and essential knowledge. An aesthetic perspective, as opposed to a rational or logical one, involves experiencing the world in a relatively unmediated fashion. Mediated experience requires one to grasp or comprehend the essence of a thing, while the unmediated aesthetic experience is simply had as lived experience. A comparison with the analytical epistemic language of “getting,” “grasping,” “comprehending” is important here. Rather than a language of mediation in which the essences of things are abstracted through concepts, the Chinese language tends to be dispositional in that it promotes the “having” of the unmediated experience through a correlating and focusing of the affairs of the day. The important contrast here is between a cognitive and discursive knowing that abstracts from experience and felt experience as the concrete content of knowledge.

The greatest difference between present-day Christianity and that of which we read in these letters, is that to us it is primarily a performance; to them it was real experience. We are apt to reduce the Christian religion to a code or, at best, a rule of heart and life. To these men it is quite plainly the invasion of their lives by a new quality of life altogether. They do not hesitate to describe this as Christ "living in" them. Mere moral reformation will hardly explain the transformation and the exuberant vitality of these men's lives -- even if we could prove a motive for such reformation, and certainly the world around offered little encouragement to the early Christians! We are practically driven to accept their own explanation, which is that their little human lives had, through Christ, been linked up with the very life of God. Many Christians today talk about the "difficulties of our times" as though we should have to wait for better ones before the Christian religion can take root. It is heartening to remember that this faith took root and flourished amazingly in conditions that would have killed anything less vital in a matter of weeks. These early Christians were on fire with the conviction that they had become, through Christ, literal sons of God; they were pioneers of a new humanity, founders of a new kingdom. They still speak to us across the centuries. Perhaps if we believed what they believed, we might achieve what they achieved.

Be Still and Know Let be and be still, and know (recognize and understand) that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations! I will be exalted in the earth! PSALM 46:10 AMP September 11, 2001. A day Americans will remember forever. Terrorists took over passenger planes and ran two of them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Another crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Yet another plane headed to the nation’s capitol crashed into a Pennsylvania field when the passengers took out the hijackers, refusing to let them fulfill their purpose. While the whole world watched the horrible events unfold, many turned to the Word of God to find comfort in this unprecedented carnage. Psalm 46 is one of the passages promising peace in the midst of cataclysmic events. The psalmist starts the song with “God is our refuge and strength, always ready to help in times of trouble. So we will not fear when earthquakes come and the mountains crumble into the sea” (vv. 1–2 NLT). No matter what happens, God is standing ready to help. Later in the psalm, the reader is invited to “see the glorious works of the LORD” (v. 8), to watch as the Lord destroys all those who stand in opposition to Him. Then the reader sees the command: “Be still, and know that I am God.” In another version the phrase is translated, “Cease striving” (NASB). No matter what happens, God has it all under His control. There is no need for fear. Father, quiet my spirit before You today so I may know who You are.

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.

The neighborhood of Indian Village lay just twelve blocks west of Hurlbut, but it was a different world altogether. The four grand streets of Burns, Iroquois, Seminole, and Adams (even in Indian Village the White Man had taken half the names) were lined with stately houses built in eclectic styles. Red-brick Georgian rose next to English Tudor, which gave onto French Provincial. The houses in Indian Village had big yards, important walkways, picturesquely oxidizing cupolas, lawn jockeys (whose days were numbered), and burglar alarms (whose popularity was only just beginning). My grandfather remained silent, however, as he toured his son’s impressive new home. “How do you like the size of this living room?” Milton was asking him. “Here, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Tessie and I want you and Ma to feel like this is your house, too. Now that you’re retired—” “What do you mean retired?” “Okay, semiretired. Now that you can take it a little bit easy, you’ll be able to do all the things you always wanted to do. Look, in here’s the library. You want to come over and work on your translations, you can do it right here. How about that table? Big enough for you? And the shelves are built right into the wall.” Pushed out of the daily operations at the Zebra Room, my grandfather began to spend his days driving around the city. He drove downtown to the Public Library to read the foreign newspapers. Afterward, he stopped to play backgammon at a coffee house in Greektown. At fifty-four, Lefty Stephanides was still in good shape. He walked three miles a day for exercise. He ate sensibly and had less of a belly than his son. Nevertheless

That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.

Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.

I’ve worn Niki’s pants for two days now. I thought a third day in the same clothes might be pushing it.” Ian shrugged with indifference. “It might send Derian through the roof, but it doesn’t bother me. Wear what you want to wear.” Eena wrinkled her nose at him. “Do you really feel that way or are you trying to appear more laissez-faire than Derian?” “More laissez-faire?” “Yes. That’s a real word.” “Two words actually,” he grinned. “Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!" He coated the words with a heavy French accent. Eena gawked at him. “Since when do you speak French?” “I don’t.” Ian chuckled. “But I did do some research in world history the year I followed you around on Earth. Physics was a joke, but history—that I found fascinating.” Slapping a hand against her chest, Eena exclaimed, “I can’t believe it! Unbeknownst to me, Ian actually studied something in high school other than the library’s collection of sci-fi paperbacks!” He grimaced at her exaggerated performance before defending his preferred choice of reading material. “Hey, popular literature is a valuable and enlightening form of world history. You would know that if you read a book or two.” She ignored his reproach and asked with curiosity, “What exactly did you say?” “In French?” “Duh, yes.” “Don’t ‘duh’ me, you could easily have been referring to my remark about enlightening literature. I know the value of a good book is hard for you to comprehend.” He grinned crookedly at her look of offense and then moved into an English translation of his French quote. “Let it do and let it pass, the world goes on by itself.” “Hmm. And where did that saying come from?” Ian delivered his answer with a surprisingly straight face. “That is what the French Monarch said when his queen began dressing casually. The French revolution started one week following that famous declaration, right after the queen was beheaded by the rest of the aristocracy in her favorite pair of scroungy jeans.” “You are such a brazen-tongued liar!

If man were forced to prove to himself all the truths he makes use of every day, he would never finish; he would exhaust himself in preliminary demonstrations without advancing; as he does not have the time because of the short span of life, nor the ability because of the limits of his mind, to act that way, he is reduced to accepting as given a host of facts and opinions that he has neither the leisure nor the power to examine and verify by himself, but that the more able have found or the crowd adopts. It is on this first foundation that he himself builds the edifice of his own thoughts. It is not his will that brings him to proceed in this manner; the inflexible law of his condition constrains him to do it. There is no philosopher in the world so great that he does not believe a million things on faith in others or does not suppose many more truths than he establishes. This is not only necessary, but desirable. A man who would undertake to examine everything by himself could accord but little time and attention to each thing; this work would keep his mind in a perpetual agitation that would prevent him from penetrating any truth deeply and from settling solidly on any certitude. His intellect would be at the same time independent and feeble. It is therefore necessary that he make a choice among the various objects of human opinions and that he adopt many beliefs without discussing them in order better to fathom a few he has reserved for examination. It is true that every man who receives an opinion on the word of another puts his mind in slavery; but it is a salutary servitude that permits him to make good use of his freedom. It is therefore always necessary, however it happens, that we encounter authority somewhere in the intellectual and moral world. Its place is variable, but it necessarily has a place. Individual independence can be more or less great; it cannot be boundless. Thus, the question is not that of knowing whether an intellectual authority exists in democratic centuries, but only where it is deposited and what its extent will be.

That's a fine line," he said at last, indicating with his thumb what pleased him. "You're beginning to learn to draw." Clutton did not answer, but looked at the master with his usual air of sardonic indifference to the world's opinion. "I'm beginning to think you have at least a trace of talent." Mrs. Otter, who did not like Clutton, pursed her lips. She did not see anything out of the way in his work. Foinet sat down and went into technical details. Mrs. Otter grew rather tired of standing. Clutton did not say anything, but nodded now and then, and Foinet felt with satisfaction that he grasped what he said and the reasons of it; most of them listened to him, but it was clear they never understood. Then Foinet got up and came to Philip. "He only arrived two days ago," Mrs. Otter hurried to explain. "He's a beginner. He's never studied before." "Ca se voit," the master said. "One sees that." He passed on, and Mrs. Otter murmured to him: "This is the young lady I told you about." He looked at her as though she were some repulsive animal, and his voice grew more rasping. "It appears that you do not think I pay enough attention to you. You have been complaining to the massiere. Well, show me this work to which you wish me to give attention." Fanny Price coloured. The blood under her unhealthy skin seemed to be of a strange purple. Without answering she pointed to the drawing on which she had been at work since the beginning of the week. Foinet sat down. "Well, what do you wish me to say to you? Do you wish me to tell you it is good? It isn't. Do you wish me to tell you it is well drawn? It isn't. Do you wish me to say it has merit? It hasn't. Do you wish me to show you what is wrong with it? It is all wrong. Do you wish me to tell you what to do with it? Tear it up. Are you satisfied now?" Miss Price became very white. She was furious because he had said all this before Mrs. Otter. Though she had been in France so long and could understand French well enough, she could hardly speak two words. "He's got no right to treat me like that. My money's as good as anyone else's. I pay him to teach me. That's not teaching me." "What does she say? What does she say?" asked Foinet. Mrs. Otter hesitated to translate, and Miss Price repeated in execrable French. "Je vous paye pour m'apprendre." His eyes flashed with rage, he raised his voice and shook his fist. "Mais, nom de Dieu, I can't teach you. I could more easily teach a camel." He turned to Mrs. Otter. "Ask her, does she do this for amusement, or does she expect to earn money by it?" 304

After your email about the Late Bronze Age collapse, I became very intrigued by the idea that writing systems could be ‘lost’. In fact I wasn’t really sure what that even meant, so I had to look it up, and I ended up reading a lot about something called Linear B. Do you know all about this already? Basically, around the year 1900, a team of British excavators in Crete found a cache of ancient clay tablets in a terracotta bathtub. The tablets were inscribed with a syllabic script of unknown language and appeared to date from around 1400 BCE. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, classical scholars and linguists tried to decipher the markings, known as Linear B, with no success. Although the script was organised like writing, no one could work out what language it transcribed. Most academics hypothesised it was a lost language of the Minoan culture on Crete, with no remaining descendants in the modern world. In 1936, at the age of eighty-five, the archaeologist Arthur Evans gave a lecture in London about the tablets, and in attendance at the lecture was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy named Michael Ventris. Before the Second World War broke out, a new cache of tablets was found and photographed – this time on the Greek mainland. Still, no attempts to translate the script or identify its language were successful. Michael Ventris had grown up in the meantime and trained as an architect, and during the war he was conscripted to serve in the RAF. He hadn’t received any formal qualifications in linguistics or classical languages, but he’d never forgotten Arthur Evans’s lecture that day about Linear B. After the war, Ventris returned to England and started to compare the photographs of the newly discovered tablets from the Greek mainland with the inscriptions on the old Cretan tablets. He noticed that certain symbols on the tablets from Crete were not replicated on any of the samples from Pylos. He guessed that those particular symbols might represent place names on the island. Working from there, he figured out how to decipher the script – revealing that Linear B was in fact an early written form of ancient Greek. Ventris’s work not only demonstrated that Greek was the language of the Mycenaean culture, but also provided evidence of written Greek which predated the earliest-known examples by hundreds of years. After the discovery, Ventris and the classical scholar and linguist John Chadwick wrote a book together on the translation of the script, entitled ‘Documents in Mycenaean Greek’. Weeks before the publication of the book in 1956, Ventris crashed his car into a parked truck and died. He was thirty-four

In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually believed in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a dignified library of sacred books that they studied reverently as part of this weekly reflection and which, if more than a little odd in their Greek translation, seemed to point toward a consistent worldview. Besides their religious seriousness, Jews were unusual in a number of ways that caught the attention of gentiles. They were faithful spouses—no, really—who maintained strong families in which even grown children remained affectively attached and respectful to their parents. Despite Caesar Nero’s shining example, matricide was virtually unknown among them. Despite their growing economic success, they tended to be more scrupulous in business than non-Jews. And they were downright finicky when it came to taking human life, seeming to value even a slave’s or a plebeian’s life as much as anyone else’s. Perhaps in nothing did the gentiles find the Jews so admirable as in their acts of charity. Communities of urban Jews, in addition to opening synagogues, built welfare centers for aiding the poor, the miserable, the sick, the homebound, the imprisoned, and those, such as widows and orphans, who had no family to care for them. For all these reasons, the diaspora cities of the first century saw a marked increase in gentile initiates to Judaism. Many of these were wellborn women who presided over substantial households and who had likely tried out some of the Eastern mystery cults before settling on Judaism. (Nero’s wife Poppea was almost certainly one of these, and probably the person responsible for instructing Nero in the subtle difference between Christians and more traditional Jews, which he would otherwise scarcely have been aware of.) These gentiles did not, generally speaking, go all the way. Because they tended to draw the line at circumcision, they were not considered complete Jews. They were, rather, noachides, or God-fearers, gentiles who remained gentiles while keeping the Sabbath and many of the Jewish dietary restrictions and coming to put their trust in the one God of the Jews. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, however, could turn out to be a difficult test of the commitment of the noachides. For here in the heart of the Jewish world, they encountered Judaism enragé, a provincial religion concerned only with itself, and ages apart from the rational, tolerant Judaism of the diaspora. In the words of Paul Johnson:

Two men were advancing towards the car along the cross track. One man carried a short wooden bench on his back, the other a big wooden object about the size of an upright piano. Richard hailed them, they greeted him with every sign of pleasure. Richard produced cigarettes and a cheerful party spirit seemed to be developing. Then Richard turned to her. “Fond of the cinema? Then you shall see a performance.” He spoke to the two men and they smiled with pleasure. They set up the bench and motioned to Victoria and Richard to sit on it. Then they set up the round contrivance on a stand of some kind. It had two eye-holes in it and as she looked at it, Victoria cried: “It’s like things on piers. What the butler saw.” “That’s it,” said Richard. “It’s a primitive form of same.” Victoria applied her eyes to the glass-fronted peephole, one man began slowly to turn a crank or handle, and the other began a monotonous kind of chant. “What is he saying?” Victoria asked. Richard translated as the singsong chant continued: “Draw near and prepare yourself for much wonder and delight. Prepare to behold the wonders of antiquity.” A crudely coloured picture of Negroes reaping wheat swam into Victoria’s gaze. “Fellahin in America,” announced Richard, translating. Then came: “The wife of the great Shah of the Western world,” and the Empress Eugénie simpered and fingered a long ringlet. A picture of the King’s Palace in Montenegro, another of the Great Exhibition. An odd and varied collection of pictures followed each other, all completely unrelated and sometimes announced in the strangest terms. The Prince Consort, Disraeli, Norwegian Fjords and Skaters in Switzerland completed this strange glimpse of olden far-off days. The showman ended his exposition with the following words: “And so we bring to you the wonders and marvels of antiquity in other lands and far-off places. Let your donation be generous to match the marvels you have seen, for all these things are true.” It was over. Victoria beamed with delight. “That really was marvellous!” she said. “I wouldn’t have believed it.” The proprietors of the travelling cinema were smiling proudly. Victoria got up from the bench and Richard who was sitting on the other end of it was thrown to the ground in a somewhat undignified posture. Victoria apologized but was not ill pleased. Richard rewarded the cinema men and with courteous farewells and expressions of concern for each other’s welfare, and invoking the blessing of God on each other, they parted company. Richard and Victoria got into the car again and the men trudged away into the desert. “Where are they going?” asked Victoria. “They travel all over the country. I met them first in Transjordan coming up the road from the Dead Sea to Amman. Actually they’re bound now for Kerbela, going of course by unfrequented routes so as to give shows in remote villages.” “Perhaps someone will give them a lift?

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. 2 Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. 3 They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard.[*] 4 Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world.

In the late summer of 410, the Western Goths (or Visigoths) arrived at the gates of a defenseless Rome. Their king Alaric wanted to cooperate with Rome in finding a permanent home for his people within the empire. He knew what Romans did not, that a far more dangerous and menacing foe was on the move in the hinterlands behind him: the Huns. Alaric and other barbarian chieftains would gladly have joined forces with the Romans against these Asian marauders. However, the king of the Visigoths decided that Rome’s officials were playing tricks on him. On August 24, he ordered his troops to take the city and pillage it, which they did for three days. The physical damage the Visigoths did was minor. However, the psychological damage was felt from one end of the empire to the other. Rome, mistress of the world, had fallen to the blast of trumpets and the howling of the Goths, as one eyewitness described it. Constantinople held three days of mourning at the news. “If Rome can perish,” Saint Jerome wrote from distant Palestine, where he was struggling to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into usable Latin, “what can be safe?

Although the vast country just described was inhabited by numerous tribes of native peoples, one can justly say that at the time of its discovery it was still no more than a wilderness. The Indians occupied it but did not possess it. It is through agriculture that man takes possession of the soil, and the first inhabitants of North America lived by hunting. Their implacable prejudices, their unbridled passions, their vices, and, perhaps most of all, their savage virtues marked them out for inevitable destruction. The ruin of these tribes began the day that Europeans landed on their shores. It has continued ever since and is even now being carried through to completion. Providence placed these people among the riches of the New World but made their enjoyment brief. They were there, in a sense, only in anticipation. These coasts, so well suited to trade and industry, these rivers so deep, this inexhaustible Mississippi valley, this whole continent, in fact, seemed but an empty cradle awaiting the birth of a great nation. Here civilized men would attempt to build society on new foundations. Applying for the first time theories either previously unknown or deemed inapplicable, they would stage for the world a spectacle for which nothing in the history of the past had prepared it.

Months beforehand I started focusing my Manhattanite efficiency on getting registered in Italy, Andrea leading me by the hand through the wilderness of Old World red tape. The first step was “getting my documents together,” an Italian ritual repeated before every encounter with officialdom. Sticking to a list kindly provided by the Italian Consulate, I collected my birth certificate, passport, high school diploma, college diploma, college transcript, medical school diploma, medical school transcript, certificates of internship and residency, National Board Examination certificates, American Board of Internal Medicine test results, and specialization diploma. Then I got them transfigured into Italian by the one person in New York authorized by the Italian Consulate to crown his translation with an imprimatur. We judiciously gave him a set of our own translations as crib notes, tailored by my husband to match the Rome medical school curriculum. I wrote a cover letter from Andrea’s dictation. It had to be in my own hand, on a folded sheet of double-sized pale yellow ruled Italian paper embossed with a State seal, and had to be addressed “To the Magnificent Rector of the University of Rome.” You have to live in Italy a while to appreciate the theatrical elegance of making every fiddler a Maestro and every teacher a Professoressa; even the most corrupt member of the Italian parliament is by definition Honorable, and every client of a parking lot is by default, for lack of any higher title, a Doctor (“Back up, Dotto’, turn the wheel hard to the left, Dotto’”). There came the proud day in June when I got to deposit the stack of documents in front of a smiling consular official in red nail polish and Armani. After expressing puzzlement that an American doctor would want to move to her country (“You medical people have it so good here”), she Xeroxed my certificates, transcripts, and diplomas, made squiggles on the back to certify the Xeroxes were “authentic copies,” gave me back the originals, and assured me that she’d get things processed zip zip in Italy so that by the time I left for Rome three months later I’d have my Italian license and be ready to get a job. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. When we were about to fly in September and I still hadn’t heard from her, I went to check. Found the Xeroxes piled up on Signora X’s desk right where I’d left them, and the Signora gone for a month’s vacation. Slightly put out, I snatched up the stack to hand-carry over (re-inventing a common expatriate method for avoiding challenges to the efficiency of the Italian mails), prepared to do battle with the system on its own territory.

A Wife of Noble Character 10[*]Who can find a virtuous and capable wife?        She is more precious than rubies. 11 Her husband can trust her,        and she will greatly enrich his life. 12 She brings him good, not harm,        all the days of her life. 13 She finds wool and flax        and busily spins it. 14 She is like a merchant’s ship,        bringing her food from afar. 15 She gets up before dawn to prepare breakfast for her household        and plan the day’s work for her servant girls. 16 She goes to inspect a field and buys it;        with her earnings she plants a vineyard. 17 She is energetic and strong,        a hard worker. 18 She makes sure her dealings are profitable;        her lamp burns late into the night. 19 Her hands are busy spinning thread,        her fingers twisting fiber. 20 She extends a helping hand to the poor        and opens her arms to the needy. 21 She has no fear of winter for her household,        for everyone has warm[*] clothes. 22 She makes her own bedspreads.        She dresses in fine linen and purple gowns. 23 Her husband is well known at the city gates,        where he sits with the other civic leaders. 24 She makes belted linen garments        and sashes to sell to the merchants. 25 She is clothed with strength and dignity,        and she laughs without fear of the future. 26 When she speaks, her words are wise,        and she gives instructions with kindness. 27 She carefully watches everything in her household        and suffers nothing from laziness. 28 Her children stand and bless her.        Her husband praises her: 29 “There are many virtuous and capable women in the world,        but you surpass them all!” 30 Charm is deceptive, and beauty does not last;        but a woman who fears the LORD will be greatly praised. 31 Reward her for all she has done.        Let her deeds publicly declare her praise. Ecclesiastes 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12

Your voice is who you are. Maybe not the “you” you carry around every day, but the one yelling from inside, demanding to be heard. Your voice is the way you see the world and how you translate it back. When you train your voice and allow it to grow and be heard, that beautiful sound will carve a path for you to follow for life. Conversely, if you fail to use your voice, others will be in charge of it. And you. Never give in, never surrender. Your voice is your most powerful tool.

Ya'aburnee1. As in you bury me. A rough translation for the way I want to leave this world before you because I can’t imagine having to go through a single day without you in it. If this last week was a preview of that kind of life, then I can assure you it isn’t a life worth living. You’re my wife and my best friend. The future mother of my children and the one place that truly feels like home. You’re the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, not because you signed a contract, but because you love me enough to stay without one. “I want to be the kind of man who is worthy of a woman like you—if it’s even possible. I promise to work every damn day to make sure you don’t regret marrying someone as miserable as me. Because when I’m with you, I’m not miserable at all. You make me happy in a way that makes me afraid to blink just in case it all disappears.” The vulnerability of his words tugs at every single one of my heartstrings. “I’ll give you anything you want—anything at all—so long as you give me a chance to make you as happy as you make me. A dog. A family. A home. I want it all. These are my terms and conditions, take it or leave it because I’m not open to negotiations.

As the Chinese translation of the name Sukhāvatī suggests, it is a land of supreme joy. The Sanskrit is of similar meaning: “that which possesses ease and comfort.” Sukhāvatī is not subject to the sufferings that plague this world and, furthermore, it is a land of surpassed beauty. It is described as having seven tiers of balustrades, seven rows of nets, and seven rows of trees, all adorned with four jewels (gold, silver, lapsis lazuli, and crystal). There is a lake of the seven jewels (gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, a kind of big shell [tridacna gigas], coral, and agate), filled with water having the eight virtues. The bottom of the lake is gold sand. On the four sides of the lake are stairs (galleries) made of the four jewels. Above are towers and palaces also adorned with the seven jewels. Above are towers and palaces also adorned with the seven jewels. In the lake bloom lotus flowers as large as chariot wheels. The blue lotus flowers emit a blue light, and the yellow, red, and white lotus flowers emit light of corresponding colors. They all give forth a sweet fragrance. The delightful sound of heavenly music can be hard, and in the morning, at noon, and in the evening mandārava flowers fall from the sky and gently pile up on the golden ground. Every morning the inhabitants of the Pure Land gather these flowers with the hems of their robes and make offerings of them to myriads of buddhas in other lands. At mealtime they return to their own land, where they take their meal and stroll around. There are many kinds of birds—swans, peacocks, parrots, sharikas, kalaviṅkas, and jīvaṃjīvakas, which sing with beautiful voices, proclaiming the teachings of the Buddha. When living beings hear this song, they think about the Buddha, Dharma (“law,” or his teachings), and Saṅgha (“community of believers”). When the gentle breezes blow, the rows of four-jeweled trees and jeweled nets give forth a gentle music, like a beautiful symphony. In this land dwell Amitābha Buddha and his two attendants, the bodhisattvas Avalokitśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta. At their feet are those virtuous beings who have been reborn in that land because of their ardent faith. All, however, are male; women of deep faith are reborn here with male bodies. The female sex, considered inferior and unfortunate, has no place in Sukhāvatī. All people, says Śākyamuni, should ardently wish for rebirth in that land and become the companions of the most virtuous of all beings. People cannot hope for rebirth there just by performing a few good deeds, however. If living beings meditate eagerly upon the name of Amitābha for even one day with an undisturbed mind, Amitābha and his holy retinue will appear before them to receive them at the end of Life. They will enter the Pure Land with unperturbed hearts.

As has been discussed at length, the Yoga school holds that not only is consciousness, ātman/puruṣa, separate from the objects of consciousness, but the goal of the entire system is precisely for consciousness to be aware of itself as a separable, unchanging entity and thereby be extricated from its enmeshment in the world of objects. It is autonomous and independent. In contrast, liberation in Buddhism, nirvāṇa, is attained precisely when one ceases to identify with consciousness as an eternal, unchanging self and realizes that consciousness depends on objects of consciousness and does not exist without them. Consciousness is not autonomous or independent; it is dependent or interdependent on its objects—the very opposite of the Yoga position. In other words, whereas in Yoga, one must identify with and strive to realize the ātman, in Buddhism, one must cease identifying with or clinging to the notion of and striving for the liberation of an ātman; hence, in philosophical discourse, Buddhism is sometimes referred to as an-ātmavāda the system that does not believe in an ātman. But, argues Vijñānabhikṣu, in order to reject something, there must be two entities: the rejecter and the thing to be rejected. If the notion of ātman becomes the thing to be rejected, who is the rejecter of the notion? Or, as Hariharānanda puts it, if one aspires to liberation by thinking, “Let me be free from misery by suspending the activities of the mind,” there will remain a pure me free from the pangs of misery. The self behind or beyond the mind is the real experiencer of this process. If one denies the ultimate existence of such an agent, then one is faced with the often-marshaled question: For whose sake is liberation sought? In any event, Vyāsa puts forth the position of Yoga in distinction to the Buddhist view: Consciousness, puruṣa, is eternal and immutable, the subject of experience, and liberation involves detaching it from the objects of experience in the form of the evolutes of prakṛti. As an interesting aside, the term for suffering, duḥkha, seems to have been coined by analogy to its opposite, sukha, happiness. Kha refers to the axle of a wagon, and su- is a prefix denoting good (and duḥ-, bad). Thus in its old Indo-Aryan, Vedic usage, sukha denoted a wagon with good axles (that is, a comfortable ride). The Indo-Aryans were tribal cowherders, and one can imagine that comfortable wagons for their travels on the rough, unpaved trails of their day would have been a major factor in their notions of happiness and comfort.

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it.

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior.

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior. They “felt they had more time available . . . and were less impatient . . . more willing to volunteer their time to help others . . . preferred experiences over material products . . . and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.” A quiet parietal lobe promotes empathy, compassion, relaxation, appreciation, connectedness, and self-esteem.

Ya'aburnee1. As in you bury me. A rough translation for the way I want to leave this world before you because I can’t imagine having to go through a single day without you in it.

Chakra balance is the process of restoring a harmonious energy flow through the chakra system. Often the effect of well-balanced chakras translates into a feeling of well-being, relaxation, centeredness, increased vitality and self-incarnation. When we talk about balancing the chakra, we might actually refer to different techniques and meanings. A commonly accepted definition of chakra balancing is the process by which the chakra energy is brought into a well-functioning, harmonious state. The notion of calming a chakra tackles only part of the picture: Each chakra part of a system that works as a whole. When we look at how the chakras work, we see that they have a fluid relation and an active relationship with one another. Therefore, it is not only important to consider each chakra when doing chakra balancing, but also the neighboring centers and the energy throughout the body. Why balancing your chakras? The aim of balancing the chakra is to maintain a balanced flow which will preserve our overall energy level. We are subjected to a number of activities, sources of stress and demands in our daily lives that result in fluctuations in our energy level. Some may feel draining, others may experience fulfillment or nourishment. Moreover, past events and experiences often leave a long-lasting influence on how we feel and are in the world and thus influence how we manage our day-to-day energy. Stresses imposed on us by life demands will result in interruptions and changes in our energy flow and imbalances in the chakras. A chakra imbalance can affect: • How much energy flows through the chakra or chakra network • A chakra is defective when the energy is "blocked" or "closed" •       A chakra is overactive when the energy flow is increased excessively and is not controlled •       The direction of the energy field associated with one or more chakras is displaced. Balancing consists of maintaining appropriate and stable flow where there is not enough, controlling energy where there is too much, and aligning where imbalance or displacement is present. How to balance your chakras? Chakra balancing strategies fall into three categories: those based on a physical process or action, a meditative or introspective exercise, and energy transfer from or on your own.

AKKA MAHADEVI Around nine hundred years ago in southern India, there lived a female mystic called Akka Mahadevi. Akka was a devotee of Shiva. Ever since her childhood, she had regarded Shiva as her beloved, her husband. It was not just a belief; for her it was a living reality. The king saw this beautiful young woman one day, and decided he wanted her as his wife. She refused. But the king was adamant and threatened her parents, so she yielded. She married the man, but she kept him at a physical distance. He tried to woo her, but her constant refrain was, “Shiva is my husband.” Time passed and the king’s patience wore thin. Infuriated, he tried to lay his hands upon her. She refused. “I have another husband. His name is Shiva. He visits me, and I am with him. I cannot be with you.” Because she claimed to have another husband, she was brought to court for prosecution. Akka is said to have announced to all present, “Being a queen doesn’t mean a thing to me. I will leave.” When the king saw the ease with which she was walking away from everything, he made a last futile effort to salvage his dignity. He said, “Everything on your person—your jewels, your garments—belongs to me. Leave it all here and go.” So, in the full assembly, Akka just dropped her jewelry, all her clothes, and walked away naked. From that day on, she refused to wear clothes even though many tried to convince her otherwise. It was unbelievable for a woman to be walking naked on the streets of India at the time—and this was a beautiful young woman. She lived out her life as a wandering mendicant and composed some exquisite poetry that lives on to this very day. In a poem (translated by A. K. Ramanujan), she says: People, male and female, blush when a cloth covering their shame comes loose. When the lord of lives lives drowned without a face in the world, how can you be modest? When all the world is the eye of the lord, onlooking everywhere, what can you cover and conceal? Devotees of this kind may be in this world but not of it. The power and passion with which they lived their lives make them inspirations for generations of humanity. Akka continues to be a living presence in the Indian collective consciousness, and her lyrical poems remain among the most prized works of South Indian literature to this very day. Embracing

Can we believe that “all Scripture is inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16)? Here is why I think we can. It is remarkable in composition. Composed over sixteen centuries by forty authors. Begun by Moses in Arabia and finished by John on Patmos. Penned by kings in palaces, shepherds in tents, and prisoners in prisons. Would it be possible for forty writers, writing in three different languages and several different countries, separated by as much as sixteen hundred years, to produce a book of singular theme unless behind them there was one mind and one designer? It is remarkable in durability. It is the single most published book in history. Translated into at least twelve hundred languages.17 Bibles have been burned by governments and banished from courtrooms, but God’s Word endures. The death knell has been sounded a hundred times, but God’s Word continues. It is remarkable in prophecy. More than three hundred fulfilled prophecies about the life of Christ,18 were all written at least four hundred years before he was born. Imagine if something similar occurred today. If we found a book written in 1900 that prophesied two world wars, a depression, an atomic bomb, and the assassinations of a president and a civil rights leader, wouldn’t we trust it? Glory Days

However you translate this phrase, the meaning is obvious: sin and wickedness will have run their course and finally, after thousands of years, reached an end point. That means there will be no more capacity to be sensitive to sin. Mankind’s conscience will have been seared—yes, that is how evil the world will be. At that point, when sin has reached its maximum, the Anti-Messiah will show up and appear to save the day. He will come when people on earth have become so saturated with darkness and when evil is so abundant—when there’s such a demonic stronghold and Satan has such reign on the earth—mankind will no longer be able to tell the difference between right and wrong. They will be incapable of detecting such darkness in a global leader because the entire world—including themselves—will be so darkened by sin. In the previous chapter we looked at past examples of when the world had grown this dark. In Noah’s time the world was so filled with violence that it corrupted the planet. In Lot’s time Sodom and Gomorrah were so overrun by sexual immorality that the cities’ men threatened to kill Lot if he prevented them from having sex with the angels visiting him. In our time more people are enslaved than ever in history, and each year as many unborn babies are murdered as American soldiers have been killed in all wars combined.5 We celebrate our immorality by marketing it as entertainment, and we even bless such immorality in our churches when we approve of homosexuality

As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of "knowing himself," will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his "averageness";—that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness—by the imperious "genius of the species" therein—and is translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual—there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer.... This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world;—that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid,—a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation. Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned: I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of "thing in itself" and phenomenon, for we do not "know" enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowing or for "truth"; we "know" (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "usefulness" is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

If there were not thousands who still conceive that the sun and moon were created and are kept going for no other purpose than to lighten the darkness of our little planet; if only the other day a grave gentleman had not written a perfectly serious essay to show that the world is a flat plain, one would scarcely believe that there could still be people who doubt that ancient Egyptian is now read and translated as fluently as ancient Greek. Yet an Englishman whom I met in Egypt — an Englishman who had long been resident in Cairo, and who was well acquainted with the great Egyptologists who are attached to the service of the khedive — assured me of his profound disbelief in the discovery of Champollion. "In my opinion," said he, "not one of these gentlemen can read a line of hieroglyphics.

I should be more surprised. I should be reeling. But isn't this exactly how I've always felt? That I'm not quite made the same? That I'm some kind of alien, trying to learn how to be a human from scratch every day? That I constantly need to translate the world around me to myself, and then myself back to the world again, like speaking two completely different languages simultaneously? Wow. No wonder I'm always so bloody exhausted.

Routine was death of the worst kind, a slow, insidious stripping of soul. Rarely could I even bring myself to run the same route on subsequent days; more rarely did I run at the same time every day. Sometimes I'd venture out first thing in the morning, other times during midday, still others in the evening or at night. I wasn't made to fit the modern industrialized world; my natural rhythms ran contrary to the nine-to-five business cycle. And I didn't always find people the preferred company. Not that I was antisocial, but being by myself wasn't unpleasant. Running alone was something I relished most of my life, even more so as I'd become older. Most runners prefer to run alone, so these habits are not entirely aberrant. The world and its institutions engulf and suffocate us. We runners find our sanctuary in retreating to the roadways and trails, our sacred reprieve. The wonder isn't that we go; it's that we come back. Our daily outings become purgings and resurrections. We move through this world as spirits, the air and the ground and the sky above absorbing us into something grander, and we disappear from the unbearable heaviness of being. These moments of transcendence cleanse our soul and liberate us from the manufactured and superficial. For a brief, beautiful instant we are as a human is meant to be, free and unencumbered, and this restores us and makes us fresh once more. And then it's on to the follies of being a citizen, of being a useful and contributing member of society. Back to the fickleness and irrationality of human nature and the roller coaster of modern living, with its spirals and twists, letdowns and disappointments. As soon as there are people involved, things get complicated, and rarely do they go the way you want them to. Over a lifetime, nos greatly outnumber the yeses. But the strong endure. The lessons you learn from running translate to life. The runner has a strong body and a strong heart. You get knocked down, you pick yourself back up, dust off, and keep going, only to get knocked down again, only to pick yourself back up once more and continue on, arising one time greater than toppling. And in this persistent enduring you acquire endurance. Your permanence is established in this way because you do not unseat easily, you have what it takes to withstand setbacks. You may waver and misstep, but you never give up. No matter how daunting the obstacle, you forge onward and keep chipping away until that barrier is eventually obliterated and overcome. p97

Ya'aburnee. As in you bury me. A rough translation for the way I want to leave this world before you because I can't imagine having to go through a single day without you in it. If this last week was a preview of that kind of life, then I can assure you it isn't a life worth living.

On one of those nights in January 2014, we sat next to each other in Maria Vostra, happy and content, smoking nice greens, with one of my favorite movies playing on the large flat-screen TVs: Once Upon a Time in America. I took a picture of James Woods and Robert De Niro on the TV screen in Maria Vostra's cozy corner, which I loved to share with Martina. They were both wearing hats and suits, standing next to each other. Robert de Niro looked a bit like me and his character, Noodles, (who was a goy kid in the beginning of the movie, growing up with Jewish kids) on the picture, was as naive as I was. I just realized that James Woods—who plays an evil Jewish guy in the movie, acting like Noodles' friend all along, yet taking his money, his woman, taking away his life, and trying to kill him at one point—until the point that Noodles has to escape to save his life and his beloved ones—looks almost exactly like Adam would look like if he was a bit older. “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” – William Shakespeare That sounds like an ancient spell or rather directions, instructions to me, the director instructing his actors, being one of the actors himself as well, an ancient spell, that William Shakespeare must have read it from a secret book or must have heard it somewhere. Casting characters for certain roles to act like this or like that as if they were the director’s custom made monsters. The extensions of his own will, desires and actions. The Reconquista was a centuries-long series of battles by Christian states to expel the Muslims (Moors), who had ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula since the 8th century. The Reconquista ended on January 2, 1492. The same year Columbus, whose statue stands atop a Corinthian custom-made column down the Port at the bottom of the Rambla, pointing with his finger toward the West, had discovered America on October 12, 1492. William Shakespeare was born in April 1564. He had access to knowledge that had been unavailable to white people for thousands of years. He must have formed a close relationship with someone of royal lineage, or used trick, who then permitted him to enter the secret library of the Anglican Church. “A character has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure what he/she’s supposed to be doing.” – Anthony Burgess Martina proudly shared with me her admiration for the Argentine author Julio Cortazar, who was renowned across South America. She quoted one of his famous lines, saying: “Vida es como una cebolla, hay que pelarla llorando,” which translates to “Life is like an onion, you have to peel it crying.” Martina shared with me her observation that the sky in Europe felt lower compared to America. She mentioned that the clouds appeared larger in America, giving a sense of a higher and more expansive sky, while in Europe, it felt like the sky had a lower and more limiting ceiling. “The skies are much higher in Argentina, Tomas, in all America. Here in Europe the sky is so low. In Argentina there are huge clouds and the sky is huge, Tomas.” – Martina Blaterare “It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.” – George Orwell, 1984

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What has just been said of the followers of different faiths is even more patent in their mystics. Despite the abrogation of their religions, we do not doubt the possibility of mystics of other faiths reaching a higher spiritual plane, for when the lower soul is negated and sublimated by spiritual disciplines, the powers of the higher soul seldom fail to appear, and it is not impossible that in such a condition it might behold Ultimate Reality, which is, after all, as real and objective as Detroit or anything else in the physical world. But what a difference between the few hundred Jewish, Christian, or even American Indian mystics of the Western tradition who left any record of their experiences-men and women such as Catherine of Siena, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Francis of Assisi, Moses Cordovero, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John Tauler, Henry Suso, Jakob Böhme, Handsome Lake, Isaac Luria, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross-and the literally thousands of Sufi masters of the Islamic tradition who founded the great mystical orders, had immense influence for centuries at all levels of society, produced an unparalleled and monumental body of mystic literature in poetry and prose, and left countless adepts in the beatitude of the Divine Presence, a living tradition that continues to this day. What other religion has ever seen a Mathnawi like Rumi’s? There is a tremendous difference between a few outstanding spiritual personalities that appeared at times and places in the West, like occasional watering places scattered across a hinterland, and the throngs of mystics of the Islamic milieu, on a sea of the Divine whose tides flooded regularly. Not only in the numbers of contemplatives, but in the abidingness of their personal experiences, there is a great difference between the mystics of Islam, who proceeded from the light of true monotheism to a state of perpetual illumination, men such as Sahl al-Tustari, al-Ghawth Abu Madyan, Shams al-Tabrizi, Ibn ‘Arabi, Abul Hasan al-Shadhili, and others whose testimony is unambiguous, and those of other faiths, who through self-mortification caught momentary glimpses of the Godhead in “experiences” they then translated to others in spiritual depositions.

Arberry, one of the scholars who made Rumi speak English through the translations explains his influence as follows: Rumi speaks to the people with different religions from all over the world in search of spiritual meaning through the works he wrote as the greatest Sufi poet for centuries.

when she's asleep he likes to sit down beside her bed and make one further attempt to get to the bottom of what has seemed to him the greatest riddle in all the history of mankind: how processes, circumstances, or events of a general nature – such as war, famine, or even a civil servant's salary that fails to increase along with the galloping inflation – can infiltrate a private face. Here they turn a few hairs gray, there devour a pair of lovely cheeks until the skin is stretched taut across singular jawbones; the secession of Hungary, say, might result in a pair of lips bitten raw in the case of one particular woman, perhaps even his own wife. In other words, there is a constant translation between far outside and deep within, it's just that a different vocabulary exists for each of us, which no doubt explains why it's never been noticed that this is a language in the first place – and in fact, the only language valid across the world and for all time. -- Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days (2012), trans. Susan Bernofsky, 2014, p. 73.

If i live on longer, shall i again, i wonder, yearn for these days ? The world that i once saw as bitter, now, is dear to me !

Variations on a Summer Day" I Say of the gulls that they are flying In light blue air over dark blue sea. II A music more than a breath, but less Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech, A repetition of unconscious things, Letters of rock and water, words Of the visible elements and of ours. III The rocks of the cliffs are the heads of dogs That turn into fishes and leap Into the sea. IV Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star, Lantern without a bearer, you drift, You, too, are drifting, in spite of your course; Unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned You are the will, if there is a will, Or the portent of a will that was, One of the portents of the will that was. V The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken. There was a tree that was a father. We sat beneath it and sang our songs. VI It is cold to be forever young, To come to tragic shores and flow, In sapphire, round the sun-bleached stones, Being, for old men, time of their time. VII One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guineas, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent. VIII An exercise in viewing the world. On the motive! But one looks at the sea As one improvises, on the piano. IX This cloudy world, by aid of land and sea, Night and day, wind and quiet, produces More nights, more days, more clouds, more worlds. X To change nature, not merely to change ideas, To escape from the body, so to feel Those feelings that the body balks, The feelings of the natures round us here: As a boat feels when it cuts blue water. XI Now, the timothy at Pemaquid That rolled in heat is silver-tipped And cold. The moon follows the sun like a French Translation of a Russian poet. XII Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers: Hugh March, a sergeant, a redcoat, killed, With his men, beyond the barbican. Everywhere spruce trees bury spruce trees. XIII Cover the sea with the sand rose. Fill The sky with the radiantiana Of spray. Let all the salt be gone. XIV Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle Of mica, the dithering of grass, The Arachne integument of dead trees, Are the eye grown larger, more intense. XV The last island and its inhabitant, The two alike, distinguish blues, Until the difference between air And sea exists by grace alone, In objects, as white this, white that. XVI Round and round goes the bell of the water And round and round goes the water itself And that which is the pitch of its motion, The bell of its dome, the patron of sound. XVII Pass through the door and through the walls, Those bearing balsam, its field fragrance, Pine-figures bringing sleep to sleep. XVIII Low tide, flat water, sultry sun. One observes profoundest shadows rolling. Damariscotta dada doo. XIX One boy swims under a tub, one sits On top. Hurroo, the man-boat comes, In a man-makenesse, neater than Naples. XX You could almost see the brass on her gleaming, Not quite. The mist was to light what red Is to fire. And her mainmast tapered to nothing, Without teetering a millimeter's measure. The beads on her rails seemed to grasp at transparence. It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping.

The result of Alexander the Great’s victory over Darius in 330 BCE not only shifted the balance of power in the ancient world to the Macedonian general but also instigated a political and cultural transformation that has shaped the course of Western history down to the present day. Although the fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought an end to Greek cultural dominance in the Mediterranean world, the legacy of Greek thought never met the same end.9 As we shall come to see, it was this singular event in world history that led to the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, which paved the way for the creation and expansion of Christianity. For many centuries, the fortunes of the church would be tied intimately to those of Greek culture, and the direction of Western history would be closely related to that of the church.

This is a wonderful feminine quality but it is also important to remember that our own soothing, helping, and giving to ourselves is critical. So we may skip a day of doing the ten ideas if the world goes upside down. But we can take it again the next morning because our ideas are important. And because our contribution, the way we see the world, our thoughts, translated through a fine-tuned intuition of ideas is important.

Through all my later literary life I have sought to make it plain, as the result of antecedent years spent in occult research, that the occult sciences—in all their general understanding—are paths of danger when they are not paths of simple make-believe and imposture. The importance of Éliphas Lévi’s account at large of the claims, and of their story throughout the centuries, arises from the fact (a) that he is the authoritative exponent-in-chief of all the alleged sciences; (b) that it is he who, in a sense, restored and placed them under a new and more attractive vesture, before public notice at the middle period of the nineteenth century; (c) that he claimed, as we shall see, the very fullest knowledge concerning them, being that of an adept and master; but (d) that—subject to one qualification, the worth of which will be mentioned—it follows from his long examination that Magic, as understood not in the streets only but in the houses of research concerning it, has no ground in the truth of things, and is of the region of delusion only. It is for this reason that I have translated his History of Magic, as one who reckons a not too gracious task for something which leans toward righteousness, at least in the sense of charity. The world is full at this day of the false claims which arise out of that region, and I have better reasons than most even of my readers can imagine to undeceive those who, having been drawn in such directions, may be still saved from deception. It is well therefore that out of the mouth of the masters we can draw the fullest evidence required for this purpose. In the present prefatory words I propose to shew, firstly, the nature of Éliphas Lévi’s personal claims, so that there may be no misconception as to what they were actually, and as to the kind of voice which is speaking; secondly, his original statement of the claims, nature and value of Transcendental Magic; and, thirdly, his later evidences on its phenomenal or so-called practical side, as established by its own history.

6 But after arepenting, and humbling himself sincerely, through faith, God ministered unto him by an holy bangel, whose ccountenance was as lightning, and whose garments were pure and white above all other whiteness; 7 And gave unto him acommandments which inspired him; 8 And agave him power from on high, by the bmeans which were before prepared, to translate the Book of Mormon; 9 Which contains a arecord of a fallen people, and the bfulness of the cgospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and to the Jews also; 10 Which was given by inspiration, and is confirmed to aothers by the ministering of angels, and is bdeclared unto the world by them— 11 Proving to the world that the holy scriptures are atrue, and that God does binspire men and call them to his choly work in this age and generation, as well as in generations of old; 12 Thereby showing that he is the asame God yesterday, today, and bforever. Amen.

In my work,” Everett says, “in mergers and amalgamations, we’re seeing a real boom. LBOs are still the cornerstone of the business, obviously, but the increase in global capital flows is translating to even more revenue. It’s an exciting time. And there’s real security there. We work hard, and there’s a measurable gain, or, yes, occasionally, a loss, but at the end of the day, win or lose, we can all look at the same numbers and acknowledge we’ve accomplished something. It’s real, you know what I mean?” I nod vigorously, to show her I agree, but honestly, Everett’s world doesn’t sound like a more measurable one than mine at all, and the closest I can come to picturing what she’s talking about is imagining numbers dancing around gaily on a computer screen while giant piles of cartoon cash rain down from the ceiling at the end of each day. My mind began to wander somewhere around “LBOs.

If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers’ worth of running, it will go into hyperthermia and collapse.” Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom.

I say it reverently, if I understand the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, this is the vision He has given me of it: that all of heaven's ability and heaven's glory and heaven 's strength are at the disposal of the believer. This is the most miraculous thing the world ever saw. I believe that in the last days there is going to be an unveiling of the power of God, and multitudes will arise and live. Weymouth's translation of Romans 5:17 tells us that we reign as Kings in the Realm of Life in Christ. We are to absolutely reign as Christ, and with Christ. How? By faith. Is God your righteousness? You say, "I am trying to make Him my righteousness." Can you make Him your righteousness? If you believe on Jesus Christ, He IS your righteousness. Then go out and act it. Dare to let God loose in you.

Ivo Andric, Bosnian chronicle (Quote about nostalgia, free translation from Bosnian lenguage) More than three hundred years ago, brought us from our homeland, a unique Andalusia, a terrible, foolish, fratricidal whirlwind, which we can not understand even today, and who has not understood it to this day, scattered us all over the world and made us beggars to which gold does not help. Now, threw us on the East, and life on the East is not easy for us or blessed, and the as much man goes further and gets closer to the sun's birth, it is worse, because the land is younger and more raw and people are from the land. And our trouble is that we could not fully love this country, to which we owe becouse it has received us, accept us and provided us with shelter, nor could we hate the one who has unjustly took us away and expelled us as an unworthly sons. We do not know is it more difficult that we are here or that we are not there. Wherever we were outside of Spain, we would suffer because we would have two homelands, I know, but here life is too much pressed us and humiliated us. I know that we have been changed for a long time,we do not remember anymore how we were, but surely we remember that we were different. We left and road up long time ago and we traveled hard and we unluckily fell down and stopped at this place, and that is why we are no longer even a shadow of what we were. As a powder on a fruit that goes hand-to-hand, from man first fall of what is finest on him. That's why we are like this. But you know us, us and our life, if we can call this life. We live between "occupiers" and commonalty, miserable commonalty and terrible Turkish. Cutted away completely from our loved ones, we are careful to look after and keep everything Spanish, songs and meals and customs, but we feel that everything changes in us, spoils and forgets. We remember the language of our land, the lenguage we did take and carried three centuries ago, the lenguage which even do not speak there anymore, and we ridiculously speak with stumbling the language of the comonalty with which we suffer and the Turkish who rules over us. So it may not be a long day when we will be purely and humanly able to express ourselves only in prayer, and which actually does not need any words. This so lonely and few, we marry between us and see that our blood is paling and fainting. We bend and shred in front of everyone, we mourn, suffer and contrive, as people said: on the ice we make campfire, we work, we gain, we save, not only for ourselves and for our children, but for all those who are stronger and more insolent, impudent than us and strike on our life , on the dignity, and on the wealth. So we preserved the faith for which we had to leave our beautiful country, but lost almost everything else. Luckily, and to our sorrow, we did not lose from our memory reminiscence of our dear country, as it was, before she drive away us like stepmother; just as it will never extinguish in us the desire for a better world, the world of order and humanity in which you goes stright, watches calmly and speaks openly. We can not free ourselves from that feeling, nor feeling that, in addition to everything, we belong to such a world, though, we are expelled and unhappy, otherwise we live. That's what we would like to know there. That our name does not die in that brighter and higher world that is constantly darkening and destroying, iconstantly moves and changes, but never collapses, and always for somebody exists, that that world knows that we are carrying him in our soul, that even here we serve him on our way, and we feel one with him, even though we are forever and hopelessly separated from him.

Your influence over me is inexpressibly bland and soothing. You certainly are my good spirit. I like you so much, that I have been quite content with your isolation; I get you all to myself. These walks with you, since that famous oyster supper, the very day of my return home, have been the chief feature of my life. I count my hour with you as the pay for my scuffle with the world. A third party would spoil the whole! What would become of our confidence, our intimate exchange of thought on every possible subject, if there were another fellow by, who might be a vulgarian or a muff? What could we do with a chap to whom we should have to explain our metaphysics, give page and line for our quotations, interpret our puns, translate our allusions, analyze our intuitions, define our God? Such a companion would take the sparkle and the flash of this rapid and unerring sympathy out of our lives. No, Dreeme, this isolation of yours suits me; and since you continue to tolerate my society, I must suit you. We form a capital exclusive pair, close as any of the historic ones, — Orestes and Pylades, for example, — to close my long discourse classically.

One of those settlers was Normandy-born and ornately named J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur, who embarked for America in 1754, purchased an estate in Pennsylvania, and married the daughter of an American merchant. In his Letters from an American Farmer, first published in 1782 in English and translated soon after into French, Crevecoeur described his adoptive country and his countrymen in the most flattering terms: We are the most perfect society now existing in the world... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world... Here a man is free as he ought to be... An American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence – this is an American. It was partly through such fervent testimonies from men like Crevecoeur, and from foreigners like the even more famous Frenchman de Tocqueville and the less famous German Francis Lieber, that America gained its reputation abroad, because third-party

In his Letters from an American Farmer, first published in 1782 in English and translated soon after into French, Crevecoeur described his adoptive country and his countrymen in the most flattering terms: We are the most perfect society now existing in the world... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world... Here a man is free as he ought to be... An American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence – this is an American.

Hebrews 4 Promised Rest for God’s People God’s promise of entering his rest still stands, so we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it. 2 For this good news—that God has prepared this rest—has been announced to us just as it was to them. But it did them no good because they didn’t share the faith of those who listened to God.* 3 For only we who believe can enter his rest. As for the others, God said, “In my anger I took an oath:       ‘They will never enter my place of rest,’”* even though this rest has been ready since he made the world. 4 We know it is ready because of the place in the Scriptures where it mentions the seventh day: “On the seventh day God rested from all his work.”* 5 But in the other passage God said, “They will never enter my place of rest.”* 6 So God’s rest is there for people to enter, but those who first heard this good news failed to enter because they disobeyed God. 7 So God set another time for entering his rest, and that time is today. God announced this through David much later in the words already quoted: “Today when you hear his voice,       don’t harden your hearts.”*

6 So God’s rest is there for people to enter, but those who first heard this good news failed to enter because they disobeyed God. 7 So God set another time for entering his rest, and that time is today. God announced this through David much later in the words already quoted: “Today when you hear his voice,       don’t harden your hearts.”* 8 Now if Joshua had succeeded in giving them this rest, God would not have spoken about another day of rest still to come. 9 So there is a special rest* still waiting for the people of God. 10 For all who have entered into God’s rest have rested from their labors, just as God did after creating the world. 11 So let us do our best to enter that rest. But if we disobey God, as the people of Israel did, we will fall.

Sometimes I don't feel I've translated them correctly. I listen to other songwriters and think they have translated their Sonic Light Being more concisely, so I study them and try to gain the tools to become a better interpreter of light into sound. Because this lives in a dimension where there are no real estate agents of light—at least not yet, thank God— I know it seems intangible to some people. But the sonic world can be visited. I started visiting this world when I was three, listening to a piece by Béla Bartók; I visited a configuration that day that wasn't on this earth. My toes were curled up in worn Methodist carpet, and I knew I wanted to take more journeys like this. It was euphoric. It is euphoric.

And recite to them the news of Abraham When he said to his father and his people: What do you worship? They said, "We worship idols and remain to them devoted. He said, "Do they hear you when you supplicate? Or do they benefit you, or do they harm? They said, "But we found our fathers doing thus. He said, "Then do you see what you have been worshipping, You and your ancient forefathers? Indeed, they are enemies to me, except the Lord of the worlds, Who created me, and He [it is who] guides me. And it is He who feeds me and gives me drink. And when I am ill, it is He who cures me And who will cause me to die and then bring me to life And who I aspire that He will forgive me my sin on the Day of Recompense. (A Translation of Quran , 69-82)

I frequently forward the message that our spirit people are quite all right where they are. They respond with eagerness when a guest recognizes them, and are happy to spend some time conversing back and forth, through me. Yet they also seem to know that this kind of communication is only temporary, so most are quick to point out before they leave that they will meet their physical friends one day in the future. A forty-ish woman came for an appointment one day with her friend. As I tuned in, I felt the presence of a young woman who’d passed before her time in a vehicle accident. My client acknowledged her daughter, who had died at the age of nineteen while traveling to a camping weekend with friends. The spirit conveyed her joy at her mother’s presence, and insistently repeated that she really was safe and happy. Her younger sister needed to hear this message in particular, and she urged her mother to pass it on. “Do you miss us?” the mother asked. “Do you think about us and miss us, are you counting the days till we can be together again, too?” With a feeling of frustration from the spirit, I had to translate, “I’m fine!” yet again. This spirit came across as being almost dismissive of her family’s grief. As her mother cried on my couch, the spirit came through very much like a teenaged girl, saying “Oh Mom, come on! I’m fine!” After we concluded, I spent some time in meditation asking for help. How could I translate a spirit’s genuine well-being, without sounding dismissive myself? How could I show my clients that the spirit people are so certain of meeting again, that they rarely spend much time trying to convince us?

9 For see, the day of the LORD is coming—       the terrible day of his fury and fierce anger. The land will be made desolate,       and all the sinners destroyed with it. 10 The heavens will be black above them;       the stars will give no light. The sun will be dark when it rises,       and the moon will provide no light. 11 “I, the LORD, will punish the world for its evil       and the wicked for their sin.

Do everything without complaining and arguing, 15 so that no one can criticize you. Live clean, innocent lives as children of God, shining like bright lights in a world full of crooked and perverse people. 16 Hold firmly to the word of life; then, on the day of Christ’s return, I will be proud that I did not run the race in vain and that my work was not useless.

The dictionary defines ‘hindermost’ as a variant of hindmost; farthest to the rear; last. (American Heritage Dictionary). The Hebrew word used in Jeremiah 50:12, “achariyth,” appears 61 times in scripture, translated 31 times as end, and 12 times as latter. In the KJV it is never translated as “least” as does the NIV. The same word, achariyth, for example, is translated in Isaiah 2:2 as “last”: “It shall come to pass in the last days.” In Daniel 10:14 the angel’s words are translated, including the same word, achariyth, as: “Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the last days.” The NIV version of Daniel 10:14, translates achariyth as the “future,” not the ‘least.’ Translating acariyth as ‘least’ is not only contrary to other interpretations of achariyth, it is also inconsistent with the other Daughter of Babylon verses, which tell us that the nation is the world’s preeminent superpower, not the ‘least’ nation.

If they were, they might not care for an article by Rand, published in Cosmopolitan in April 1963, in which she distinguished between “Money-Makers” and “Money-Appropriators.”6 Rand’s views were rooted in the long-gone days of heavy industry, so she admired “Money-Makers” who exemplify “the discoverer who translates his discovery into material goods.” The Money-Appropriator, on the other hand, “is essentially noncreative—and his basic goal is to acquire an unearned share of wealth created by others. He seeks to get rich, not by conquering nature, but by manipulating men” and by “social maneuvering.” The Money-Appropriator “does not produce, he redistributes; he merely switches the wealth already in existence from the pockets of its owners to his own.” Rand was aiming her ridicule directly at Wall Street. In the article, she quoted her longtime associate Alan Greenspan addressing “what percentage of men in our business world he would regard as authentic Money-Makers—as men of fully sovereign, independent judgment.” Greenspan’s response, “a little sadly: ‘On Wall Street—about five per cent; in industry—about fifteen.

...a copy of his Ninty-five Theses, a formal declaration of his arguments against indulgences. This is the document that Luther is said to have nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. If it happened at all, it was not quite as dramatic as it sounds—this was not an uncommon way to distribute pamphlets and polemics, and the Theses, written in Latin, would not have been accessible to most of the lay townspeople. But the timing—on the eve of All Saints' Day—made the challenge auspicious, and the document was soon thereafter distributed in a German translation by a local printer.

WORK MAKES MEN. A university is not merely a place for making scholars, it is a place for making Christians. A farm is not a place for growing corn, it is a place for growing character, and a man has no character except that which is developed by his life and thought. God's Spirit does the building through the acts which a man performs from day to day. A student who cons out every word in his Latin and Greek instead of consulting a translation finds that honesty is translated into his character. If he works out his mathematical problems thoroughly, he not only becomes a mathematician, but becomes a thorough man. It is by constant and conscientious attention to daily duties that thoroughness and conscientiousness and honorableness are imbedded in our beings. Character is

One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante’s Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi’s despair and his dehumanization. It was the canto about Ulysses, and though it ends tragically, it contains the lines You were not made to live like animals But to pursue virtue and know the world which he recited and translated to the man walking with him.

There has always been a vocal minority that claims Christians should not feel stressed. In the old days to acknowledge that you felt anxious, depressed or stressed-out indicated spiritual backsliding, failure in your devotional life or your Christian service. As a result, many people kept quiet about it and just tried to cope. There is little evidence in Scripture for this belief. Both Jesus and Paul were careful to make stress positive as well as negative. Jesus warned us that ‘in this world you will have trouble’, also translated as ‘tribulation’ or ‘pressure’ (John 16:33), but went on to say that we should take heart because he had overcome this on our behalf. In other words, we shall experience pressure but it will not destroy us, he will bring us through. Paul indicates that coping with stress is a recurrent problem for Christians when he says that despite his own period of discouragement and despair, God ‘has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers’ (2 Corinthians 1:10–11).

Oneness and Peace in Christ 11Don’t forget that you Gentiles used to be outsiders. You were called “uncircumcised heathens” by the Jews, who were proud of their circumcision, even though it affected only their bodies and not their hearts. + 12In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope. 13But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ.

One thing I have asked from Jehovah- It is what I will look for- That I may dwell in the house of Jehovah all the days of my life, To gaze upon the pleasantness of Jehovah And to look with appreciation upon his temple.

Roommates ...the door opened and the most improbable trio walked in: a tiny dark-haired man, a very tall and big-nosed guy with long hair like a rock star, and a girl in a white nightgown with a toilet seat around her neck. They were Edmondo Zanolini, Michael Laub, and a fifteen-year-old girl named Brigitte—an Italian, a Belgian, and a Swede— and they were the performance-art trio who called themselves Maniac Productions. They gave themselves this name because, among other things, they would enlist people from their own families to do strange things. For instance, Edmondo’s grandfather was a pyromaniac. And since he was also a bit senile, he was very dangerous—he had set his house on fire a number of times. His family was very careful to keep matches out of his reach at all times, except when Maniac Productions was performing. Then Edmondo would invite his grandfather to the theater and give him a big box of matches; the grandfather would wander around the theater lighting fires while the group performed and pretended not to notice him. This was his maniac thing. It was very original theater, and very satisfying to Edmondo’s grandfather. He didn’t care if the audience was looking at him or not, because he had his box of matches. Edmondo and Brigitte moved into our flat. Michael came from a family of diamond merchants in Brussels and stayed in five-star hotels. Another tenant was Piotr from Poland. Piotr had a book of logic—I think it was Wittgenstein translated into Polish—and for reasons best known to himself, he kept it in the freezer. This book was his favorite thing in the world. And every morning he would wake up with this imbecilic smile on his face, take his book out of the freezer, wait patiently until the page he wanted to read unfroze, read to us from it in Polish, then turn the page and put the book back in the freezer for the next day. Brigitte’s father had started the pornography industry in Sweden—a very big deal; the porn revolution really began there—and she hated her father; she hated everybody. She was a deeply depressed person: she literally never spoke a word. All of us in the flat ate all our meals together, and she would just sit there, completely silent. Then in the middle of the night one night, Edmondo knocked on our door. I opened it and said, “What’s wrong?” “She talks, she talks!” he said. “What did she say?” I asked. “She said, ‘Boo,’ ” he said. “That’s not much,” I said. The next morning, she packed and left. (...) “I’m so happy,” Michael told us one day, about his pair of girlfriends. “The two of them complement each other perfectly.” Marinka and Ulla knew (and liked) each other, and knew (but didn’t like) the arrangement. Then Ulla got pregnant—not only pregnant, but pregnant with twins. When Michael told Marinka about it, she moved to Australia. And Piotr followed her there, and committed suicide on her birthday.

Has nobody not told you, Brian, that you've got this kind of gleeful preoccupation with the future? I wouldn't even mind, but you don't even have a fuckin' future, I don't have a future. Nobody has a future. The party's over. Take a look around you man, it's all breaking up. Are you not familiar with the book of Revelations of St. John, the final book of the Bible prophesying the apocalypse?... He forced everyone to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead so that no one shall be able to buy or sell unless he has the mark, which is the name of the beast, or the number of his name, and the number of the beast is 6-6-6... What can such a specific prophecy mean? What is the mark? Well the mark, Brian, is the barcode, the ubiquitous barcode that you'll find on every bog roll and packet of johnnies and every poxy pork pie, and every fuckin' barcode is divided into two parts by three markers, and those three markers are always represented by the number 6. 6-6-6! Now what does it say? No one shall be able to buy or sell without that mark. And now what they're planning to do in order to eradicate all credit card fraud and in order to precipitate a totally cashless society, what they're planning to do, what they've already tested on the American troops, they're going to subcutaneously laser tattoo that mark onto your right hand, or onto your forehead. They're going to replace plastic with flesh. Fact! In the same book of Revelations when the seven seals are broken open on the day of judgment and the seven angels blow the trumpets, when the third angel blows her bugle, wormwood will fall from the sky, wormwood will poison a third part of all the waters and a third part of all the land and many many many people will die! Now do you know what the Russian translation for wormwood is?... Chernobyl! Fact. On August the 18th, 1999, the planets of our solar system are gonna line up into the shape of a cross... They're gonna line up in the signs of Aquarius, Leo, Taurus, and Scorpio, which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the apocalypse, as mentioned in the book of Daniel, another fuckin' fact! Do you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Brian, the game is up!

[The curve of your eyes] La courbe de tes yeux fait le tour de mon coeur, Un rond de danse et de douceur, Auréole du temps, berceau nocturne et sûr, Et si je ne sais plus tout ce que j’ai vécu C’est que tes yeux ne m’ont pas toujours vu. Feuilles de jour et mousse de rosée, Roseaux du vent, sourires parfumés, Ailes couvrant le monde de lumière, Bateaux chargés du ciel et de la mer, Chasseurs des bruits et sources des couleurs, Parfums éclos d’une couvée d’aurores Qui gît toujours sur la paille des astres, Comme le jour dépend de l’innocence Le monde entier dépend de tes yeux purs Et tout mon sang coule dans leurs regards. *** The curve of your eyes goes around my heart, A round of dance and sweetness, Halo of time, nocturnal and safe cradle, And if I don’t know any more all that I’ve lived through It’s because I haven’t always been seen by you. Leaves of day and scum of dew, Reeds of the wind, perfumed smiles, Wings covering the world with light, Ships filled with the sky and the sea, Hunters of noises and sources of colours, Perfumes bloomed from a brood of dawns That always lies on the straw of the stars, As the day depends on innocence The whole world depends on your pure eyes And all my blood flows in their looks. Paul Éluard , L’Amour la poésie (1929) Translated by Anne-Charlotte Husson

. I will start our own little group there, in some place like Ometepe, as described in Disputed Questions. Howard Frankl, the ex-beatnik poet who translated my poems and just recently entered the monastery of Cuernavaca, would go there also; there is another young poet in Nicaragua who also wants to go, and a young Father [Father García], who is a professor in the seminary of Managua, who is also planning to write to you in the next few days, to consult with you regarding his vocation. We would naturally be above politics, but we would help them with advice, letters, etc., and with a place of retreat where they could go to think and meditate. I have spoken a lot about all of this with Coronel, and he too has planned these things a lot with me, and would be a very permanent guest. He already leads a very eremitic life in Río San Juan, even though he lives with his wife; every day he reads the Rule of Saint Benedict, and his life is very Benedictine. He says that he is not going to participate in the new government, that this is for Pablo Antonio, and that it will be up to us to help them with advice and prayer. I was in Ometepe because my grandmother has some properties there and I went to take a look. They do not seem very good to me, and

Superstring theory in the thirteenth century?!” Katherine wasn’t buying it. “Come on!” Superstring theory was a brand-new cosmological model. Based on the most recent scientific observations, it suggested the multidimensional universe was made up not of three . . . but rather of ten dimensions, which all interacted like vibrating strings, similar to resonating violin strings. Katherine waited as her brother heaved open the book, ran through the ornately printed table of contents, and then flipped to a spot near the beginning of the book. “Read this.” He pointed to a faded page of text and diagrams. Dutifully, Katherine studied the page. The translation was old-fashioned and very hard to read, but to her utter amazement, the text and drawings clearly outlined the exact same universe heralded by modern superstring theory—a ten-dimensional universe of resonating strings. As she continued reading, she suddenly gasped and recoiled. “My God, it even describes how six of the dimensions are entangled and act as one?!” She took a frightened step backward. “What is this book?!” Her brother grinned. “Something I’m hoping you’ll read one day.” He flipped back to the title page, where an ornately printed plate bore three words. The Complete Zohar. Although Katherine had never read the Zohar, she knew it was the fundamental text of early Jewish mysticism, once believed so potent that it was reserved only for the most erudite rabbis. Katherine eyed the book. “You’re saying the early mystics knew their universe had ten dimensions?” “Absolutely.” He motioned to the page’s illustration of ten intertwined circles called Sephiroth. “Obviously, the nomenclature is esoteric, but the physics is very advanced.” Katherine didn’t know how to respond. “But . . . then why don’t more people study this?” Her brother smiled. “They will.” “I don’t understand.” “Katherine, we have been born into wonderful times. A change is coming. Human beings are poised on the threshold of a new age when they will begin turning their eyes back to nature and to the old ways . . . back to the ideas in books like the Zohar and other ancient texts from around the world. Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it. There will come a day when modern science begins in earnest to study the wisdom of the ancients . . . that will be the day that mankind begins to find answers to the big questions that still elude him.

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.

A rough translation for the way I want to leave this world before you because I can’t imagine having to go through a single day without you in it.

The unfolding spatial extension fron the center of the world to the circumference of the outermost sphere is in relation to the Soveriegn who encompasses it like a single point, and the unfolding temporal dimension from the pre eternal beginning of the motion of the regulator of the day to it's never-ending end, with respect to his actual presence with it, is like a single now.

Jesus’ Last Public Teaching 44Jesus shouted out passionately, “To believe in me is to also believe in God who sent me. 45For when you look at me you are seeing the One who sent me. 46I have come as a light to shine in this dark world so that all who trust in me will no longer wander in darkness. 47If you hear my words and refuse to follow them, I do not judge you. For I have not come to judge you but to save you. 48If you reject me and refuse to follow my words,an you already have a judge. The message of truth I have given you will rise up to judge you at the Day of Judgment.ao 49For I’m not speaking as someone who is self-appointed, but I speak by the authority of the Father himself who sent me, and who instructed me what to say. 50And I know that the Father’s commands resultap in eternal life, and that’s why I speak the very words I’ve heard him speak.

This book should never have happened. If it wasn’t for the most bizarre and twisted sequence of events involving a diverse array of people it wouldn’t have. Let us explain. If someone we, the authors, had wanted to impress - a publisher, say, or a book reviewer - had asked us how it had emerged, we could have come up with all kinds of things to establish our credentials for writing it. But they would have been only a small part of the story of how it came about, and not the interesting bit either. The truth is much more human and fascinating - and it also gets to the heart of the book and shows how networks really work. Greg has always been fascinated by ‘network theory’ - the findings of sociologists, mathematicians and physicists, which seemed to translate to the real world of links between people. Early in his professional life at Auto Trader magazine in Canada he got to see an extraordinary network of buyers and sellers in operation. Later, when he became a venture capitalist - someone who invests in new or young companies, hoping that some of them will become very valuable - he applied what he’d learned. He invested in businesses that could benefit from the way networks behave, and this approach yielded some notable successes. Richard came from a different slant. For twenty years, he was a ‘strategy consultant’, using economic analysis to help firms become more profitable than their rivals. He ended up co-founding LEK, the fastest-growing ‘strategy boutique’ of the 1980s, with offices in the US, Europe and Asia. He also wrote books on business strategy, and in particular championed the ‘star business’ idea, which stated that the most valuable venture was nearly always a ‘star’, defined as the biggest firm in a high-growth market. In the 1990s and 2000s, Richard successfully invested the money he had made as a management consultant in a series of star ventures. He also read everything available about networks, feeling intuitively that they were another reason for business success, and might also help explain why some people’s careers took off while equally intelligent and qualified people often languished. So, there were good reasons why Greg and Richard might want to write a book together about networks. But the problem with all such ‘formal’ explanations is that they ignore the human events and coincidences that took place before that book could ever see the light of day. The most

Over the following days, Dodge became my translator of the world outside the house. Through his nose it became safer, and soon I found myself wanting to inhale the air around me as he did, as something pure and alive and full of messages.

Right now, the majority of plant researchers are skeptical about whether such behavior points to a repository for intelligence, the faculty of memory, and emotions. Among other things, they get worked up about carrying over findings in similar situations with animals and, at the end of the day, about how this threatens to blur the boundary between plants and animals. And so what? What would be so awful about that? The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself: the former photosynthesizes and the latter eats other living beings. Finally, the only other big difference is in the amount of time it takes to process information and translate it into action. Does that mean that beings that live life in the slow lane are automatically worth less than ones on the fast track? Sometimes I suspect we would pay more attention to trees and other vegetation if we could establish beyond a doubt just how similar they are in many ways to animals.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. ~ Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense. ~ The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.

### A Literary Treasure Trove: The best kannada books to gift Searching for the best kannada books to gift ? Discover best-selling novels, poetry, and masterpieces by renowned writers—ideal for any reader who appreciates Kannada literature! Books are the ideal present for any occasion because of their special capacity to unite people from different generations, ethnicities, and viewpoints. There are plenty of engrossing books that appeal to readers of all ages for those wishing to explore the rich world of Kannada literature. Here is a carefully chosen list of some of the greatest Kannada novels to give, whether they are timeless classics or contemporary works of art that capture intricate cultural subtleties and wonderful storytelling. #### 1. R.K. Narayan's "Malgudi Days" A must-read is this classic collection of short stories set in the made-up town of Malgudi. The human condition and the spirit of Indian existence are encapsulated in R.K. Narayan's exquisite narrative. Every story provides an insight into the everyday lives of common people, making it a touching present for anybody who enjoys straightforward yet thought-provoking tales. #### 2. Kuvempu's "Gokak’s Poems" One of Kannada literature's most renowned poets, Kuvempu, skillfully combines intellectual ideas with natural imagery in his poetry. Presenting a selection of his poems, such as "Karnataka Janagalu," encourages the reader to consider their own lives and surroundings while also showcasing the beauty of the Kannada language. #### 3. **"Bhagavad Gita" (D.R. Bendre's translation)** Bendre's Kannada translation of this ancient literature is a remarkable translation that provides readers with a deeper understanding of the intellectual intricacies of the Bhagavad Gita. This holy book is a significant gift that cuts across time and cultural boundaries since it addresses spirituality and ethics.

Jeetbuzz: A Seamless Digital Experience, Built for Bangladesh With Bangladesh’s digital scene expanding every day, users are looking for platforms that work well across devices, support local language, and stay stable even on slower networks. Jeetbuzz stands out by doing all of this — and more — with a platform that feels like it was made just for the local audience. Optimized for Real-World Connectivity Whether you're browsing from Dhaka or a small town in Rajshahi, internet speed is rarely consistent. Jeetbuzz is developed to load fast, even on lower-speed mobile data. The platform is lightweight and smartly designed to reduce buffering and data consumption, which means less waiting and more doing — no matter where you are. Works Smoothly on All Devices Bangladesh is a mobile-first country. Most users are on smartphones, many of them mid-range or budget models. Jeetbuzz has been built to run efficiently on all of them. You won’t need a high-end device to enjoy a full-featured experience. Whether it’s an Android phone, an iPhone, or a tablet, the platform adjusts to your screen without losing functionality. Full Bangla Language Support What makes Jeetbuzz truly accessible is its Bangla-first approach. Every part of the platform — from navigation menus to customer support — is offered in Bangla. This is a big plus for users who prefer using their native language when exploring digital tools. It’s not just translation — it’s localization done right. Clean Interface, Easy to Use A good user experience starts with design, and Jeetbuzz keeps things simple. The layout is clean, the buttons are easy to find, and you don’t have to waste time figuring things out. Everything is placed where it makes sense, making the platform easy for both experienced and first-time users. Why Jeetbuzz Official Matters When it comes to safety and updates, the source matters. That’s why it’s important to use Jeetbuzz Official — the verified access point for the platform. You’ll get the latest features, bug fixes, and performance upgrades, all delivered securely. It also helps you avoid fake versions or phishing links floating around online. Jeetbuzz Official ensures that your information stays protected while you enjoy the full potential of what the platform has to offer. Locally Aware, Globally Functional One of the key strengths of Jeetbuzz is that while it’s adapted to local needs, it doesn’t compromise on technical quality. The platform combines global-grade performance with features that reflect what Bangladeshi users actually need — low data usage, reliable support, mobile compatibility, and full Bangla usability. If you’re looking for a platform that feels local, performs reliably, and is built for your device and connection, Jeetbuzz delivers on all fronts. For the most secure and complete experience, always choose Jeetbuzz Official.

THINK OF THE WAY a stretch of grass becomes a road. At first, the stretch is bumpy and difficult to drive over. A crew comes along and flattens the surface, making it easier to navigate. Then, someone pours gravel. Then tar. Then a layer of asphalt. A steamroller smooths it; someone paints lines. The final surface is something an automobile can traverse quickly. Gravel stabilizes, tar solidifies, asphalt reinforces, and now we don’t need to build our cars to drive over bumpy grass. And we can get from Philadelphia to Chicago in a single day. That’s what computer programming is like. Like a highway, computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction. A microchip—the brain of a computer, if you will—is made of millions of little transistors, each of whose job is to turn on or off, either letting electricity flow or not. Like tiny light switches, a bunch of transistors in a computer might combine to say, “add these two numbers,” or “make this part of the screen glow.” In the early days, scientists built giant boards of transistors, and manually switched them on and off as they experimented with making computers do interesting things. It was hard work (and one of the reasons early computers were enormous). Eventually, scientists got sick of flipping switches and poured a layer of virtual gravel that let them control the transistors by punching in 1s and 0s. 1 meant “on” and 0 meant “off.” This abstracted the scientists from the physical switches. They called the 1s and 0s machine language. Still, the work was agonizing. It took lots of 1s and 0s to do just about anything. And strings of numbers are really hard to stare at for hours. So, scientists created another abstraction layer, one that could translate more scrutable instructions into a lot of 1s and 0s. This was called assembly language and it made it possible that a machine language instruction that looks like this: 10110000 01100001 could be written more like this: MOV AL, 61h which looks a little less robotic. Scientists could write this code more easily. Though if you’re like me, it still doesn’t look fun. Soon, scientists engineered more layers, including a popular language called C, on top of assembly language, so they could type in instructions like this: printf(“Hello World”); C translates that into assembly language, which translates into 1s and 0s, which translates into little transistors popping open and closed, which eventually turn on little dots on a computer screen to display the words, “Hello World.” With abstraction, scientists built layers of road which made computer travel faster. It made the act of using computers faster. And new generations of computer programmers didn’t need to be actual scientists. They could use high-level language to make computers do interesting things.* When you fire up a computer, open up a Web browser, and buy a copy of this book online for a friend (please do!), you’re working within a program, a layer that translates your actions into code that another layer, called an operating system (like Windows or Linux or MacOS), can interpret. That operating system is probably built on something like C, which translates to Assembly, which translates to machine language, which flips on and off a gaggle of transistors. (Phew.) So, why am I telling you this? In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.

The New Yorker (The New Yorker) - Clip This Article on Location 1510 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015 5:42:23 PM FICTION THE DUNIAZáT BY SALMAN RUSHDIE   In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi , or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town. The philosopher who could not speak his philosophy lived on a narrow unpaved street in a humble house with small windows and was terribly oppressed by the absence of light. He set up a medical practice in Lucena, and his status as the ex-physician of the Caliph himself brought him patients; in addition, he used what assets he had to enter modestly into the horse trade, and also financed the making of tinajas , the large earthenware vessels, in which the Jews who were no longer Jews stored and sold olive oil and wine. One day soon after the beginning of his exile, a girl of perhaps sixteen summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not knocking or intruding on his thoughts in any way, and simply stood there waiting patiently until he became aware of her presence and invited her in. She told him that she was newly orphaned, that she had no source of income, but preferred not to work in the whorehouse, and that her name was Dunia, which did not sound like a Jewish name because she was not allowed to speak her Jewish name, and, because she was illiterate, she could not write it down. She told him that a traveller had suggested the name and said it was Greek and meant “the world,” and she had liked that idea. Ibn Rushd, the translator of Aristotle, did not quibble with her, knowing that it meant “the world” in enough tongues to make pedantry unnecessary. “Why have you named yourself after the world?” he asked her, and she replied, looking him in the eye as she spoke, “Because a world will flow from me and those who flow from me will spread across the world.” Being a man of reason, Ibn Rushd did not guess that the girl was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular.

Ten times the Shechinah came down unto the world:—At the garden of Eden (Gen. iii. 8); at the time of the Tower (Gen. xi. 5); at Sodom (Gen. xviii. 21); in Egypt (Exod. iii. 8); at the Red Sea (Ps. xviii. 9); on Mount Sinai (Exod. xix. 20); into the Temple (Ezek. xliv. 2); in the pillar of cloud (Num. xi. 25). It will descend in the days of Gog and Magog, for it is said (Zech. xiv. 4), "And His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives" (the tenth is omitted in the original).

Peter suggests that we never forget one fact: 'That with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day.' Translation: God sets His watch to a time zone not accessible to us. Once again we need to remember that He is the one who created time, like everything else, and He uses it for His own purposes. I like the little story about the foolishness of quantifying God's timing. A little boy asked God, 'How long is a second in heaven?' God said, 'One million years.' The boy asked, 'How much is a penny in heaven?' God answered, 'One million dollars.' The boy said, 'Could I have a penny?' To which God answered, 'In just a second.

Figuring I might entertain myself with heckling, I walked to the bar. I never made it through the door. Instead, I leaned against the doorway, crossed my arms, and enjoyed the spectacle of Raven, Bailey, and Sawyer singing horribly along with Steve Perry. The three blondes sang their talentless hearts out with Sawyer on a stool in the middle. Bailey wasn’t singing as much as yelling to the music. Sawyer was talking the song. Raven though was really trying to sound good. Unfortunately, her sexy voice didn’t translate well into song. The few people in the bar clapped when the song ended. Mainly because Bailey and Raven were hot. Sawyer ran to the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender nodded and gave her a big glass of root beer. She winked at him and told Bailey to pay the man. The kid was going to rule the world one day.

Though the question of Job’s historicity has never been the subject of specific revelation for Latter-day Saints, it has been the subject of at least one semi-official letter from a First Presidency source, as Thomas Alexander reports in Mormonism in Transition: In October 1922, while Heber J. Grant was in Washington, the First Presidency received a letter from Joseph W. McMurrin asking about the position of the Church with regard to the literality of the Bible. Charles W. Penrose, with Anthony W. Ivins, writing for the First Presidency, answered that the position of the Church was that the Bible is the word of God as far as it was translated correctly. They pointed out that there were, however, some problems with the Old Testament. . . . While they thought Jonah was a real person, they said it was possible that the story as told in the Bible was a parable common at the time. The purpose was to teach a lesson, and it “is of little significance as to whether Jonah was a real individual or one chosen by the writer of the book” to illustrate “what is set forth therein.” They took a similar position on Job.

Are there not twelve hours of daylight in every day?b You can go through a day without the fear of stumbling when you walk in the One who gives light to the world.

23 And it came to pass after they had fasted and prayed for the space of two days and two nights, the limbs of Alma received their strength, and he stood up and began to speak unto them, bidding them to be of good comfort: 24 For, said he, I have repented of my sins, and have been redeemed of the Lord; behold I am born of the Spirit. 25 And the Lord said unto me: Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, must be born again; yea, born of God, changed from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming his sons and daughters; 26 And thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this, they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God. 27 I say unto you, unless this be the case, they must be cast off; and this I know, because I was like to be cast off. 28 Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation, repenting nigh unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God. 29 My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity. I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more. 30 I rejected my Redeemer, and denied that which had been spoken of by our fathers; but now that they may foresee that he will come, and that he remembereth every creature of his creating, he will make himself manifest unto all. 31 Yea, every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess before him. Yea, even at the last day, when all men shall stand to be judged of him, then shall they confess that he is God; then shall they confess, who live without God in the world, that the judgment of an everlasting punishment is just upon them; and they shall quake, and tremble, and shrink beneath the glance of his all-searching eye. 32 And now it came to pass that Alma began from this time forward to teach the people, and those who were with Alma at the time the angel appeared unto them, traveling round about through all the land, publishing to all the people the things which they had heard and seen, and preaching the word of God in much tribulation, being greatly persecuted by those who were unbelievers, being smitten by many of them. 33 But notwithstanding all this, they did impart much consolation to the church, confirming their faith, and exhorting them with long-suffering and much travail to keep the commandments of God. 34 And four of them were the sons of Mosiah; and their names were Ammon, and Aaron, and Omner, and Himni; these were the names of the sons of Mosiah. 35 And they traveled throughout all the land of Zarahemla, and among all the people who were under the reign of king Mosiah, zealously striving to repair all the injuries which they had done to the church, confessing all their sins, and publishing all the things which they had seen, and explaining the prophecies and the scriptures to all who desired to hear them. 36 And thus they were instruments in the hands of God in bringing many to the knowledge of the truth, yea, to the knowledge of their Redeemer. 37 And how blessed are they! For they did publish peace; they did publish good tidings of good; and they did declare unto the people that the Lord reigneth. Mosiah Chapter 28 The sons of Mosiah go to preach to the Lamanites—Using the two seer stones, Mosiah translates the Jaredite plates.

The key features of this interpretation include most prominently: The Hebrew word translated “create” (bārāʾ) concerns assigning functions. The account begins in verse 2 with no functions (rather than with no material). The first three days pertain to the three major functions of life: time, weather, food. Days four to six pertain to functionaries in the cosmos being assigned their roles and spheres. The recurring comment that “it is good” refers to functionality (relative to people). The temple aspect is evident in the climax of day seven when God rests—an activity in a temple. The account can then be seen to be a seven-day inauguration of the cosmic temple, setting up its functions for the benefit of humanity, with God dwelling in relationship with his creatures.

•from taking a course or reading a book on world religions, to developing a friendship with a Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist person, to moving to a city in North Africa or South Asia in hopes of being a witness for Christ there •from becoming an advocate for immigrant rights, to getting involved in the diplomatic corps, to becoming a lawyer at the United Nations dedicated to getting countries to abide by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights •from going on a short-term mission trip to reach children in a poor barrio, to supporting a child for forty dollars a month through World Vision or Compassion International, to becoming a social worker dedicated to serving children •from learning a language, to learning about people who don't have the Bible in their mother tongue, to becoming a linguist who translates the Bible •from dedicating thirty minutes per day to pray for the nations of the world, to building crosscultural friendships, to going to serve in a multicultural organization •from studying business at a university, to learning about microfinance, to engaging in business partnerships designed to create jobs for the poorer populations of the world •from taking a stand for an issue (advocating for free-trade coffee, opposing blood diamonds, opposing the manufacturing of "conflict minerals" for cell phones), to becoming an advocate for the people affected, to becoming an executive with a multinational corporation who brings the Christian value of dignity for the people affected by these issues You get the point. These are not issues that will be solved by a generous check. These are issues that can take our lifetimes.

If I died in a freak accident while hurrying through Shibuya's notorious "scramble" intersection, where thousands of pedestrians crossed from all directions at once when the WALK light shifted to green, I hoped whoever performed my funeral service would know I died satisfied. Shibuya felt like being in the center of the vertical world, with tall buildings flashing advertisements, neon lights, and level after level of stores and restaurants visible through glass windows. So many people, so hurried, so much to look at and experience. Fashionista women wearing skinny pants with stiletto pumps riding bikes down crowded sidewalks. Harajuku girls with pink hair and crazy outfits. Loud izakaya bars where men's conversations and laughter spilled onto the street, and women walking by wearing kimonos with white socks tucked into flip-flops. Young people strutting around dressed in kosupure ("cosplay," Nik translated) outfits from their favorite anime, like it was Halloween every day here. TOO MUCH FUN. I didn't want to die, but if I did, I would tell the souls I met in the afterlife: Don't feel bad about my premature end. I saw it all in my short time down in the upworld of Tokyo.

John Wycliffe was born around 1328 in England, and in many truly remarkable ways he prefigured Luther and Luther’s eventual reforms. Wycliffe agitated for a vernacular translation of the Bible so that the people could read God’s Word, and he himself translated most of the New Testament into English—although of course in the fourteenth century it was not the so-yclept Modern English of our own time but the Middle English of Chaucer.* Thus John 3:16 was rendered as “For God louede so the world, that he Ȝaf his oon bigetun sone, that ech man that bileueth in him perische not, but haue euerlastynge lijf.” Wycliffe also worked with others to translate the Old Testament and was as passionate in his day as Luther would be in his own that everyone should know the Gospels in his own spoken language. “Christ and his apostles taught the people in that tongue that was best known to them,” he said. “Why should men not do so now?

Can we say that there is a specifically Islamic kind of psychotherapy? The answer is both yes and no. yes, inasmuch as any kind of intervention based on Islamic principles and using Islamic models and criteria must obviously be regarded as specifically Islamic. No, inasmuch as there will be, of necessity many ideas and techniques that will have to be borrowed by the West. Today's professionals are much more likely to study the techniques of various kinds of therapies from Western textbooks and not from traditional Islamic sources. This is not far removed from the situation of the Muslim world in the early days of the Abbasid caliphate when the Muslims translated works on philosophy, medicine, astronomy, geography, and so on, from Greek to Arabic, evaluated them according to the revealed knowledge of the Quran and hadith, assimilated whatever they found compatible and discarded whatever they thought was not.

Did she want Asma to know the value of the freedom that marriage would give her? She’d be one of the women now, and finally she would have the right to come and go, to mix freely with the older women and listen to their talk, to attend weddings, all of them, near and far, and funerals too. Now she would be one of the women who sat around their coffee in the late mornings and then again at the end of the day. She would be invited to lunch and dinner, and she would issue her own invitations, since she was no longer merely a girl. Marriage was her identity document, her passport to a world wider than home.

and over, the job you go to day in and day out, the status of your bank account. Now consider what you believe is missing in your life . . . Everything you are experiencing is a function of your files, or what you are thinking. Another way to increase your awareness of your dominant negative thought patterns is to closely examine what you think about other people. Here is a series of truths that is often difficult for people to recognize or accept: if you can see it out there, it exists—or has at some point existed—within you. Some of what you see, you have been or don’t want to be. Most of what you see, you believe you are. All of what you see—out there in the world or attached to other people—is a thought that is already present in your mind. “I give meaning to everything I see” is a lesson from A Course in Miracles. It can be translated to mean the following: “I see it because I recognize it. I recognize it because I believe I am it. Because I believe I am it, the ego demands that I hide it and make it all about you.” Making your life conditions and experiences about something or someone other than yourself “trumps” the truth that thoughts, not people, create the

The word hytte can too-simply be translated as "hut," but it holds a more vaulted status in Norway than the English word implies. A quarter of the population own such hytte. They are usually buried in the forest or up above the treeline, and offer Norwegians a place of escape from their lives down in the valleys. Sometimes the huts are located so close to the main residence that it doesn't seem to make sense that someone would abandon the comforts of home for a woodstove-heated, out-housed cabin. But that is exactly the point. This change of gears toward a simpler life, where tasks like boiling water on the woodstove or chopping wood with an ax, that might take only minutes with the help of more advanced technology, may fill the day in your wilderness retreat. These places are sacred to their owners, because they make a balance of the old world and the new.

Ariel signed. "I will take these matters into consideration," Flounder translated, "and will either return here myself in three days or send a messenger in my place." "Understood," the seagull said with a bow. "Understood, My Queen," Flounder corrected politely. "My Queen? How does that work with the Law of the Worlds- that of the Dry World and the World Under the Sea?" Ariel found herself almost rolling her eyes and making that wide, sighing smile she used to with Flounder. But the little gull looked at her, at her, while she signed. Not at her hands, or Flounder as he had spoken. There was a friendly heart under Jona's direct and inappropriate questions. Ariel just shook her head and dove back under the water, tossing a sign over her shoulder as she went. "The Queen says you may call her Ariel," Flounder said. Also, under his breath: "You have no idea what an honor that is.

Banalata Sen Jibananda Das. Translated from the original Bengali by Amitabha Mukerjee A thousand years I have walked these paths, From the harbour at Malacca in the dark of night To the straits of Ceylon at glimmer of dawn. Much have I travelled - The grey world of Ashoka-Bimbisara, Further yet, The dark city of Vidharbha; Around me life foams its stormy breath. Weary of soul, I found a moment's respite in her presence - She: Banalata Sen of Natore. Her hair the ancient darkness of Vidisha, Face a sculpture from Sravasthi. A sailor in distant oceans, rudderless, lost, When hoves into view Island of grass through fronds of cinnamon, A green relief So she felt to me. In the darkness she spoke - "All these years, where had you been?" Her eyebrows arched like the soaring wings of a bird - She: Banalata Sen of Natore. With the sound of dewdrops, Comes evening. The sunset fringe of gold on the eagle's wing Melts into the night And the glow of fireflies. Birds return to nest - The shop of life Shuttered for the day. Left behind in the darkness Face to face - Only she: Banalata Sen of Natore. Original translation 11/90

After Zeidy’s heavy footfalls fade down the stairs, and I watch from my second-floor bedroom window as my grandparents get into the taxi, I slide the book out from under the mattress and place it reverently on my desk. The pages are made of waxy, translucent paper, and they are each packed with text: the original words of the Talmud as well as the English translation, and the rabbinical discourse that fills up the bottom half of each page. I like the discussions best, records of the conversations the ancient rabbis held about each holy phrase in the Talmud. On the sixty-fifth page the rabbis are arguing about King David and his ill-gotten wife Bathsheba, a mysterious biblical tale about which I’ve always been curious. From the fragments mentioned, it appears that Bathsheba was already married when David laid his eyes upon her, but he was so attracted to her that he deliberately sent her husband, Uriah, to the front lines so that he would be killed in war, leaving Bathsheba free to remarry. Afterward, when David had finally taken poor Bathsheba as his lawful wife, he looked into her eyes and saw in the mirror of her pupils the face of his own sin and was repulsed. After that, David refused to see Bathsheba again, and she lived the rest of her life in the king’s harem, ignored and forgotten. I now see why I’m not allowed to read the Talmud. My teachers have always told me, “David had no sins. David was a saint. It is forbidden to cast aspersions on God’s beloved son and anointed leader.” Is this the same illustrious ancestor the Talmud is referring to? Not only did David cavort with his many wives, but he had unmarried female companions as well, I discover. They are called concubines. I whisper aloud this new word, con-cu-bine, and it doesn’t sound illicit, the way it should, it only makes me think of a tall, stately tree. The concubine tree. I picture beautiful women dangling from its branches. Con-cu-bine. Bathsheba wasn’t a concubine because David honored her by taking her as his wife, but the Talmud says she was the only woman David chose who wasn’t a virgin. I think of the beautiful woman on the olive oil bottle, the extra-virgin. The rabbis say that God only intended virgins for David and that his holiness would have been defiled had he stayed with Bathsheba, who had already been married. King David is the yardstick, they say, against whom we are all measured in heaven. Really, how bad can my small stash of English books be, next to concubines? I am not aware at this moment that I have lost my innocence. I will realize it many years later. One day I will look back and understand that just as there was a moment in my life when I realized where my power lay, there was also a specific moment when I stopped believing in authority just for its own sake and started coming to my own conclusions about the world I lived in.

COMPLEMENTARY SKILLS. Opposites attract, and in the startup world this couldn’t be truer. When you’re starting a company, do yourself a favour and make sure your cofounders don’t have overlapping skills – you don’t need three master’s degrees in business administration (or MBAs) to start a company (in fact, that’s probably a recipe for disaster and PowerPoint suicide). In the early days you need someone to take care of the product and business side, and someone to build the software. If you’re great on the business side, you’ll need to stretch yourself to develop a product that users really want to use, and then seduce a great software developer to work alongside you. If you’re a great developer, make sure you hunt for someone who is dedicated to producing a great business model and a great product. The key team skills that you’re looking for are the ability to discover, design and refine a great product concept (and business model) and the ability to translate that vision into actual software. With those bases covered, you’ve cracked one of the toughest parts of getting started. PASSION. Being an entrepreneur is a vocation. If you’ve ever been stuck in a job thinking you could do your boss’s job better, or have said to yourself, ‘What the hell is the CEO thinking? I’d never do that in his position’, then you should test yourself and start a business. It doesn’t matter whether your cofounder comes from a business or marketing background, or an engineering or software background, but it does matter that you both have the same level of passion. Make sure your cofounder has the same drive to solve a big problem, to change the status quo. Without the passion, without the drive, you’re never going to overcome the myriad challenges that will appear on the way.

The Cherokee code talkers (forty in all, twenty for Utah, twenty for Omaha) worked on their radios—they could speak in their own language, confident the Germans would never be able to translate.

... the Hebrew word Shabbat means “to stop.” But it can also be translated “to delight.” It has this dual idea of stopping and also of joying in God and our lives in his world. The Sabbath is an entire day set aside to follow God’s example, to stop and delight.

White genderqueer writer Meg Day wrote of meeting Laura Hershey at a Lambda Literary retreat and Laura asking Meg why she wasn't reading certain Deaf and disabled writers, saying, "these are your foremothers." I didn't know about Laura or her writing until after she died—she'd FB friend requested me but I didn't know who she was. Yet, as Laura Hershey wrote in her poem "Translating the Crip," here we are: "thriving and unwelcome, the irony of the only possible time and place." And we are writing and creating our own media whether or not the abled world can see hear read or witness us.

with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world’s intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things.

Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left, but this too: if we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If our mind starts to wander, we'll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it's time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for... all those are gone.

Then they will ask ˹you˺, “Who will bring us back ˹to life˺?” Say, “The One Who created you the first time.” They will then shake their heads at you and ask, “When will that be?” Say, “Perhaps it is soon!” 52. On the Day He will call you, you will ˹instantly˺ respond by praising Him,[525] thinking you had remained ˹in the world˺ only for a little while.

He left only a small office for his personal business and several people who worked for him buying and selling stocks and paying taxes. In 1917, we were occupying the entire top floor and half of the floor below at 820 Fifth Avenue, which is where I was born. We—“the babes,” as Mother often referred to us in her diary—lived with Powelly in this Fifth Avenue apartment. A governess, Anna Otth, had been added after Bill was born. I can’t remember the years in New York, and since I was a baby, those very early years of separation and substitute parenting had the least effect on me of any of the children. Only psychiatrists can guess about their effect on my older siblings. Much later, my brother, when he was in the process of being analyzed to become a psychoanalyst himself, got very angry thinking about the separation and testily asked my mother how she could have left her children in New York for those early years. She said, “Well, you were all in school.” But the older children were two, four, and six, and I was a few months old, when our parents first left for Washington. WHEN SHE WENT to Washington, my mother’s life changed drastically—and for the better. She was part of a team for the first time, going into a strange city in which she and my father were both new. There seems to have been less anti-Semitic prejudice in Washington than in New York. And in Washington, unlike the many women who to this day find the city distasteful because they are regarded as appendages of their husbands, my mother found a wide canvas on which to paint. She continued to maintain her old interests, particularly in Chinese art, even admitting in her autobiography that “I was so engrossed in translating Chinese texts and in writing a book on the philosophy of Chinese art that it never occurred to me to make any active contribution toward the war effort. In plain truth I sat out the First World War.” At the same time, however, she threw herself into Washington’s social life in a determined way, partly because she enjoyed it but also because she saw immersion in social life as the way she could help further my father’s interests. Mother began another diary at the time they moved to Washington, which makes it clear how devoted she was to him. She often worried that his talents weren’t sufficiently recognized, and she constantly noted the progress of his career and her faith in his abilities: “He is so big that I want him to be of more help in this terrible situation of chaos produced by incompetence and politics mixed.” Although she never quite said so, and often claimed the contrary, she clearly thrived

Kiss the world like morning sun, Sing to the sky like waking birds. Fret not the fears of wild insecurity, You do your task with dutybound heart. Touch the soul like summer breeze, Hug the soil like monsoon rain. Life is calling, can't you hear! Universe awaits your humane reign.

Good to see you again, Freya,” Javier says, his Spanish accent like a warm blanket I want to nuzzle. My mind skips over his words as I imagine what I’d like to hear him say. “I love how your face shines in the morning sun.” “Hot day outside, isn’t it?” he adds with a pained look towards the window. Imaginary translation: He worries about my well-being. “I like the colour of your dress today.” He notices the little things. “Did you pop in yesterday for coffee? I didn’t see you.” He misses me when I’m not here. “Having the usual? Iced coffee with extra milk?” Our wedding photos would be magnificent. I shake my head to silence the voice in my mind that’s as fanciful as a telenovela

In his translation of Columbus’s log, Robert Fuson discusses the context that Zinn deliberately left out: “The cultural unity of the Taino [the name for this particular tribe, which Zinn labels “Arawaks”] greatly impressed Columbus…. Those who see Columbus as the founder of slavery in the New World are grossly in error. This thought occurred to [Samuel Eliot] Morison (and many others), who misinterpreted a statement made by Columbus on the first day in America, when he said, ‘They (the Indians) ought to be good servants.’ In fact, Columbus offered this observation in explanation of an earlier comment he had made, theorizing that people from the mainland came to the islands to capture these Indians as slaves because they were so docile and obliging.

My body is an interchange of time. It is traversed with signals, noises, messages and parasites. It is not exceptional in this vast world. This remains true of animals and plants, of air and crystals, of cells and atoms, of groups and constructed objects. Transformation, deformation of information. I had thought that interchanges were intermediaries, that interference was on the fringe, that the translator was placed between instances43, that the bridge connected two riverbanks, that the path went from the origin to the goal. There are no instances. Or rather, instances, systems, riverbanks, etc. are analyzable in turn as interchanges, paths, translations and so on. There are no instances or systems except for black boxes. When we do not understand, when we defer our knowledge to a later date, when the thing is too complex for the means of the day, when we put everything in a temporary black box, we prejudge that it is a matter of a system. When we can finally open the box, we see that this box functions like a space of transformation. There are no systems, instances or substances except from our ignorance. A system is non-knowledge. The other side of non-knowledge. Non-knowledge has a chaos side and a system side. Knowledge bridges these two riverbanks. Knowledge as such is a space of transformation. This entire question is fractal.

Oh, Mother," Mom begins to translate the text at the bottom, "I met a world that tried to steal me from myself. My body, a glass pot in their hands..." "Thrown away, smashed against the tiles when they were done..." Maasi continues. "But I held my own hand and held yours. I made it to my wedding day..." Bibi Jee nods her head. "And here I am, oh Mother," I finish the sentence. "Here I am marrying myself.

Ya'aburnee. As in you bury me. A rough translation for the way I want to leave this world before you because I can't imagine having to go through a single day without you in it. If this last week was a preview of that kind of life, then I can assure you it isn't a life worth living. You're my wife and my best friend. The future mother of my children and the one place that truly feels lke home. You're the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, not because you signed a contract, but because you love me enough, to stay without one. I want to be the kind of man who is worthy of a woman like ypu - if it's even possible. i promise to work every damn day to make sure you don't regret marrying someone as miserable as me. Because when I'm with you, I'm not miserable at all. You make me happy in a way that makes me afraid to blink just in case it all disappears.

On the Day He will gather them, it will be as if they had not stayed ˹in the world˺ except for an hour of a day,[396] ˹as though they were only˺ getting to know one another. Lost indeed will be those who denied the meeting with Allah, and were not ˹rightly˺ guided!

Review — My Work: Reliquary of the Soul If Emotional Roller Coaster is a cry, Reliquary of the Soul is an intimate altar. Also written independently, this book is born as a poetic and confessional anthology, where each text is a living reliquary: a fragment of the soul transformed into word. Structured in constellations, it guides the reader through different inner universes: *Nature as a mirror of the soul — rivers, mountains, moons, and seasons become metaphors of life, waiting, pain, and rebirth. *Human emotions as inner constellations — each emotion a star lit in the chest, forming a map of feeling. *Invisible illnesses as wounds of the soul — depression, anxiety, panic, and dysphoria translated into poetry and sensitivity. *The rare light of the different — a poetic embrace to neurodivergent, intense, and sensitive souls who never fit the social mold. *Between sky and skin — existential and spiritual reflections that weave philosophy, sensuality, and mysticism. Reliquary does not promise healing, but offers something just as necessary: a sacred mirror where pain has a place, sensitivity has value, and silence becomes shelter. It is the book for those who have been called “too intense,” “too sensitive,” “too dramatic” and need to hear that feeling is a gift, not a flaw. Every page is a scar that chose to become a star. Every metaphor, a lap. Every silence, an embrace. It is not a book to be merely read, it is to be felt, carried in the chest, revisited on the days when the world is heavy.

Once more, I found myself in a positively uncanny world in some ways, conceptually quite unlike our own, in which—contrary to certain theological and cultural developments of later centuries—the partition between the natural and the supernatural, like that between the physical and the spiritual, simply did not yet exist. It was a world in which numinous intelligences, in the form of stars, were visible to the eye in the sky at night, in which the heavens above were occupied by spiritual potentates of questionable character, in which angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty places, in which spirit and breath and wind were all one thing (at once transcendent and materially palpable), and in which the entire cosmos was for many an eternal divine order and for many others a darkened prison house soon to be destroyed and replaced by a redeemed creation. And above it all, literally seated on high in an empyrean beyond the turning heavens, was God in his true dwelling place, in light inaccessible, from whom humanity was separated by a gulf at once spatial and spiritual. In that world, the highest divine reality was always near at hand—just there, above the stars, or just there at the rapidly approaching end of days—and yet also always beyond reach. And yet, as strange as that world now seems to us, what would have seemed far stranger to the people of that time was the extraordinary claim that the God who reigned on high, over this entire order of light and darkness, with all its radiant hierarchies of spirits and powers and its abysmal mysteries of demonic malice, had appeared in the form of a slave and died as a criminal, only then to be raised up and revealed as the Lord of all things. Whether one believes it or not, the very announcement of such a conviction in that world, in that age, was as singular an anomaly within the normal course of things, and within the ordinary frame of human history and culture, as there has ever been. I doubt any of us has ever understood it nearly as well as we imagine.

While the data comes from the richest country in the world during a prosperous period, there have been similar improvements in wealth across the globe. For example, a World Bank report found that the percentage of people living in extreme poverty (less than $1.90 a day) fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent by 2015. This translates to over 1 billion fewer people living in such conditions, despite a global population increase of over 2 billion over this period.[4] Though I don’t have detailed data on global wealth mobility, the large declines in worldwide poverty suggest that more wealth is being built by more people than ever before.

5You have indulged yourselves with every luxury and pleasure this world offers, but you’re only stuffing your heart full for a day of slaughter. 6You have condemned and murdered good and innocent peoplee who had no power to defend themselves.f

As we said earlier, many scholars argue a better translation of Jesus’ original language is “Apprentice under me.” Here’s another option: “Copy the details of my life. Take the template of my day-to-day life as your own.