Wrote Your Name Quotes

I wrote your name across my heart So I would not forget. The way I felt when you were born Before we'd even met   I wrote your name across my heart So your heart beats with mine And when I miss you most I trace Each loop and every line   I wrote your name across my heart, So we could be together So I could hold you close to me And keep you there forever.

After you're gone, people will forget your name, no matter how important it was, and your face, no matter how pretty it was, and what you said, no matter how clever any of it sounded. The things you've done will crumble and fade and the places you once loved, will change and be given new names. You are only here for one moment and it lasts exactly one lifetime.

I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s. I did it, I am here. Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on.

Later that evening in my diary, I wrote: I was exagerrating when I said I thought you hated the piece. What I meant to say was: I thought you hated me. I was hoping you’d persuade me of the opposite—and you did, for a while. Why won’t I believe it tomorrow morning?

If I breathe you in and you breathe me out, I swear we can breathe forever. I swear I’ll find summer in your winter and spring in your autumn and always, hands at the ends of your fingers, arms at the ends of your shoulders and I swear, when we run out of forever, when we run out of air, your name will be the last word that my lungs make air for.

I went home that day, and I wrote your name over and over on a piece of paper. I must have written it a hundred times. My mom found the paper a few days later in my sock drawer. She wanted to know why I'd done that..." I wanted to know why more than anything I'd ever remembered wanting, but a part of me hoped he'd chicken out. "I told her I liked the way your name made my heart jump.

I then asked his assistant for a pen, opened up the hardbound edition, and wrote, Zwischen Immer und Nie, for you in silence, somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties. In years to come, if the book was still in his possession, I wanted him to ache.

Well I wrote our names a thousand times...just to see yours sitting next to mine.

The universe is a brilliant writer,
 it wrote your name
in my stars
 before any of us existed
 so when the time comes
 they’ll light up your path
 and lead you straight to me.

I wrote your name across my heart So I would not forget. The way I felt when you were born Before we'd even met   I wrote your name across my heart So your heart beats with mine And when I miss you most I trace Each loop and every line   I wrote your name across my heart, So we could be together So I could hold you close to me And keep you there forever.

I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: 'English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache...The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.' And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless,inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I'd ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.

I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading TOM JONES as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. . . . My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible.

The very quality of your life, whether you love it or hate it, is based upon how thankful you are toward God. It is one's attitude that determines whether life unfolds into a place of blessedness or wretchedness. Indeed, looking at the same rose bush, some people complain that the roses have thorns while others rejoice that some thorns come with roses. It all depends on your perspective. This is the only life you will have before you enter eternity. If you want to find joy, you must first find thankfulness. Indeed, the one who is thankful for even a little enjoys much. But the unappreciative soul is always miserable, always complaining. He lives outside the shelter of the Most High God. Perhaps the worst enemy we have is not the devil but our own tongue. James tells us, "The tongue is set among our members as that which . . . sets on fire the course of our life" (James 3:6). He goes on to say this fire is ignited by hell. Consider: with our own words we can enter the spirit of heaven or the agonies of hell! It is hell with its punishments, torments and misery that controls the life of the grumbler and complainer! Paul expands this thought in 1 Corinthians 10:10, where he reminds us of the Jews who "grumble[d] . . . and were destroyed by the destroyer." The fact is, every time we open up to grumbling and complaining, the quality of our life is reduced proportionally -- a destroyer is bringing our life to ruin! People often ask me, "What is the ruling demon over our church or city?" They expect me to answer with the ancient Aramaic or Phoenician name of a fallen angel. What I usually tell them is a lot more practical: one of the most pervasive evil influences over our nation is ingratitude! Do not minimize the strength and cunning of this enemy! Paul said that the Jews who grumbled and complained during their difficult circumstances were "destroyed by the destroyer." Who was this destroyer? If you insist on discerning an ancient world ruler, one of the most powerful spirits mentioned in the Bible is Abaddon, whose Greek name is Apollyon. It means "destroyer" (Rev. 9:11). Paul said the Jews were destroyed by this spirit. In other words, when we are complaining or unthankful, we open the door to the destroyer, Abaddon, the demon king over the abyss of hell! In the Presence of God Multitudes in our nation have become specialists in the "science of misery." They are experts -- moral accountants who can, in a moment, tally all the wrongs society has ever done to them or their group. I have never talked with one of these people who was happy, blessed or content about anything. They expect an imperfect world to treat them perfectly. Truly, there are people in this wounded country of ours who need special attention. However, most of us simply need to repent of ingratitude, for it is ingratitude itself that is keeping wounds alive! We simply need to forgive the wrongs of the past and become thankful for what we have in the present. The moment we become grateful, we actually begin to ascend spiritually into the presence of God. The psalmist wrote, "Serve the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful singing. . . . Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name. For the Lord is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting and His faithfulness to all generations" (Psalm 100:2, 4-5). It does not matter what your circumstances are; the instant you begin to thank God, even though your situation has not changed, you begin to change. The key that unlocks the gates of heaven is a thankful heart. Entrance into the courts of God comes as you simply begin to praise the Lord.

Hazel Grace,” he said, my name new and better in his voice. “It has been a real pleasure to make your acquaintance.” “Ditto, Mr. Waters,” I said. I felt shy looking at him. I could not match the intensity of his waterblue eyes. “May I see you again?” he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice. I smiled. “Sure.” “Tomorrow?” he asked. “Patience, grasshopper,” I counseled. “You don’t want to seem overeager.” “Right, that’s why I said tomorrow,” he said. “I want to see you again tonight. But I’m willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m serious,” he said. “You don’t even know me,” I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. “How about I call you when I finish this?” “But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said. “I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book.” He broke out into that goofy smile. “And you say we don’t know each other.

Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in Corriere della Sera when it was published was "Sì, abbiamo un'anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot – "Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots." And I thought, exactly. That’s the view. Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we’re here. No buffalo knows it’s a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we’re members of Homo sapiens, and it’s the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations. It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.

What is your name, Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters, But you wrote books and those books carry your name, said the doctor's wife, Now nobody can read them, it is as if they did not exist.

Kissing booth? - Stella Keeping tabs on me? - Chet Hard not to. when they wrote your name on the roster, girls within a ten mile radius swooned and fainted flat on their backs. -Stella But not you? - Chet I don't kiss friends - Stella

One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide and made my pains his prey. Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay A mortal thing so to immortalise; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wipèd out likewise. Not so (quod I); let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame; My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, And in the heavens write your glorious name: Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.

This poem is very long So long, in fact, that your attention span May be stretched to its very limits But that’s okay It’s what’s so special about poetry See, poetry takes time We live in a time Call it our culture or society It doesn’t matter to me cause neither one rhymes A time where most people don’t want to listen Our throats wait like matchsticks waiting to catch fire Waiting until we can speak No patience to listen But this poem is long It’s so long, in fact, that during the time of this poem You could’ve done any number of other wonderful things You could’ve called your father Call your father You could be writing a postcard right now Write a postcard When was the last time you wrote a postcard? You could be outside You’re probably not too far away from a sunrise or a sunset Watch the sun rise Maybe you could’ve written your own poem A better poem You could have played a tune or sung a song You could have met your neighbor And memorized their name Memorize the name of your neighbor You could’ve drawn a picture (Or, at least, colored one in) You could’ve started a book Or finished a prayer You could’ve talked to God Pray When was the last time you prayed? Really prayed? This is a long poem So long, in fact, that you’ve already spent a minute with it When was the last time you hugged a friend for a minute? Or told them that you love them? Tell your friends you love them …no, I mean it, tell them Say, I love you Say, you make life worth living Because that, is what friends do Of all of the wonderful things that you could’ve done During this very, very long poem You could have connected Maybe you are connecting Maybe we’re connecting See, I believe that the only things that really matter In the grand scheme of life are God and people And if people are made in the image of God Then when you spend your time with people It’s never wasted And in this very long poem I’m trying to let a poem do what a poem does: Make things simpler We don’t need poems to make things more complicated We have each other for that We need poems to remind ourselves of the things that really matter To take time A long time To be alive for the sake of someone else for a single moment Or for many moments Cause we need each other To hold the hands of a broken person All you have to do is meet a person Shake their hand Look in their eyes They are you We are all broken together But these shattered pieces of our existence don’t have to be a mess We just have to care enough to hold our tongues sometimes To sit and listen to a very long poem A story of a life The joy of a friend and the grief of friend To hold and be held And be quiet So, pray Write a postcard Call your parents and forgive them and then thank them Turn off the TV Create art as best as you can Share as much as possible, especially money Tell someone about a very long poem you once heard And how afterward it brought you to them

Hey, Arnold," he said. I looked up 'in love with a white girl' on Google and found and article about that white girl named Cynthia who disappeared in Mexico last summer. You remember how her face was all over the papers and everybody said it was such a sad thing?" "I kinda remember," I said. "Well this article said that over two hundred Mexican girls have disappeared in the last three years in that same part of the country. And nobody says much about that. And that's racist. The guy who wrote the article says people care more about beautiful white girls than they do about everybody else on the planet. White girls are privileged. They're damsels in distress." So what does that mean?" I asked. "I think it means you're just a racist asshole like everybody else.

There's that feeling that comes when you read something and the lines speak directly to you, and to you only, even though the person who wrote them died long before you were born, or, even if alive, has no idea you exist. The words seep right into your mind. They pour into your secret hollows and take their shape, a perfect fit, like water. And you are slightly less alone in the universe, because you have been witnessed, because you have been filled, because someone once found words for things within you that you couldn't yourself name – something gesturing not only toward what you are, but what you could become.

Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town — still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done.

The lions of hard rock, guys like Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Brian Johnson, Rob Halford, these monsters feel completely timeless, iconic, eternal. They simply shall not, will not, do not die. It's almost impossible to imagine a musical world without Robert Plant. No metal fan of any stripe can imagine a day when, say, Iron Maiden shuts it all down because Bruce Dickinson turned 85 and suddenly can't remember the lyrics to "Hallowed Be Thy Name." Metal revels in the raw energy and unchecked phantasmagorical ridiculousness of youth. It is all fire and testosterone and rebellious fantasy. It doesn't go well with reality. So it is for hard rock and a guy like Dio, an elfin titan with an undying love for lasers and sorcery, dragons and kings. The man wrote some terribly corny metal songs, but he sang every one with a ferocity and love and total honesty. He also wrote some of the finest hard rock melodies of all time, sang them with a precision and love unmatched by any hard rock singer since. It's a rare thing to give metal some heartfelt props. It is time. Raise your devil horns and salute.

Hey, manager... Some kid must have left his glove here... It has his name on it... See? Right here... Willie Mays... He wrote his name on his glove, see? Poor kid... He's probably been looking all over for it... We should have a lost and found. I don't know any kid around here named Willie Mays, do you? How are we gonna get it back to him? He was pretty smart putting his name on his glove this way, though... It's funny, I just don't remember any kid by that name..." "Look at your own glove." "What?" "Look at your own glove... There's a name on it..." "Babe Ruth... Well, I'll be! How in the world do you suppose I got her glove?!

David Eagleman once wrote that everyone dies twice – first when we stop breathing, and second when your name is mentioned for the last time.

I wrote Your Name in My Heart and Forever it will Stay.

I drove by all the places we used to hang out getting wasted I thought about our last kiss, how it felt the way you tasted And even though your friends tell me you're doing fine Are you somewhere feeling lonely even though he's right beside you? When he says those words that hurt you, do you read the ones I wrote you? Sometimes I start to wonder, was it just a lie? If what we had was real, how could you be fine? 'Cause I'm not fine at all I remember the day you told me you were leaving I remember the make-up running down your face And the dreams you left behind you didn't need them Like every single wish we ever made I wish that I could wake up with amnesia And forget about the stupid little things Like the way it felt to fall asleep next to you And the memories I never can escape 'Cause I'm not fine at all The pictures that you sent me they're still living in my phone I'll admit I like to see them, I'll admit I feel alone And all my friends keep asking why I'm not around It hurts to know you're happy, yeah, it hurts that you've moved on It's hard to hear your name when I haven't seen you in so long It's like we never happened, was it just a lie? If what we had was real, how could you be fine? 'Cause I'm not fine at all I remember the day you told me you were leaving I remember the make-up running down your face And the dreams you left behind you didn't need them Like every single wish we ever made I wish that I could wake up with amnesia And forget about the stupid little things Like the way it felt to fall asleep next to you And the memories I never can escape If today I woke up with you right beside me Like all of this was just some twisted dream I'd hold you closer than I ever did before And you'd never slip away And you'd never hear me say I remember the day you told me you were leaving I remember the make-up running down your face And the dreams you left behind you didn't need them Like every single wish we ever made I wish that I could wake up with amnesia And forget about the stupid little things Like the way it felt to fall asleep next to you And the memories I never can escape 'Cause I'm not fine at all No, I'm really not fine at all Tell me this is just a dream 'Cause I'm really not fine at all

Mr Wisdom,' said the girl who had led him into the presence. 'Ah,' said Howard Saxby, and there was a pause of perhaps three minutes, during which his needles clicked busily. 'Wisdom, did she say?' 'Yes. I wrote "Cocktail Time"' 'You couldn't have done better,' said Mr Saxby cordially. 'How's your wife, Mr Wisdom?' Cosmo said he had no wife. 'Surely?' "I'm a bachelor.' Then Wordsworth was wrong. He said you were married to immortal verse. Excuse me a moment,' murmured Mr Saxby, applying himself to the sock again. 'I'm just turning the heel. Do you knit?' 'No.' 'Sleep does. It knits the ravelled sleave of care.' (After a period of engrossed knitting, Cosmo coughs loudly to draw attention to his presence.) 'Goodness, you made me jump!' he (Saxby) said. 'Who are you?' 'My name, as I have already told you, is Wisdom' 'How did you get in?' asked Mr Saxby with a show of interest. 'I was shown in.' 'And stayed in. I see, Tennyson was right. Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers. Take a chair.' 'I have.' 'Take another,' said Mr Saxby hospitably.

My mother wasn’t a psychotic criminal. (Kiara) No. I’m sure she was a wonderful lady who loved you dearly. That she held you when you cried, probably even baked you cookies and gave you hugs and kisses before she sent you off to bed at night, and it’s a damn shame a decent woman like her died so tragically. My mother, whore that she was, abandoned me and my sister to our father so that she could return to her cushy life and pretend we didn’t exist while she left us in that house with a man whose name, even though he’d been dead for decades, can still make an assassin wet his pants. And if you think his cruelty was reserved for strangers, think again. My sister and I were target practice for him. So don’t you dare talk to me about pain. My father wrote the book on it and he rammed it down my throat every day of my childhood until they killed him. And the real kicker is, my life under his demented fist was a lot better than Nykyrian’s. At least I was able to hide sometimes from the ones trying to kill me. You want me to call your daddy, baby? Go right ahead. I’ll be more than happy to take you to him. But know that Aksel will have his hands on you in a matter of hours. Then you’ll be able to talk to me about pain and you’ll finally have an idea of what we’ve endured. You won’t live long enough to apologize, but true clarity will be yours before you die. (Syn)

He was not forced to acknowledge the facts of his present. He was talked about in terms of his lost potential, what he would never be, rather than what he is. They spoke as if his future was patiently waiting for him to step into it. Most of us understand that your future is not promised to you. It is constructed day by day, through the choices you make. Your future is earned, little by little, through hard work and action. If you don't act accordingly, that dream dissolves. If punishment is based on potential, privileged people will be given lighter sentences. Brock was shielded inside projections of what people like him grow up to become, or are supposed to become...The judge argued that he'd already lost so much, given up so many opportunities, What happens to those who start off with little to lose? Instead of a...Stanford athlete, let's imagine a Hispanic nineteen-year-old working in the fraternity kitchen commits the same crime. Does this story end differently? Does the Washington Post call him a surgeon? My point can be summed up in the line Brock wrote: I just existed in a reality where nothing can go wrong or nobody could think of what I was doing as wrong. Privilege accompanies the light skinned, helped maintain his belief that consequences did not apply to him.

Call themselves?" asked Yama. "You are wrong, Sam, Godhood is more than a name. It is a condition of being. One does not achieve it merely by being immortal, for even the lowliest laborer in the fields may achieve continuity of existence. Is it then the conditioning of an Aspect? No. Any competent hypnotist can play games with the self-image. Is it the raising up of an Attribute? Of course not. I can design machines more powerful and more accurate than any faculty a man may cultivate. Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe, so that those who look upon you know this without hearing your name spoken. Some ancient poet said that the world is full of echoes and correspondences. Another wrote a long poem of an inferno, wherein each man suffered a torture which coincided in nature with those forces which had ruled his life. Being a god is being able to recognize within one's self these things that are important, and then to strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. Then, beyond morals or logic or esthetics, one is wind or fire, the sea, the mountains, rain, the sun or the stars, the flight of an arrow, the end of a day, the clasp of love. One rules through one's ruling passions. Those who look upon gods then say, without even knowing their names, 'He is Fire. She is Dance. He is Destruction. She is Love.' So, to reply to your statement, they do not call themselves gods. Everyone else does, though, everyone who beholds them." "So they play that on their fascist banjos, eh?" "You choose the wrong adjective." "You've already used up all the others.

Desmond ushered the man inside. He was stooped and ugly, with an unkempt beard and unwashed clothes, yet Father greeted him pleasantly and asked his name. “Yoren, as it please m’lord. My pardons for the hour.” He bowed to Arya. “And this must be your son. He has your look.” “I’m a girl,” Arya said, exasperated. If the old man was down from the Wall, he must have come by way of Winterfell. “Do you know my brothers?” she asked excitedly. “Robb and Bran are at Winterfell, and Jon’s on the Wall. Jon Snow, he’s in the Night’s Watch too, you must know him, he has a direwolf, a white one with red eyes. Is Jon a ranger yet? I’m Arya Stark.” The old man in his smelly black clothes was looking at her oddly, but Arya could not seem to stop talking. “When you ride back to the Wall, would you bring Jon a letter if I wrote one?” She wished Jon were here right now. He’d believe her about the dungeons and the fat man with the forked beard and the wizard in the steel cap.

Two thousand years ago, a church elder named Peter wrote the recipe for community. “Above all else,” he wrote, “hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). That means when you love a person, you occasionally have to turn a blind eye toward their shortcomings.

Many BrainPal users find it useful to give their BrainPal a name other than BrainPal. Would you like to name your BrainPal at this time? "Yes," I said. Please speak the name you would like to give your BrainPal. "Asshole," I said. You have selected "Asshole," the BrainPal wrote, and to its credit it spelled the word correctly. Be aware that many recruits have selected this name for their BrainPal. Would you like to chose a different name? "No," I said, and was proud that so many of my fellow recruits also felt this way about their BrainPal. Your BrainPal is now Asshole, the BrainPal wrote. You may change this name in the future if you like. Now you must choose an access phrase to activate Asshole. While Asshole is active at all times it will only respond to commands after it has been activated. Please choose a short phrase. Asshole suggests "Activate Asshole" but you may choose another phrase. Please say your activation phrase now. "Hey, Asshole," I said. You have choosen "Hey, Asshole." Please say it again to confirm. I did. Then it asked me to choose a deactivation phrase. I chose (of course) "Go away, Asshole." Would you like Asshole to refer to itself in the first person? "Absolutely." I said. I am Asshole. "Of course you are.

That's what makes us human. Feeling things–even pain. That's what music does, if it's any good: it makes you feel things. You listen to a song, and somehow you know what that person was going through when he wrote it. Or maybe it puts a name to what you're feeling. And because you can share that, you don't feel so alone.

If I'm a bad person, you don't like me Well I guess I'll make my own way It's a circle A mean cycle I can't excite you anymore Where's your gavel? Your jury? What's my offense this time? You're not a judge but if you're gonna judge me Well sentence me to another life Don't wanna hear your sad songs I don't wanna feel your pain When you swear it's all my fault Cause you know we're not the same (no) We're not the same (no) Oh we're not the same Yeah the friends who stuck together We wrote our names in blood But I guess you can't accept that the change is good (hey) It's good (hey) It's good Well you treat me just like another stranger Well it's nice to meet you sir I guess I'll go I best be on my way out You treat me just like another stranger Well it's nice to meet you sir I guess I'll go I best be on my way out Ignorance is your new best friend Ignorance is your new best friend This is the best thing that could've happened Any longer and I wouldn't have made it It's not a war no, it's not a rapture I'm just a person but you can't take it The same tricks that, that once fooled me They won't get you anywhere I'm not the same kid from your memory Well now I can fend for myself Don't wanna hear your sad songs I don't wanna feel your pain When you swear it's all my fault Cause you know we're not the same (no) We're not the same (no) Oh we're not the same Yeah we used to stick together We wrote our names in blood But I guess you can't accept that the change is good (hey) It's good (hey) It's good Well you treat me just like another stranger Well it's nice to meet you sir I guess I'll go I best be on my way out You treat me just like another stranger Well it's nice to meet you sir I guess I'll go I best be on my way out Ignorance is your new best friend Ignorance is your new best friend Ignorance is your new best friend Ignorance is your new best friend Well you treat me just like another stranger Well it's nice to meet you sir I guess I'll go I best be on my way out You treat me just like another stranger Well it's nice to meet you sir I guess I'll go I best be on my way out

That’s your name, isn’t it? You aren’t the man who wrote the logbook. You’re not the hero that was sent to protect the people … you’re his servant. The packman who hated him.” She

I had the feeling that, somewhere, there were boys and girls like Taki and Mitsuha. This story is a fantasy, of course, but I do think there are people somewhere who've had experiences similar to theirs, and who hold similar feelings inside. People who've lost precious loved ones or places, and who've privately decided to "struggle and fight," even so. People who believe that they're sure to find something someday, even though it hasn't happened yet, and who keep reaching out for it. I felt that those feelings needed to be related with an immediacy that differed from the glamour of the movie, and I think that's why I wrote this book.

My wondrous book says you’re a feline, and a carnivore, and a vertebrate, and a mammal. I wish them that wrote it could smell around here right now and maybe they wouldn’t call you all those pretty names.

She gave me a pledge card, a card promising an annual gift of $5, $10, or $25 toward the support of the Unity mission. I filled it out under the hot light of the projector. The name and address spaces were much too short, unless you wrote a very fine hand or unless your name was Ed Poe and you lived at 1 Elm St.

New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.

And for those who bear the brunt of hate because of the color of their skin, or the sound of their name, or the scarf on their head, or the person they love; for those who are spat upon, for those who are told to “go home” when they are home: you are known. You are loved. You are enough. Let your light shine. I wrote this book for you.

‘You are your” “Past, Present,” “& Future,’ he said” ” ‘You divide into” “those components” “in this room’ ” ” ‘But I do not have” “components!’ ” “our three voices said,” ” ‘My secret name—” “Time’s secret name” “is Oneness,” “is One Thing’ ” “As I—the one” “in the middle—spoke,” “the one of us in front—” “who was the Past—” “had already” “finished speaking” “& was awaiting” “his reply” “He said,” ” ‘Don’t we seem” “to experience” “things somewhat this way?” “There is past, present” :& future’ ” “The Future then cried out,” ” ‘Where is my life?” ‘Where is my life?” “You have stolen” “my life!’ ” “There was a silence” “The man” “reached out &” “pressed a button” “on the cave wall—” “we three united” “into one again” “while he wrote words on” “a clipboard” “Then he looked up & said,” ” ‘Going forward?” “Going on?” “Death lies ahead, you know’ ” “Any woman” “may already” “be dead,’ ” “I said

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him. Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways. This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls. Listen to some of these stats: A majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. Twenty-four percent could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket. Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators, and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only three got their wife's name right on the first try. People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes more twenty-four percent of our budget. It's actually less than one percent. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen ad a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence, because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge." Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll say eighteen percent of us think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. And I haven't even brought up religion. But here's one fun fact I'll leave you with: Did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which came first. I rest my case.

Bob,” she said, “offerings burned in the mortal world appear on this altar, right?” Bob frowned uncomfortably, like he wasn’t ready for a pop quiz. “Yes?” “So what happens if I burn something on the altar here?” “Uh…” “That’s all right,” Annabeth said. “You don’t know. Nobody knows, because it’s never been done.” There was a chance, she thought, just the slimmest chance that an offering burned on this altar might appear at Camp Half-Blood. Doubtful, but if it did work… “Annabeth?” Percy said again. “You’re planning something. You’ve got that I’m-planning-something look.” “I don’t have an I’m-planning-something look.” “Yeah, you totally do. Your eyebrows knit and your lips press together and—” “Do you have a pen?” she asked him. “You’re kidding, right?” He brought out Riptide. “Yes, but can you actually write with it?” “I—I don’t know,” he admitted. “Never tried.” He uncapped the pen. As usual, it sprang into a full-sized sword. Annabeth had watched him do this hundreds of times. Normally when he fought, Percy simply discarded the cap. It always appeared in his pocket later, as needed. When he touched the cap to the point of the sword, it would turn back into a ballpoint pen. “What if you touch the cap to the other end of the sword?” Annabeth said. “Like where you’d put the cap if you were actually going to write with the pen.” “Uh…” Percy looked doubtful, but he touched the cap to the hilt of the sword. Riptide shrank back into a ballpoint pen, but now the writing point was exposed. “May I?” Annabeth plucked it from his hand. She flattened the napkin against the altar and began to write. Riptide’s ink glowed Celestial bronze. “What are you doing?” Percy asked. “Sending a message,” Annabeth said. “I just hope Rachel gets it.” “Rachel?” Percy asked. “You mean our Rachel? Oracle of Delphi Rachel?” “That’s the one.” Annabeth suppressed a smile. Whenever she brought up Rachel’s name, Percy got nervous. At one point, Rachel had been interested in dating Percy. That was ancient history. Rachel and Annabeth were good friends now. But Annabeth didn’t mind making Percy a little uneasy. You had to keep your boyfriend on his toes. Annabeth finished her note and folded the napkin. On the outside, she wrote: Connor, Give this to Rachel. Not a prank. Don’t be a moron. Love, Annabeth She took a deep breath. She was asking Rachel Dare to do something ridiculously dangerous, but it was the only way she could think of to communicate with the Romans—the only way that might avoid bloodshed. “Now I just need to burn it,” she said. “Anybody got a match?” The point of Bob’s spear shot from his broom handle. It sparked against the altar and erupted in silvery fire. “Uh, thanks.” Annabeth lit the napkin and set it on the altar. She watched it crumble to ash and wondered if she was crazy. Could the smoke really make it out of Tartarus? “We should go now,” Bob advised. “Really, really go. Before we are killed.” Annabeth stared at the wall of blackness in front of them. Somewhere in there was a lady who dispensed a Death Mist that might hide them from monsters—a plan recommended by a Titan, one of their bitterest enemies. Another dose of weirdness to explode her brain. “Right,” she said. “I’m ready.” ANNABETH LITERALLY STUMBLED over the second Titan.

Because the truth was, and we both knew it, he'd gone long, long ago. I'd just made him stick around when he really wanted to be somewhere else. In his own weird way, he was another victim of the shooting, One of the ones who couldn't get away. "Are you mad?" he asked, which I thought was a really strange question. "Yes," I said. And I was. It's just that I wasn't so sure I was mad at him. But I don't think he needed to hear that part. I don't think he wanted to hear that part. I think it was important to him to hear that I cared enough to be angry. "Will you ever forgive me?" he asked. "Will you ever forgive me?" I shot back, leveling my gaze directly into his eyes. He stared into them for a few moments then got up silently and headed for the door. He didn't turn around when he reached it. Just grabbed the doorknob and held it. "No," he said without facing me. "Maybe that makes me a bad parent, but I don't know if I can. No matter what the police found, you were involved in that shooting, Valerie. You wrote those names on that list. You wrote my name on that list. You had a good life here. You might not have pulled the trigger, but you helped cause the tragedy." He opened the door."I'm sorry. I really am." He stepped out into the hallway. "I'll leave my new address and phone number with your mother," he said before walking slowly out of my sight.

The greatest regret of my military career was as Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, he later wrote of the decision he made. I lost 169 soldiers during that year-long deployment. However, the monument we erected at Fort Hood, Texas, in memoriam lists 168 names. I approved the request of others not to include the name of the one soldier who committed suicide. I deeply regret my decision.

I picked up all your things and I put them in a box. I was going to send them back to you, all those things you gave me when you promised I was the only thing you needed. And then I realized I can’t put every kiss in the box or return every “I love you.” I can’t return every time I held you or unwrite every love letter I wrote you. I can’t undo every time I touched you or unhear the way you said my name. I can’t send back every “You’re beautiful” because things will never be the same. What am I going to do with all these things if I can never pack them away?

Since you haven’t got a name,” he said. “I guess you can pick one for yourself. Would you like to pick one for me to write down?” She stopped rocking and looked at him. “I can do that? It’s legal and everything?” He smiled. “It’s a free country again,” he said. “At least in theory.” She nodded. “And when I pick a name it can be any name I want?” He nodded. “What’s your name?” “Victor,” he said. “Vic, for short.” “Okay,” she said, leaning forward and taking the pad from under his large thing hands. “How do you spell that?” He spelled it and she wrote it down. Her handwriting was perfectly small and legible. “Can I be Victor, too?” she said, looking up from the pad. He smirked. “It’s a boy’s name,” he said. “You’re a girl. You have to add an i and an a to the end if you want to make it a girl’s name.” She looked down at the name she had written and added the letters i and a to the end. “Victoria,” she said, passing the notepad back to the cop. “Hello, Victoria,” he said, smiling, taking the pad and pen back and presenting his hand for a shake. “It’s nice to meet you, officially.

There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip," said Joe, after some rumination, "namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. That ain't the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You're oncommon small. Likewise you're a oncommon scholar." "No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe." "Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even! I've seen letters––Ah! and from gentlefolks!––that I'll swear weren't wrote in print," said Joe. "I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It's only that." "Well, Pip," said Joe, "be it so or be it son't, you must be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope!

Who is he?” Eleanor lowered her voice, the name rolling off her tongue like a dark secret. “Dante Berlin.” I laughed. “Dante? Like the Dante who wrote the Inferno? Did he pick that name just to cultivate his ‘dark and mysterious’ persona?” Eleanor shook her head in disapproval. “Just wait till you see him. You won’t be laughing then.” I rolled my eyes. “I bet his real name is something boring like Eugene or Dwayne.” I expected Eleanor to laugh or say something in return, but instead she gave me a concerned look. I ignored it. “He sounds like a snob to me. I bet he’s one of those guys who know they’re good-looking. He probably hasn’t even read the Inferno. It’s easy to pretend you’re smart when you don’t to anyone.” Eleanor still didn’t respond. “Shh . . .” she muttered under her breath. But before I could say “What?” I heard a cough behind me. Oh God, I thought to myself, and slowly turned around. “Hi,” he said with a half grin that seemed to be mocking me. And that’s how I met Dante Berlin. So how do you describe someone who leaves you speechless? He was beautiful. Not Monet beautiful or white sandy beach beautiful or even Grand Canyon beautiful. It was both more overwhelming and more delicate. Like gazing into the night sky and feeling incredibly small in comparison. Like holding a shell in your hand and wondering how nature was able to make something so complex yet to perfect: his eyes, dark and pensive; his messy brown hair tucked behind one ear; his arms, strong and lean beneath the cuffs of his collared shirt. I wanted to say something witty or charming, but all I could muster up was a timid “Hi.” He studied me with what looked like a mix of disgust and curiosity. “You must be Eugene,” I said. “I am.” He smiled, then leaned in and added, “I hope I can trust you to keep my true identity a secret. A name like Eugene could do real damage to my mysterious persona.” I blushed at the sound of my words coming from his lips. He didn’t seem anything like the person Eleanor had described. “And you are—” “Renee,” I interjected. “I was going to say, ‘in my seat,’ but Renee will do.” My face went red. “Oh, right. Sorry.” “Renee like the philosopher Rene Descartes? How esoteric of you. No wonder you think you know everything. You probably picked that name just to cultivate your overly analytical persona.” I glared at him. I knew he was just dishing back my own insults, but it still stung. “Well, it was nice meeting you,” I said curtly, and pushed past him before he could respond, waving a quick good-bye to Eleanor, who looked too stunned to move. I turned and walked to the last row, using all of my self-control to resist looking back.

Dear Pen Pal, I know it’s been a few years since I last wrote you. I hope you’re still there. I’m not sure you ever were. I never got any letters back from you when I was a kid. But in a way it was always therapeutic. Everyone else judges everything I say. And here you are: some anonymous person who never says “boo.” Maybe you just read my letters and laughed or maybe you didn’t read my letters or maybe you don’t even exist. It was pretty frustrating when I was young, but now I’m glad that you won’t respond. Just listen. That’s what I want. My dog died. I don’t know if you remember, but I had a beagle. He was a good dog. My best friend. I’d had him as far back as I could remember, but one day last month he didn’t come bounding out of his red doghouse like usual. I called his name. But no response. I knelt down and called out his name. Still nothing. I looked in his doghouse. There was blood everywhere. Cowering in the corner was my dog. His eyes were wild and there was an excessive amount of saliva coming out of his mouth. He was unrecognizable. Both frightened and frightening at the same time. The blood belonged to a little yellow bird that had always been around. My dog and the bird used to play together. In a strange way, it was almost like they were best friends. I know that sounds stupid, but… Anyway, the bird had been mangled. Ripped apart. By my dog. When he saw that I could see what he’d done, his face changed to sadness and he let out a sound that felt like the word ‘help.’ I reached my hand into his doghouse. I know it was a dumb thing to do, but he looked like he needed me. His jaws snapped. I jerked my hand away before he could bite me. My parents called a center and they came and took him away. Later that day, they put him to sleep. They gave me his corpse in a cardboard box. When my dog died, that was when the rain cloud came back and everything went to hell…

And there was something familiar about the cadence of the words. The language. It was him. I wrote: I know who you are. I recognize your voice. by kidzero I felt a little dizzy after I sent it, maybe because I had been holding my breath. A new message pinged and the air rushed out of me like a deflated balloon. you shouldn't be talking to strangers anyway. who am I? by anonymous I didn't really know his name or anything about him, but I couldn't admit that now. I wanted to keep talking to him. I quickly typed: You are the Unidentified. The Unidentified refuses to be typecast, target-marketed, corporate-identified, defined. by kidzero

A pale, bored woman in white ankle-socks and a white tasselled beret was sitting on a bentwood chair at the corner entrance to the verandah of the writer's club, where there was an opening in the creeper-grown trellis. In front of her on a plain kitchen table lay a large book like a ledger, in which for no known reason the woman wrote the names of the people entering the restaurant. She stopped Koroviev and Behemoth. 'Your membership cards?' she said, staring in surprise at Koroviev's pince-nez, at Behemoth's Primus and grazed elbow. 'A thousand apologies, madam, but what membership cards?' asked Koroviev in astonishment. 'Are you writers?' asked the woman in return. 'Indubitably,' replied Koroviev with dignity. 'Where are your membership cards?' the woman repeated. 'Dear lady...' Koroviev began tenderly. 'I'm not a dear lady,' interrupted the woman. 'Oh, what a shame,' said Koroviev in a disappointed voice and went on: 'Well, if you don't want to be a dear lady, which would have been delightful, you have every right not to be. But look here - if you wanted to make sure that Dostoyevsky was a writer, would you really ask him for his membership card? Why, you only have to take any five pages of one of his novels and you won't need a membership card to convince you that the man's a writer. I don't suppose he ever had a membership card, anyway! What do you think?' said Koroviev, turning to Behemoth. 'I'll bet he never had one,' replied the cat, putting the Primus on the table and wiping the sweat from its brow with its paw. 'You're not Dostoyevsky,' said the woman to Koroviev. 'How do you know?' 'Dostoyevsky's dead,' said the woman, though not very confidently. 'I protest!' exclaimed Behemoth warmly. 'Dostoyevsky is immortal!' 'Your membership cards, please,' said the woman.

In the Middle of This Century” In the middle of this century we turned to each other With half faces and full eyes like an ancient Egyptian picture And for a short while. I stroked your hair In the opposite direction to your journey, We called to each other, Like calling out the names of towns Where nobody stops Along the route. Lovely is the world rising early to evil, Lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity, In the mingling of ourselves, you and I, Lovely is the world. The earth drinks men and their loves Like wine, To forget. It can’t. And like the contours of the Judean hills, We shall never find peace. In the middle of this century we turned to each other, I saw your body, throwing shade, waiting for me, The leather straps for a long journey Already tightening across my chest. I spoke in praise of your mortal hips, You spoke in praise of my passing face, I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey, I touched your flesh, prophet of your end, I touched your hand which has never slept, I touched your mouth which may yet sing. Dust from the desert covered the table At which we did not eat But with my finger I wrote on it The letters of your name.

Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what’s at stake, namely its credibility as God’s infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably. But you can’t fail at something you’re not trying to do. To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That’s a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. As we have seen, biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating, and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere.

When Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened came out, I learned she’d quoted my final paragraph: On nights when you feel alone, I am with you . . . Then she wrote: Early on the morning of November 9, when it came time to decide on what I’d say in my concession speech, I remembered those words. Inspired by them, I wrote these: “To all the little girls watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.” Wherever she is, I hope Emily Doe knows how much her words and her strength meant to so many. At a moment of monumental loss, she had consulted the statement for hope. She had returned to my darkest place to light the way forward. 13.

It’s like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gone, but the idea of removing it via pill is . . . I don’t know . . . weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.” “You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It’s like a demon inside of you; you’ll call your consciousness a bus, or a prison cell, or a spiral, or a whirlpool, or a loop, or a—I think you once called it a scribbled circle, which I found interesting.” “Yeah,” I said. “One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” She turned to her computer, shook her mouse to wake it up, and then clicked an image on her desktop. “I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.

There’s another trouble with meaning. We’ve been taught to believe it comes near the end. As if the job of all those sentences were to ferry us along to the place where meaning is enacted—to “the point,” Just before the conclusion, Which restates “the point.” This is especially true in the school model of writing. Remember the papers you wrote? Trying to save that one good idea till the very end? Hoping to create the illusion that it followed logically from the previous paragraphs? You were stalling until you had ten pages. Much of what’s taught under the name of expository writing could be called “The Anxiety of Sequence.” Its premise is this: To get where you’re going, you have to begin in just the right place And take the proper path, Which depends on knowing where you plan to conclude. This is like not knowing where to begin a journey Until you decide where you want it to end. Begin in the wrong place, make the wrong turn, And there’s no getting where you want to go. Why not begin where you already are?

Only the Great Poison, he who is handsome and wise and charming and handsome, can lead the faithful to Edom. So cater to the Great Poison with food and drink and baths and the occasional massage. "They wrote 'handsome' twice," murmured Alec. "Why is it called the Red Scrolls," said Shiyun, "when it is a book? And not a scroll?" "It's definitely not plural scrolls," said Alec. "I'm sure whoever this handsome, handsome cult founder is," said Magnus, his chest constricting, "he had his reasons." Shinyun read on. "The prince wishes only the best for his children. Thus, to honor his name, there must be a hearth crowded with only the finest of liquors and cigars and bonbons. Tithes of treasure and gifts showered upon the Great Poison symbolize the love between the faithful, so keep the spirits flowing and the gold growing, and always remember the sacred roles. "Life is a stage, so exit in style. "Only the faithful who make a truly great drink shall be favored. "Offend not the Great Poison with cruel deeds or poor fashion. "Seek the children of demons. Love them as you love your lord. Do not let the children be alone. "In times of trouble, remember: all roads lead to Rome." Alec looked at Magnus, and Magnus could not entirely understand Alec's small smile. "I think you wrote this.

soul awakens, you begin to truly inherit your life. You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces, repetitive talk, and weary roles and slip deeper into the true adventure of who you are and who you are called to become.” Sobriety, for me, was exactly as he wrote—I truly inherited my life. I slipped deeper into the adventure of who I felt called to become, and the tired roles I had played forever became obsolete as I moved forward into a world where I was finally naming the terms of who I would be, and who I wouldn’t be.

One afternoon in the fall of 2015, while I was writing this book, I was driving in my car and listening to SiriusXM Radio. On the folk music station the Coffee House, a song came on with a verse that directly spoke to me—so much so that I pulled off the road as soon as I could and wrote down the lyrics and the singer’s name. The song was called “The Eye,” and it’s written by the country-folk singer Brandi Carlile and her bandmate Tim Hanseroth and sung by Carlile. I wish it could play every time you open these pages, like a Hallmark birthday card, because it’s become the theme song of this book. The main refrain is: I wrapped your love around me like a chain But I never was afraid that it would die You can dance in a hurricane But only if you’re standing in the eye. I hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law. Some politicians propose to build a wall against this hurricane. That is a fool’s errand. There is only one way to thrive now, and it’s by finding and creating your own eye. The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.” Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. “There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning—you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush!

The word is dissociate. There is no 'a' before the 'ss'. People invariably say dis-a-ssociate, which, if you're suffering Disso-ciative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder, can be irritating. People then want to know how many personalities I have and the answer is: I don't know. The first book about Multiple Personality Disorder to make an impact was Flora Rheta Schreiber's Sybil, published in 1973, which carries the subtitle: The True and Extraordinary Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities. Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley published the controversial The Three Faces of Eve much earlier in 1957, and Pete Townshend from The Who wrote the song 'Four Faces'. People seem to feel safe with numbers. The truth is more complicated. The kids emerged over time. Billy, the boisterous five-year-old, was at first the most dominant. But he slowly stood aside for JJ, the self-confident ten-year-old who appears when Alice is under stress and handles complicated situations like travelling on the Underground and meeting new people. The first entity to visit was the external voice of the Professor. But he had a choir of accomplices without names. So, how many actual alter personalities are there? I would say more than fifteen and less than thirty, a combination of protectors, persecutors and friends - my own family tree.

...For all the profound human modesty of Comrade Stalin,he will have to tolerate our outpourings of love and loyalty to him[applause],because not only we,who live and work under his direction,but all the working people in our land,tie their hopes for a radiant future for mankind to his name.[Applause] 'Listen,why should I read this? Let's go' Gleb repeated. All right.All right. But what do you think? -He's flunky! -But he wrote The Quiet Don,a great novel. In the twenties there was doubt about his authorship.They even had a special commission to investigate. I heard something about that. Akimov told me.The read author was some White officer.But no one would acknowledge that...If The Quiet Don is a work of genius,the author cannot be flunky.As your beloved Pushkin said,dearie,genius and evil are incompatible. Not every genius can overcome fear.And Sholokhov is no genius.

It’s a bit ironic, you know,” Henry says, gazing up at it. “Me, the cursed gay heir, standing here in Victoria’s museum, considering how much she loved those sodomy laws.” He smirks. “Actually … you remember how I told you about the gay king, James I?” “The one with the dumb jock boyfriend?” “Yes, that one. Well, his most beloved favorite was a man named George Villiers. ‘The handsomest-bodied man in all of England,’ they called him. James was completely besotted. Everyone knew. This French poet, de Viau, wrote a poem about it.” He clears his throat and starts to recite: “‘One man fucks Monsieur le Grand, another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre, and it is well known that the King of England, fucks the Duke of Buckingham.’” Alex must be staring, because he adds, “Well, it rhymes in French. Anyway. Did you know the reason the King James translation of the Bible exists is because the Church of England was so displeased with James for flaunting his relationship with Villiers that he had the translation commissioned to appease them?” “You’re kidding.” “He stood in front of the Privy Council and said, ‘Christ had John, and I have George.’” “Jesus.” “Precisely.” Henry’s still looking up at the statue, but Alex can’t stop looking at him and the sly smile on his face, lost in his own thoughts. “And James’s son, Charles I, is the reason we have dear Samson. It’s the only Giambologna that ever left Florence. He was a gift to Charles from the King of Spain, and Charles gave it, this massive, absolutely priceless masterpiece of a sculpture, to Villiers. And a few centuries later, here he is. One of the most beautiful pieces we own, and we didn’t even steal it. We only needed Villiers and his trolloping ways with the queer monarchs. To me, if there were a registry of national gay landmarks in Britain, Samson would be on it.

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

So we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind I ask them to desist and to refrain And then we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon Well, he knew exactly who to blame And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix! Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!(Doop doop doop doop dooop) Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet Ask me things, but I don't know where to start They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart And once again I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...)We call upon the author to explain Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought? I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions Well, it does in your brain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?) Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures Then tells me to get ready for the rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best! He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain We call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish "The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you And again I call upon the author to explain Yeah, we call upon the author to explain Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!

There is no reason to deprive your body of love, beauty, creativity, and inspiration, Chopra said. I wrote out a collection of sensory memories from childhood, recalling how it felt to be nourished and soothed. Rice steaming, rain outside. Standing in a towel heated by the tall furnace, feet dripping on the hardwood floor. The smell of sun on asphalt. Cold water on my face in the morning. Eating a bowl of cereal at midnight. The sound of a page turning as I am being read to. The thud of a peach falling. The dusty smell of sand. The scorch of cocoa, the sticky film of melted marshmallow. Spongy insides of bread sopping up tomatoes and vodka sauce. I am reminded of what I am capable of feeling. The ways I consume, my senses opening to receive, at ease, indulgent.

If I could write an autobiography for fear, it would read like this: __________ Hi, my name is Fear. F-E-A-R. But you are going to call me a lot of other things as you start to get closer to me. I’m terribly unoriginal. I’m like every has-been out there, but you give me way more credit than I deserve. You should keep doing that. I like it when you make me bigger than I actually am. I’m going to make you feel alone, and I like it when you believe you’re the only one who’s ever felt this way. You think I’m custom-catered to fit you, but I’m really no different than the brand of me your best friend wears. I’m a ballad lurking in the hearts of a billion people, and I will do anything to keep you from realizing that I am just the same song on repeat. You all know all my words. I’m pretty jealous though. I want you alone with me at night. I’m not afraid to say I’m greedy or that I don’t want to share you. I’m a territorial lover, and I would rather you not have solid and deep conversations at dinner parties or find a community that doesn’t leave your side. I wrote you a story a long time ago, and I don’t want you to figure out that you’ve outgrown the plotline. I wonder why you don’t get over me sometimes, but then the realization hits me: You come back because you know I want you. You come back because you know the sound of my voice. You come back because you know the way I move and how I shut you down. You’ve stood face-to-face with me so many times and I have told you who you are. The crazy thing is, you’ve believed me.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

December 8, 1986 Hello John: Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place. You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.” And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does. As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?” They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds. Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: “I put in 35 years…” “It ain’t right…” “I don’t know what to do…” They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait? I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!” One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life. So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die. To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. Your boy, Hank

ANA. Has even death failed to refine your soul, Juan? Has the terrible judgment of which my father’s statue was the minister taught you no reverence? DON JUAN. How is that very flattering statue, by the way? Does it still come to supper with naughty people and cast them into this bottomless pit? ANA. It has been a great expense to me. The boys in the monastery school would not let it alone: the mischievous ones broke it; and the studious ones wrote their names on it. Three new noses in two years, and fingers without end. I had to leave it to its fate at last; and now I fear it is shockingly mutilated. My poor father! DON JUAN. Hush! Listen! [Two great chords rolling on syncopated waves of sound break forth: D minor and its dominant: a sound of dreadful joy to all musicians]. Ha! Mozart’s statue music. It is your father. You had better disappear until I prepare him. [She vanishes].

Oh, stop talking," I cried, in a hunted tone. "I can't bear it. If you are going to arrest me, get it over." "I'd rather NOT arrest you, if we can find a way out. You look so young, so new to Crime! Even your excuse for being here is so naive, that I—won't you tell me why you wrote a love letter, if you are not in love? And whom you sent it to? That's important, you see, as it bears on the case. I intend," he said, "to be judgdicial[sic], unimpassioned, and quite fair." "I wrote a love letter" I explained, feeling rather cheered, "but it was not intended for any one, Do you see? It was just a love letter." "Oh," he said. "Of course. It is often done. And after that?" "Well, it had to go somewhere. At least I felt that way about it. So I made up a name from some malted milk tablets——" "Malted milk tablets!" he said, looking bewildered. "Just as I was thinking up a name to send it to," I explained, "Hannah—that's mother's maid, you know—brought in some hot milk and some malted milk tablets, and I took the name from them." "Look here," he said, "I'm unpredjudiced and quite calm, but isn't the `mother's maid' rather piling it on?" "Hannah is mother's maid, and she brought in the milk and the tablets, I should think," I said, growing sarcastic, "that so far it is clear to the dullest mind." "Go on," he said, leaning back and closing his eyes. "You named the letter for your mother's maid—I mean for the malted milk. Although you have not yet stated the name you chose; I never heard of any one named Milk, and as to the other, while I have known some rather thoroughly malted people—however, let that go." "Valentine's tablets," I said. "Of Course, you understand," I said, bending forward, "there was no such Person. I made him up. The Harold was made up too—Harold Valentine." "I see. Not clearly, perhaps, but I have a gleam of intellagence[sic]." "But, after all, there was such a person. That's clear, isn't it? And now he considers that we are engaged, and—and he insists on marrying me." "That," he said, "is realy[sic] easy to understand. I don't blame him at all. He is clearly a person of diszernment[sic]." "Of course," I said bitterly, "you would be on HIS side. Every one is." "But the point is this," he went on. "If you made him up out of the whole cloth, as it were, and there was no such Person, how can there be such a Person? I am merely asking to get it all clear in my head. It sounds so reasonable when you say it, but there seems to be something left out." "I don't know how he can be, but he is," I said, hopelessly. "And he is exactly like his picture." "Well, that's not unusual, you know." "It is in this case. Because I bought the picture in a shop, and just pretended it was him. (He?) And it WAS." He got up and paced the floor. "It's a very strange case," he said. "Do you mind if I light a cigarette? It helps to clear my brain. What was the name you gave him?" "Harold Valentine. But he is here under another name, because of my Familey. They think I am a mere child, you see, and so of course he took a NOM DE PLUME." "A NOM DE PLUME? Oh I see! What is it?" "Grosvenor," I said. "The same as yours.

I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the more realistic works of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the town. But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become selfconscious about. Counting boxcars is a prime activity of boys. Their elders fret and fume and jeer at the train that holds them up, but boys happily count and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places. And again, that supposedly ugly railyard was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants who washed the brick pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark morning. As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement every autumn to await the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which clanged down and released a ton of beauteous meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures. In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

Try it! You might like it !! I wrote this letter to tell you that I am very, very sorry. When you are mad at me, your face looks like Daddy’s when he smelled that skunk that was hiding in the garage. And this made me very sad. Your face, not the smelly skunk. Are you still mad? Pleeze circle one: YES NO If you are still mad, pleeze accept my sorryness for taking your clock, calling you a sandwich stealer, playing games on your phone and drawing my very cute face on it, and trying to call Price Princess Sugar Plum. I did not reech her. But I did reech a guy named Moe by mistake, and he was not very polite at all. He said if I reech him again he will call the cops. That would be very bad becuz I do not think they serve chicken nuggets in jail. Then I would starve to death, which would not be a very fun time . Anyway, I made this sandwich just for you because I really care about you. I hope you love it! You are my very best friend! After Miss Penelope and Princess Sugar Plum.

[WAIT—IT WON’T LET ME REDACT THESE LITTLE SUBHEADING THINGS? THAT’S SUPER ANNOYING!] [FINE, I’LL JUST GIVE YOU MY SUMMARY.] [SO, WHOEVER WROTE THIS WAS ALL BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-STELLARLUNE-SOMETHING-SOMETHING-LEGACY. BUT SERIOUSLY, NO ONE WANTS TO READ ABOUT THE CREEPY STUFF MY MOM DID BEFORE SHE GOT PREGNANT WITH ME! (AND WE’RE ALL SUPER SICK OF HEARING ABOUT MY “LEGACY,” AMIRITE?) SO, LET’S JUST LEAVE IT AT THIS: MY MOM IS EVIL. SHE THINKS SHE’S WAY SMARTER THAN SHE IS. AND NOTHING SHE DID IS GOING TO AFFECT MY GENERAL AWESOMENESS, OKAY?] A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY: [WOW, HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH SUCH A CLEVER TITLE?!] [AND YEAH, I HAVE A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY. NOT SURE WHY ANYONE CARES. BUT IT DOES COME IN HANDY DURING MIDTERMS AND FINALS.] AHEAD OF THE GAME: [BASICALLY: I’M A GENIUS. I SKIPPED LEVEL ONE AT FOXFIRE. YES, YOU SHOULD BE IMPRESSED.] UNREASONABLY HIGH STANDARDS: [GOTTA ADMIT, I WAS TEMPTED TO LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE, SINCE WHOEVER WROTE IT ACTUALLY GOT THINGS PRETTY MUCH RIGHT. I GUESS EVEN THE COUNCIL KNOWS MY DAD’S A JERK WHO FREAKS OUT ALL THE TIME BECAUSE I’M NOT A LITTLE MINI-HIM. WHO KNEW?] A POWERFUL EMPATH: [UGH, THAT’S THE BEST YOU COULD DO FOR THIS SUBHEADING???] [HOW ABOUT “LORD OF THE FEELS”? OR “TRUST THE EMPATH”! OR “HE KNOWS WHAT YOU’RE FEELING—AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF”?] [OOO! I’VE GOT IT! “HE KNOWS FOSTER BETTER THAN YOU DO! BETTER THAN SHE EVEN KNOWS HERSELF!”] [THOUGH… KEEPING IT REAL? THE FOSTER OBLIVION CAN BE KINDA NOT COOL SOMETIMES.] THE HEART OF THE MATTER: [I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GUYS NAMED A SECTION OF MY FILE AFTER MY FATHER’S SUPER-BORING BOOK—AND THEN RAMBLED ON FOR TWO PAGES ABOUT HIS SUPER-BORING THEORY!!!!!] [YOU DON’T NEED TWO PAGES ON IT. YOU DON’T EVEN NEED TWO SENTENCES. HERE’S ALLLLLL YOU NEED TO KNOW—BESIDES THE FACT THAT HE’S TOTALLY NOT THE FIRST PERSON TO COME UP WITH THIS (JUST THE ONE WHO LOVES TO TAKE CREDIT): OUR HEADS AND OUR HEARTS SOMETIMES FEEL DIFFERENT EMOTIONS, AND WHAT’S IN OUR HEARTS IS PROBABLY STRONGER.] [THAT’S IT!] [WELL… OKAY… I GUESS HE ALSO GOES ON A BIT ABOUT HOW EMPATHS PROBABLY ONLY READ THE EMOTIONS FROM THE HEAD.] [AND THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT HEART EMOTIONS BEING PURER BECAUSE NO ONE CAN CONTROL THEM.] [BUT THAT’S IT.] [AND DON’T TELL LORD BORINGPANTS I READ HIS DUMB BOOK! I MOSTLY SKIMMED.] PRANKSTER AND TROUBLEMAKER: [100 PERCENT ACCURATE. ALSO, I’M LEAVING YOUR LITTLE ATTACHED DETENTION RECORD BECAUSE IT’S THE GREATEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE!!!!]

As I am new to teaching this course, University policy is that we are to use this time to get to know each other better.  I realize that this is an incredible waste of all of our times and tuition money, is utterly tedious, and accomplishes nothing, but that is the rule.”  She started handing out more paperwork.  “Break into small groups and try to answer as many of the inane and entirely nonsensical questions as you can, before you stop caring about the assignment and learn to hate the others in your group.  Once you have spent five consecutive minutes discussing how it is impossible for the members of your group to discuss anything for five minutes-- as you obviously have nothing in common and are all equally boring-- the assignment will be complete, and you can promptly forget all of the names and information you have learned about your classmates, and go home.  Please hand in your papers to me on your way out, so that I can discard them without bothering to read what you wrote, as I do not care.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]

when i left them, i painted myself burgundy and grey i stopped saying the words “please” and “i’m sorry” i walked into grocery stores and bought too many clementines, ordered too much Chinese, spent my last four dollars on over the counter sleeping pills that made my stomach bleed but my soul forget every time i wanted to tell you “i’m sorry”, i wrote you a poem instead, i said things like “i hope your mother calls you beautiful” to strangers and when boys with dry hands and broken eyes asked me on dates i didn’t hesitate no, didn’t even stop them when their hands grazed my breasts and when they moaned my name against my thighs i cried i opened the mail and didn’t tell anyone for a week that i got accepted into law school, i stopped watering the plants and filled the bathtub with roses and milk, when i got invited to parties, i wore blue jeans with white shirts, sat alone in some kitchen drinking hard liquor until some boys mouth made me feel like home i stopped answering the phone for a month, i didn’t like how my name tasted in his mouth but he was older and didn’t say things like “it doesn’t matter” and i think i went insane, my heart boiled blisters, i couldn’t understand why my bones felt like cages, i walked around art museums until closing, watched them lock up the gates and then open them up again the very same morning, i thought about clocks and how time was a deception of my fingertips, i had stars growing inside of me into constellations, and only when some man on the 9 AM bus asked me for the time did i realize that you cannot run from light igniting your lungs, you cannot run from yourself.

It was Day Three, Freshman Year, and I was a little bit lost in the school library,looking for a bathroom that wasn't full of blindingly shiny sophomores checking their lip gloss. Day Three.Already pretty clear on the fact that I would be using secondary bathrooms for at least the next three years,until being a senior could pass for confidence.For the moment, I knew no one,and was too shy to talk to anyone. So that first sight of Edward: pale hair that looked like he'd just run his hands through it, paint-smeared white shirt,a half smile that was half wicked,and I was hooked. Since, "Hi,I'm Ella.You look like someone I'd like to spend the rest of my life with," would have been totally insane, I opted for sitting quietly and staring.Until the bell rang and I had to rush to French class,completely forgetting to pee. Edward Willing.Once I knew his name, the rest was easy.After all,we're living in the age of information. Wikipedia, iPhones, 4G ntworks, social networking that you can do from a thousand miles away.The upshot being that at any given time over the next two years, I could sit twenty feet from him in the library, not saying a word, and learn a lot about him.ENough, anyway, for me to become completely convinced that the Love at First Sight hadn't been a fluke. It's pretty simple.Edward matched four and a half of my If My Prince Does, In Fact, Come Someday,It Would Be Great If He Could Meet These Five Criteria. 1. Interested in art. For me, it's charcoal. For Edward, oil paint and bronze. That's almost enough right there. Nice lips + artist= Ella's prince. 2. Not afraid of love. He wrote, "Love is one of two things worth dying for.I have yet to decide on the second." 3.Or of telling the truth. "How can I believe that other people say if I lie to them?" 4.Hot. Why not?I can dream. 5.Daring. Mountain climbing, cliff dying, defying the parents. Him, not me. I'm terrified of an embarrassing number of things, including heights, convertibles, moths, and those comedians everyone loves who stand onstage and yell insults at the audience. 5, subsection a. Daring enough to take a chance on me.Of course, in the end, that No. 5a is the biggie. And the problem. No matter how muuch I worshipped him,no matter how good a pair we might have been,it was never, ever going to happen. To be fair to Edward,it's not like he was given an opportunity to get to know me. I'm not stupid.I know there are a few basic truths when it comes to boys and me. Truth: You have to talk to a boy-really talk,if you want him to see past the fact that you're not beautiful. Truth: I'm not beautiful. Or much of a conversationalist. Truth: I'm not entirely sure that the stuff behind the not-beautiful is going to be all that alluring, either. And one written-in-stone, heartbreaking truth about this guy. Truth:Edward Willing died in 1916.

I do have a bad habit,” he says. “of falling in love. With regularity and to spectacular effect. You see, it never goes well.” I wonder if this conversation makes him think of our kiss, but then, I was the one who kissed him. He’d only kissed back. “As charming as you are, how can that be?” I say. He laughs again. “That’s what my sister Taryn always says. She tells me that I remind her of her late husband. Which makes some sense, since I would be his half brother. But it’s also alarming, because she’s the one who murdered him.” Much as when he spoke about Madoc, it’s strange how fond Oak can sound when he tells me a horrifying thing a member of his family has done. “Whom have you fallen in love with?” I ask. “Well, there was you,” the prince says. “When we were children.” “Me?” I ask incredulously. “You didn’t know?” He appears to be merry in the face of my astonishment. “Oh yes. Though you were a year my senior, and it was hopeless, I absolutely mooned over you. When you were gone from Court, I refused any food but tea and toast for a month.” I cannot help snorting over the sheer absurdity of his statement. He puts a hand to my heart. “Ah, and now you laugh. It is my curse to adore cruel women. He cannot expect me to believe he had real feelings. “Stop with your games.” “Very well,” he says. “Shall we go to the next? Her name was Lara, a mortal at the school I attended when I lived with my eldest sister and her girlfriend. Sometimes Lara and I would climb into the crook of one of the maple trees and share sandwiches. But she had a villainous friend, who implicated me in a piece of gossip—which resulted in Lara stabbing me with a lead pencil and breaking off our relationship.” “You do like cruel women,” I say. “Then there was Violet, a pixie. I wrote terrible poetry about how I adored her. Unfortunately, she adored duels and would get into trouble so that I would have to fight for her honor. And even more unfortunately, neither my sister nor my father bothered to teach me how to fight for show. I thought of the dead-eyed expression on his face before his bout with the ogre and Tiernan’s angry words. “That resulted in my accidentally killing a person she liked better than me.” “Oh,” I say. “That is three levels of unfortunate.” “Then there was Sibi, who wanted to run away from Court with me, but as soon as we went, hated it and wept until I took her home. And Loana, a mermaid, who found my lack of a tail unbearable but tried to drown me anyway, because she found it equally unbearable that I would ever love another.” The way he tells these stories makes me recall how he’s told me many painful things before. Some people laugh in the face of death. He laughed in the face of despair. “How old were you?” “Fifteen, with the mermaid,” he said. “And nearly three years later, I must surely be wiser.” “Surely,” I say, wondering if he was. Wondering if I wanted him to be.

Forget your magic mirror," she decided to say. "If I lived here, I would spend my whole life in here, reading." "They're just... books...." He carefully lit the candelabra at the front and placed Lumière on the floor, dismissing him. "Just books? That's like saying Alexandria is just a library." She ran over to the closest shelf and tilted her head, reading the titles. "You don't understand. I don't understand how you don't understand. Look- here's an ancient text in Greek about astronomy... and next to it is everything Galileo Galilei ever wrote!! This whole section is about the stars and planets and the entire universe!" The Beast stood, looking slightly embarrassed, scratching the back of his neck with his hand. Belle grabbed a book and ran over to him, shoving it in his face. "Up until this man, Copernicus, everyone thought the entire universe rotated around the earth- that we were the center of it all." She flipped open to a page that had an engraving of planets and their paths, little callouts to their names and the length of their orbits. "Thanks to men like him and Tycho Brahe and Kepler, we now know nothing revolves around the earth- except the moon.

We decided to attend to our community instead of asking our community to attend the church.” His staff started showing up at local community events such as sports contests and town hall meetings. They entered a float in the local Christmas parade. They rented a football field and inaugurated a Free Movie Night on summer Fridays, complete with popcorn machines and a giant screen. They opened a burger joint, which soon became a hangout for local youth; it gives free meals to those who can’t afford to pay. When they found out how difficult it was for immigrants to get a driver’s license, they formed a drivers school and set their fees at half the going rate. My own church in Colorado started a ministry called Hands of the Carpenter, recruiting volunteers to do painting, carpentry, and house repairs for widows and single mothers. Soon they learned of another need and opened Hands Automotive to offer free oil changes, inspections, and car washes to the same constituency. They fund the work by charging normal rates to those who can afford it. I heard from a church in Minneapolis that monitors parking meters. Volunteers patrol the streets, add money to the meters with expired time, and put cards on the windshields that read, “Your meter looked hungry so we fed it. If we can help you in any other way, please give us a call.” In Cincinnati, college students sign up every Christmas to wrap presents at a local mall — ​no charge. “People just could not understand why I would want to wrap their presents,” one wrote me. “I tell them, ‘We just want to show God’s love in a practical way.’ ” In one of the boldest ventures in creative grace, a pastor started a community called Miracle Village in which half the residents are registered sex offenders. Florida’s state laws require sex offenders to live more than a thousand feet from a school, day care center, park, or playground, and some municipalities have lengthened the distance to half a mile and added swimming pools, bus stops, and libraries to the list. As a result, sex offenders, one of the most despised categories of criminals, are pushed out of cities and have few places to live. A pastor named Dick Witherow opened Miracle Village as part of his Matthew 25 Ministries. Staff members closely supervise the residents, many of them on parole, and conduct services in the church at the heart of Miracle Village. The ministry also provides anger-management and Bible study classes.

What Homer could never have foreseen is the double idiocy into which we now educate our children. We have what look like our equivalent to the Greek “assemblies”; we can watch them on cable television, as long as one can endure them. For they are charades of political action. They concern themselves constantly, insufferably, about every tiniest feature of human existence, but without slow deliberation, without balance, without any commitment to the difficult virtues. We do not have men locked in intellectual battle with other men, worthy opponents both, as Thomas Paine battled with John Dickinson, or Daniel Webster with Robert Hayne. We have men strutting and mugging for women nagging and bickering. We have the sputters of what used to be language, “tweets,” expressions of something less than opinion. It is the urge to join—something, anything—while remaining aloof from the people who live next door, whose names we do not know. Aristotle once wrote that youths should not study politics, because they had not the wealth of human experience to allow for it; all would become for them abstract and theoretical, like mathematics, which the philosopher said was more suitable for them. He concluded that men should begin to study politics at around the age of forty. Whether that wisdom would help us now, I don’t know.

Kavita looks peaceful when she's sleeping, when the Morphine finally brings her some comfort. Jasu sits in a chair next to the bed and reaches for her frail hand. With his touch, her eyes flutter open and she licks her dried lips. She sees him and smiles. “Jani, you’re back,” she says softly. “I went there, chakli.” He tries to begin slowly, but the words come tumbling out. “I went to Shanti, the orphanage. The man there knows her, he’s met her, Kavi. Her name is Asha now. She grew up in America, her parents are doctors, and she writes stories for newspapers—look, this is hers, she wrote this.” He waves the article in front of her. “America.” Kavita’s voice is barely a whisper. She closes her eyes and a tear drips down the side of her face and into her ear. “So far from home. All this time, she’s been so far from us.” “Such a good thing you did, chakli.” He strokes her hair, pulled back into a loose bun, and wipes her tears away with his rough fingers. “Just imagine if…” He looks down, shakes his head, and clasps her hand between his. He rests his head against their hands and begins to cry. “Such a good thing.”He looks up at her again. “She came looking for us, Kavi. She left this.” Jasu hands her the letter. A small smile breaks through on Kavita’s face. She peers at the page while he recites from memory. “My name is Asha…

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

Gen 22:11–16a The story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac is traced to E. It refers to the deity as Elohim in vv. 1,3,8, and 9. But, just as Abraham’s hand is raised with the knife to sacrifice Isaac, the text says that the angel of Yahweh stops him (v. 11). The verses in which Isaac is spared refer to the deity as Yahweh (vv. 11–14). These verses are followed by a report that the angel speaks a second time and says, “… because you did not withhold your son from me….” Thus the four verses which report that Isaac was not sacrificed involve both a contradiction and a change of the name of the deity. As extraordinary as it may seem, it has been suggested that in the original version of this story Isaac was actually sacrificed, and that the intervening four verses were added subsequently, when the notion of human sacrifice was rejected (perhaps by the person who combined J and E). Of course, the words “you did not withhold your son” might mean only that Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son. But still it must be noted that the text concludes (v. 19), “And Abraham returned to his servants.” Isaac is not mentioned. Moreover, Isaac never again appears as a character in E. Interestingly, a later midrashic tradition developed this notion, that Isaac actually had been sacrificed. This tradition is discussed in S. Spiegel’s The Last Trial (New York: Schocken, 1969; Hebrew edition 1950).

Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications? No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons—not to improve a country. The people I've known who've done great things of that type—you know, building hospitals, running schools—are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Missionaries get a bad rap, but I've known missionaries in Africa who were very self-sacrificing and humble and who did great things. They ran schools, hospitals, libraries; they helped people. Some wrote dictionaries and translated languages that hadn't been written down. I saw a lot of missionaries in Africa that were doing that, and you would never know their names; they came and did their work, and now they're buried there. Are there travel books out there that feel especially honest to you? Many of the books I quote in The Tao of Travel feel honest. One of them, really the most heartfelt, is Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard is a very honest book. Jan Morris has written numerous books, and you can take what she says to the bank. But there are some that just don't feel right. Bruce Chatwin never rang true to me. Bill Bryson said that he would take a couple of people and make them into one composite character. Well, that's what novelists do. If you're a travel writer you have to stick to the facts.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth,

History Eraser I got drunk and fell asleep atop the sheets but luckily i left the heater on. And in my dreams i wrote the best song that i've ever written...can't remember how it goes. I stayed drunk and fell awake and i was cycling on a plane and far away i heard you say you liked me. We drifted to a party -- cool. The people went to arty school. They made their paints by mixing acid wash and lemonade In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name I found an ezra pound and made a bet that if i found a cigarette i'd drop it all and marry you. Just then a song comes on: "you can't always get what you want" -- the rolling stones, oh woe is we, the irony! The stones became the moss and once all inhibitions lost, the hipsters made a mission to the farm. We drove by tractor there, the yellow straw replaced our hair, we laced the dairy river with the cream of sweet vermouth. In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name You said "we only live once" so we touched a little tongue, and instantly i wanted to... I lost my train of thought and jumped aboard the Epping as the doors were slowly closing on the world. I touched on and off and rubbed my arm up against yours and still the inspector inspected me. The lady in the roof was living proof that nothing really ever is exactly as it seems. In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name We caught the river boat downstream and ended up beside a team of angry footballers. I fed the ducks some krill then we were sucked against our will into the welcome doors of the casino. We drank green margaritas, danced with sweet senoritas, and we all went home as winners of a kind. You said "i guarantee we'll have more fun, drink till the moon becomes the sun, and in the taxi home i'll sing you a triffids song!" In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name

It has been noted in various quarters that the half-illiterate Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari never recorded the exact plans or dimensions for how to make one of his famous instruments. This might have been a commercial decision (during the earliest years of the 1700s, Stradivari’s violins were in high demand and open to being copied by other luthiers). But it might also have been because, well, Stradivari didn’t know exactly how to record its dimensions, its weight, and its balance. I mean, he knew how to create a violin with his hands and his fingers but maybe not in figures he kept in his head. Today, those violins, named after the Latinized form of his name, Stradivarius, are considered priceless. It is believed there are only around five hundred of them still in existence, some of which have been submitted to the most intense scientific examination in an attempt to reproduce their extraordinary sound quality. But no one has been able to replicate Stradivari’s craftsmanship. They’ve worked out that he used spruce for the top, willow for the internal blocks and linings, and maple for the back, ribs, and neck. They’ve figured out that he also treated the wood with several types of minerals, including potassium borate, sodium and potassium silicate, as well as a handmade varnish that appears to have been composed of gum arabic, honey, and egg white. But they still can’t replicate a Stradivarius. The genius craftsman never once recorded his technique for posterity. Instead, he passed on his knowledge to a number of his apprentices through what the philosopher Michael Polyani called “elbow learning.” This is the process where a protégé is trained in a new art or skill by sitting at the elbow of a master and by learning the craft through doing it, copying it, not simply by reading about it. The apprentices of the great Stradivari didn’t learn their craft from books or manuals but by sitting at his elbow and feeling the wood as he felt it to assess its length, its balance, and its timbre right there in their fingertips. All the learning happened at his elbow, and all the knowledge was contained in his fingers. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polyani wrote, “Practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action.”1 By that he meant that we learn as Stradivari’s protégés did, by feeling the weight of a piece of wood, not by reading the prescribed measurements in a manual. Polyani continues, To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.

The traumatic aspect of drinking ayahuasca is that in order to heal yourself, you must first confront the wound; by forcing you to deal with your own inner garbage, ayahuasca shows you things about yourself that you might not want to see. I wish that a whole country could drink ayahuasca—not merely every individual citizen of a country, but the country itself, the spirit of the country. I wish that a flag could drink ayahuasca, that we could just fold the Stars and Stripes into the shape of a cup, pour in the tea, and transport Uncle Sam into another dimension. He’d have to fight his way out of some nightmares, but he’d be cleansed. What would he find? William S. Burroughs wrote that when you drink ayahuasca, “The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized—pass through your body.” When Burroughs drank, he actually saw himself transformed into both a black man and a black woman. What if some freedom-hating narcoterrorists snuck into the Fox News studios and put ayahuasca in Sean Hannity’s coffee, just before he went live? What would be the day’s fair and balanced news for America? If America drank ayahuasca and then withdrew into the filthy pit of its own heart, confronting all its fears and hate and finally purging itself of that negative energy, maybe America would come out Muslim: sucked through a black hole by the Black Mind, young Latter-Day Saint crackers with smooth cheeks, short-sleeved white shirts, and name tags confront nightmarish visions of getting swallowed whole by giant grotesque “Jolly Nigger” coin banks and then find themselves vomited back up as Nubian Islamic Hebrews in turbans and robes selling incense on the subways. The “God Hates Fags” pastor, eyes wild with a new passion for Allah, boards a helicopter to drop thousands of Qur’ans upon the small towns below. I want to see ayahuasca’s vine goddess clean out America’s poison. But what would happen if a religion could drink the vine? What if I poured ayahuasca into my Qur’an?

Okay, so I shouldn't have fucked with her on the introduction thing. Writing nothing except, Saturday night. You and me. Driving lessons and hot sex ... in her notebook probably wasn't the smartest move. But I was itching to make Little Miss Perfecta stumble in her introduction of me. And stumbling she is. "Miss Ellis?" I watch in amusement as Perfection herself looks up at Peterson. Oh, she's good. This partner of mine knows how to hide her true emotions, something I recognize because I do it all the time. "Yes?" Brittany says, tilting her head and smiling like a beauty queen. I wonder if that smile has ever gotten her out of a speeding ticket. "It's your turn. Introduce Alex to the class." I lean an elbow on the lab table, waiting for an introduction she has to either make up or fess up she knows less than crap about me. She glances at my comfortable position and I can tell from her deer-in-the-headlights look I've stumped her. "This is Alejandro Fuentes," she starts, her voice hitching the slightest bit. My temper flares at the mention of my given name, but I keep a cool facade as she continues with a made-up introduction. "When he wasn't hanging out on street corners and harassing innocent people this summer, he toured the inside of jails around the city, if you know what I mean. And he has a secret desire nobody would ever guess." The room suddenly becomes quiet. Even Peterson straightens to attention. Hell, even I'm listening like the words coming out of Brittany's lying, pink-frosted lips are gospel. "His secret desire," she continues, "is to go to college and become a chemistry teacher, like you, Mrs. Peterson." Yeah, right. I look over at my friend Isa, who seems amused that a white girl isn't afraid of giving me smack in front of the entire class. Brittany flashes me a triumphant smile, thinking she's won this round. Guess again, gringa. I sit up in my chair while the class remains silent. "This is Brittany Ellis," I say, all eyes now focused on me. "This summer she went to the mall, bought new clothes so she could expand her wardrobe, and spent her daddy's money on plastic surgery to enhance her, ahem, assets." It might not be what she wrote, but it's probably close enough to the truth. Unlike her introduction of me. Chuckles come from mis cuates in the back of the class, and Brittany is as stiff as a board beside me, as if my words hurt her precious ego. Brittany Ellis is used to people fawning all over her and she could use a little wake-up call. I'm actually doing her a favor. Little does she know I'm not finished with her intro. "Her secret desire," I add, getting the same reaction as she did during her introduction, "is to date a Mexicano before she graduates." As expected, my words are met by comments and low whistles from the back of the room. "Way to go, Fuentes," my friend Lucky barks out. "I'll date you, mamacita, " another says. I give a high five to another Latino Blood named Marcus sitting behind me just as I catch Isa shaking her head as if I did something wrong. What? I'm just having a little fun with a rich girl from the north side. Brittany's gaze shifts from Colin to me. I take one look at Colin and with my eyes tell him game on. Colin's face instantly turns bright red, resembling a chile pepper. I have definitely invaded his territory.

Anne Sexton, who died forty-two years ago today, did her best to respond to the legions of fans who wrote to her. The letter below, from August 1965, finds her dispensing unvarnished advice to an aspiring poet from Amherst. Read more of her correspondence in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Your letter was very interesting, hard to define, making it hard on me somehow to set limits for you, advise or help in any real way. First of all let me tell you that I find your poems fascinating, terribly uneven … precious perhaps, flashes of brilliance … but the terrible lack of control, a bad use of rhyme and faults that I feel sure you will learn not to make in time. I am not a prophet but I think you will make it if you learn to revise, if you take your time, if you work your guts out on one poem for four months instead of just letting the miracle (as you must feel it) flow from the pen and then just leave it with the excuse that you are undisciplined. Hell! I’m undisciplined too, in everything but my work … Everyone in the world seems to be writing poems … but only a few climb into the sky. What you sent shows you COULD climb there if you pounded it into your head that you must work and rework these uncut diamonds of yours. If this is impossible for you my guess is that you will never really make it … As for madness … hell! Most poets are mad. It doesn’t qualify us for anything. Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing. Even though I’m often crazy, and I am and I know it, still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak … nothing grows from it and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail. Advice … Stop writing letters to the top poets in America. It is a terrible presumption on your part. I never in my life would have the gall (sp?) to write Randall Jarrell out of the blue that way and all my life I have wanted to do so. It’s out of line … it isn’t done. I mean they get dozens of fan letters a day that they have no time to respond to and I’m sure dozens of poems. Meanwhile, these poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way—not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems, usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole … make contact with others such as you. They are just as lonely, just as ready, and will help you far more than the distant Big Name Poet … I’m not being rejecting, Jon, I’m being realistic.

The kid in the newspaper was named Stevie, and he was eight. I was thirty-nine and lived by myself in a house that I owned. For a short time our local newspaper featured an orphan every week. Later they would transition to adoptable pets, but for a while it was orphans, children your could foster and possibly adopt of everything worked out, the profiles were short, maybe two or three hundred words. This was what I knew: Stevie liked going to school. He made friends easily. He promised he would make his bed every morning. He hoped that if he were very good we could have his own dog, and if he were very, very good, his younger brother could be adopted with him. Stevie was Black. I knew nothing else. The picture of him was a little bigger than a postage stamp. He smiled. I studied his face at my breakfast table until something in me snapped. I paced around my house, carrying the folded newspaper. I had two bedrooms. I had a dog. I had so much more than plenty. In return he would make his bed, try his best in school. That was all he had to bargain with: himself. By the time Karl came for dinner after work I was nearly out of my mind. “I want to adopt him,” I said. Karl read the profile. He looked at the picture. “You want to be his mother?” “It’s not about being his mother. I mean, sure, if I’m his mother that’s fine, but it’s like seeing a kid waving from the window of a burning house, saying he’ll make his bed if someone will come and get him out. I can’t leave him there.” “We can do this,” Karl said. We can do this. I started to calm myself because Karl was calm. He was good at making things happen. I didn’t have to want children in order to want Stevie. In the morning I called the number in the newspaper. They took down my name and address. They told me they would send the preliminary paperwork. After the paperwork was reviewed, there would be a series of interviews and home visits. “When do I meet Stevie?” I asked. “Stevie?” “The boy in the newspaper.” I had already told her the reason I was calling. “Oh, it’s not like that,” the woman said. “It’s a very long process. We put you together with the child who will be your best match.” “So where’s Stevie?” She said she wasn’t sure. She thought that maybe someone had adopted him. It was a bait and switch, a well-written story: the bed, the dog, the brother. They knew how to bang on the floor to bring people like me out of the woodwork, people who said they would never come. I wrapped up the conversation. I didn’t want a child, I wanted Stevie. It all came down to a single flooding moment of clarity: he wouldn’t live with me, but I could now imagine that he was in a solid house with people who loved him. I put him in the safest chamber of my heart, he and his twin brother in twin beds, the dog asleep in Stevie’s arms. And there they stayed, going with me everywhere until I finally wrote a novel about them called Run. Not because I thought it would find them, but because they had become too much for me to carry. I had to write about them so that I could put them down.

I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34 Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed. The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35 Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt. Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period: Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis… Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36 It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37 Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.