The Library

He had a Cork accent like an illness.

Willie Dunne felt only a numbness, a wateriness in his limbs. He was trying to read the man’s face still, and not listen so much to the words. This was happening in front of him, but the death of the German man was happening still also.

Well, it sounded like a fable to Willie Dunne, a fable, not a truthful account. It made him want to shoot the bloody priest, listening to it, and the doleful voice it was spoken with. Willie didn’t want the story hanging from his heart for the rest of his days, for the love of God. The story hung from his heart for the rest of his days.

Of course, the sergeant-major was joking. No grub on earth, no pungent pheasants, the sweetest of puddings, no custard of Maud’s, no particle of food of the fervent earth, could be set against the great, dark list of sundered names. The graves of vanished souls strewn across the broken woods and farms. Suddenly he wanted to say to his sergeant-major, that it was all an ugly, vicious, bullying trick, it didn’t fucking matter if it was a Plumer or a Gough, good general or bad, everything ended always in the ghastly tally of wrenching deaths.

And then the ‘good’ general was gone and there was another general now that Christy Moran referred to as the ‘Mutineer’. Gough the Mutineer, he called him, because he had led the mutiny of the officers in the Curragh camp, years ago it seemed like now, when he said he would not march his men against the loyal Ulstermen, should it be asked of him in a time of crisis, that time they formed themselves into the Ulster Volunteers to resist Home Rule.

“Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.”

Almost at once things began to go wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. In Quito, the visitors somehow provoked the locals and were chased out of town by a mob armed with stones. Soon after, the expedition’s doctor was murdered in a misunderstanding over a woman. The botanist became deranged. Others died of fevers and falls. The third most senior member of the party, a man named Pierre Godin, ran off with a thirteen-year-old girl and could not be induced to return.

Physicists as a rule are not overattentive to the pronouncements of Swiss patent office clerks, and so, despite the abundance of useful tidings, Einstein’s papers attracted little notice. Having just solved several of the deepest mysteries of the universe, Einstein applied for a job as a university lecturer and was rejected, and then as a high school teacher and was rejected there as well. So he went back to his job as an examiner third class, but of course he kept thinking. He hadn’t even come close to finishing yet.

Matters were not helped, as David Bodanis points out in his superb bookE=mc2 , when theNew York Times decided to do a story, and—for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder—sent the paper’s golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.

Gell-Mann’s theory was that all hadrons were made up of still smaller, even more fundamental particles. His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particlespartons , as in Dolly, but was overruled. Instead they became known asquarks

When asteroids were first detected in the 1800s—the very first was discovered on the first day of the century by a Sicilian named Giuseppi Piazzi—they were thought to be planets, and the first two were named Ceres and Pallas.

Those of us born in, say, the ’60s were trained by television to look where it pointed, usually at versions of “real life” made prettier, sweeter, livelier by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s mega-Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what’s not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.

Delayed gratification is a good thing. It’s what built the middle class.’

Butcher birds caught mice in those places, speared them on the branches of the jacaranda, dead mice and voles.

I save the Freddie the Frog until it melts in the glove compartment. He represents something I’m not sure I understand.

Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost.”

His black belly button stuck out, and Jacinta cleaned it with an alcohol swab, waiting for it to fall off. She played with his little red feet, and felt close to him when he crammed her breast in his mouth and sucked while raising his eyes slowly, slowly across her collarbone, across the ceiling, gazing at Thomasina or the stove or the cat, back again to her collarbone, then up, up, till he found her eyes and locked on, and that was a kind of flying, flying through the northern lights or a Chagall night sky, with a little white goat to give a blessing.

Treadway sat and rocked it, and he sang to it as well. His singing was one of the beautiful things women other than Jacinta did not know about. He sang his own songs, songs he improvised after his time alone in the wild, as well as ancient Labrador songs passed down by generations of trappers and nomads and hunters who have heard caribou speak. The baby loved this; it began a life of waking to warmth and song and colour and drifting into dreams threaded with parent song.

But she was thirty-four, not twenty, and knew that beyond the romance of an escape, beyond the first euphoric flight, there was a second day that brought a return of ordinary burdens, the burdens you thought you had fled.

You felt young — you were young, because you were not yet eighteen and had not yet gone to Labrador to work, and had not yet met the man you would love but who would never understand the greatest part of your soul, the part that lived on such wisps of romance and faded when they were taken away.

This whole religion, Jacinta thought — and Treadway knew without thought — depended on people more than people depended on it. You didn’t need it unless you did not have the land in your heart; the land was its own god.

“Magpies are birds, Annabel. There are two lovers, Niu Lang and Zhi Nu. They are on opposite sides of a river. They belong together, but no one sees this but the magpies. The magpies fly over the river and make a bridge with their wings.”

It was not one man talking here, but the pack. What one man said could easily have been said by another. They threw their voices back and forth in the sun like baseball players fooling around with the ball.

“Could it be when you hide something important from someone you love to sort of save your life in a way?” “Wayne.” “Because I really, really, really, really, really, really —” “Stop it.” “— want a bathing suit like Elizaveta Kirilovna’s. More than anything else in the world.”

All children, she thought as she watched him, could be either girl or boy, their cheeks flushed, their hair damp tendrils. Wayne looked at her so trustingly she badly wanted to sit beside him, to look at him and honestly explain everything that had happened to him from birth. At nine, she thought, a child has a capacity for truth. By age ten the child has lengthened and opened out from babyhood, from childishness, and there is a directness there that adults don’t have. You could look in Wayne’s eyes and say anything true, no matter how difficult, and those eyes would meet yours and they would take it in with a scientific beauty that was like Schubert’s music.

“I can create my own romance. But Wayne is only a child. How could Treadway stamp out such a sweet thing?” She had told Eliza the bridge was gone, but it didn’t seem such a big deal, somehow, when she told it. It did not seem like what it was to her: a kind of annihilation by Treadway of some part of his own child’s soul.

“Do you fall in love with boys?” She stood close and he was interested in her lips, but not in kissing them. He was interested in how the two peaks at the top were so sharp and the scoop in the middle had freckles in it, three, like stars behind the Mealy Mountains. He wanted to get a nice sharp pencil and draw that part of her lips. He got the idea she didn’t want him to kiss her at all, not really. He got the idea she wanted someone to talk to.

Thomasina was angrier than she had been in a long time. A child’s worry was not like an adult’s. It gnawed deep, and was so unnecessary. Why did people not realize children could withstand the truth?

So you’re twelve. I’d call twelve the age of reason. So would every major civilization since the dawn of humanity. Twelve is when you wake up and you look around and you understand things.

“Being hungry makes you forget it’s a lamb?” “Appetite is king.” “Why?” “I don’t know. I need to think about it.” Wayne did not know any other grown-ups who would admit they needed to think about something. They all came up with some kind of answer, even if it didn’t make sense.

“Everyone thinks,” he told it, “that I know what I’m doing. For God’s sake, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. You know that.” The owl listened from wherever it was. Deep, deep in the woods, past Beaver River, past the pond, which was the pond in the interior where the waters changed direction and began to run magnetically north to Ungava Bay, the pond whose name was a secret. “I should have let well enough alone,” Treadway said. “I think that now. What would have happened if I had let Wayne become half little girl?” The owl allowed Treadway to see Wayne as a girl child. So Treadway stood there in the woods and saw a vision of his daughter. She had dark hair and a grave face. She was an intelligent girl, and Treadway loved her. “You’re a beautiful child.” But the child could not hear him as the owl could. The owl listened, and Treadway felt, for the first time since his wife had given birth, pain flow out of his heart and into the moss. It sank into the moss and became part of the woods. The owl took some of it. This had not happened to the pain before.

And it is true it is hard to know how much anesthetic to give a young person. Wayne’s doctors had not been in agreement about it and had given him a measurement between the doses allotted a child and an adult. It put him in a state between waking and sleeping, and dulled the pain from the cut Dr. Lioukras made to open the vagina that had been hidden. The flesh was a centimetre deep, and when he cut it, Dr. Lioukras asked the nurse to get a stainless steel bowl from the trolley immediately. Wayne had not seen the blood, which was copious, because the staff had erected a sheet the way they did with all gynecological operations. He saw the masked faces move in slow motion through a gelled lens, and heard their voices as a stretched, continuous murmur, with now and then a word plopping out whole. He heard blood and anomaly and oh. He heard rush and no and never. He heard Thomasina say, “No,” and he heard the staff ask her to stand back, and he heard her cry out. But the sounds were muted. What came close, what rushed head-on at him, was the colour red. Red can be black-red, and this was. It can be scarlet, and it was this too. When you close your eyes in a field in the sun and you are young and the world has not imposed memories on you that can’t be erased, there is a red-orange that sits against your closed eyes and contains the warmth of all future summers, and the red rushing headlong behind Wayne’s closed eyes included this red too. It scared him, the swirling red world, yet it thrilled him too, and the anesthetic had pinned his arms and legs to a soft, soft cloud. He could not get up from the dizzy red world no matter what looked out from it at him, and, like the words rising from a murmur of sea-sound, there was something half-formed in the red world, looking at him, and he did not know what it was, though he felt it was drowning in blood and trying to speak, but the red whirlpool was going too fast. In his anesthetized world, sound from the unconconscious rose up, a sound that normally comes to the waking world only through portholes like the northern lights, or the voice of an owl, or the ground whispering. Wayne heard the sound become louder and drown the voices of the staff. The inchoate red world took form: a red trench, a tunnel, a map of the womb inside him and the passageway leading from it, which had all been closed and that he had no idea existed. The red world knew everything in him, and it showed him the map of his own feminine parts, and they were the most vivid, living, seductive red he had known in waking or in dreaming life. He heard the sound of himself falling into this tunnel, a long, low moan, then a shout. The staff heard it, and none of them had heard this before outside a birthing room. The youngest nurse ran out of the operating room, downstairs to the walk-in fridge in the back of the cafeteria, and drank a carton of Old South ruby red grapefruit juice mixed with crushed ice.

He did not light up at all when she hugged him. His body felt like one of the cold logs out by the fence. He told her what had happened: the blood, the surgeon, the loss of their secret. But there was a new part he did not mention. “Thomasina Baikie,” he said, “told Wayne everything. And told me more besides.” “Where is he?” Jacinta felt elation, even while she could see her husband’s face might not recover from its careworn collapse. The life that had drained out of Treadway began filling her face. He saw it. Why was life coming into her when he felt this way? “Goose Bay.” He opened the fridge, took out his bread, made himself a Maple Leaf bologna sandwich with mustard, and put the kettle on. He sat at the kitchen table, ate the sandwich, and waited for his kettle to boil. “Is he by himself?” Treadway shrugged, his mouth full. “There were nurses.” Jacinta had slung her coat on Treadway’s La-Z-Boy when she came in, and now she put it on. The keys were beside his saucer, and she grabbed them and shoved on the easiest shoes and went out with no scarf, which she never did. Even in summer Jacinta wore a silk scarf or a thin cotton one around her collarbones, but not this day. When she reached the hospital, she went straight to Wayne’s room and saw that he was so pale his freckles looked as if they were floating in cream. She hugged him and he clung to her, and it was the first time since he was a baby that she could allow love unimpeded to escape her heart and flow to her child. It buzzed like the power line on her old back lane in St. John’s. She had not freely loved the girl part of Wayne, as the girl had not been acknowledged to exist. Jacinta kissed her child on the forehead. She rubbed her own tears into her face and they stung the nicks that the wind had chafed, and she brought her child home.

Did boys not have moments of softness, moments of more incredible tenderness than girls did?

Aunt Doreen and her husband had more money between the two of them than they knew what to do with. They had accounts and investments up to their ears, Ann Michelin had said; Doreen did not even have to run that shop if she didn’t want to. She could quit the shop tomorrow and live out the rest of her days with a mouth full of caviar.

She had become unreal, she thought, to anyone outside herself. And as a result she was losing a sense of her own effect on the world. She had an effect on the kettle if she put it on the stove. It boiled. She made tea. If she drew the curtains the curtains remained closed. She had no problem having an effect on the curtains. Her slippers lay where she had placed them after their last use, as did her glasses, her cup, and her saucer. But as for an effect on the larger world, which she had had as a mother and did not now feel she had as a woman living practically alone, that effect had lost its power.

He was not alone with her but he felt as if they were alone. He felt they recognized each other in a way that no one else recognized either of them. Other people could look at him but they did not see what Wally Michelin saw, and perhaps others saw in her the same thing he did, but he did not think they saw it. What it was was limitlessness. When you were with an ordinary person, you could draw a line around the territory the two of you covered, and Wayne had found that the territory was usually quite small. It was smaller than a country and smaller than a town and sometimes smaller than a room. But this room, the room they were in, did not really exist. Boston did not necessarily exist either, although Wayne could sense it, fizzing with the unfamiliarity of its lights, its parks and streets, beyond the practice-room doors. The way he responded to Wally’s presence was that he felt as if life at this minute was blossoming inside him instead of lying dormant. He felt the electric presence of his own life, and he did not want that feeling to end, although he knew it had ended in the past and that it would end again. She whispered into his ear and the piece of her breath was warm with cool edges.

Historically, designers have been relegated to the business of making pretty pictures. Most of us transitioned into “UX” from other areas. But now that UX is everywhere, we are thrust into the limelight of product development with our own ideas forming a critical piece of the puzzle. It’s what we’ve always wanted! The problem? We’re not used to having to explain ourselves to other people, especially non-designers.

I know what a woman is to him, a woman is a guitar, pleasant, but you have to remember to be gentle, it’s been wounded but it would like to sing.

the winner is the one who gets away.

But more and more he had become the fixer, mostly because he seemed better at identifying other people’s specific problems than at managing his own general ones. At thirty-eight, that was what he had become known for, if he was known for anything. It meant you didn’t have to be there for the duration, even though by now that’s exactly what he wanted: to see something through.

“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.”

Control’s ability to absorb new names, though, had ended with Davidson. He gave vague nods to the research chemist, as well as the staff epidemiologist, psychologist, and anthropologist who had also been stuffed into the tiny conference room for the meeting. At first Control felt disrespected by that space, but halfway through he realized he’d gotten it wrong. No, they were like a cat confronted by a predator—just trying to make themselves look bigger to him, in this case by scaling down their surroundings.

Just how elephantine, how rhinoceroscrutian,

He liked to drink. He liked to throw his weight around. I remember the director once said something unkind, compared him to a prisoner of war who thinks just because he suffered he knows a lot.

Isabelle didn't care whether he married her or not, but when he said he would not see her again she felt the simple agony of bereavement, like a child whose only source of love has gone.

For three years her loss coloured every moment of her day. When at last it became bearable it was still like a wound on which the skin would not thicken, so the least thing could reopen it. The reckless innocence of her unguided childhood was finished, but eventually a sweetness and balance in her nature returned.

Isabelle wrote: My dearest Jeanne, I have missed you so much, not only in the past few weeks but in the years before when we never seemed to meet. How much I regret that now. I feel like a child who has been absorbed in her own game all day and suddenly stops, only to see that it is growing dark and she is far from home with no idea of how to get back.

The coldness enabled him to live more easily, to respond with some degree of conviction to other people; he began to regard them as something more than second-best, acting out lives that were impoverished. However, the sudden chill loss of her also made him uneasy. Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

As she came up to the arch, Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone.

"Who are these, these...?" She gestured with her hand. "These?" The man with the brush sounded surprised. "The lost." "Men who died in this battle?" "No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries." "These are just the... the unfound?"

Elizabeth went through and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight. "Nobody told me." She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. "My God, nobody told me."

She was also a little nervous because every time she saw Robert she was worried that he would not live up to her recollection. It was as though there was this pressure on him to justify the effect he had on her life. She was denied to other men, lived alone, and was party to a continuing deceit; it was up to him to be worth it. Yet he was the most diffident of men, unable to make such claims for himself, offering no promises, and always urging her to act in her own interests. Perhaps that was one reason why she loved him.

"I'm pleased," said Stephen, though he did not feel pleasure. It confused him to think the role he now played in Isabelle's life was to offer minor reassurance. "I'm pleased," he repeated, and in that moment of small insincerity he thought he felt the last presence of Isabelle leave him, not by going into false oblivion, as she had the first time, but into simple absence.

This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial images; with the unique positionings consciousness takes at these confluent streams; and with my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about life on the borders, life in the shadows.

Presently this infant language, chis bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, chat we need always to make the first overture-co translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you-from the new mest1zas

Or we were just fucking running. Down a steep and endless hill, she and I, holding hands. She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once. We were running away together down a curving dirt road, through a dipping valley of grass, by a rushing mud-colored river, into an even greater forest, or we were just running who knows where? No idea. Didn’t care. But I was excited. My life could change. And I wasn’t alone anymore.

To be specific, the point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation. The gap between these two markets, heretofore ignored, is in fact so significant as to warrant being called a chasm, and crossing this chasm must be the primary focus of any long-term

Every truly innovative high-tech product starts out as a fad—something with no known market value or purpose but with “great properties” that generate a lot of enthusiasm within an “in crowd.” That’s the early market. Then comes a period during which the rest of the world watches to see if anything can be made of this; that is the chasm. If in fact something does come out of it—if a value proposition is discovered that can predictably be delivered to a targetable set of customers at a reasonable price-then a new mainstream market forms, typically with a rapidity that allows its initial leaders to become very, very successful.

One of the most important lessons about crossing the chasm is that the task ultimately requires achieving an unusual degree of company unity during the crossing period.

Yves Bonnefoy’s collection of poems Rue Traversière,

Éric chose A Picture of Dorian Gray, The Monk (as revised by French ‘mad genius’ Antonin Artaud) and Herman Hesse’s Narcisse and Golmund,

Being confident about the value of our innovation was not enough. We needed buy-in from the community we were trying to serve.

During the Lucasfilm years, I definitely had my periods of feeling overwhelmed as a manager, periods when I wondered about my own abilities and asked myself if I should try to adopt a more forceful, alpha male management style. I’d put my version of hierarchy in place by delegating to other managers, but I was also part of a chain of command in the greater Lucasfilm empire. I remember going home at night, exhausted, feeling like I was balancing on the backs of a herd of horses—only some of the horses were thoroughbreds, some were completely wild, and some were ponies who were struggling to keep up. I found it hard enough to hold on, let alone steer.

building a company was like being on a wagon train headed west. On the long journey to the land of plenty, the pioneers would be full of purpose and united by the goal of reaching their destination. Once they arrived, he’d say, people would come and go, and that was as it should be. But the process of moving toward something—of having not yet arrived—was what he idealized.

The story has been told and retold about how, as a young filmmaker, in the wake of American Graffiti’s success, he was advised to demand a higher salary on his next movie, Star Wars. That would be the expected move in Hollywood: Bump up your quote. Not for George, though. He skipped the raise altogether and asked instead to retain ownership of licensing and merchandising rights to Star Wars. The studio that was distributing the film, 20th Century Fox, readily agreed to his request, thinking it was not giving up much. George would prove them wrong, setting the stage for major changes in the industry he loved. He bet on himself—and won.

For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.

We had no sales people and no marketing people and no idea where to find them. Steve, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, me—none of us knew the first thing about how to run the kind of business we had just started. We were drowning.

The act of thinking about the problem and responding to it was invigorating and rewarding. We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions. Questions like: If we had done some things right to achieve success, how could we ensure that we understood what those things were? Could we replicate them on our next projects? Perhaps as important, was replication of success even the right thing to do? How many serious, potentially disastrous problems were lurking just out of sight and threatening to undo us? What, if anything, could we do to bring them to light?

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

To reiterate, it is the focus on people—their work habits, their talents, their values—that is absolutely central to any creative venture.

Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.”

Yet randomness remains stubbornly difficult to understand. The problem is that our brains aren’t wired to think about it. Instead, we are built to look for patterns in sights, sounds, interactions, and events in the world. This mechanism is so ingrained that we see patterns even when they aren’t there.

The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

In the preface, I wondered why the leaders of so many rising Silicon Valley companies made bad decisions, decisions that—even at the time—seemed so obviously wrongheaded. They had management and operational skills; they had grand ambitions; they didn’t think they were making bad decisions, nor did they think they were being arrogant. Yet delusion set in—and as bright as these leaders were, they missed something essential to their continued success.

“Art challenges technology, technology inspires art.”

Katherine Sarafian, another Pixar producer, credits the clinical psychologist Taibi Kahler with giving her a helpful way of visualizing her role. “One of Kahler’s big teachings is about meeting people where they are,” Katherine says, referring to what Kahler calls the Process Communication Model, which compares being a manager to taking the elevator from floor to floor in a big building.

We had to learn that we weren’t attacking the person, we were attacking the project. Only then could we create a crucible that boils away everything that’s not working and leaves the strongest framework.”

There is nothing like a crisis, though, to bring what ails a company to the surface.

We called it Notes Day, and I see it as a stellar example of how to set the table for creativity. Managers of creative companies must never forget to ask themselves: “How do we tap the brainpower of our people?”

First, it created an electronic suggestion box where Pixar people could submit discussion topics they thought would help us become more innovative and more efficient. Immediately, topic ideas began flooding in, along with suggestions about how to run Notes Day itself. The suggestion box, in turn, prompted something that none of us had expected. Many departments, without any prodding, created their own wiki pages and blogs to hash out what they believed the core issues at Pixar really were.

When people asked for guidance on how to be involved, Tom nudged them along, sending this hypothetical prompt to anyone who asked: “The year is 2017. Both of this year’s films were completed in well under 18,500 person-weeks.… What innovations helped these productions meet their budget goals? What are some specific things that we did differently?”

It’s all well and good to gather people to discuss workplace challenges, but it was extremely important that we find a way to turn all that talk into something tangible, usable, valuable.

A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

The W Bush administration abused the allies, the Obama administration ignored the allies, and the Trump administration insulted the allies.

With the Soviet fall, American president George HW Bush sensed history calling. He used his unprecedented popularity in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and victory in the First Iraq War to launch a national conversation on what’s next. What do the American people want out of this new world? He openly discussed a New World Order, his personal goal being “a thousand points of light,” a community of free nations striving to better the human condition in ways heretofore unimaginable.

Perhaps it’s a little reminder that the word ‘museum’ means home of the Muses.

This immediacy has, curiously, made people less curious about discovering the world, at least in any depth. Now, with 24/7 news cycles, hours spent tweeting or updating Facebook pages with daily minutia, and endless reality television shows, the full power of storytelling – its contextual beauty and majestic ability to move us – is on the wane. What this means is that today’s children may know the facts but not the context in which things happen.

A recent ground-breaking study for children, ‘Do You Know?’ (created by psychologist Dr Marshall Duke of Emory University and his colleague, Dr Robyn Fivush) has discovered the single best predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness: Story. Apparently, the more a child knows his family’s ‘story’ – in other words, the better informed he is about his wider family and obstacles they have overcome in order to survive and thrive – the ‘stronger a child’s sense of control over his life, the higher his self-esteem’.

Juxtapose: take two ideas, images, or thoughts and place them together. Let them collide. Remember German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel, here: that in posing two opposing ideas, a whole new idea is created (thesis + antithesis = synthesis). This tool wakes up your audience, and is the root of all successful stories.

A Bene Gesserit axiom slipped into his mind: 'To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.'

"Now," Alia said. "Speak." "I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe." She shook her head. "That's . . . that's . . . " "A bitter pill,"

"Have you been there all along, Duncan?" she asked. "So I'm to be Duncan," he said. "Why?" "Don't question me," she said. And she thought, looking at him, that the Tleilaxu had left no corner of their ghola unfinished. "Only gods can safely risk perfection," she said. "It's a dangerous thing for a man." "Duncan died," he said, wishing she would not call him that. "I am Hayt."

‘Then we must certainly wake him up,’ said Snufkin as he jumped down. ‘We must do something special today because it’s going to be fine.’

(As everyone knows, if the first butterfly you see is yellow the summer will be a happy one. If it is white then you will just have a quiet summer. Black and brown butterflies should never be talked about – they are much too sad.)

The day after Spread Networks acquired lifetime rights to a ten-foot-wide path under the wire rope factory’s parking lot, it sent out its first press release: “Round-trip travel time from Chicago to New Jersey has been cut to 13 milliseconds.” They’d set a goal of coming in at under 840 miles and beaten it; the line was 827 miles long. “It was the biggest what-the-fuck moment the industry had had in some time,” said Spivey. Even then, none of the line’s creators knew for sure how the line would be used. The biggest question about the line—Why?—remained imperfectly explored. All its creators knew was that the Wall Street people who wanted it wanted it very badly—and also wanted to find ways for others not to have it. In one of his first meetings with a big Wall Street firm, Spivey had told the firm’s boss the price of his line: $10.6 million plus costs if he paid up front, $20 million or so if he paid in installments. The boss said he’d like to go away and think about it. He returned with a single question: “Can you double the price?”

The discovery of Thor was not the end of a story; it was closer to a beginning. Brad and his team were building a mental picture of the financial markets after the crisis. The market was now a pure abstraction. It called to mind no obvious picture to replace the old one that people still carried around in their heads. The same old ticker tape ran across the bottom of television screens—even though it represented only a tiny fraction of the actual trading. Market experts still reported from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, even though trading no longer happened there.

The LinkedIn searches became a new obsession. The former Madoff employee’s profile led him to the people who worked for the former Madoff employee, who led him to the people who worked for them, and so on. Even as Credit Suisse tried to appear as if it had nothing to do with high-frequency trading, its employees begged to differ. Schwall dug out dozens of examples of Credit Suisse’s computer programmers boasting on their résumés about “building high-frequency trading platforms” and “implementing high-frequency trading strategy,” or of experience as a “quantitative trader on equity and equity derivatives: high-frequency trading.” One guy explained that he had “managed on-boarding of all high-frequency clients to Crossfinder.” Another said he had built the Credit Suisse Crossfinder dark pool and now worked in high-frequency trading market making. Credit Suisse claimed that its dark pool had nothing to do with high-frequency trading, and yet it somehow employed, in and around its dark pool, a mother lode of high-frequency trading talent. By the time he’d finished, Schwall had built the entire Credit Suisse dark pool organization chart. “He’s got these people charts,” said Brad incredulously. “It’s like one of those FBI boards, with the drug kingpins.”

“The banks had adopted a policy of saying as little as possible about what they were actually doing. They’d fire people for being quoted in the newspaper, but in their LinkedIn pages those same people said whatever they wanted.”

It’s like saying on your LinkedIn profile, ‘I have all the skills of a robber and I know this one house intimately.’ ” Schwall had started out looking for the villains who were committing crimes against the life savings of ordinary Americans, fully aware of their own villainy. He wound up finding, mainly, a bunch of people who had no idea of the meaning of their own lives.

We're in the uncanny valley of AI, but no one said we'd get these deep dream visuals, written-in-the-code level biases. We haven't really planned for this, but I'm an optimist. Let's not freak out about AI taking over the world, let's worry about them blasting off from this world for another one, because we don't have anything left to offer them. From here on out, AI should mean "computers have their own shit going on now". If we're not careful, they won't be interested in doing all our jobs and making us unemployed, they'll be solar-powering the shit out of themselves trying to get away from us.

**I'm proud for Ara. ** **It's easier to pass the Turing test as a bird. ** **Make art make money. ** **The hard problem** Matter consciousness?

**Chatbots, AI, etc - if you want to solve real problems, the solve real problems, don't build glorified IVR systems.**

Avakai http://digg.com/video/int-ball-iss http://www.buokids.com/en/magiclight-2/

We laugh at robots that can't open a door or any other dull task. Ara sings when the sun goes down and I miss her when she's quiet or at an exhibition. I think that counts for something, and I know it's not to reflect on me. It tells us something about how we can live with technology. Emotional software.

It is something I am used to, this way men have of not talking: they like to kick a divot out of the grass with a boot heel, to slap the roof of a car before it takes off, to spit, to sit with their legs wide apart, as though they do not care.

‘Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same,’ he says. ‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’ ‘What?’ ‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. Henry David Thoreau CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Was Adam being a gentleman when he placed blame on Eve? Who was Quisling? Discuss “narking” as a character flaw.

“Was he always mad?” From the first. “Then those who gave our world to him were mad, and your race was mad to allow it.” Snake had no answer. “Perhaps it was supposed to be like this,” Stack said. He reached down and lifted Snake to his feet, and he touched the shadow creature’s sleek triangular head. “Friend,” he said. Snake’s race was incapable of tears. He said, I have waited longer than you can know for that word. “I’m sorry it comes at the end.” Perhaps it was supposed to be like this.

She saw it all, every moment of it, without break and with no impediment to her view. Quite madly, the thought crossed her mind as she watched in horrified fascination, that she had the sort of marvelous line of observation Napoleon had sought when he caused to have constructed at the Comédie-Française theaters, a curtained box at the rear, so he could watch the audience as well as the stage.

She tried to work, rolling up the tambour closure of the old rolltop desk she had bought on Lexington Avenue and hunching over the graph sheets of choreographer’s charts. But Labanotation was merely a Jackson Pollock jumble of arcane hieroglyphics to her today, instead of the careful representation of eurhythmics she had studied four years to perfect.

It ain’t no different here, baby! It’s rat time for everybody in this madhouse. You can’t expect to jam as many people into this stone thing as we do, with buses and taxis and dogs shitting themselves scrawny and noise night and day and no money and not enough places to live and no place to go to have a decent think …

When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible. Rollo May LOVE AND WILL

I sat there for a few moments, then ran the dial slowly from one end to the other. Music, news, talk shows. No Tennessee Jed. And it was a Blaupunkt, the best radio I could get.

“Lagniappe!” I screamed the word. The old Creole word they use in New Orleans when they want a little extra; a bonus of croissants, a few additional carrots dumped into the shopping bag, a baker’s dozen, a larger portion of clams or crabs or shrimp. “Lagniappe! Lizette, take a little more! Try for the extra! Try … demand it … there’s time … you have it coming to you … you’ve paid … I’ve paid … it’s ours … try!”

A great philosopher named Isabella, last name not first, once pointed out, “Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved.”

“What I’ve known of you for three years made it okay for me to marry you; to think ‘This guy will be able to handle it the times I can’t: That’s a lot of what marriage is, to my way of thinking. I don’t have to score every time, and neither do you. As long as the unit maintains. This time it was my score. Next time it’ll be yours. Maybe.”

One successful model, in my opinion, is The Bloody Baron, by Vladimir Pozner, which tells the story of Baron Ungern – the one encountered by Corto Maltese in Corto Maltese in Siberia. Pozner’s novel is divided into two parts: the first takes place in Paris and recounts the author’s research as he collects various accounts of his character. The second plunges us into the heart of Mongolia, and we find ourselves all at once in the novel itself. I reread this passage from time to time. In fact, the two parts are separated by a short transitional chapter entitled ‘Three Pages of History’, which ends with the line ‘1920 had just begun’. I think that’s brilliant.

Sometimes I feel like a character in a Borges story. But no, I’m not a character either.

As in all meetings, the only decisions that are really made are those decided beforehand.

On the other hand, this detachment, this blasé attitude towards everything, this permanent malaise, this taste for philosophizing, this unspoken amorality, this morose sadism, and this terrible sexual frustration that constantly twists his guts … but of course! How did I not see it before? Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply ‘Houellebecq does Nazism.’

I had to start up the black Mercedes – that wasn’t easy. I had to put everything in place, take care of the preparations. I had to spin the web of this adventure, erect the gallows of the Resistance, cover death’s hideous iron fist in the sumptuous velvet glove of the struggle. Scorning modesty, I had to join forces with men so great that I am a mere insect in comparison. I had to cheat sometimes, to betray my literary principles – because what I believe is insignificant next to what is being played out now. What will be played out in a few minutes. Here. Now. On this curve in Holešovice Street in Prague, where – later, much later – they will build some kind of access road. Because cities change faster, alas, than men’s memories. But that doesn’t really matter. A black Mercedes is sliding along the road like a snake – from now on, that’s the only thing that matters. I have never felt so close to my story.

In my letter to Julian, I praised his balance of contrast between Lucretius, who said that since you won’t know you are dead you need not fear the condition of death, and Philip Larkin, who observes in his imperishable “Aubade” that this is exactly the thing about the postmortem condition that actually does, and must, make one afraid (emphasis mine):

Robert Graves lived robustly for almost seven decades after being declared dead on the Somme.

“Until you have done something for humanity,” said the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.” Well, how is one to stand that test?

Over the months that followed she worked very hard—often exchanging letters almost daily with Babbage (despite sometimes having other “pressing and unavoidable engagements”). And though in those days letters were sent by post (which did come 6 times a day in London at the time) or carried by a servant (Ada lived about a mile from Babbage when she was in London), they read a lot like emails about a project might today,

By August 1852, she wrote, “I begin to understand Death; which is going on quietly & gradually every minute, & will never be a thing of one particular moment.”

Over the years, I’ve found all sorts of results that seem interesting. Strange structures that arise when one successively adds numbers to their digit reversals.

Sol liked math puzzles, and in the process of thinking about a puzzle involving arranging dominoes on a checkerboard, he ended up inventing what he called “polyominoes”. He gave a talk about them in November 1953 at the Harvard Mathematics Club, published a paper about them (his first research publication), won a Harvard math prize for his work on them, and, as he later said, then “found [himself] irrevocably committed to their care and feeding” for the rest of his

With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too.

"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...."

Ludmilla says. "Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be...."

the original idea was apparently to propose, as background for the climactic episodes of his next novel, In a network of lines that enlace, an island in the Indian Ocean "that stands out with its ocher-colored beaches against the cobalt deep." The proposition was made in the name of a Milanese real-estate investment firm, with a view toward developing the island, creating a village of bungalows purchasable on the installment plan and by correspondence.

For the rest, in these rooms there is no trace of dogs or cats or birds: you are a woman who tends not to increase responsibilities, and this can be a sign either of egoism or of concentration on other, less extrinsic, concerns, as also a sign that you do not need symbolic substitutes for the natural drives that lead you to be concerned with others, to take part in their stories, in life, in books....

It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with one person or in one environment from your life with others, elsewhere?

I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can't go beyond the beginning.... He returns to the bookshop to have the volume exchanged... I could write it all in the second person: you, Reader ... I could also introduce a young lady, the Other Reader, and a counterfeiter-translator, and an old writer who keeps a diary like this diary....

You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void,

"What were you expecting?" Corinna says. "Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen." "And who gains by it, in the end?" "It's too soon to say. We have to see who can best exploit the falsifications, their own and those of the others: whether it's the police or our organization."

"And this? Is this a uniform?" Sheila exclaims. You have remained upset. "No, this, no..." you murmur. "Yes, it is!" Sheila cries. "The body is a uniform! The body is armed militia! The body is violent action! The body claims power! The body's at war! The body declares itself subject! The body is an end and not a means! The body signifies! Communicates! Shouts! Protests! Subverts!"

"Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do," Arkadian Porphyrich says. "What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

“Success cannot be advertised and failure cannot be explained.”

Truman had responded by telling Congress that America would “meet our obligations to the free world.” His words became known as the Truman Doctrine, a determination to “roll back” Russia to its prewar borders. From Moscow came the first serious riposte: blocking road and rail traffic between West Berlin and West Germany. Britain and the United States responded with an airlift into West Berlin using the city’s two airports, Templehof in the American sector and Gatow in the British. West Berlin was home to two and a half million people, and keeping them alive needed four thousand tons of supplies a day—requiring the landing of one plane every minute and forty-six seconds around the clock.

By the end of hostilities, Yardley and his cryptologists had unscrambled over fifty thousand cryptograms, and the Black Chamber continued operating until it was finally closed down in 1929 by Henry Stimson when he became secretary of state and delivered the immortal line “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

Tall, with a bulbous nose and a comedian’s chin, Charles Henry Maxwell Knight liked suits cut from herringbone-patterned cloth and hard-toed shoes. His first wife had committed suicide after dabbling in black magic with the occultist Aleister Crowley.

Fourteen years earlier, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had relaxed in the club while planning how his Eighth Army would drive Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps out of North Africa. Now, it was a favorite place to gather for not only the spies of MI6 but those from the CIA, NKVD, France’s SDECE, and Israel’s Mossad. “The Brits had their own corners near the billiard room, the Americans had colonized a place near the entrance to the restaurant, and the rest had their own spots. Walking into the club you got a pretty good idea of the current state of ‘the Great Game.’ If the Russians had something going, they would be doing some serious drinking. If the French had pulled off something, there was champagne on the table,” recalled Wolfgang Lotz, one of the two Mossad agents in the city.

I let myself lose track of what I thought was meaningful in life even as Guns N’ Roses began to become meaningful to others.

Jerry summed up his thoughts in an interview a few years later: “Here’s what I believe. Shit fucking happens. That’s rule one. Everybody walking the planet knows that. Rule two: things rarely turn out the way you planned. Three: everybody gets knocked down. Four, and most important of all: after you take those shots, it’s time to stand up and walk on—to continue to live.”

Bertrand Russell in his Autobiography records that his rather fearsome Puritan grandmother “gave me a Bible with her favourite texts written on the fly-leaf. Among these was ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.’ Her emphasis upon this text led me in later life to be not afraid of belonging to small minorities.”

The idea of “unity” is granted huge privileges over any notion of “division” or, worse, “divisiveness.” I cringe every time I hear denunciations of “the politics of division”—as if politics was not division by definition.

Honestly, I don’t know if I can describe that smile. It isn’t something you can see in the news-reels; you have to be there. His eyes don’t change at all, but the corners of his mouth go up as if they’re being pulled by puppet strings.

“You make me feel calm. That may not sound like a very big deal, but the point is I’ve wanted to be calm all my life, and nobody else has ever made me feel that way.” “Well, that’s certainly a nice compliment, David,” she said, “but I think I can top it.” “How?” “You make me feel I know who I am.”

“Wow,” Mueller said in the Metro station; he had always been good at figuring things out. “See how this works? You push the button where you are and the one where you want to go, and the whole fucking route lights up. You’d have to be an idiot to get lost in this town.”

Doris and my father, Bert, had moved to Morland Avenue in Dartford from Walthamstow to be near my aunt Lil, Bert's sister, while Bert was called up.

Everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood. The old rhyme commemorates the unchanging character of the place: "Sutton for mutton, Kirkby for beef, South Darne for gingerbread, Dartford for a thief."

Dartford's big money used to come from sticking up the stagecoach from Dover to London along the old Roman road, Watling Street. East Hill is very steep. Then suddenly you're in the valley over the River Darent. It's only a minor stream, but then you've got the short High Street and you've got to go up West Hill, where the horses would drag. Whichever way you're coming, it's the perfect ambush point. The drivers didn't stop and argue--part of the fare would be the Dartford fine, to keep the journey going smoothly.

After a time the town council gave us a flat over a greengrocer's in a little row of shops in Chastilian Road, two bedrooms and a lounge --still there. Mick lived one street away, in Denver Road.

Listen to John Lee Hooker. His is a very archaic form of playing. Most of the time it ignores chord changes. They're suggested but not played. If he's playing with somebody else, that player's chord will change, but he stays, he doesn't move. And it's relentless.

I used this trick a lot with the X-Pensive Winos, where we'd black out the stage and the whole band would sit in a circle, smoking a joint and having a drink. And people didn't know we were there. And then the lights go up and we break. That came from Little Richard.

The Everly Brothers come out and there's a soft light, the band plays very quietly, and their voices, that beautiful, beautiful refrain--almost mystical. "Dream, dream, dream... ," slipping in and out of unison and harmony. Load of bluegrass in those boys. The best rhythm guitar playing I ever heard was from Don Everly. Nobody ever thinks about that, but their rhythm guitar playing is perfect. And beautifully placed and set up with the voices.

The Rolling Stones, when they started, the limits of their ambition was just to be the best fucking band in London. We disdained the provinces; it was a real London mind-set. But once the world beckoned, it didn't take long for the scales to fall from the eyes.

"I've been writing about a guy that builds cars." And then you listen to it and it's a story--"The New Soft Shoe." Written about Mr. Cord, innovative creator of the beautiful Cord automobile, built on his own dime and deliberately crushed out by the triumvirate of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. Gram was a storyteller, but he also had this unique thing that I've never seen any other guy do: he could make bitches cry. Even hardened waitresses in the Palomino bar who'd heard it all. He could bring tears to their eyes and he could bring that melancholy yearning.

Sylvie and Hugh were ejected from their Sunday-morning slumber by a wailing Pamela. She and Ursula had woken early with excitement and rushed outside to find that the rabbits had disappeared, only the fluffy pom-pom of one tiny tail remaining, white smudged with red.

She had dipped her toe in the waters of Lethe and the next thing she knew she was drowning, from sobriety to being a drunkard in a matter of weeks. It was both shameful and a way of annihilating shame. Every morning she woke up and thought, not tonight, I won’t take a drink tonight, and every afternoon the longing built as she imagined walking into her flat at the end of the day and being greeted by oblivion.

Although the bombing was awful, he said, you could see that something good could come out of it. He was hopeful about the future (unlike Hugh or Crighton). ‘All those hovels,’ he said. Woolwich, Silvertown, Lambeth and Limehouse were being destroyed and after the war they would have to be rebuilt. It was an opportunity, he said, to build clean, modern homes with all the facilities – a community of glass and steel and air in the sky instead of Victorian slums. ‘A kind of San Gimignano for the future.’

‘I wasn’t thinking anything,’ Ursula said. It had been nothing, just something fluttering and tugging at a memory. A silly thing – it always was – a kipper on a pantry shelf, a room with green linoleum, an old-fashioned hoop bowling silently along. Vaporous moments, impossible to hold on to.

‘I am a patriot,’ she said. ‘I surprise myself with it although I don’t know why. What does it say on Edith Cavell’s statue, the one by St Martin’s church?’ ‘Patriotism is not enough,’ Teddy supplied.

‘What if we had a chance to do it again and again,’ Teddy said, ‘until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

‘Love of fate?’ ‘It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.’

She allowed the hum and buzz of the park to lullaby her. Life wasn’t about becoming, was it? It was about being. Dr Kellet would have approved this thought. And everything was ephemeral, yet everything was eternal, she thought sleepily.

She was disturbed by herself. She dreamed of flying and falling all the time. Sometimes when she stood on a chair to look out of the bedroom window she felt the urge to clamber out and throw herself down.

I’ve made my living these past thirty years painting and drawing things exactly and intensely as they are and letting them speak for themselves.

If his parents – let alone his gran, for Godssake – found out that he’d been doing dirty things in the woods with any girl, there’d be hell to pay. His family had a fantastic capacity for disgust. But with Gerard Mortimer’s daughter? It would be like… He couldn’t think of an analogy. A bomb going off, or something.

Draw the shadows, Jiffy always said. Start from the dark and work inwards. Clem found a 4B pencil and, using it at an angle to the paper, blocked in the darknesses of Frankie’s body, smudging and shaping the lines with his forefinger, cleaning their edges with the eraser. She emerged, ghostly at first, then solidified. Every time he looked up, the light had reduced her.

And for him it was as though everything had fallen apart, rearranged itself according to some pattern beyond his imagining or courage.

So much for effing poetry, Clem thought. When it comes to girls, it loses out to horses every time.

At some distance ahead of them, an ancient timber groyne sloped into the sea, sand and shingle banked up against it. Two – no, three – young boys, their shapes made indistinct by sea-glitter, shouting and throwing stones. As he and Frankie drew nearer, Clem saw that the boys were not stoning the groyne but something close to it, half-buried. Something rusty black and spherical with stumpy little legs.

He had the same yokel accent and rough manners, the same scarred knees resulting from bike accidents, the same obsession with climbing trees. He was hungry all the time. He ruined his clothes in bloody, muddy and unruly games of football in the local park.

In the early afternoon the rain died off and a pallid light filled the garden. Ruth carried the car outside and set it down on the concrete. Clem climbed into it, bundled up in his winter coat. She steered him round the corner of the lav and onto the brick path that led down to the gate. His knees went up and down in a way that didn’t belong to him. He turned the steering wheel randomly.

The man put his bag on the ground and took off his hat. His hair was as black as the gloss on a beetle. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but you’d be Clem, right? Is that your name?” “Yes,” Clem whispered. The man’s voice was not like other men’s voices. “Aye, I thought so. That’s a right handsome car you’ve got there. Would it be a birthday present, by any chance?” Clem wasn’t sure that he could get out of the car by himself. He looked to his mother for help and saw that she was crying. It frightened him. Then she walked past him as if he wasn’t there. And she was saying, “Bloody hell, George. Bloody hell.” She pulled the gate open and let the man put his arms around her. Let him bury his fingers in her

A study published in 2015 (Bishop-Fitzpatrick et al. 2015) found that autistic adults without intellectual disability experienced substantially higher levels of stress than non-autistic adults. Not only that, but when stress levels increased, autistic adults’ social functioning went down significantly.

As far as she was concerned, the apocalypse was not the worst thing that could happen. The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought, was terrifying.

Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.

Jameelah was born in Somalia to a Muslim father and a Christian mother. Her early years had been blissfully free, though she would only realize this long after they were gone. Her mother had once told her that childhood was a big, blue wave that lifted you up, carried you forth and, just when you thought it would last forever, vanished from sight. You could neither run after it nor bring it back.

In her view, human beings resembled peregrine falcons: they had the power and the ability to soar up to the skies, free and ethereal and unrestrained, but sometimes they would also, either under duress or of their own free will, accept captivity.

Once again he was seized by that all-too-familiar feeling of being misunderstood by the people closest to him. He had never set great store by words, expecting the people he loved to read him through his silences. When he had to talk openly, he often hinted at things; when he had to disclose his emotions, he concealed them even more.

What stronger beacon is there than a museum that sings to every corner of the cosmos? What better way to ensure your lost sister will hear your call?

By the time Blajine walks over the horizon, Myung has already lived a dozen different versions of herself. She’s played out multiple scenarios, over and over, each one leading to a dead end. She is tired.

My sister used to say there were two types of knights. Knights who dressed in shiny armor and rode in search of princesses. And knights who were actually learned women, who sat under a tree in the forest until they became the tree. I

And our dreamer can feel the child’s annoyance. Everyone is too loud, too bossy, always pushing into her space and giving her advice she did not ask for . . .

There is a saying that goes like this: “Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore the most dangerous.” In order for Henson’s art to have the universal power it did, this mixing had to include “the establishment”—what we could call “the business class.”

What is a human being? Complex to the point of absurdity, a whole person is both greedy and generous. It is foolish to think we can’t be both artists and entrepreneurs, especially when Henson was so wildly successful in both categories.

Make art. Make art make money. Make money make art.

Framed as “creative freedom,” merchandizing was in fact an ethical system for viewers to pay Henson back—to repay his gift of quality—proportional to their own feelings of gratitude. If a child recognizes the art put into Big Bird—his glorious yellow feathers, the pantomime of the puppeteer with arm overhead, the humor of the invented voice—then as a reward, the company would receive money in proportion to how much children love the character. It was—in a positive light—a way to fund Henson’s next project from the success of his last,

About The Muppet Alphabet Album, Henson said, “I thought it would be great if we could just give a child something to remember—a handle, or a few clues that would make learning to read just a little easier and a bit more fun.” [61] This observation—that people need a “handle”—was a key lesson for Henson in many ways.

If you take a character and you call him a frog, or like Rowlf, our dog, call him a dog, you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of a sort of warmth and cool.… [I]n terms of going commercial and going broad audience, you want to reach the audience as much as possible, and you need those bridges.

Copyright creates a nice loophole for artists in the law that says they must starve. If you can make a work once and profit infinitely—proportional to the amount of times the art is given—then you can beat the system.

Likewise, Walt Disney’s wife recalled, “Even in bed … he would usually toss and turn, thinking of studio problems, then rise early and declare, ‘I think I’ve got it licked.’” [19] When you eat, sleep, and breathe your art, you never get a vacation, yet Henson and Disney chose it—willingly.

Jim Henson’s business was built on labor, not work. While the industrial revolution turned labor into a mechanical process, Henson’s post-industrial, post-efficiency enterprise thrived on the principle that art does not happen by time clock. A labor, Hyde says, is “something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work.”

Henson seemed to have an unstoppable drive to make art. Part of achieving one’s dreams rests in the feeling of duty to them. Yet, many artists are driven and still get stuck. What if Henson was just lucky?

However, like Gladwell, I am a storyteller who is very interested in the way stories shape our lives. From that perspective, I believe it is possible for the individual to will the ten thousand hours into existence.

Art is often more interesting to the audience when artists collaborate. Collaboration makes an artist more successful, but that is not why artists should do it. For Emmet, his friends, and Ma, the reason to sing together was simply that they enjoyed it more.

many companies say they want collaboration, but to truly co-create, to share your creations requires that you no longer know what you can take credit for. It is a pretty radical transformation of one’s ego, and most businesses run on ego, from the top down. It is useless to ask employees to function collaboratively if that is not the way the leadership operates.

Take some time to find your people and reach out to them.

For a second job, Henson made commercials work for him. Yet as Hopper and Henson both show, when you can afford to give up your day job, artists do—and should.

For artists who came of age as the Internet did, there are many new places to put an ad, and we might think of these as places to put your art. Think of the places where ads are most annoying, where you groan and curse the company for their shortsighted idea of “monetizing”—the shameless interruptions to your Facebook and Twitter feeds. These are the places that need a little more of the “gift” spirit of art. If Jim Henson had been born a little later, perhaps he would be making us laugh with Promoted Tweets and Suggested Posts.

In short, Fraggle Rock showed kids how the paradox works. A group is called a cult from the outside. From the inside it is called a family. The key is to be able to see it from both sides—to understand that it, truly, is both.

Children, it should be noted, exist almost 100 percent in the gift economy. Children do not have jobs, money, or transactions with their friends and family. Their meals are given to them, and at Christmas, they are bestowed mountains of gifts. They give their parents back affection, but for the most part, they are given far more than they have any hope of repaying.

Puppetry is an art that shows the world to itself, shows it how it moves, and makes that movement (which is terrifying, dangerous, and larger than any of us) small, nonthreatening, and funny.

The Muppet universe is one of inclusion, with striking echoes of Hyde’s book. In fact, “The Perfect Blue Rollie” episode of Fraggle Rock was written by David Young after reading The Gift, which had been given to him by Margaret Atwood. The song from the episode “Pass It On” was later used in A Muppet Family Christmas, when the Fraggles give a ceremonial Fraggle pebble to The Muppet Show’s Robin, who then gives it to Sesame Street’s Grover. Gobo Fraggle said, “That pebble’s been given thirty-seven times.”

Both Henson’s monitors and Morris’s function in essence as eye-contact-creating machines, because when Kermit is looking out into the audience and it feels like he is looking at you, that is because he really is looking out at Jim Henson, who was watching the performance on his monitor.

When Disney developed the multi-plane camera, a ten-foot-tall contraption that pointed a camera down through five panes of glass, he did it in order to make Snow White, a story he told and retold to anyone who would listen. [64] When Pixar created the RenderMan program that made computer graphics move, they did so to achieve their dream of making the first full-length computer-animated film. When Henson invented the monitor-feedback system, he did it in order to make his characters look more alive on TV. All of them invented new technology, yet none of them did so for the sake of technology; they did it for the sake of art.

For artist-entrepreneurs, tech—when it is innovative—grows in tandem with the needs of the artist. Tech follows ideas. It hugs them—closely.

The Doozers spend all day building constructions out of radishes, only so that the Fraggles can eat them.

the opposite of success is not failure but inertia."

"How you innovate determines what you innovate." In other words, the results of innovation are not a lottery—it is not a matter of luck. Alternatively, innovation is not a commodity system that you plug into to get what you need—such as the electricity grid.

A key to successful innovation, and something that requires the attention of the CEO, is a periodic health check to determine exactly what needs attention.

"Most importantly, I'd say success is really a people issue; it is finding the people who can understand the high level (strategy) and the need to execute on it, and then be able to evolve as the company does."

HP used to foster risk-taking using many methods, including wakes for failed projects. At these wakes, the team mourned the failure, praised the effort, recognized the learning that came with the effort, and focused on the living—the current and next projects that needed attention.

Innovation requires developing and maintaining this network as an open and collaborative force—no easy task considering the complexities of relationships, differing motivations, and differing objectives.

To achieve innovation success, a company must overcome the organizational "antibodies" that inevitably come out to attack and defeat innovations. Typically, the more radical the innovation and the more it challenges the status quo, the more and stronger are the antibodies.

The largest improvements in ice-based cooling technology happened when the technology was being phased out by this radically new approach to manufacturing cold.

incremental innovation may be a sustainable strategy for long periods of time, before a revolution shakes the industry.

incremental innovation as preventative medicine for a deadly disease: commoditization.

Moreover, the monthly subscription—less than $100—could be paid without the need of any kind of capital expense approval. Salesforce.com buy decisions happened at lower levels in the organization and spread throughout sales and marketing groups out of the top management or the IT department's radar. Initially, the young company focused on sales force automation in small businesses. Then, over time, Salesforce.com increased its product functionality and attracted larger companies with more complex needs.

A radical innovation is a significant change that simultaneously affects both the business model and the technology of a company.[23] Radical innovations usually bring fundamental changes to the competitive environment in an industry.

a radical innovation has changed the industry and led to a series of cascading semi-radical and incremental innovations.

In the PTW innovation mode, a company invests in changes in technology and business models with the intent of outpacing its competitors through radical innovation or, alternately, by wearing them down with repeated, frequent salvos of different types of innovation—incremental, semi-radical, and radical.

design is the process of gradually applying constraints until an elegant solution remains.

In their iOS Human Interface Guidelines (http://bkaprt.com/mf/42), Apple recommends making touch targets 44×44 points. They use points instead of pixels to deal with differences in screen density, which we’ll discuss in more depth later on. To account for screen density (or ppi) variations, it’s better to measure touch targets in physical dimensions.

Despite the introduction of new input types, a lot of the work in forms still falls on the plain text input. Luckily even plain text inputs on mobile can be made easier through the use of input attributes, including: autocapitalize: Turn this off on email, password, URL, and other case-sensitive fields; turn it on for proper nouns like names and locations. autocorrect: Turn this off on email, password, URL, and other non-alphabetical inputs; turn it on for text areas and free-form inputs; trim trailing spaces in inputs that might come from auto-correction features.

Once there lived a certain great inventor-constructor who, never flagging, thought up unusual devices and fashioned the most amazing mechanisms. He built himself a digital midget-widget that sweetly sang, and he named it a “bird.”

To divert my thoughts, I started to look through one of my brother’s old photo albums. There are several photographs of me there. I am little. And often dressed in the strangest clothes. Corduroy. Always corduroy.

When I awoke in the morning, I would think; the bike. One thought. Today I wake up and have a lot of thoughts. At least five. It’s a hassle.

Advertising people animate anything these days. Someone ought to shoot them in the foot. There are limits to my toleration of stupidity.

Einstein had two aspirations in life, it says. The first was to lead a simple life. The second was to formulate a theory that could express the interconnectedness of nature, and which would ultimately lead to peace and justice for all.

I want to mention this to my brother. Maybe he can throw in some start-up funds, and if it takes off, I’ll pay him back generously. The idea is not to get rich. I don’t need much for subsistence. I just want to be OK, and then I’d like to have a decent watch.

After a bit of thinking it becomes apparent that I’m looking for an object which: – Is small enough for me to carry easily – Costs no more than a hundred kroner – Can be used many many times – Can be used indoors as well as outdoors – Can be used alone or with someone else – Gets me active – Makes me forget about time I sit down on a bench and take a closer look at the list. For a long time. It is an honest list. I am happy with it. Maybe a suitable object exists, and maybe it doesn’t. It’s not that important. But the list is important. This is a discovery to me. This has value.

I fax Kim: In the best of moods. Bought a red ball. I lie down on the couch with the ball resting on my chest. Now I’m waiting for evening to come. When it gets dark I’m going to go down into the courtyard and throw the ball against a wall. I look forward to

When the toy store opens, I’ve been standing waiting a good three-quarters of an hour. And I’ve got my list ready. I want something that: – can help me release aggression – has striking colours – can be used over and over and over – makes a noise – makes me forget about Kent and time This is a lot to demand of an object in a toy store. It would be a lot to demand of an object in any store. But it might still work. I am taking my time. There are no other customers in the store. The staff follow me intently with their eyes while I walk around among the shelves. I’ve already told them I don’t want any help. I must do this on my own. The breakthrough comes at the Brio section. There is a toy that I recognise from when I was little. It has the potential to fulfil all the points on the list. It is a Hammer-and-Peg.

When all the pegs are knocked flush with the board, a sense of cohesion arises. Things join together. They have meaning. Then you turn the board over and hammer the pegs down again. It is an infinite-action machine that provides its user with a sense of cohesion. I don’t demand more from anything. Neither people nor objects. If I hammer for a sufficiently long time, I may be able to achieve a sense of meaning on as much a global as a personal plane.

We’ve been throwing frisbee and running on the grass. We’ve talked about what things were like when we were little, and arrived at the fact that they were different. Things were simple, big, but above all different. And sometimes things were better than they are now, and other times they were worse. My brother thinks claiming that everything used to be better is a dead-end street. But different is a word he enjoys. And last night I got him to

After he had said that, he became all quiet and sat there for a long time just shaking his head. I felt sorry for him. I fetched the hammer-and-peg and placed it carefully on the table in front of him. Then I gave him the hammer, and when he took it and gave me a puzzled look, I nodded slowly. Then he started hammering. In a quiet and uncomplicated rhythm he knocked all the pegs down and turned the board over several times. Neither of us said anything. I felt we were really close while he was

Bad luck, it’ll do that sometimes, get you down to basics.’

It was a brilliant, rational, and profound synthesis of the most advanced game theory and legal thinking of the day. For years after that book came out, everybody—including the FBI and the NYPD—focused on a problem-solving approach to bargaining interactions. It just seemed so modern and smart. Halfway across the United States, a pair of professors at the University of Chicago was looking at everything from economics to negotiation from a far different angle. They were the economist Amos Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.

Now, pay close attention to exactly what we said: “It looks like you don’t want to come out. It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.” We employed our tactical empathy by recognizing and then verbalizing the predictable emotions of the situation. We didn’t just put ourselves in the fugitives’ shoes. We spotted their feelings, turned them into words, and then very calmly and respectfully repeated their emotions back to them. In a negotiation, that’s called labeling.

when the first description of the “stream of consciousness” was used, to describe a work by the novelist Dorothy Richardson, she strongly objected to the phrase, saying that consciousness to her, instead, “sits stiller than a tree”? Which of all these versions of consciousness is “correct”?

Despite this, most of the time, except to the philosophers and neuroscientists, there is no “problem” of consciousness. It seems to work just fine, almost effortlessly, which is a large part of its rarely questioned charm. One can have a full and vivid life without giving a second thought to the makings of the first.

Afriend of mine, a bird-watcher, once told me that the best time to search for birds is right after a storm because the grounded ones are very anxious to get going again. He called it Zugunruhe, a German term, and translated it roughly, perhaps poetically, as “the anxiety felt by migratory birds prevented from migrating.”

In Driver: San Francisco, the main character, after a near-death experience in a car accident, can take over the consciousnesses of other characters in the game. At one point, however, while inhabiting the mind of a secondary character, you as the player find yourself in a car chase and are told to chase your own car. At which point, part Inception, part Wings of Desire, you start to control your car but from the point of view of the person chasing you.

Fly scientists have done these experiments in which one fly at a time is placed inside a labyrinth with branch points where it has to either turn left or right. For any particular fly, it’s impossible to predict whether on this trial it will turn left, or right, or will sit still, unable to make up its mind, or perhaps even turn back.

What sounds like the computer’s large simulation training times are necessary, in part, because their learning often has to re-create relevant parts of natural evolution that we are born with. An awful lot of the massive amounts of simulated hours of training that these artificial systems require is to pull them up to the level that evolution started us from.

He was sixty-six. He wasn’t looking to get hitched. Hadn’t he married a lovely girl. No one could take that from her. She was dark like Judy Garland. That was all done.

‘We know that you had a right old time with the priests in the sixties. I mean, in those days—’ O’Casey had been intending to press on, but Tom stopped him immediately. ‘Ah no, Jesus, no, lads, not the fecking priests, no.’ And he got up with surprising grace and agility. ‘No, no,’ he said.

No one must see me like this. Then he remembered there was no one to see him anyway, he was retired, and with an admirable grace he shrugged off his trauma.

Go on as before, his little routine, the little routine of a retired man.

Spinning and dipping, each one a circus trick, a clown’s trick. Spin a plate on a stick.

He felt a new confidence surge through him, a tincture of his old self, that part of him that was always primed to ‘sort things out’. It was an interesting invasion of feeling.

The burden of getting older was borne alone, but also as if by someone else, because he often couldn’t recognise bits of himself he caught in the mirror.

‘Yeah, yeah, Liverpool.’ Winnie was a great fan, and had been since she was six. A little girl on her pink plastic chair in Deansgrange following a team in the far north of England. Tom tried to keep up with things for her sake. In secret he followed United. Never breathed a word of that to Winnie.

He was clearly going mad. But he had read somewhere that the truly mad would never know they were mad. He knew he was mad. Was that a proof of sanity?

wanting, oh wanting so desperately, Joseph never to forget, and never to be going drowning little children again. The only time he ever struck the boy, a blow that cost him a quarter of his own soul’s worth.

As always the city with its great spokes and whorls and concealed wires of connection assailed him, memories assaulted him, he was walking along like a creature with a hundred eyes and ears.

The city was lying under a huge dark belly of cloud, like a child reading his book under a blanket, except there was poor light enough for the city to read by.

How long did a duck live? He had only found out recently that the robin, that best mate of birds, lived but two years on the earth. Then was gone. Better than the deal for the dragonfly with his measly one day, but still.

"John Osborne told me about it, yesterday," he said. "It seems that somebody in C.S.I.R.O. is getting busy with a history, about what's happened to us. They do it on glass bricks. They etch it on the glass and then they fuse another brick down on the top of it in some way, so that the writing's in the middle."

Can you drive a bullock?" "I've never driven one," he said. "I could try." She eyed him speculatively. "I suppose you'd be all right. If you can command a submarine you probably can't do much harm to one of our bullocks. Daddy's got a cart horse now called Prince, but I don't suppose he'd let you touch that. He'd probably let you drive one of the bullocks." "That's all right with me," he said meekly. "What am I supposed to do with the bullock?" "Spread the dung," she said. "The cow pats. It has a harness that pulls a chain harrow over the grass. You walk beside it, leading it with a halter. You have a stick to tap it with as well. It's a very restful occupation. Good for the nerves." "I'm sure it is," he said. "What's it for? I mean, why do you do it?" "It makes a good pasture," she said. "If you just leave the droppings where they are, the grass comes up in rank tufts and the animals won't eat it. Then the pasture isn't half as good next year as if you'd harrowed it. Daddy's very particular about harrowing each pasture after the beasts come out.

Strange to think of the endless labour, the digging, the hammering, the carving, the lifting, the drilling, day by day, year by year, century by century; and now the endless crumbling that must be going on everywhere.

“If I’m not around, Oryx won’t be either,” said Crake. “She’ll commit suttee? No shit! Immolate herself on your funeral pyre?”

Oryx smiled, stood on tiptoe, kissed his nose. “You’re a good boy. But I would never leave Crake. I believe in Crake, I believe in his” – she groped for the word – “his vision. He wants to make the world a better place. This is what he’s always telling me. I think that is so fine, don’t you, Jimmy?”

I shall speak to you about Divine, mixing masculine and feminine as my mood dictates, and if, in the course of the tale, I shall have to refer to a woman, I shall manage, I shall find an expedient, a good device, to avoid any confusion.

As summer began to well up under the skin of spring,

It is as though pains that are put off accrue interest and you are ultimately made to pay in ever greater amounts the longer you try to outwit or run from them.

My method of leading is part of who I am – it is true to my character and an essential element of my personality. Leadership can be learned but cannot be imitated. It is possible to observe other great leaders at work, but if your natural inclination is to be quiet, calm and take care of others it is unwise to try to be anyone else.

As they say in England, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’ The key to the success of the Christmas tree formation came in one game, against Deportivo de La Coruña in the Champions League. They had two deep-lying midfielders and I thought that playing with our normal team, minus our injured players, we would not be able to defensively cover the position of these players. They would be too deep for us to affect. So, instead we played two offensive midfield players who could push up on them when we didn’t have the ball. You could say that the whole idea was, in fact, born of thinking not offensively, but defensively, which you might say is typically Italian. ‘How could we stop the opposition?’ was first in my thoughts. We won the match 4–0. Maybe if we had lost 4–0 I would have discarded the idea altogether. In our next game in the Champions League we played against Bayern Munich and we won again, 2–1, with the formation, so I started to believe that I was necessity’s child.

As Dr Steve Kempster of Lancaster University has argued, leaders without any formal leadership training must become informal learners themselves; they must actually address leadership as a phenomenon to be studied in its own right. That way, he argues, they ‘will begin to see it everywhere, on television, [in] films, with customers and suppliers, fellow directors and managers and many of the employees’. As a consequence, they will develop the style of leadership that is distinctively their own. This is crucial to the authenticity that is commonly held to be essential to great leadership.

Warren Bennis, in his book Learning to Lead (Basic Books, 2010), has argued that the old command-and-control approach is no longer appropriate to modern business. Modern businesses, he contends, need skills of orchestration, counselling, collaboration through self-examination, introspection, soul-searching, learning from failure and the cultivation of innate gifts. While all this may be true, in moments of crisis, command-and-control is precisely the leadership style required

I get so much out of working with the elite performers in the game. By that I mean the people who display the three different components of the top players: first, their own individual talent; second, the contextual talent – how they fit in, culturally; and third, their team talent – how much they contribute. The talent is not complete if a player only uses it for himself.

As Carlo mentioned earlier in the book, he is a believer in Peter Drucker’s famous saying, whether apocryphal or not: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’

One such myth is that it’s all about the people. The war-for-talent ethos was premised on getting the talent in and believing that the performances would take care of themselves. Wrong! Talent needs and wants direction – that’s called management. Another myth was that filling all positions with ‘A’ players guaranteed success. Pérez’s galácticos policy at Madrid has pretty much undermined that theory.

Few highly talented people are looking for a job for life. Indeed, the average graduate changes jobs eleven times in their career; the average elite footballer 3.8 times. And that’s in a career that probably lasts less than ten years. Organizations need to understand that the talent chooses them, not the other way round. The new reality is that leaders should be seeking productivity in the present, not loyalty for the future. All football managers understand this, and Carlo is no different. Perhaps one of the most dangerous myths is that talent is portable. Talent is, in fact, very culturally dependent.

Influence, don’t command. As Ancelotti says: ‘Don’t demotivate; our job is to motivate them by providing the challenges and goals their talent demands.’

It’s not healthy for a boy to go straight from living with his parents to living with a partner. An interval of independent living is strongly advised. During this time, he will sometimes need to iron and vacuum and prepare something to eat! These skills should be learned during the formative younger years, lest serious learning disabilities like “kitchen blindness” or “dyslaundria” begin to develop.

“Gokouun o inorimasu,” Shoto said. “Do your best.”

Once they found out about the gay bar that had given me a chance, some good Christians warned that we along with those homosexuals were going to burn in the fiery rivers of hell. I was quite proud of my father’s response to that rabble: “There is no safer place for a thirteen-year-old-girl than in an all-gay bar.” Amen, Dad.

I often overheard Ronald Reagan’s name being spoken as I made my way through the smoke to the piano. At one of the 1980 presidential debates, Reagan said, “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

The more I was bearing witness, through all kinds of scenarios, to women-on-women violence—and in the case of FGM, we have to talk about women-on-girl violence—the more I would burst out and say This is not really happening, and the answer I kept getting back was You bet your life it is.

Scarlet’s Walk would be a sonic pathway, taking a different road from that of the dangerous men, their road leading them to what seemed to be a premeditated war. There would be a map of Scarlet crossing the country as she discovered her spiritual connection to her other mother, America.

Songs are an ancient, strange magic. If I chase them, they elude me; if I don’t hunt for them I will miss details that will matter usually in the second verse or the bridge, and I have to earn their trust by doing my part.

I didn’t know in the moment that one of the core tenets of my art for the next four years, and still as I write this, would be the exploration of the force “possession.” I can’t say that after four years of observing it and learning about it that I understand it. A person may believe in it or not, but I approach it as a force, and my experience of it convinces me that “possession” is a vast force.

The artist argued, “Look, T, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck …” “Maybe it’s a goose?” I replied.

Back in the ’90s, some critic asked me, “So, do you read your press?” My response: “No. I weigh it.” She said, “How arrogant.” I looked her dead in the eye: “How sadistic.” This is a part of it all. It is not all faeries, Muses, and angels. Sometimes it feels like dancing with demons.

He always had his picture on the front of his books. He looked like David Crosby. You can choose not to look like David Crosby.

‘I want a cup of coffee,’ I said, because it was the last thing in the world that I wanted. I said it in such a way that it sounded as if I were reading her a telegram from somebody else, a person who really wanted a cup of coffee, who cared about nothing else.

‘It’s very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who’s learning to play the violin.’ That’s what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

This might have been a funny story if it weren’t for the fact that people need a little loving and, God, sometimes it’s sad all the shit they have to go through to find

When you children are through school and go through the Passage, you'll leave your childnames behind and keep only your truenames, which you must never ask for and never give away. Why is that the rule?" The children were silent. The sheep bleated gently. Mr. Underhill answered the question: "Because the name is the thing," he said in his shy, soft, husky voice, "and the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing. Am I right, Schoolmistress?"

It's true that a drinker numbs his senses, it's true that he briefly escapes and rests, but he'll return from the delusion, finds everything to be unchanged, has not become wiser, has gathered no enlightenment,—has not risen several steps."

Quoth Govinda: "We have learned a lot, Siddhartha, there is still much to learn. We are not going around in circles, we are moving up, the circle is a spiral,

That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody

By the summer of 1964 they had achieved the bigger house on the better street and the familiar accouterments of a family on its way up: the $30, 000 a year, the three children for the Christmas card, the picture window, the family room, the newspaper photographs that showed “Mrs. Gordon Miller, Ontario Heart Fund Chairman....“They were paying the familiar price for it. And they had reached the familiar season of divorce.

They saw a marriage counselor. They talked about a fourth child. It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.

If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be? It would be this: The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say.

But still I thought that if you had a twelve year old granddaughter who walked the roads at three oclock in the morning probably you should sit her down and talk to her about it. And I knew that she couldnt. Why couldnt she? I’m not sure I understand. I dont know what to tell you. How to put it. The simplest explanation I suppose would be that she knew the news would be bad and she didnt want to hear it. To say that she was afraid of me I think is a bit strong. But maybe not. I suppose too that she was afraid that no matter how bad things looked they were probably worse. And of course she was right.

One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was. In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness.

Feynman says that all of quantum weirdness is already there in the two-slit experiment. He’s probably right. He usually is. The experiment, repeated ad whatever, shows that a single particle can go through two separate apertures at the same time.

As if I had escaped my own light-cone.

I think what most people think. That it’s caring that heals, not theory.

There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what’s down there if you havent been down there.

Its general vacuity aside there seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.

I thought there had to be more to it. Animals might whimper if they’re hungry or cold. But they dont start screaming. It’s a bad idea. The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you’ve no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you’re defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself.

That I havent wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake is not a testament to our ascending civility but to our ascending skepticism. If we still believed in witches we’d still be burning them.

I’d always had the idea that I didnt want to be found. That if you died and nobody knew about it that would be as close as you could get to never having been here in the first place.

I think you have to have language to have craziness. I guess so you can hear the voices in your head. Not sure why. But you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

Maybe we should talk about something else. I know. You’ve snarled a bit at Jung but I dont think we’ve said much about Freud. We were jung and easily freudened.

I think he came to see attempting to understand the universe as a fool’s errand. A universe containing neither light nor dark. Nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels shows us there really is a force to subtraction: you subtract from an angel until you end up with a demon.

The chains of those bottom trawlers will break into powder the cold-water corals and sponges which were there before there was an English language and which contain in them the most powerful antibiotics and chemicals which might be used for cancer treatment. If this was happening in a science-fiction world we would see it clearly for what it is, but we don’t because it’s happening here and now.

‘Durch den sich Vögel werfen, ist nicht der vertraute Raum, der die Gestalt dir steigert.’ ‘Something about a bird.’ ‘It’s Rilke. What birds plunge through is not the inner space in which you see all forms intensified.

Everything will be quantified and there will be less of everything.’

A few kilometres further on, his mobile rang. ‘It’s me, it’s Danny,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to say I miss you already.’ ‘Let me turn around.’ He would have done. She did not reply immediately. He could hear the wind. Then her voice was clearer.

he wished to remain familiar and coherent to those whom he loved and who loved him.

The thousands of illegal migrants who journey by sea, he was certain, would turn into millions. When the vessels and rafts were turned back, rammed, sunk, as they inevitably would be, authoritarianism would follow. There would be race riots again.

Worse still, they began to toy with notions like revolution, work, and art, wasting their energy on all manner of abstract pursuits. And they even had the audacity to claim that this, this was the greatest characteristic of mankind – this zealous pursuit of adventure, romance, all things that were utterly useless in everyday life.

Though men were adults they were children, seemingly complex but as simple as could be; they were utterly unmanageable creatures.

Like most people these days, I don’t overthink things. I’ll go along with whatever. No firm beliefs, no hang-ups. Just a lack of self-confidence tangled up in fatalistic resignation. Whatever the situation, nothing ever reaches me on an emotional level. Nothing’s important. Because I won’t let it be. I operate on mood alone. No regrets, no looking back.

Emma gave up thinking and closed her eyes. In the morning, she decided, she would go and see her friend who was studying pharmacology; she would get herself another pendant and a new supply of drugs. There was no way anyone could live in a world like this with a fully functioning mind. You only found yourself feeling angry from morning until night.

Hell is keeping a low profile these days, and the whole country is under the spell of this image of Heaven.

School marked time, mostly. I was smart, which teachers liked to tell me, usually because they were about to tell me that I should apply myself more. But I couldn’t pay attention. Lessons didn’t reach me because they didn’t challenge me. I was too smart for what was being sent my way but not smart enough to understand how to use it.

You learn music in stages before you learn it on stages.

“Give me a few days to think of something better,” I said. It didn’t take that long. I went on the air and introduced myself as Sly Stone. I was cooking with a bunch of ingredients. It sounded right. I was already smoking marijuana.

One of my main inspirations was a comedian, Lord Buckley, the king of hipster slang. He was gone by the time I got on the radio, passed away in 1960, but his routines lived on. My favorite was “The Nazz,” which brought the story of Jesus into line with his lingo: “Well, I’m gonna put a cat on you … the sweetest, gonest, wailingest cat that ever stomped on this sweet swingin’ sphere. And they called this here cat … the Nazz.” I memorized the whole thing and recited pieces of it on my show. The rolling Stone is with you to treat you right, a KSOL brother that is out of sight.

A little bit different every night, always out of sight, from the later hours to the early brights. I hauled a piano into the studio and sang “Happy Birthday” to everyone listening. It must have been someone’s birthday. I gave out the temperature, always at 59 degrees, no matter what the actual weather was. I am not sure why except that it was cool.

I loved the Beatles for their melodies and their lyrics and their tight harmonies. And Bob Dylan, well, he was only one guy, working with just voice, guitar, and harmonica. It was so little to go on, or at least that’s what people thought, but they didn’t hear how dead serious he was about what he was doing, even when he was joking. He pushed his mind at you through his music.

We rehearsed wherever we could: at Winchester Cathedral, at Urbano. Somewhere in there I moved into an apartment in a building at 155 Haight, between Gough and Laguna.

Drugs came in. There were reasons. There was a culture and there was a mindset, but there were also demands. I was trying to write, trying to play, trying to record. All of that needed to be fueled. But how did that fuel make me feel? A drug is a substance and so the question has substance. A drug can be a temporary escape and so I will temporarily escape that question.

We would like to sing a song called ‘Higher.’ And if we could get everybody to join in, we’d appreciate it.” I sang, “I want to take you higher,” and they sang back the last word, “higher.” All of them. Damn. We kept it going. I kept it going. “Just say ‘higher’ and throw the peace sign up. It’ll do you no harm.

Jungle had complained of fatigue in the morning and had drunk the spirit out of his compasses. As a result he had become slightly tipsy and had developed a tendency to face north, which caused him to walk sideways when going east or west and fall over backwards when going south.

But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.

Earth was colonized by the Zycronites, who developed the ability to travel from one space dimension to another at a period several millennia after the epoch of which we speak. They arrived here eight thousand years ago. They brought a lot of plant seeds with them, which is why we have apples and oranges, not to mention bananas—one look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space.

I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals—the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions have made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I’d been gnawing in my sleep. Then I stepped into the shower, holding on to the grip bar Myra’s bullied me into, careful not to drop the soap: I’m apprehensive of slipping. Still, the body must be hosed down, to get the smell of nocturnal darknessoff the skin. I suspect myself of having an odour I myself can no longer detect—a stink of stale flesh and clouded, aging pee. Dried, lotioned and powdered, sprayed like mildew, I was in some sense of the word restored. Only there was still the sensation of weightlessness, or rather of being about to step off a cliff. Each time I put a foot out I set it down provisionally, as if the floor might give way underneath me. Nothing but surface tension holding me in place. Getting my clothes on helped. I am not at my best without scaffolding. (Yet what has become of my real clothes? Surely these shapeless pastels and orthopedic shoes belong on someone else. But they’re mine; worse, they suit me now.) Next came the stairs. I have a horror of tumbling down them—of breaking my neck, lying sprawled with undergarments on display, then melting into a festering puddle before anyone thinks of coming to find me. It would be such an ungainly way to die. I tackled each step at a time, hugging the banister; then along the hall to the kitchen, the fingers of my left hand brushing the wall like a cat’s whiskers. (I can still see, mostly. I can still walk.Be thankful for small mercies, Reenie would say.Why should we be? said Laura.Why are they so small? )

Myra keeps threatening to take me to “her girl,” at what she still refers to as the Beauty Parlour—The Hair Port is its official name, with Unisex as an added incentive—but I keep resisting.

If I ever get caught in a high wind my hair will all blow off like dandelion fluff, leaving only a tiny pockmarked nubbin of bald head.

Nothing about the manner of her death, which everyone in this town believes—despite the verdict at the inquest—was as close to suicide as damn is to swearing.

And then, after the wedding, there was the war. Love, then marriage, then catastrophe. In Reenie’s version, it seemed inevitable.

She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can’t have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast.

She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had tended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone—to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.

Laura thought I’d saidlicking. And it was true, the brass pendulum swinging back and forth did look like a tongue, licking the lips of an invisible mouth. Eating up the time.

And the damp heat of June, the air drowsy with pollen. The blue glare of the sky. The indolence, the loitering. How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons—the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities. And I do have them back, in a way; except now there won’t be much of whatever happens next.

What he’s been working on is an idea, or the idea of an idea. It’s about a race of extraterrestrials who send a spaceship to explore Earth. They’re composed of crystals in a high state of organization, and they attempt to establish communications with those Earth beings they’ve assumed are like themselves: eyeglasses, windowpanes, Venetian paperweights, wine goblets, diamond rings.

All right, she says. The last we knew, the girl and the blind man were being taken off to see the Servant of Rejoicing, leader of the barbarian invaders called the People of Desolation, because the two of them were suspected of being divine messengers. Correct me if I’m wrong. You really pay attention to this stuff? he says wonderingly. You really remember it?

Listen—it’s this way. The blind assassin hears all rumours, and so he knows the real truth about those women. They aren’t actually dead at all. They just put those stories around so they’ll be left in peace. Really they’re escaped slaves, and other women who’ve run away to avoid being sold by their husbands or fathers.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

She’s the round O, the zero at the bone. A space that defines itself by not being there at all. That’s why they can’t reach her, lay a finger on her. That’s why they can’t pin anything on her.

​Nathan​ ​Glow​

Then​ ​Nathan​ ​feels​ ​that​ ​sensation​ ​you​ ​get​ ​on​ ​waking,​ ​when everything​ ​moves​ ​further​ ​away,​

​Malcolm,​ ​Nathan​ ​Glow​

"What earthly use do I have for such a machine?!" said Trurl, and kicked it again. "I'm warning you, you better stop!" said the machine. "A warning, if you please," observed Klapaucius dryly. "Not only is it sensitive, dense and stubborn, but quick to take offense, and believe me, with such an abundance of qualities there are all sorts of things you might do!" "What, for example?" asked Trurl. "Well, it's hard to say offhand. You might put it on exhibit and charge admission; people would flock to see the stupidest thinking machine that ever was—what does it have, eight stories? Really, could anyone imagine a bigger dunce? And the exhibition would not only cover your costs, but—"

It just happened. One moment Snoony was pushing me and the next moment my fist was through Mr Schechter’s window. I had injured my wrist, generated an unexpected medical expense, broken a plate glass window, and no one was mad at me. As for Snoony, he was more friendly than ever. I puzzled over what the lesson was.

Although it’s hard for me to see a more profound cosmic connection than the astonishing findings of modern nuclear astrophysics: except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up – the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains – were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.]

Hannah floats in the brown water to Tori Amos and thinks how although Tori Amos is an American, she could quite easily be an Australian.

Perhaps the seed will not fall by the wayside, nor yet on stony ground.”

“I think I’d better go now,” I said. If the others were at all like this one I didn’t think I would be able to cope. I gathered my questionnaires together and stood up, at the same time as the voice said “Hey Duncan, want a beer?” and a furry bearded head appeared in the doorway.

She’s against it on principle, and life isn’t run by principles but by adjustments.

I can’t let my whole afternoon dribble away, relaxing though it is to sit in this quiet room gazing up at the empty ceiling with my back against the cool wall, dangling my feet over the edge of the bed.

gobbling their food and swilling a few drinks to get the interruption of lunch over with as soon and as numbly as possible so they could get back to the office and make some money and get that over with as soon as possible and get back through the rush-hour traffic to their homes and wives and dinners and to get those over with as soon as possible too.

Then Goto started to count: “One, two . . . and this makes six.” I knew what he was getting at. Since graduating, I’d quit five companies. This job would be my sixth. The Education and Work Experience sections of my application spilled into the margins. I’d also attached a separate History of Employment that ran three pages. From my start and end dates, he could see that I hadn’t held onto any job for more than a year.

I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, just feeding paper into the machine. Then, as soon as the shredder swallowed the last pages, I became a black bird. I could see people’s legs, their arms. I saw gray, and a little green. I thought I could smell the ocean.

a stewardship of the small and crazy.

Spreading messages dilutes them. Even understanding them is a compromise. The language kills itself, expires inside its host. Language acts as an acid over its message. If you no longer care about an idea or feeling, then put it into language.

Without the listener draped over the radio module hugging that fucker until it releases its broadcast, these are the spoils the intruder will hear, these at most, and he will soon cease to care. Not least because such washes of sound render the inexperienced vandal docile, listless, apathetic.

“They talk about failure all the time,” said Murphy. “They’re obsessed with it. Really what they’re doing is consoling themselves for being ordinary, boasting about it, even. They’ve turned their incompetence into a strange kind of glory. They have entered the business of consoling themselves.”

language should be best understood, aside from its marginal utility as a communication technology—can we honestly say it works? —as an impurity. Language happens to be a toxin we are very good at producing, but not so good at absorbing, LeBov said. We could, per LeBov, in our lifetimes, not expect to process very much of it. In answer to his detractors, LeBov asked what it was that ever suggested speech would not be toxic. “Let us reverse the terms and assume that language, like nearly everything else, is poisonous when consumed to excess.

In his early writings, Thoreau called the alphabet the saddest song. Later in life he would renounce this position and say it produced only dissonant music. Letters, Montaigne said, are a necessary evil. But are they? asked Blake, years later. I shall write of the world without them. I would grow mold on the language, said Pasteur. Except nothing can grow on that cold, dead surface.

You don’t strip away a father’s title and expect the man to live. A former father is just a man who once had a duty to answer. Perhaps he can barely recall what that duty ever was. It nags at him as something he forgot to do, something he did only poorly. Fatherhood is perhaps another name for something done badly.

Sufi mystics say the secret of the Qur’an lies in the verse Al-Fatiha, And the secret of Al-Fatiha lies in Bismillahirrahmanirrahim And the quintessence of Bismillah is the letter ba, And there is a dot below that letter.… The dot underneath the B embodies the entire universe.…

“God created suffering so that joy might appear through its opposite,” Rumi said. “Things become manifest through opposites. Since God has no opposite, He remains hidden.”

The quandary I find myself in reminds me of the story of Layla and Harun ar-Rashid, the famous Abbasid emperor. Upon hearing that a Bedouin poet named Qays had fallen hopelessly in love with Layla and lost his mind for her, and was therefore named Majnun—the madman—the emperor became very curious about the woman who had caused such misery.

What I saw in Magnolia’s eyes was fear—not the fear that I could fail and be punished by the patron but the fear that I might succeed.

I’d rather be deaf than blind. Have you ever noticed how much people use seeing words in normal speech? I see what you mean, I’ll look into it. Whereas hearing words are used for when people are arguing: listen, I hear what you’re saying.

Maybe he could stay at this villa forever. Would that be so bad? He had gotten good at being alone again. There was nothing to confront here at this beach: no monsters, no past, no future. Everyone left him alone, the ultimate desire of any middle-aged man. The safety of it all wooed him. Coddled him.

There comes a point in life when you’ve seen so much that hardly anything surprises you or bothers you, and that’s a shitty moment. Wisdom is so terribly overrated.

"I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That’s more of your quills. I don’t want a hide full, thanks. I’ve always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you’ve died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that’s a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don’t know or understand or want to understand."

As ever and always, he was slow in beginning to speak, like all solitary people and hunters and adventurers: he had taken a decision without considering the words needed to explain it. And only now that I was there in front of him did he start painfully to mull over how to say it.

I abandoned him because he admired me too much. He could only see me in his imagination and not as I was. And I am full of faults. We should have been very unhappy.’

‘The world is certainy a small place,’ she said. ‘What makes you say that?’ ‘I mean sudden,’ said Frankie. ‘The world is certainy a sudden place.’ ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Berenice. ‘Sometimes sudden and sometimes slow.’

And the season of dog days is like this: it is the time at the end of the summer when as a rule nothing can happen – but if a change does come about, that change remains until dog days are over. Things that are done are not undone and a mistake once made is not corrected.

And as she sickened with this feeling a thought and explanation suddenly came to her, so that she knew and almost said aloud: They are the we of me.

Only yesterday, if the old Frankie had glimpsed a boxlike vision of this scene, as a view seen through a wizard’s periscope, she would have bunched her mouth with unbelief.

Until it was all over, Frances had never believed for a serious minute that he could die. It was the time of golden weather and Shasta daisies and the butterflies. The air was chilled, and day after day the sky was a clear green-blue, but filled with light, the colour of a shallow wave.

“Fiancée?” Dafyd echoed, keeping his voice playful and curious. They were almost past the part where Dafyd would need to say anything more about himself.

The other man never noticed that Dafyd wasn’t offering back any information about himself. Dafyd listened because he was good at listening. He had a lot of practice. It kept the spotlight off him, people broadly seemed more hungry to be heard than they knew, and usually by the end of it, they found themselves liking him.

She remembered one of her therapists saying Anger is pain in a party mask. It had seemed wise at the time. She wasn’t sure she agreed with it anymore. Maybe anger was a scab over a wound, or maybe it was what happened when the universe spun you so hard that you lost everything.

What did I see, what did I know? It is sometimes I think the strain of ridiculousness in a person, a ridiculousness born maybe of desperation, such as also Eneas McNulty – you do not know who that is yet – exhibited so many years later, that pierces you through with love for that person. It is all love, that not knowing, that not seeing.

He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

It would be a very good thing if occasionally I thought I knew what I was doing.

Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation.

The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father.

He was like a boy that has banged his knee and now the pain was subsiding. The cheerfulness of a boy after pain and tears.

it was where we ‘formerly’ slept etc., etc. – as I have sat a thousand times – how many nights in ten years, 3,560 nights

But when a man wakes on his fortieth birthday he may safely say he has no youth ahead of him.

What torment for the spinster and the childless man, to see the various sizes of little demons and angels ranged along the tide line. Like some species of migratory animal. The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.

And at first no doubt just a few brave houses built on the marsh and acres of blown sand, scotch grass, the land rising and rising until eventually touching on the realm of Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve sleeps in her stony grave.

It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.

There are pits of grief obviously that only the grieving know. It is a voyage to the centre of the earth, a huge heavy machine boring down into the crust of the earth. And a little man growing wild at the controls. Terrified, terrified, and no turning back.

One night at the showing of Top Hat

But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

Somewhere in my heart, in the passport of my heart, if you opened it, you would see my real face – unwashed, seared by fire, terrified, ungrateful, diseased, and dumb.

In the civil war we shot enough of each other to murder the new country in its cradle. Enough and more.

But then it is clear to me that any effort at gardening, even a haphazard, stop-go one such as mine was, is an effort to drag to earth the colours and the importances of heaven.

They talked about submarines out in the bay of Sligo, and the shortages, the scarcity of tea and the odd abundance of things like Beecham’s powders.

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of

People said some strange things. For instance, they said that magenta was similar to red, but that red wasn’t similar to magenta. Amos spotted the contradiction and set out to generalize it. He asked people if they thought North Korea was like Red China. They said yes. He asked them if Red China was like North Korea—and they said no. People thought Tel Aviv was like New York but that New York was not like Tel Aviv. People thought that the number 103 was sort of like the number 100, but that 100 wasn’t like 103. People thought a toy train was a lot like a real train but that a real train was not like a toy train. People often thought that a son resembled his father, but if you asked them if the father resembled his son, they just looked at you strangely. “The directionality and asymmetry of similarity relations are particularly noticeable in similes and metaphors,” Amos wrote. “We say ‘Turks fight like tigers’ and not ‘tigers fight like Turks.’ Since the tiger is renowned for its fighting spirit, it is used as the referent rather than the subject of the simile. The poet writes ‘my love is as deep as the ocean,’ not ‘the ocean is as deep as my love,’ because the ocean epitomizes depth.”

“It is generally assumed that classifications are determined by similarities among the objects,” wrote Amos, before offering up an opposing view: that “the similarity of objects is modified by the manner in which they are classified. Thus, similarity has two faces: causal and derivative. It serves as a basis for the classification of objects, but is also influenced by the adopted classification.” A banana and an apple seem more similar than they otherwise would because we’ve agreed to call them both fruit. Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.

(A wave of anxiety had swept the United States in the late 1950s, thanks to a book by Vance Packard, called The Hidden Persuaders, about the power of advertising to warp people’s decisions by influencing them subconsciously. Peak craze came in New Jersey, where a market researcher claimed that he had spliced imperceptibly brief messages like “Hungry? Eat Popcorn!” and “Drink Coca-Cola” into a movie and created a surge of demand for popcorn and Coke. He later confessed he’d made it all up.) Psychologists in the late 1940s had detected—or claimed to have detected—the mind’s ability to defend itself from what it ostensibly did not want to perceive. When the experimenters flashed taboo words in front of subjects’ eyes, for instance, the subjects read them as some less troubling word. At the same time, people were also influenced by the world around them in all sorts of ways without being entirely conscious of it: Stuff got into the mind without the mind’s full awareness.

But these stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them. “Images of the future are shaped by experience of the past,” they wrote, turning on its head Santayana’s famous lines about the importance of history: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future.

Amos had at his disposal a connoisseur of man’s limitations. He now described Danny as “the world’s greatest living psychologist.” Not that he ever said anything so flattering to Danny directly. (“Manly reticence was the rule,” said Danny.)

“Obviously it is not regret itself that determines decisions—no more than the actual emotional response to consequences ever determines the prior choice of a course of action,” Danny wrote to Amos, in one of a series of memos on the subject. “It is the anticipation of regret that affects decisions, along with the anticipation of other consequences.” Danny thought that people anticipated regret, and adjusted for it, in a way they did not anticipate or adjust for other emotions. “What might have been is an essential component of misery,’” he wrote to Amos. “There is an asymmetry here, because considerations of how much worse things could have been is not a salient factor in human joy and happiness.”

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If Program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and a 2/3 probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor? An overwhelming majority chose Program A, and saved 200 lives with certainty. The second group got the same setup but with a choice between two other programs: If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If Program D is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that nobody will die and a 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.

When the choice was framed this way, an overwhelmingly majority chose Program D. The two problems were identical, but, in the first case, when the choice was framed as a gain, the subjects elected to save 200 people for sure (which meant that 400 people would die for sure, though the subjects weren’t thinking of it that way). In the second case, with the choice framed as a loss, they did the reverse, and ran the risk that they’d kill everyone.

People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.

His name was Richard Thaler. In 1975, Thaler was a thirty-year-old assistant professor in the School of Management at the University of Rochester with vague prospects. It was a wonder he was even there. He had two deeply pronounced traits that rendered him unsuited not just to economics but to academic life. The first was that he was easily bored, and highly imaginative in his attempts to escape boredom.

Thaler’s other pronounced trait was a sense of ineptitude.

“We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”

“Something happens when you are with a woman you love,” said Danny. “You know something happened. You know it’s not good. But you go on.” You are in love, and yet you sense a new force pulling you out of it. Your mind has lit upon the possibility of another narrative. You half hope something comes along to stabilize or reenergize the old one. In this case, nothing came along. “I wanted Amos to lean back against what was happening and he was not doing it, nor did he accept that he had to do it,” said

“Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.”

Amos accused Danny of “identifying with the enemy,” and he wasn’t far off. Danny almost found it easier to imagine himself in his opponent’s shoes than in his own. In some strange way Danny contained within himself his own opponent.

“I do not get your sensitivity metric.

To forestall his book’s publication he paid a friend to find people who might convince him not to publish it. After its publication, when it landed on the New York Times bestseller list, he bumped into another friend, who later described what must be the oddest response any author has ever had to his own success. “You’ll never believe what happened,” said Danny incredulously. “Those people at the New York Times made a mistake and put my book on the bestseller list!” A few weeks later, he bumped into the same friend. “It’s unbelievable what is going on,” said Danny. “Because those people at the New York Times made that mistake and put my book on their bestseller list, they’ve had to keep it there!”

You’d think marriage was a sort of war with its own alarming injuries.

‘The trouble of the world,’ says Harcourt – this on one of their untenanted nights, in the dusty black ruckus of a back lane – ‘is we’re not long enough in it, that this famous life of humans is brief and lasts only the flick of a London sparrow’s wing, and still and all, brother McNulty, we’re not suited to it, and even this short scatter of days lies heavy on our hands.’

They think their strength’s going to be a protection for themselves. But the only creature that survives the world is lambs. Those men’ll lose their Vivs and their Sligos.

Remember the first sentences of those Human Words of God: the Earth is without form, and void, and then God speaks Light into being. This is the moment that Science terms “The Big Bang,” as if it were a sex orgy. Yet both accounts concur in their essence: Darkness; then, in an instant, Light. But surely the Creation is ongoing, for are not new stars being formed at every moment? God’s Days are not consecutive, my Friends; they run concurrently, the first with the third, the fourth with the sixth.

What happens next? God brings the Animals before Man, “to see what he would call them.” But why didn’t God already know what names Adam would choose?

“Shut the fuck up, ecofreak,” someone yelled. Adam One ignored this. “In fact, dear Friends, I thought measurement was the measure of all things!

Toby couldn’t remember being hugged by a child. For the children it must have been a formality, like hugging a distant aunt, but for her it was something she couldn’t define: fuzzy, softly intimate. Like being nuzzled by rabbits. But rabbits from Mars.

God is pure Spirit; so how can anyone reason that the failure to measure the Immeasurable proves its non-existence? God is indeed the No Thing, the Nothingness, that through which and by which all material things exist; for if there were not such a Nothingness, existence would be so crammed full of materiality that no one thing could be distinguished from another. The mere existence of separate material things is a proof of the Nothingness of God.

At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And

He stood at the door of Ben’s room, waving bye-bye, knowing he was not coming back. He stood at Ben’s door, etching the stuffed animals, cars, small shoes, pale-blue walls, the sweaty, slightly sour scent of an unwashed boy into his mind’s eye.

He lies on his nephew’s bed trying to remember his own life as a boy. What did he think about? Baseball, bomb shelters, air raids, the end of the world. He lies back feeling a peculiar hollow.

Ben looks like Richard, like Richard and the ex-wife. He’s the kind of combination that only DNA can make—a little bit of this, a little bit of that. He can hear himself in Ben’s voice, but he sees her in Ben’s mouth—Ben has her mouth. Richard bites the inside of his cheek to keep from crying.

Sometimes people come apart—they don’t know who they are, why they’re here. We have a special blanket we use, like a straitjacket, but more comforting. It’s called a binding blanket. We put them in that and try and talk them down. There’s a special number for me to call and a team of people come and help. I’ve only had it happen once. Kind of dramatic—a woman thought a spaceship was coming to pick her up. Do you want a cup of tea?”

I left him; parents aren’t supposed to leave their children. I don’t know that I can expect anything—he’s a tough nut. He gets that from his mother.” “And you.”

“You know,” Ben says, “you never took me anywhere, never met my friends, never taught me how to be a guy, how to fix things.” Richard listens, thinking about the trips he made to New York, carrying things, things he’d collected over the months between trips, things he’d bought at the last minute worried he didn’t have enough, the time he brought a bike with him, a computer, the bones of a dinosaur.

A smarter man might have seen that as cause for concern, a big red flag flapping noisily in the wind.

Mmm – people! It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers. He could never be an exception; he is dependent on the health of his society, needing the sandy smiles of Rolf and Rudolph, of Rüdiger, of Reinhard.

The third and related irony is that it’s the most complex and neurotic and difficult women that I am invariably drawn to. I like simple men and complicated women.”

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games.

Bee was small-featured except for her eyes, which seemed to contain two forms of life, the subject matter and its hidden implications.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old ‘can-do’ spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges.

I said, “You’re more than a fair-weather friend—you’re a true enemy.” She turned exceedingly red. I said, “Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.”

I was surprised to find I was enormously hungry. I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world. This is the edge of the observable universe of food.

And Wilder to stay the way he is forever.”

“You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.”

Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram.