I’ve often thought of the forest as a living cathedral, but this might diminish what it truly is. If I have understood Koyukon teachings, the forest is not merely an expression or representation of sacredness, nor a place to invoke the sacred; the ...
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - ...
Of course, if we do find the Great Glom, we will see other gloms as well," said Dottia. "I mean, he will not exist alone, will he? Mythic creatures like him are often spoken of as if they did exist alone, and they were born unique, hatched from a sin...
The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That'...
What sorts of books are placed by garbage cans on garbage night in the town of Sterns? Mainly they're old class books, the kind people carry around in boxes in their basements for twenty years and then one day think: I will never again in my entire l...
How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he co...
Altogether forty-five Emperors had claimed the Spear of Destiny as their possession between the coronation in Rome of Charlemagne and the fall of the old German Empire exactly a thousand years later. And what a pagentry it was! THe Spear had passed l...
She had always suffered from a curious fear of what was going to happen round the next corner. Even when life went smoothly and nothing occurred to justify her vague apprehensions, they did not altogether disperse. She had tried to face these fears a...
We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but back...
The Brinktown jail is one of the most ingenious ever propounded by civic authorities. It must be remembered that Brinktown occupies the surface of a volcanic butte, overlooking a trackless jungle of quagmire, thorn, eel-vine skiver tussock. A single ...
What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the...
Michael looked embarrassed. “No, I don’t really… I mean in real life, I don’t do that. I read BDSM once in a while, but honestly, I prefer the sweeter romances.” “Sure. I believe you. Bondage Ben.” “Stop it.” Michael laughed. “Cra...
Some people spend their entire lives devoted to a religion that claims to be the ‘right’ religion... they often deny scientific evidence that contradicts their archaic holy books, they sometimes oppress those who disagree with them, and they alwa...
New Rule: Apple's next device must be a computer that you control with your tongue. Thanks for eliminating the keyboard and the mouse, but pointing and pushing at things already seems too complicated and tiring. We're Americans--and until you free ou...
In the entire works of the Jewish historian Josephus (37-c. 100 CE), which constitute hundreds of pages, there are only two paragraphs that purport to refer to Jesus. Although much has been made of these 'references,' they have been dismissed by many...
I want to keep you. I want to lock you up and not let anyone near you. I don't want others touching you, I don't want them to smell you. I want you hidden and safe. I want to hoard you and never share you with anyone again. I would shape my entire li...
We could stay. You could sleep it off and we can still go to Disney with everyone tomorrow. Don’t you want to go to Fantasyland?” I batted my eyelashes. Jackson ran his thumb and forefinger over his lip, catching his grin and a speck of dried blo...
You think when someone you love passes away, everything becomes clearer, that your priorities and perspectives align in a way they’ve never aligned before because of the sobriety of it all. But it doesn’t. Those revelations just become skewed and...
It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but special relationship between two things of di...
Every human relationship begins with a coincidence. Even the most fundamental relationship - that of parent and child - begins entirely with a coincidence. The child is produced by whatever serendipity brought its parents together, and the fact that ...
Or [take] the old cripple worried about choking on his vitamins or tripping if he tries to hobble over that wide crack in the sidewalk. He won’t be bound by mere experience - he renounces it all together as something confusing; the very moment it o...
