Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces. We worry that we are becoming stupider, an begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends ...
Every brush stroke on the canvas, every dab of color introduced, the fine textures impressed in the paint—this accumulation of many small acts combines to shape a final work of art. And so it is with life; each step, each deed, each brief choice ...
What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We s...
I did, of course, on both counts, and started going out with the boy I lost my virginity to - all of it. He lost his to me too, except that neither of us felt we had lost anything - just discovered the meaning of life and love and everything else unn...
It is possible to be in two dreams at once. If I dream about you, and you are asleep at the time, you are in both your dreams, and mine. Still, you’re not really in my dream, are you? It’s like a party you’re invited to, but aren’t allowed en...
More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-an...
How did you know I was different?” “You mean besides the obvious obsidian, the alien entourage, and the branch?” He laughed. “You’re full of electricity. See?” He reached between the seats and placed his hand over mine. Static crackled, j...
I think LOVE. Love is what brings families together, and love is often what drives them apart. Love can act as both a fuel and an exterminator for fire, a cause of war, but also of peace. Love brings new souls to the family and removes old ones. Love...
The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces...
Tree' is the title of a dance, is the cadence of a song. The black silhouette is only a moment of stillness caught by the shutter of the eye. It is finely tuned to the harmonics of the air. It loves both the sun and the wind and is let turn towards i...
Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the ...
Planetologist call it the conundrum of unforeseen ecological consequence. I call it the whack-a-mole rule of human meddling. She clasped both hands like a child hammering. WHACK! We change something here. Oops, that makes another problem pop up there...
Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplis...
Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The...
The targets of this story are not "wayward sinners" but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. H wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self rig...
Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respec...
The mystery of the world is revealed only to the person who can look upon the material world with his physical eyes and simultaneously has the spiritual vision necessary to see the unseen spiritual world. One who knows both Matter and Spirit is thus ...
High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passi...
It was a very special moment for John's spirit was awakening and he was opening up, I had touched and resonated with his soul. It was more than just cyber sex, more than making love with someone you loved, it was blending souls as soul mates do and i...
I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia's alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money.
She leaned against him, listening to his strong heartbeat as they cuddled together. Maybe he didn’t say all the right things, and maybe he didn’t do it all in the right way, but he was hers, and she was his, and they’d figure it all out togethe...
