A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the ...
I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years befor...
The beasts of the field and forest had a Lion as their king. He was neither wrathful, cruel, nor tyrannical, but just and gentle as a king could be. During his reign he made a royal proclamation for a general assembly of all the birds and beasts, and...
Blame your body. The whole biological purpose of existence is to mate, so from the time we hit puberty, our hormones are demanding us to couple up. Maybe it’s basic instinct to feel inadequate if you’re single." "That’s what sucks. There’s so...
Though riches had charms, poverty had no terrors for an inexperienced girl like me. Indeed, to say the truth, there was something exhilarating in the idea of being driven to straits, and thrown upon our own resources. I only wished papa, mamma, and M...
After a few seconds of scraping, I realize what he has isn’t a trail, it’s a whole forest! Ack! Weren’t all men supposed to shave their chest and stuff nowadays? Whatever happened to having fuzz-free Hollywood heroes as role models? At least ...
Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sa...
Well, you're free without wanting to be,' he explained, 'it just happens so, that's all. But Mathieu's freedom is based on reason.' 'I still don't understand,' said Lola, shaking her head. 'Well, he doesn't care a curse about his apartment: he lives ...
Guardando Gundam si ha la sensazione di assistere a una fiction televisiva corale, in cui uomini e donne fatti di carne e sangue combattono, muoiono, vivono e amano all'interno di un palcoscenico che seppur fittizio non ci appare affatto inverosimile...
Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim ci...
I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Rep...
He held me as if my bones were made of glass, as if my skin would tear beneath his lips if he applied too much pressure. When his lips pressed against the pulse at the base of my throat, I wondered if he could feel the power in my pulse, the power he...
Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by ...
A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flo...
Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungr...
That's what yer little sister said,' said Hagrid, nodding at Ron. Met her jus' yesterday.' Hagrid looked sideways at Harry, his beard twitching. 'Said she was jus' lookin' round the grounds, but I reckon she was hopin' she might run inter someone els...
Some people were simply created with the right genes and the proper social skills, I figured. They ended up at a lunch table with a group of good-looking individuals, like them, who did what all good-looking individuals managed: making the rest of us...
È la mia anima ad aver scelto la sua, perché in essa ha individuato il substrato ideale in cui continuare a esistere anche quando sarò morta. Un uomo può deporre in una donna un figlio, per avere la certezza che la sua vita prosegua, ma una donna...
For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet—to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he sp...
Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to b...
Our world is moving so fast and we are apt to miss so much of what is happening "right now." If we can put down our smart phones for one moment and be present to what is around us, I believe these incidental meetings and strangers who come into our l...
