The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are ve...
It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despai...
To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. ...
Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel , where a society of ants declares, 'Everything not forbidden is compulsory.' In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a p...
Conversation, to take another example, is one of the common pleasures of life, but not all conversation is pleasurable. The stutterer finds talking painful, and the listener is equally pained. Persons who are inhibited in expressing feeling are not g...
In our society, defecation involves an individual in activity which is defined as inconsistent with the cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of our performances. Such activity also causes the individual to disarrange his clothing and to...
It occurs to me to devise mental tests on myself to see if I am who I think I am, but then I think, “I am who I think I am, or I probably am, and a test I conceive and answer about myself isn’t a way to test if I’m another person pretending to ...
Nature, ... in order to carry out the marvelous operations [that occur] in animals and plants has been pleased to construct their organized bodies with a very large number of machines, which are of necessity made up of extremely minute parts so shape...
The best antidote to worry is action. If there is an action that will lessen the likelihood of a dreaded outcome occurring, and if that action doesn't cost too much in terms of effort or freedom, then take it. The worry about whether we remembered to...
When I have my interview with my God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage—a doer of good, regardless of what assi...
Here again, it occurred to me, was the unique problem that faces my generation, the generation of those who had been, say, seven or eight years old during the mid-1960s, the generation of the grandchildren of those who'd been adults when it all happe...
Perhaps when I first arrived on this world so long ago I may have known more. Now, though, I do not have knowledge of as much as I used to. The years, many of them, have changed this world and the great societies flourish with change. Although I feel...
Such places exist among the endless abodes of every major city, places that seem to be sanctuaries from the present, immune to the hustle and bustle, the sound and fury that in the end change nothing. Like long unopened books sitting upon dusty shelv...
Director: Cut dammit! Cut! Mr Bakshi. Hrundi V. Bakshi: Yes, Sir? Director: Has it occurred to you that the period of our picture is 1878? Hrundi V. Bakshi: Oh, yes indeed sir. I am well aware that that is the period of the film. 1878. Director: Mr. ...
[None of the Avengers can lift the Mjölnir, but Captain America moves it slightly] Tony Stark: It's biometrics, right? Like a security code? "Whoever is carrying Thor's fingerprints" is, I think, the literal translation. Thor: Yes, well that's a ver...
Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesima...
Many people, through diverse spiritual practices and disciplines have sought enlightenment. Various phenomena, some of them potentially quite captivating, may occur along the path of spiritual development whether it leads to true enlightenment or not...
Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily at...
An even more pointed example of the the power of the silence tabu in libraries occurred in Duluth in 1981. The police were pursuing a fugitive from justice who ran into the public library. Uniformed police surrounded the building, and the library dir...
In cases of organized and multi-perpetrator abuse when the abuse occurs in the context of rituals and ceremonies, some elements of the experience may have been staged specifically with the intention of encouraging the disbelief of others if the victi...
Gradually it became clear that it is a to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But this is what the psychoanalysts did. On the contrary: any idea occurring in the course of the sexual act only has the effect of hinderin...
