Worries Vanish Quotes

Reyna marvelled at how peaceful he looked. The worry lines vanished. His face became strangely angelic…like his surname, di Angelo. She could almost believe he was a regular fourteen-year-old boy, not a son of Hades who had been pulled out of time from the 1940s and forced to endure more tragedy and danger than most demigods would in a lifetime.

Science is not a matter of belief. Science does not care whether you believe in it or not. Science will continue to do what science will do, free from morality, free from ethical concerns, and most of all, free from the petty worry that it will not be believed. Belief has shaped the history of human accomplishment—we believe we can, and so we do—but belief has never changed the natural world. The mountain does not vanish because we believe it should. The unicorn does not appear because we believe it will.

I looked up at him. His green eyes glittered in the dark, reflecting the moonlight like a cat's. His scowl had vanished. The defiance was gone, too, replaced by a tightness around his mouth, a worry that clouded his eyes; and seeing that quicksilver change, I wanted to... I don't know what I wanted to do. Kick him in the shins seemed like a good option. Unfortunately, bursting into tears seemed more likely, because here lay the root of the problem, the contradiction in Derek that I couldn't seem to work out, no matter how hard I tried. One second he was in my face, making me feel stupid and useless. The next he was like this: hovering, concerned, worried. I told myself it was just his wolf instinct, that he had to protect me whether he wanted to or not, but when he looked like this, like he'd pushed me too far and regretted it . . . That look said he genuinely cared.

[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." Yes? Why is that?" Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]

It's alright" said a dreamy voice from beside Harry as Ron vanished into the coach's dark interior. "You're not going mad or anything. I can see them too." "Can you?" said Harry desperately, turning to Luna. He could see the bat-winged horses reflected in her wide, silvery eyes. "Oh yes," said Luna, "I've been able to see them since my first year here. They've always pulled the carriages. Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am." Smiling faintly, she climbed into the musty interior of the carriage after Ron. Not altogether reassured, Harry followed her.

Sometimes, we are so focused on what we want that we are blind to the things that make us happy. It’s just incredible, and when I focus on what is right in front of me, nothing else matters. All my worries vanish.

She started to tell him so, but the words vanished unsaid when he abruptly thrust his hands under her skirt, all the way to her waist. Mary gave a startled shriek and jerked back, almost oversetting the chair. He glared at her, his eyes like black ice. "You don't have to worry," he snapped. "This is Saturday. I only rape on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Mania was a mental state every bit as dangerous as depression. At first, however, it felt like a rush of euphoria. You were completely captivating, completely charming; everybody loved you. You took ridiculous physical risks, jumping out of a third-floor dorm room into a snowbank, for instance. It made you spend your year's fellowship money in five days. It was like having a wild party in your head, a party at which you were the drunken host who refused to let anyone leave, who grabbed people by the collar and said, "Come on. One more!" When those people inevitably did vanish, you went out and found others, anyone and anything to keep the party going. You couldn't stop talking. Everything you said was brilliant. You just had the best idea. Let's drive down to New York! Tonight! Let's climb on top of List and watch the sunrise! Leonard got people to do these things. He led them on incredible escapades. But at some point things began to turn. His mind felt as if it was fizzing over. Words became other words inside his head, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. He kept making puns. No one understood what he was talking about. He became angry, irritable. Now, when he looked at people, who'd been laughing at his jokes an hour earlier, he saw that they were worried, concerned for him. And so he ran off into the night, or day, or night, and found other people to be with, so that the mad party might continue...

Worry isn't productive.

It’s funny how you can think you’ve said something when you never really did.” I giggled, feeling that the words were coming in his very next breath. “It’s also funny how you can think you’ve heard something when you didn’t either,” he said instead. All the humor vanished from the moment. “I know what you mean.” I swallowed and watched as his hand moved from my cheek to lace his fingers through mine, knowing that he and I were both watching them. “Maybe, for some people, it would be hard to confess that. Like, if they worried they might not make it to the end.” He sighed. “Or it would be hard to say if you worried that someone might not want to make it to the end . . . maybe never quite gave up on someone else.

It’s tough. When my own son goes out, it’s natural to worry, but I get really paranoid. I worry that something’s going to happen, or he’s going to go missing when he goes out. I’m very protective of him.

5. Fifth Six Regret vanishes. Lose or gain, Stop worrying. Going forward: good fortune. Nothing is unfavorable. Win or lose, stop worrying. To proceed will afford ground for congratulation.

So if you really go the whole way and see how you feel at the prospect of vanishing forever. Have all your efforts, and all your achievements, and all your attainments turning into dust and nothingness. What is the feeling? What happens to you? That's what it's all going to come to. And for some reason or other, we are supposed to find this depressing. Do you see in a way, how that is saying: the most real state is the state of nothing? But if somebody is going to argue that the basic reality is nothingness. Where does all this come from? Obviously from nothingness. Once again you get how it looks behind your eyes. You see? So in this way, by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality, and you see it's your reality. Then how can anything contaminate you? All the idea of you being scared, and put out and worried, and so on, this is nothing, it's a dream. Because you're really nothing. But this is most incredible nothing. So cheer up! You see? The essence of your mind is intrinsically pure. Pure means clear, void. See? If you think of this idea of nothingness as mere blankness, and you hold onto this idea of blankness then kind of grizzly about it, you haven't understood it. Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe. All the sun and the stars and the mountains, and rivers, and the good men and bad men, and the animals, and insects, and the whole bit. All are contained in void. So out of this void comes everything and You Are IT. What else could You BE?

Since flow is a fluid action state, making better decisions isn’t enough: we also have to act on those decisions. The problem is fear, which stands between us and all actions. Yet our fears are grounded in self, time, and space. With our sense of self out of the way we are liberated from doubt and insecurity. With time gone, there is no yesterday to regret or tomorrow to worry about. And when our sense of space disappears, so do physical consequences. But when all three vanish at once, something far more incredible occurs: our fear of death—that most fundamental of all fears—can no longer exist. Simply put: if you’re infinite and atemporal, you cannot die.

It's very peaceful. Like perhaps the life of a ghost. Carefree and without worry. I naturally let the wind take me forwards when it blows. Exactly where I'm headed to... is of no real concern to me. But eventually, when it's my time to leave, I'd like to vanish like an insignificant bubble, and fade away from everyone's memories as well.

Ember, the bad comes in with the good. And I want all of it—I want your secrets, your worry, your pain. I love you—you’re not alone in this life.

She was guilty, after all, of success, a success that stemmed from birthright and privilege. She took hope for granted, saw opportunity as her due, and had never really had to worry about vanishing into a sea of unseen faces and unseen voices.

back. So why am I so worried about making a first impression? I answer my own question: Because you only get to do it once. Every time after, you are only making up for what happened during that initial meeting.

The Stain That Conner left on our lives will not vanish as easily. I don’t care about Mom and her birds. Their estimation of my brother doesn’t bother me at all. Neither do I worry about Dad and what his lobbyist buddies think. His political clout has not diminished. As twins go, Conner and I don’t share a deep affection, but we do have a nine-months-in-the-same-womb connection. Not to mention a crowd of mutual friends. God, I’ll never forget going to school the day after that ugly scene. The plan was to sever the gossip grapevine from the start with an obvious explanation— accident. Mom’s orders were clear. Conner’s reputation was to be protected at all costs. When I arrived, the rumors had already started, thanks to our neighbor, Bobby Duvall. Conner Sykes got hurt. Conner Sykes was shot. Conner Sykes is in the hospital. Is Conner Sykes, like, dead? I fielded every single question with the agreed fabrication. But eventually, I was forced to concede that, though his wounds would heal, he was not coming back to school right away. Conner Sykes wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t exactly “okay.

They were a deep emerald green, the exact same color as mine, and they glowed with an intensity I had never witnessed before. A slash of silver crossed each one, the sun's reflection making them sparkle like dancing crystals. The emerald irises appeared to be swirling in circles, creating the illusion that his eyes were never-ending. Flecks of darker emerald clustered around each pupil made my breath catch in my throat. Suddenly, my disheartened mood vanished, almost as if I had never felt sadness before. Something about these eyes held me in place, as if I had found a balance, blanketing me in a cocoon of comfort, free of worries and concerns.

It's all right," said a dreamy voice from beside Harry as Ron vanished into the coach's dark interior. "You're not going mad or anything. I can see them, too." "Can you?" said Harry desperately, turning to Luna. He could see the bat-winged horses reflected in her wide silvery eyes. "Oh, yes," said Luna, "I've been able to see them ever since my first day here. They've always pulled the carriages. Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.

Now fly off and amuse yourself. Don’t worry the moonbeams, and don’t kill my white rabbits, and come home when you are hungry! The window on the roof is usually open. Good-bye!’ He vanished immediately into thin air; and anybody who has never been there will tell you how extremely thin the moon-air is.

Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct—except for the little problem that this isn’t the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that listen, and talk back—see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, et cetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics—computerised or otherwise—draws them forth. (And you thought running that fractal screen-saver was good for your computer?)

Three times he’d touched her and himself too, panting, his breath thick with brandy, while she tried to get away, but the pantry was too small and he was too strong, pressing her against the shelves. Then it was over, as quick as it started. Soon her fear of him became worse than the touching. All the days she worried that he might creep up behind her ruined the ones when he didn’t.

...she sometimes felt so alone she worried she might vanish like the ink in an overused book. But here, with wildlife all around her and magic sweet in the air like good cider, she felt her lines and colours returning, her edges darkening, her core filling in.

I’m not worried about my father. If anybody understands taking a woman captive to ensure keeping her—he does. You can’t grow up in a family like mine and not be a stalker. When we love, we obsess. We love like crazy until it gets in our bones, fucks with our minds, and takes over our soul.

A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries - each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style - recognise him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not real? They can be unsought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can ve made to be good. Very well then, it is good.

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we’ve understood it. Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define. Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror. The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn. ‘My habits are of solitude, not of men.’ I don’t know if it was Rousseau or Senancour who said this. But it was some mind of my species, it being perhaps too much to say of my race.

The missing girl—there had been unceasing news reports, always flashing to that achingly ordinary school portrait of the vanished teen, you know the one, with the rainbow-swirl background, the girl's hair too straight, her smile too self-conscious, then a quick cut to the worried parents on the front lawn, microphones surrounding them, Mom silently tearful, Dad reading a statement with quivering lip—that girl, that missing girl had just walked past Edna Skylar.

Ooh, ooh, ooh!” Ivy was practically bouncing in excitement over some kind of revelation. “I had a thought,” she said, examining the edge of the wooden stake with interest. “Oh, yes?” encouraged Alexia loudly. Ivy stopped and frowned, her pert little face creased in worry. “I said I had one. It appears to have vanished.

And suddenly I was lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling, my face numb. At least, numb until the adrenaline vanished and pain flooded into every nerve of my skull. I blinked away stars and Tweety Birds, to see Dec and Abe standing above me and looking down, both of their faces frozen in different ways: DECLAN / ABE Worry / Worry Shock / Shock Anger / Mortification Rage / Guilt hating seeing loved one hurt / hating having hurt a friend about to go Hulk-like / wanting to run, but standing his ground

Somewhere between the depth of his stroke and warmth of his tongue, all worries had vanished.

She was good at pretending to be brave. She would never admit to Farrah that she was homesick and worried always about money.

When he’s here, it’s like there’s nothing to be worried or scared about. All the anxiety that is constantly coursing through me, all the racing thoughts, all the doubts, vanish into thin air.

The only thing certain in life is uncertainty. When you’re fearful of the unknown, what you’re really unsure of is your ability to create your own life. Replace that fear with curiosity: What success or great outcome could come from this? What can I learn about myself that will help me reach my goals? Every one of my DWTS partners was worried about that first performance in front of the camera. I worried a few of them might even quit before they ever had a chance to perform. But once you hit that stage, it becomes crystal clear. The fear has nothing to do with the reality of that dance. It comes from not knowing what the experience will be like. Once you feel it and live it, that crippling fear vanishes. But you have to trust yourself: you have to take that first step.

And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees.

The thing she had once loved about swimming was the disappearing. In the water, her focus had been so pure that she thought of nothing else. Any school or home worries vanished. The art of swimming – she supposed like any art – was about - - purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.

For the first time in her life, she didn’t worry about any of the practical details when she told Blake Sanders yes. The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.

Went to find myself, she wrote. I’m safe. Don’t worry about me. The language bothered Stella most of all. You didn’t just find a self out there waiting—you had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be.

Bicycling unites physical harmony coupled with emotional bliss to create a sense of spiritual perfection that combines one’s body, mind and spirit into a single moving entity. Bicycling allows a person to mesh with the sun, sky and road as if nothing else mattered in the world. In fact, all your worries, cares and troubles vanish in the rear view mirror while you bicycle along the byways of the world: you pedal as one with the universe." ~ Frosty Wooldridge

Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women.

Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are you done?” “Almost,” Harding said. “Hang on.” “And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs—being complex creatures—might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction.

One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere — they have vanished… It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value, must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear.

Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?

Reflect on the “I” which can grasp all this. If the “I’ can grasp the idea of the universe and its laws, then that “I” stands above all other things, stands aside from all other things, judges them, fathoms them. In that case, the “I” is not only liberated from earthly axioms, the earthly laws, but has its own law, which transcends the earthly. Now, whence comes that law? Certainly not from earth, where all reaches its issue, and vanishes beyond recall. Is that no indication of immortality? If there were no personal immortality, would you be worrying yourself about it, be searching for an answer?....

IN ALL UNEQUAL relationships, those lacking a name or explicit recognition, there is usually one person who takes the initiative, who phones to suggest meeting up, while the other person has just two possibilities or ways of reaching the same goal of not fading away or vanishing, even though he or she believes that, whatever happens, this is sure to be his or her final fate. One way is simply to wait and do nothing, trusting that eventually the other person will miss you, that your silence and absence will become unexpectedly unbearable or even worrying, because we all very quickly grow accustomed to what is given to us or what is there.

So much of what I have done is tied to what I will do that at times the truth I have already experienced threatens to vanishe with that which I have yet to see. How to express this to you? Whereas my journey until now has been one of potential, of imagination, now its loss seems to question everything I have seen. I have allowed dreams to melt into my realities, now realitieies threaten to melt to only dreams, to disappear. I don't know if anything I am writing makes sense, but in the face of such beauty around me, I only see myself standing outside our door in Franklin Mews, bag in hand, unchanged from the day I left." -Edgar, in a letter to his wife (Chp 11)

From birth to death and further on As we were born and introduced into this world, We had a gift hard to express by word And somewhere in our continuous road, It kind of lost it sense and turned. There was that time we sure remember, When everything was now and 'till forever Children with no worries and no regrets, The only goal was making a few friends. But later on everything has changed, By minds that had it all arranged To bring the people into stress, Into creating their own mess. We have been slaved by our own mind, Turned into something out of our kind Slowly faded away from the present time, Forced to believe in lies, in fights and crime. They made it clearly a fight of the ego, A never ending war that won't just go They made it a competitive game, To seek selfish materialistic fame. They turned us one against eachother, Man against man, brother against brother Dividing us by religion and skin color, Making us fight to death over a dollar. Making us lose ourselves in sadly thoughts, Wasting our days by living in the past Depressed and haunted by the memories, And yet still hoping to fly in our dreams. Some of us tried learning how to dance, Step after step, giving our soul a new chance Some of us left our ego vanish into sounds, Thus being aware of our natural bounce. Some tried expressing in their rhymes, The voice of a generation which never dies They reached eternity through poetry Leaving the teachings that shall fulfill the prophecy Others have found their way through spirituality, Becoming conscious of the human duality Seeking the spiritual enlightenment, Of escaping an ego-oriented fighting Science, philosophy, religion, Try to explain the human origin. Maybe changes are yet to come, And it shall be better for some Death's for the spirit not an end, But a relieving of the embodiment So I believe that furthermore, We'll understand the power of our soul But leaving behind all we know, And all that we might not yet know It all resumes to that certain truth, That we all seek to once conclude.

Marina noticed Sophie, and the worry on my daughter’s face vanished. “My sweet girl. Aren’t you a pretty ballerina?” She touched Sophie’s curls. Sophie held Marina’s hand like it was a fragile china doll. She ran her small brown fingers over the pale-pink nails and the soft knuckles, no doubt a wonder to Sophie, in comparison to Lila’s rough hands.

Mingling with his Bedouin friends, he could keep that heavy cloud from settling over his heart, from convincing him that stories and laughter were nothing but the banal and trivial games of this fleeting lower world, this den of sorrows. When he was with them, amidst the singing, the memory of his two dead sons no longer caught in his throat like a lump and he didn’t feel so weighted down by the world that all he wanted was to vanish and leave its false pretenses behind. When he was with them, the notion that one could feel some joy at the pleasures of this world no longer churned up pangs of guilt from deep inside him. He could enjoy himself without the lurking worry that it was all a chimera he must avoid; he needed to be as alert to its dangers as he was on guard against the most vicious of traps.

A diagnosis is intimate. It is a conclusion. If it is given after years of uncertainty, it can seem liberating. It affirms that all the worries were not unnecessary, that there was, in fact, something wrong; it proves that your own perception of reality is the right one and that you can be trusted. It can put one at ease. If a diagnosis describes a progressive condition, it can also be a source of unease. It conjures images of the future. It is a road map to a place you don’t want to visit. A diagnosis has its own gravitational field. It can shape identity, like other weighty concepts—gender, sexual orientation. One who has never been diagnosed is free without knowing it. What happens when a diagnosis vanishes suddenly? Something is gone, but it was never there, and that which remains is the same as before.

Joost’s panic vanished. He knew he’d been frightened, but his fear was a distant thing. He was filled with expectation. He wasn’t sure what was coming, or when, only that it would arrive and that it was essential he be ready to meet it. It might be bad or good. He didn’t really care. His heart was free of worry and desire. He longed for nothing, wanted for nothing, his mind silent, his breath steady. He only needed to wait.

According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was heir to a small Himalayan kingdom, sometime around 500 BC. The young prince was deeply affected by the suffering evident all around him. He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?

Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t. For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names — inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perkabusing politicians — who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him. Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

To my complete and utter surprise, the writing on his door is gone. Vanished. “What happened?” I ask. It takes him a second before he realizes what I’m asking. “I washed it off,” he explains. “You what?” “I wasn’t going to, but I didn’t want the super to give me a hard time. Plus, I thought it might freak out some of my neighbors. You have to admit, death threats on doors can be pretty offensive, generally speaking. Not to mention the sheer fact that it made me look like a total asshole—like some old girlfriend was trying to get even.” “Did you take pictures at least?” “Actually, no.” He cringes. “That probably would’ve been a good idea.” “But Tray saw the writing, right?” “Um . . .” He nibbles his lip, clearly reading my angst. “You told me he was with you last night. You said you called him.” “I tried, but he didn’t pick up, and I didn’t want you to worry.” “So, you lied?” I snap. “I didn’t want you to worry,” he repeats. “Please, don’t be upset.” “How can I not be? We’re talking about your life here. You can’t go erasing evidence off your door. And you can’t be lying to me, either. How am I supposed to help you if you don’t tell me the truth?” “Why are you helping me?” he asks, taking a step closer. “I mean, I’m grateful and all, and you know I love spending time with you, be it death-threat missions or pizza and a movie. It’s just . . . what do you get out of it? What’s this sudden interest in my life?” My mouth drops open, but I manage a shrug, almost forgetting the fact that he knows nothing about my premonitions.

People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want ten. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age, and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?

People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They are too haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?

Ikicked Aiden in the balls. I kicked Aiden fucking King in the balls. My feet skid to a halt at the threshold of the classroom. I’m panting. My hands are sweaty. The wave of adrenaline vanishes from my system, leaving a tremor in my limbs. My shoulders shake with suppressed laughter. If I didn’t worry that my classmates would start calling me a lunatic, I would’ve laughed so loud right now. I want to run, jump, and bump fists with myself. It’s a strange type of freedom that I haven’t felt in like… ever. I was always quiet and introverted, but right now? I feel like I can punch the moon and kick the stars.

The problem with stealing the magician's assistant from a carnival was that you were always waiting for her to disappear. He expected her to vanish. She had in fact, multiple times, before Simon was born, and just after, too. ...Daniel wanted to be worried for, wanted to be missed without doing any of the leaving that missing demanded. When Paulina left, he counted breaths, and thought constantly of the disappearing box. The reappearing was the most important part of the trick. Eventually he stopped living in fear that she wouldn't come back. The more pressing concern was that she was cutting herself in two.

Kingsley’s phone begins to ring, and her ringtone almost makes me grin. It has Lake and Falcon chuckling. ‘It’s your daddy calling, and you know he’s gonna chew your ear off. It’s your daddy calling, all you’re gonna hear is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ “Hey, Dad,” she answers. “No, we came back early.” She smiles. “Yeah, it was okay.” She leans back against the couch and catches me watching her. I glance away as she continues, “No, nothing happened. We just felt like coming back before the other students.” After a short silence, she quickly rambles, “Someone’s knocking at the door. Gotta go. Love you, Dad.” She hangs up and pulls a worried face at the phone. “That was close.” “You’re not telling your father about the avalanche?” I ask. “There’s no need to worry him about something that’s done and dealt with,” she brushes it off. Changing the subject, Layla asks, “Which ringtone do you have for me?” “Oh!” Instantly the frown vanishes, and Kingsley grins at Layla. “You’re going to love it.” A moment later ‘You are my sunshine,’ comes from the phone. “Aww… thanks, my friend,” Layla coos. Lake leans over the back of the chair. “And me?” Kingsley looks at him from over her shoulder. “Have you heard of Lucas, the spider?” “Yeah.” “You have Lucas.” Kingsley presses play, and then you hear, ‘What you eating? I’m starving.’ “That’s perfect,” Falcon chuckles. “Now I have to hear mine.” “One sec.” Kingsley scrolls to his name and then I let out a bark of laughter. “You have a call from God. Haa-llelujah! Haa-llelujah!” “Badass,” Falcon grins, obviously happy with it. “This is Mason’s.” Kingsley grins mischievously, which tells me I’m not going to like it. Then a butler’s serious voice sounds up, ‘Excuse me, but I’m afraid someone is endeavoring to contact you telephonically. Shall I tell them to fuck off?’ Lake cracks up, disappearing behind the couch which doesn’t help shit seeing as I can hear the fucker laughing his ass off.

In your moments of solitude, when self-doubt, worry, anxiety and fear creep in, dive deep into what you love doing. This could be music, painting, gardening, reading, cooking…whatever…do whatever that makes you forget this world, that makes you forget your pain…surely, there is something that makes you forget who you are. Simply, go do it. When you do this, you will realize how you magically heal, how all your stresses and insecurities vanish. This is why Bliss is so powerful. This is why following your Bliss is so profitable. It helps you live in this world, inevitably trapped in the pulls and pressures of everyday existence, and yet be above all of it, thriving, living happily despite the circumstances.

This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are

men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want 2 million. Those who have 2 million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But

Facts. England. The first two times we children visited it were before the Dictatorship, and there was nothing much to notice but things being inefficient. But the third time, food was short, even though it was on a farm, and Mr Jones and Mrs Jones were worried. I have been asking Simon and Olga and they say that a lot of people were in prison and people got arrested suddenly and then vanished. Well, there’s nothing new in that. And the people who couldn’t get work, particularly the young ones, were rampaging about. That was before they were put in armies and kept in camps. Wales and Scotland were the same, although they were Independent. The Dictatorship was trying to be all English, and not to have so many foreigners. When George went for his year farming, it was hard to arrange. Travel got difficult after the Dictatorship and anyway, people couldn’t afford it.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you're clean and don't even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain. They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. [178: A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.’] It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

I pull into the field & cut the engine. It's simple: I just don't know how to love a man gently. Tenderness a thing to be beaten into. Fireflies strung through sapphired air. You're so quiet you're almost tomorrow. The body was made soft to keep us from loneliness. You said that as if the car were filling with river water. Don't worry. There's no water. Only your eyes closing. My tongue in the crux of your chest. Little black hairs like the legs of vanished insects. I never wanted the flesh. How it never fails to fail so accurately. But what if I broke through the skin's thin page anyway & found the heart not the size of a fist but your mouth opening to the width of Jerusalem. What then? To love another man--is to leave no one behind to forgive me. I want to leave no one behind. To keep & be kept. The way a field turns its secrets into peonies. The way light keeps its shadow by swallowing it.

The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama. According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was heir to a small Himalayan kingdom, sometime around 500 BC. The young prince was deeply affected by the suffering evident all around him. He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it? At the age of twenty-nine Gautama slipped away from his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his family and possessions. He travelled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, searching for a way out of suffering. He visited ashrams and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely – some dissatisfaction always remained. He did not despair. He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.

He pushed off from the bed against which he leaned. All signs of worry vanished from him. He forced a neutral expression onto his face. My Beast Lord. "Come," I whispered. He came over to my bed. "Closer . . ." He leaned in closer. It took all of my will. I lifted my hand and punched his jaw. It was the saddest punch on the planet. My fingers barely grazed his stubble and then my arm gave out and fell back on the bed. Curran blinked. "You looked sad," I explained. "Is this you trying to cheer me up?" "What are you . . . going . . . to do about it?" I asked. "Your Wussiness?" He touched his index finger to my forehead. His voice was rough. "Tap. You're out, Ass Kicker." "I leave you alone for five minutes and you're in here punching each other and playing grab-ass," Doolittle said from somewhere in the room. "I expect this from you, Kate, because you have no sense, but you, you should know better. Roughhousing in the hospital.

I really like you." He spoke softly and the words floated around her in a dreamy way. "More than I've ever liked anyone and if you knew everything about me, you'd know that means a lot." She started to ask him to explain, but before she could he bent down. She thought he was going to kiss her, but he let his lips tease, hovering inches from hers. Their breath mingled. When his lips finally touched hers, a pleasant shock went through her. All the worries that had been building inside her seemed to vanish and there was only Chris and the sensations of her body. She had imagined so often what it must feel like to kiss a guy, but even in her wildest fantasies a kiss had never felt as good as the ones Chris gave her. When he pulled back, she opened her eyes quickly and caught a look of intense longing in his eyes, and then it was gone. Was it only her imagination? "Chris..." She started to ask him what was bothering him, but he closed her mouth with another kiss.

I’m talking about all the order in the natural world,” Malcolm said. “And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh,

The absurd chatter of the half-caste had given more reality to the miserable dangers of his path than Stein’s careful statements. On that occasion the sort of formality that had been always present in our intercourse vanished from our speech; I believe I called him “dear boy,” and he tacked on the words “old man” to some half-uttered expression of gratitude, as though his risk set off against my years had made us more equal in age and in feeling. There was a moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a glimpse of some everlasting, of some saving truth. He exerted himself to soothe me as though he had been the more mature of the two. “All right, all right,” he said rapidly and with feeling. “I promise to take care of myself. Yes; I won’t take any risks. Not a single blessed risk. Of course not. I mean to hang out. Don’t you worry. Jove! I feel as if nothing could touch me. Why! this is luck from the word Go. I wouldn’t spoil such a magnificent chance!”... A magnificent chance! Well, it was magnificent, but chances are what men make them, and how was I to know? As he had said, even I — even I remembered — his — his misfortune against him. It was true. And the best thing for him was to go.

So now George has arrived. He is not nervous in the least. As he gets out of his car, he feels an upsurge of energy, of eagerness for the play to begin. And he walks eagerly, with a springy step, along the gravel path past the Music Building toward the Department office. He is all actor now—an actor on his way up from the dressing room, hastening through the backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make his entrance. A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line: "Go od morning!" And the three secretaries—each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style—recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply "Good morning!" to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church—a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good.)

Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It's the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don't even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don't want to feel the weather outside. Those are just its everyday manifestations. We feel it most keenly when we reach for the language of grief but find only platitudes, when we hurl the darkest wastes of our experience out into the ether and find no one willing to catch them. Something has been lost here, vanished beyond living memory: a fluency in the experiences that have patterned humanity since we began. We have surrendered the rites of passage that used to take us from birth to death, and in doing so, have rendered many parts of our experience unspeakable. We witness them anyway, separately, mutely, in studied isolation from our friends and neighbours who are doing the same. Centuries of knowledge are lost in this silence, generations of fellowship. Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.

He swore sharply, David Jones’s still-so-familiar voice coming out of that stranger’s body. “Do you have any idea how unbelievably hard it’s been to get you alone?” Had she finally started hallucinating? But he took off his glasses, and she could see his eyes more clearly and . . . “It’s you,” she breathed, tears welling. “It’s really you.” She reached for him, but he stepped back. Sisters Helen and Grace were hurrying across the compound, coming to see what the ruckus was, shading their eyes and peering so they could see in through the screens. “You can’t let on that you know me,” Jones told Molly quickly, his voice low, rough. “You can’t tell anyone—not even your friend the priest during confession, do you understand?” “Are you in some kind of danger?” she asked him. Dear God, he was so thin. And was the cane necessary or just a prop? “Stand still, will you, so I can—” “No. Don’t. We can’t . . .” He backed away again. “If you say anything, Mol, I swear, I’ll vanish, and I will not come back. Unless . . . if you don’t want me here—and I don’t blame you if you don’t—” “No!” was all she managed to say before Sister Helen opened the door and looked from the mess on the floor to Molly’s stricken expression. “Oh, dear.” “I’m afraid it’s my fault,” Jones said in a British accent, in a voice that was completely different from his own, as Helen rushed to Molly’s side. “My fault entirely. I brought Miss Anderson some bad news. I didn’t realize just how devastating it would be.” Molly started crying. It was more than just a good way to hide her laughter at that accent—those were real tears streaming down her face and she couldn’t stop them. Helen led her to one of the tables, helped her sit down. “Oh, my dear,” the nun said, kneeling in front of her, concern on her round face, holding her hand. “What happened?” “We have a mutual friend,” Jones answered for her. “Bill Bolten. He found out I was heading to Kenya, and he thought if I happened to run into Miss Anderson that she would want to know that a friend of theirs recently . . . well, passed. Cat’s out of the bag, right? Fellow name of Grady Morant, who went by the alias of Jones.” “Oh, dear,” Helen said again, hand to her mouth in genuine sympathy. Jones leaned closer to the nun, his voice low, but not low enough for Molly to miss hearing. “His plane went down—burned—gas tank exploded . . . Ghastly mess. Not a prayer that he survived.” Molly buried her face in her hands, hardly able to think. “Bill was worried that she might’ve heard it first from someone else,” he said. “But apparently she hadn’t.” Molly shook her head, no. News did travel fast via the grapevine. Relief workers tended to know other relief workers and . . . She could well have heard about Jones’s death without him standing right in front of her. Wouldn’t that have been awful?

If we focus on the meat, this contrast is, financial death and warrior death, a split which Oswald Spengler calls 'hunger death' and 'hero death'. The hungry human, in a 9 to 5 existence is threatened, dishonored, and debased by financial worry and the fear of mental starving, which stunts possibilities, chokes consciousness, produces darkness and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. You can lose your whole life-will through the gaping wretchedness of living in the modern world of debt and work. The tragedy is that in the modern world, you die of something (starvation, disease, boredom) and not for something (death by action). In waring and fighting, you sacrifice for higher policies, you can die for something higher, you full for a metaphysics, a mode of consciousness higher than your meat body. On the other hand, economic life merely waste you away. Spengler writes, 'War is the creature, hunger the destroyer, of all things'. In war life is elevated by death, often to the point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory. But in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, the vulgar, and wholly un-metaphysical form of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form of being a human miserably collapses and the naked struggle for survival of the human beast begins. By the warrior, Evola isn't writing about what Henry Kissinger called 'dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy'. Evola's metaphysical fighter need no longer be a Viking or a Helene, like king Ragnar or Achilles. That world has vanished. The modern soldier has no metaphysics. Evola writes about the struggle within. It is within where the struggle for essence takes place.

They won’t do it, Ian,” Jordan Townsende said the night after Ian was released on his own recognizance. Pacing back and forth across Ian’s drawing room, he said again, “They will not do it.” “They’ll do it,” Ian said dispassionately. The words were devoid of concern; not even his eyes showed interest. Days ago Ian had passed the point of caring about the investigation. Elizabeth was gone; there had been no ransom note, nothing whatever-no reason in the world to continue believing that she’d been taken against her will. Since Ian knew damned well he hadn’t killed her or had her abducted, the only remaining conclusion was that Elizabeth had left him for someone else. The authorities were still vacillating about the other man she’d allegedly met in the arbor because the gardener’s eyesight had been proven to be extremely poor, and even he admitted that it “might have been tree limbs moving around her in the dim light, instead of a man’s arms.” Ian, however, did not doubt it. The existence of a lover was the only thing that made sense; he had even suspected it the night before she disappeared. She hadn’t wanted him in her bed; if anything but a lover had been worrying her that night, she’d have sought the protection of his arms, even if she didn’t confide in him. But he had been the last thing she’d wanted. No, he hadn’t actually suspected it-that would have been more pain than he could have endured then. Now, however, he not only suspected it, he knew it, and the pain was beyond anything he’d ever imagined existed. “I tell you they won’t bring you to trial,” Jordan repeated. “Do you honestly think they will?” he demanded, looking first to Duncan and then to the Duke of Stanhope, who were seated in the drawing room. In answer, both men raised dazed, pain-filled eyes to Jordan’s, shook their heads in an effort to seem decisive, then looked back down at their hands. Under English law Ian was entitled to a trial before his peers; since he was a British lord, that meant he could only be tried in the House of Lords, and Jordan was clinging to that as if it were Ian’s lifeline. “You aren’t the first man among us to have a spoiled wife turn missish on him and vanish for a while in hopes of bringing him to heel,” Jordan continued, desperately trying to make it seem as if Elizabeth were merely sulking somewhere-no doubt unaware that her husband’s reputation had been demolished and that his very life was going to be in jeopardy. “They aren’t going to convene the whole damn House of Lords just to try a beleaguered husband whose wife has taken a start,” he continued fiercely. “Hell, half the lords in the House can’t control their wives. Why should you be any different?” Alexandra looked up at him, her eyes filled with misery and disbelief. Like Ian, she knew Elizabeth wasn’t indulging in a fit of the sullens. Unlike Ian, however, she could not and would not believe her friend had taken a lover and run away. Ian’s butler appeared in the doorway, a sealed message in his hand, which he handed to Jordan. “Who knows?” Jordan tried to joke as he opened it. “Maybe this is from Elizabeth-a note asking me to intercede with you before she dares present herself to you.” His smile faded abruptly. “What is it?” Alex cried, seeing his haggard expression. Jordan crumpled the summons in his hand and turned to Ian with angry regret. “They’re convening the House of Lords.” “It’s good to know,” Ian said with cold indifference as he pushed out of his chair and started for his study, “that I’ll have one friend and one relative there.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you're clean and don't even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain. They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. [178: A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.’] It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

When Mama leaned over to kiss me, I hugged her so tight she could hardly breathe. “I’ll never forget you,” I whispered. Mama drew back. “What did you say?” “Nothing,” I mumbled. “I love you, Mama.” She smiled. “Well, for goodness sake, you little jackanapes, I love you too.” Smoothing the quilt over me, she turned to the others. “What Andrew needs is a good night’s sleep. In the morning, he’ll be himself again, just wait and see.” “I hope so,” Andrew said. Papa frowned. “No one will get any sleep, good or bad, with Buster making such a racket. I don’t know what ails that animal.” While we’d been talking, Andrew had gone to the window and whistled for the dog. Though the Tylers hadn’t heard the loud two-fingered blast, Buster definitely had. His howls made the hair on my neck prickle. Even Andrew looked frightened. He backed away from the window and sat quietly in the rocker. “Edward told me a dog howls when somebody in the family is about to die,” Theo said uneasily. Papa shook his head. “That’s superstitious nonsense, Theodore. Surely you know better than to believe someone as well known for mendacity as your cousin.” Muttering to himself, Papa left the room. Taking Theo with her, Mama followed, but Hannah lingered by the bed. I reached out and grabbed her hand. “Don’t leave yet,” I begged. “Stay a while.” Hannah hesitated for a moment, her face solemn, her eyes worried. “Mama’s right, Andrew,” she said softly. “You need to rest, you’ve overexcited yourself again. We’ve got all day tomorrow to sit in the tree and talk.” When Hannah reached up to turn off the gas jet, I glanced at Andrew. He was watching his sister from the rocker, his eyes fixed longingly on her face. A little wave of jealousy swept over me. He’d get to be with her for years, but all I had were a few more minutes. In the darkness, Hannah smiled down at me. “Close your eyes,” she said. “Go to sleep.” “But I’ll never see you again.” Hannah’s smile vanished. “Don’t talk nonsense,” she whispered. “You’ll see me tomorrow and every day after that.” In the corner, Andrew stared at his sister and rocked the chair harder. In the silent room I heard it creak, saw it move back and forth. Startled by the sound, Hannah glanced at the rocker and drew in her breath. Turning to me, she said, “Lord, the moon’s making me as fanciful as you. I thought I saw--” She shook her head. “I must need a good night’s sleep myself.” Kissing me lightly on the nose, Hannah left the room without looking at the rocking chair again.

We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.

He loves you,’ I said, and smoothed the tumbled hair off her flushed face. ‘He won’t stop.’ I got up, brushing yellow leaves from my skirt. ‘We’ll have a bit of time, then, but none to waste. Jamie can send word downriver, to keep an eye out for Roger. Speaking of Roger …’ I hesitated, picking a bit of dried fern from my sleeve. ‘I don’t suppose he knows about this, does he?’ Brianna took a deep breath, and her fist closed tight on the leaf in her hand, crushing it. ‘Well, see, there’s a problem about that,’ she said. She looked up at me, and suddenly she was my little girl again. ‘It isn’t Roger’s.’ ‘What?’ I said stupidly. ‘It. Isn’t. Roger’s. Baby,’ she said, between clenched teeth. I sank down beside her once more. Her worry over Roger suddenly took on new dimensions. ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Here, or there?’ Even as I spoke, I was calculating – it had to be someone here, in the past. If it had been a man in her own time, she’d be farther along than two months. Not only in the past, then, but here, in the Colonies. I wasn’t planning to have sex, she’d said. No, of course not. She hadn’t told Roger, for fear he would follow her – he was her anchor, her key to the future. But in that case – ‘Here,’ she said, confirming my calculations. She dug in the pocket of her skirt, and came out with something. She reached toward me, and I held out my hand automatically. ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.’ The worn gold wedding band sparked in the sun, and my hand closed reflexively over it. It was warm from being carried next to her skin, but I felt a deep coldness seep into my fingers. ‘Bonnet?’ I said. ‘Stephen Bonnet?’ Her throat moved convulsively, and she swallowed, head jerking in a brief nod. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you – I couldn’t; not after Ian told me about what happened on the river. At first I didn’t know what Da would do; I was afraid he’d blame me. And then when I knew him a little better – I knew he’d try to find Bonnet – that’s what Daddy would have done. I couldn’t let him do that. You met that man, you know what he’s like.’ She was sitting in the sun, but a shudder passed over her, and she rubbed her arms as though she was cold. ‘I do,’ I said. My lips were stiff. Her words were ringing in my ears. I wasn’t planning to have sex. I couldn’t tell … I was afraid he’d blame me. ‘What did he do to you?’ I asked, and was surprised that my voice sounded calm. ‘Did he hurt you, baby?’ She grimaced, and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them against herself. ‘Don’t call me that, okay? Not right now.’ I reached to touch her, but she huddled closer into herself, and I dropped my hand. ‘Do you want to tell me?’ I didn’t want to know; I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, too. She looked up at me, lips tightened to a straight white line. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t want to. But I think I’d better.’ She had stepped aboard the Gloriana in broad daylight, cautious, but feeling safe by reason of the number of people around; loaders, seamen, merchants, servants – the docks bustled with life. She had told a seaman on the deck what she wanted; he had vanished into the recesses of the ship, and a moment later, Stephen Bonnet had appeared. He had on the same clothes as the night before; in the daylight, she could see that they were of fine quality, but stained and badly crumpled. Greasy candle wax had dripped on the silk cuff of his coat, and his jabot had crumbs in it. Bonnet himself showed fewer marks of wear than did his clothes; he was fresh-shaven, and his green eyes were pale and alert. They passed over her quickly, lighting with interest. ‘I did think ye comely last night by candlelight,’ he said, taking her hand and raising it to his lips. ‘But a-many seem so when the drink is flowin’. It’s a good deal more rare to find a woman fairer in the sun than she is by the moon.

And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media--it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benneton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity--our most necessary resource?

Some really brilliant men (I am thinking mainly of McTaggart) made great efforts in constructive idealistic thought, well above the level of Hegel; but they did not get very far beyond providing targets for equally brilliant critics. And one can say that outside the continent of Europe, especially in the last twenty years, the interest of philosophers in Hegel has slowly been vanishing. But if that is so, why worry any more about Hegel? The answer is that Hegel’s influence has remained a most powerful force, in spite of the fact that scientists never took him seriously, and that (apart from the ‘evolutionists’6. many philosophers are beginning to lose interest in him. Hegel’s influence, and especially that of his cant, is still very powerful in moral and social philosophy and in the social and political sciences (with the sole exception of economics). Especially the philosophers of history, of politics, and of education are still to a very large extent under its sway. In politics, this is shown most drastically by the fact that the Marxist extreme left wing, as well as the conservative centre, and the fascist extreme right, all base their political philosophies on Hegel; the left wing replaces the war of nations which appears in Hegel’s historicist scheme by the war of classes, the extreme right replaces it by the war of races; but both follow him more or less consciously. (The conservative centre is as a rule less conscious of its indebtedness to Hegel.)

Piper felt her temper rising. At first, she’d felt nothing but fear. Then Meyer had vanished, and intense worry mingled with her terror. A halfway sense of loss followed a few weeks of missing him, but even the emptiness had been hard to maintain over the past three months as the bunker’s day-in, day-out routine composed life’s underground ritual.

As he stood, a single red petal fell from his black velvet cloak. “I’m glad you came out of your room. I hope to see you at supper.” Luca unfastened the cloak from around his neck and handed it to her. “Here. It’s getting dark. You might get cold.” Cass accepted the cloak and draped it across her front like a blanket. A square of white cotton fell out of the pocket and she reached down and picked it up. Luca’s handkerchief. Her fingers stroked the embroidered initials--LdP. She thought back to her conversation with Madalena about dropping handkerchiefs. It seemed like the exchange had happened in another lifetime. She tucked the square of fabric back into the pocket of his cloak. Luca smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “I manage to lose more of those than you can imagine.” He turned back toward the house. The air turned cool as the stars came out, but Luca’s cloak kept Cass surprisingly warm. A blurry face appeared at one of the windows. Cass recognized Agnese’s favorite white cap. Cass gave her aunt a hesitant wave and the face vanished. Cass wondered if everyone had been worrying about her. She remembered the cautious way Luca had approached her, as if she were a wild horse that might spook and run off.

There are many whose hearts are aching under a load of care because they seek to reach the world's standard. They have chosen its service, accepted its perplexities, adopted its customs. Thus their character is marred, and their life made a weariness. In order to gratify ambition and worldly desires, they wound the conscience, and bring upon themselves an additional burden of remorse. The continual worry is wearing out the life forces. Our Lord desires them to lay aside this yoke of bondage. He invites them to accept His yoke; He says, "My yoke is easy, and My burden is light." He bids them seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and His promise is that all things needful to them for this life shall be added. Worry is blind, and cannot discern the future; but Jesus sees the end from the beginning. In every difficulty He has His way prepared to bring relief. Our heavenly Father has a thousand ways to provide for us, of which we know nothing. Those who accept the one principle of making the service and honor of God supreme will find perplexities vanish, and a plain path before their feet.

And Feuer works with you?” “No. She’s just been helping me with one case I’m working on. Just as a favor.” “Some favor,” Conroy said. He handed my license back. “You want to tell us what happened?” Gianakouros said. How to answer that? I wanted to, but this was not a story I could tell quickly. Where did it even start? When Susan began making calls for me, or before that when I first saw her dancing at the Sin Factory, or before that, when I opened the paper and saw Miranda’s face staring out at me, all innocence and accusation? Or ten years earlier, when I’d seen Miranda last, when I’d sent her off on a boomerang voyage from New York to New Mexico and back again, from possibility to disaster and from life to death? I’d have to explain an awful lot if I wanted them to understand what had happened. And I wouldn’t mind explaining — but right now I couldn’t afford the time. Jocelyn was still in town, but for how long? She was packed and ready to go. She’d just needed to sew up some loose ends, like the troublemaker who was calling all the strip clubs she’d ever worked at and trying to track her down. I’d set Susan on Jocelyn’s trail, and somehow it had gotten back to her. Was it any wonder that Jocelyn had decided to eliminate Susan before leaving the city? Now, Jocelyn probably just needed to pick up the money from wherever she’d stashed it and then she’d vanish forever. One of the country’s best agencies hadn’t been able to find her the last time she’d gone on the road, and back then she hadn’t had a half million dollars to help her hide. “We’re looking for a missing woman named Jocelyn Mastaduno,” I said. “Her parents haven’t heard from her in six years and they want to know what happened to her. Susan was helping me make some calls to track her down.” “What was she doing in the park?” “I don’t know,” I said. “How did you know she was there?” “Susan was staying with my mother. She told her she was going to the park, and my mother mentioned it to me.” “So you went there.” “I was worried,” I said. “I didn’t understand why she’d gone there, and the park can be dangerous at night.” Conroy spoke up. “Any idea who might have done this?” “None,” I said. “What about this woman you’re looking for, Mastaduno?” “It’s possible. I just don’t know.” “How close are you to finding her?” Pretty close, I thought — if I can get out of here. I fought to keep my voice calm. “I can’t say. We’re not the

Before I met Rosie, I’d believed that a snake’s personality was rather like that of a goldfish. But Rosie enjoyed exploring. She stretched her head out and flicked her tongue at anything I showed her. Soon she was meeting visitors at the zoo. Children derived the most delight from this. Some adults had their barriers and their suspicions about wildlife, but most children were very receptive. They would laugh as Rosie’s forked tongue tickled their cheeks or touched their hair. Rosie soon became my best friend and my favorite snake. I could always use her as a therapist, to help people with a snake phobia get over their fear. She had excellent camera presence and was a director’s dream: She’d park herself on a tree limb and just stay there. Most important for the zoo, Rosie was absolutely bulletproof with children. During the course of a busy day, she often had kids lying in her coils, each one without worry or fear. Rosie became a great snake ambassador at the zoo, and I became a convert to the wonderful world of snakes. It would not have mattered what herpetological books I read or what lectures I attended. I would never have developed a relationship with Rosie if Steve hadn’t encouraged me to sit down and have dinner with her one night. I grew to love her so much, it was all the more difficult for me when one day I let her down. I had set her on the floor while I cleaned out her enclosure, but then I got distracted by a phone call. When I turned back around, Rosie had vanished. I looked everywhere. She was not in the living room, not in the kitchen, not down the hall. I felt panic well up within me. There’s a boa constrictor on the loose and I can’t find her! As I turned the corner and looked in the bathroom, I saw the dark maroon tip of her tail poking out from the vanity unit. I couldn’t believe what she had done. Rosie had managed to weave her body through all the drawers of the bathroom’s vanity unit, wedging herself completely tight inside of it. I could not budge her. She had jammed herself in. I screwed up all my courage, found Steve, and explained what had happened. “What?” he exclaimed, upset. “You can’t take your eyes off a snake for a second!” He examined the situation in the bathroom. His first concern was for the safety of the snake. He tried to work the drawers out of the vanity unit, but to no avail. Finally he simply tore the unit apart bare-handed. The smaller the pieces of the unit became, the smaller I felt. Snakes have no ears, so they pick up vibrations instead. Tearing apart the vanity must have scared Rosie to death. We finally eased her out of the completely smashed unit, and I got her back in her enclosure. Steve headed back out to work. I sat down with my pile of rubble, where the sink once stood.

Somewhere in my distant memories, I used to be so busy that I longed for a pause button for my life. To freeze the whole world for an hour, or an afternoon: that was my favourite daydream. To stroll across green grass, admire the butterflies stopped in midair, stroke the soft feathers of birds at the feeder. To maybe lie down and take a nap in the sunshine and know that absolutely nothing needed to get done. No deadlines ticking closer. No obligations crowding in. But deadlines don't worry me anymore. Neither do aches and pains. Minor problems like that can't begin to touch the agony I'm in. I lie as still as I can to keep the thoughts and memories from finding me, but sick misery clings to me anyway, as close as a second skin.

Nick implied the job pays crap, so they can’t expect me to be some sort of art professor, right?” She paused when the bartender appeared with a bottle of beer and a slender fluted glass of champagne. The bubbles streaming upward through the pale liquid reminded him of Emma’s personality: round and fizzy, rising as high as they could go. He felt like shit. “Of course, I still need to find a place to live,” Emma said after taking a sip of her drink. “But as long as I have a place to work, I’m good. I can always buy a tent.” “You don’t have to buy a tent,” he said curtly. “Just joking.” She reached across the table and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “But at least now I don’t have to worry about finding a place to live where I can also work.” He drank some beer straight from the bottle, relishing its sour flavor. Closing his eyes, he pictured that small, windowless room in the community center, its linoleum floor, its cinderblock walls, its sheer ugliness. She was thrilled because she thought it was her only option. But it wasn’t. “Look, Emma—if you want, I’ll take my house off the market. I don’t have to get rid of it. If you want to continue to live there…” She’d raised her champagne flute to her lips, but his words clearly startled her enough to make her lower the glass and gape at him. “But you came to Brogan’s Point to sell the house.” “It can wait.” “And I can’t keep teaching there. You said so yourself. There are those nasty zoning laws. And insurance issues, and liability. All that legal stuff.” She pressed her lips together, effectively smothering her radiant smile. “Taking the room at the community center means I’ll be able to teach there this summer in Nick’s program. So I’ll earn a little more money and maybe make contact with more people who might want to commission Dream Portraits.” She shook her head. “I can make it work.” “You could make it work in my house, too. Stay. Stay as long as you want. We’re not a landlord and tenant anymore. We’ve gone beyond that, haven’t we?” She stared at him, suddenly wary. “What do you mean?” He wasn’t sure what was troubling her. “Emma. We’ve made love. Several times.” Several spectacular times, he wanted to add. “You can stay on in the house. Forget about the rent. That’s the least I owe you.” Her expression went from wary to deflated, from deflated to suspicious. Her voice was cool, barely an inch from icy. “You don’t owe me anything, Max—unless you want to pay me for your portrait. I can’t calculate the cost until I figure out what the painting will…entail.” She seemed to trip over that last word, for some reason. “But as far as the house… I don’t need you to do that.” “Do what? Take it off sale? It isn’t even on sale yet.” “You don’t have to let me stay on in the house because we had sex. I didn’t make love with you because I wanted something in return. You don’t owe me anything.” She sighed again. The fireworks vanished from her eyes, extinguished

Just as the word implies, mementos are reminders of a time when these items gave us joy. The thought of disposing of them sparks the fear that we’ll lose those precious memories along with them. But you don’t need to worry. Truly precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the objects associated with them.

It made him feel so good that the lingering discomfort he’d carried in his chest vanished entirely and he said, “Sometimes I really love making you mad.” “No, you don’t,” she told him, visibly softening now. “You love making me irritable. You’ve never seen me mad.” Ely snorted. “Plenty of times!” “But never at you.” She looked up at him, every inch of her face serious, like she was worried he didn’t understand this. Her eyes were wide, solemn. “I’ve never been mad at you.

By high school, the flicker of interest is for many kids vanished. As we age, the awareness of the social world often crowds out interest in the natural one, perhaps ever more so as the social world expands into vast electronic form. My favorite Thoreau book, left now in a classroom somewhere, was a series of fragments from his journals opposite full-page photographs of leaves, rocks, clouds, a narrow stream or an abandoned nest. Seeing requires a sense of solitude, if not its truth, a willingness to push away for a moment our worries about who we are to other people to take in what is before our nose.

Here’s one of Claire’s favorite recipes, which never fails to make smiles bloom around the breakfast table. The ingredients and spices are varied, and Claire claims there’s no reason to worry if you don’t have everything on hand. Just improvise. The muffins never come out the same way twice but are always delicious . . . and could be called Vanishing Muffins, since they disappear so quickly. Morning Glory Muffins MAKES 16 MUFFINS Ingredients 2¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking soda ¾ cup brown sugar, lightly packed (light or dark) ¾ cup white sugar 2 tablespoons cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground ginger ½ teaspoon allspice 2 cups grated carrots 1 cup (8 ounces) crushed pineapple, packed in juice and drained ¾ cup raisins (golden preferred) ½ cup shredded coconut ½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans 3 large eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup canola oil Directions Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F with a rack in the lower third. Line muffin tins with paper cups. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, sugar, cinnamon, ginger, and allspice. Add the carrots, pineapple, raisins, coconut, and nuts, and mix thoroughly. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs with the vanilla and then the oil. Pour egg mixture into the dry ingredients in thirds and blend well. (Do not overmix or muffins will turn out tough.) Fill muffin cups to the brim. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick or sharp, thin knife inserted in the middle of a muffin comes out clean. Allow to cool for 10-15 minutes and remove from tins.

Throughout all of this, Jeremiah wasn’t saying anything. He just kept looking at Susannah and then back at the TV, like he was worried she would vanish into thin air while his back was turned.

Finally I had to tell her that women couldn’t go with monks, and for the next few days I continued to instruct and console her. Ever since setting out from Chanthaburi—31 days altogether—I had been suffering pains in my stomach every day, but as soon as this incident occurred they vanished. I continued teaching her until she was willing to follow my instructions. Finally she agreed to return home. So I told her, ‘Don’t worry. Whenever I can find the time, I’ll be back to see you. I’m staying right nearby, in Khlawng Kung Forest Monastery.’ Up to that point she had had no idea where I was from, but as soon as I told her this, she seemed both pleased and content. So when we had reached an understanding, I returned as usual to Chanthaburi. The pains in my stomach were gone.

Are you excited to see Beau?” I ask, needing the distraction. His smile warms, and it’s like seeing light glimmer in an ocean cave, an unexpected beauty in its dark and deadly home. It’s so disarming, so close to boyish happiness, that my worries vanish, just for a moment. “There’s a bottle of whiskey with our names on it. As soon as we get the civs set up, we’re pulling an action flick marathon—because apparently that’s all Jasper’s parents ever used to watch apart from the K-dramas, and that’s not happening.

In the midst of communal screaming there is only the present moment. The past and the future dissolve the way, nothing more than illusions. When the past disappears it takes with it the possibility of regret or shame, when the future vanishes, gone are any feelings of worry, stress or our capability to experience fear.

Everything in Kira froze at the feel of those sharp fangs puncturing her skin, but she wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Instead of pain, a cascade of pure sensation flowed over her. Sweet, luscious warmth seemed to spread slowly from her neck, down her shoulders, and lower, until it felt like her body was submerged in heated chocolate. All her worries drained away in such a rush that she felt dizzy, only realizing how heavy the stress had been when it was no longer there to weigh her down. Something thick and silky threaded through her fingers. After a hazy moment, Kira realized she’d raised her arms and was now gripping Mencheres’s hair. He made a deep, guttural sound that vibrated against her neck as he swallowed. My blood. Mencheres is swallowing my blood. The thought should have frightened her, or at the very least, made her uneasy, but Kira found herself pressing closer to him instead. Shards of pleasure spiked in her as his fangs slid deeper in response. The heat spreading through her began to swirl and concentrate in one spot, making her gasp at the sudden intense need in her loins. Her hands tangled tighter in his hair while a dark, inexplicable urge had Kira rubbing her neck against his mouth. Pleasure stabbed into her with enough impact to make her gasp as his fangs slid into her again. She heard herself moaning. Felt another dizzying sweep of heat. How could a bite be responsible for so much bliss? Mencheres lifted his head all too soon, leaving cool air on her throat instead of the hard, sensual pressure of his mouth. The firm caress of his hands on her back and head vanished, too, resulting in disappointing emptiness instead of the feel of him gripping her. She didn’t even think before she yanked his head back down to her neck. “Don’t stop,” she gasped.

16thJune, 2015 You are never going to believe what happened today. We got to Fred’s house in the morning; even a little earlier than we planned. He was crying puddles, the poor fellow! His father had vanished, and he still hadn’t come home. Fred reckoned that he was probably aimlessly walking around the city. We went with him to the hospital to visit his mother. The hospital looked like a dead place, all white and ugly and it stank of that Lysol/antiseptic smell. It smelled so clean, I was worried that I would fart and the stink would kill people! And you know what? The exact opposite happened! See, we went into the room where Fred’s mother was being kept. Fred was really upset

The veil had parted, allowing me to peer into the other side, and what I saw was a world far more colorful and vibrant than the one we live in. It was a world of peace and love, a place where anxiety, fear, and worry lines simply vanished.