Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe ...
When we trust the makers of baby formula more than we do our own ability to nourish our babies, we lose a chance to claim an aspect of our power as women. Thinking that baby formula is as good as breast milk is believing that thirty years of technolo...
An author's extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it ; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of la...
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with his...
We took a right at the fork, heading farther north. The charred houses continued. To the right, a large sign nailed to an old telephone post shouted DANGER in huge red letters. Underneath in crisp black letters was written: IM-1: Infectious Magic Are...
It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one pl...
What I still don’t get though,” ventured John. “Is why you did it?” “Did what?” “Put that dress on in the first place.” “I don’t know really,” said Dennis, a puzzled look crossing his face. “I suppose it’s because it was fun...
NEW RULE: 'Kidiots' Leave the children behind. At least until they learn something. A new study has shown that half of American high schools agree that newspapers should only be able to publish government-approved material. Almost one out of five sai...
Allowing attachments to people/things create a compulsive addiction in us to be controlling. This “control” (fueled by fear of loss) fools us into a false sense of security and love. At first glance, it is common to confuse the idea of Conscious ...
Sometimes we fall into the negative so deeply that we do not realize our first instinctive reaction to everything is to think negatively or to "look" for the bad in every situation. The phrase "too good to be true" directly comes from this aspect of ...
I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind o...
Autumn. It's crispness, it's anticipation, it's melancholia, it's cool breezes replacing summer's heat. It's long days in the field, a harvest festival when work's done, a cheering crowd in a football stadium, chrysanthemums punctuating a somber land...
Indian forms of yoga have spread throughout the world due to their objectives of promoting health and harmony. Japan is but one of many countries that have received these age-old teachings. While Indian yogic disciplines (Hatha yoga in particular) ha...
Life is what we make it to be; can be other people’s life or it can be our special one. The difference is that the first we sit and watch and basically we know the ending but the second is defined by us and require lots of work and effort to define...
This Christmas mend a quarrel. Seek out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a letter. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in word and deed. Keep a promise. Forgo a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Ap...
Love is always ready to deny itself, to give, sacrifice, just in the measure of its sincerity and intensity. Perfect love is perfect self-forgetfulness. Hence where there is love in a home, unselfishness is the law. Each forgets self and lives for ot...
Religion should be subject to commonsense appraisal and rational review, as openly discussible as, say, politics, art and the weather. The First Amendment, we should recall, forbids Congress both from establishing laws designating a state religion an...
U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation’s continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor knives, and pe...
In 1803, President Jefferson oversaw the purchase of this land from the French for $15 million. It doesn't sound like much for an area three times the size of France itself but given that they'd stolen it from the Native Americans in the first place,...
sufferers of depression, who can elect to keep their feelings private, experience chronic, unremitting emotional alienation. Each moment spent “passing” as normal deepens the sense of disconnection generated by depression in the first instance. I...
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with v...