The late-afternoon sky, in Paul's peripheral vision, panoramic and mostly unobstructed, appeared rural or suburban, more indicative of forests and fields and lakes—of nature's vast connections, through the air and the soil, to more of itself—than...
People often attribute their successes to skill, and their failures to unfortunate circumstances. It’s like if I win it’s because I’m good, and if I lose it’s because I’m unlucky. With every victory, I amplify my talents and ascribe it enti...
I had to be at work at 8 am this morning, so I set my alarm clock for 7:49. Naturally, my body woke my brain up at 1:11 precisely, and I laid in bed trying to convince myself two things: one, that I function better on little sleep, and two, that I am...
She threw one leg over his and straddled his lap, then reached under herself and found him again. He tore his mouth from hers. “Wait.” “No.” She looked him frankly in the eyes. “I don’t care if you spill at once. I need you inside me now....
Profound silence would brood over the valley, even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by nature, so incapable of entering...
Not for the first time, I wonder what it would feel like that, to be so beautiful that you don't even realize people are watching you, to be so confident that you don't even have to worry about being nervous or feeling self-conscious. I've spent what...
If it is the case that we are merely slaves to the natural processes computing our advanced fight and flight responses, then we are never truly thinking, which means that logic and reason - the things we hold so dear - do not exist either.
Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, th...
All of us, have our antenna up for people who might harm us in one way or another, not just people who might hurt us physically, but also for people who might treat us unfairly, take advantage of us, cheat us or fail to do their share. And we react v...
Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven P...
Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less consid...
He says that there can be no high civilization without enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and confined to an animal nature; and a higher one thereby acquires leisure and...
I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute bel...
...if pride, that plague of human nature, that source of so much misery, did not hinder it; for this vice does not measure happiness so much by its own conveniences, as by the misery of others; and would not be satisfied with being thought a goddess,...
Though men in the mass forget the origins of their need, they still bring wolfhounds into city apartments, where dog and man both sit brooding in wistful discomfort. The magic that gleams an instant between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition ...
Oddly enough I never used to suffer from depression on cold, gray, cloudy days like this. I feel as if nature is in harmony with me, that it reflected my soul. On the other hand, when the sun appeared, the children would come out to play in the stree...
We humans have a questionable track record in our dealings with the environment. Recent studies show that complete restoration of Florida’s Everglades could take approximately 30 years and 7.8 billion dollars. There’s a lot of work to be done–b...
he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In...
The public's abiding fascination with flaying saucers, C.G. Jung suggests, 'may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such tim...
When pain comes to me, I leave my physical self. It's just like quietly slipping into the next room when someone you don't want to meet comes along. I can do it very naturally. I recognize that the pain has come to my body; I feel the existence of th...
No one ever said your life would be easy. The nature of being human makes life for all of us a challenge. The most important thing to consider here is this. Your life is only as challenging as you think it is. Think of challenge as a teacher and your...
