In the world of animals, pain serves an equivocal role. Parental nips and swipes are common tools in upbringing. And socially, pain is sometimes used to maintain hierarchies of dominance. But this animal use of pain seems somewhat restrained, at leas...
As we drove off into the moonless night, raindrops danced through our headlights like the fireflies of my childhood. I silently cursed the frailty of happiness and doubted whether it ever existed for me. I could remember happier times, though, and th...
Neleus... The son of Poseidon! A birth that came from the mate of a god and a mortal woman. Not plain at all! So it was, when the gods love, mate as humans with humans! From such a union two children were born, both boys. Their mother placed them in ...
How lucky country children are in these natural delights that lie ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their d...
In a few more days I'd anticipated telling Veronika that our injections had cured her heart condition. But in light of her unscheduled departure form Villette my telling that particular lie will not be required. The majority of people who attempt sui...
They may also ask that you bring certain types of food, alcohol, or tobacco on a regular basis. It must be noted that although djinn in their natural state might be composed of plasma, most of them can take a physical shape for short periods of time....
Mr. Morris's poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous ,—a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the ...
The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don’t just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick and choose whose lives are important – who we actually treat as hu...
We are one knot in a great web of being, building out of the vast past and (with luck) continuing billions of years into the future, until the sun dies, the last of its energy reaches Earth, and our local light goes out. The most appropriate response...
To all those who care, You can't forever. Time steals the years, And your reflection in the mirror. But I can still see the story in your eyes, And your timeless passion that’s never died. While your skin became tired, Your heart became strong, The...
As the night air started to creep in, he lifted her in his arms and walked the back way to their home on campus. He spent the evening digging her grave, not even caring who came his way. He didn’t care whether he lived or died, now that he had lost...
I don't have the type of ambition that will make me do anything at any cost to get what I want. I don't want to be beholden to people. I don't want to open a shop with your money because I don't want to be indebted to you." "I'm your husband; it's ou...
...and it's not my place to chase around after you, fixing stuff. What I know's what I know, and it don't include putting the world back the way it out to be. It's too late for that. Way too late for heroes, champions, miracles. Don't matter what our...
I now want to examine a second major feature of Western civilization that derives from Christianity. This is what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the 'affirmation of ordinary life.' It is the simple idea that ordinary people are fallible, and yet th...
Each of our devoted investigators has had to protest the critical importance to science and the surpassing conveniences offered by the cabin: How well the hill-and-dale floor is held together by layered patches of variegated linoleum; how nicely the ...
I devised a test. I turned off the TV and instantly the snoring stopped. She began to move. When I felt her eyes about to open, I turned the TV back on and back to sleep she went. Then I'd turn it off and on - sometimes for millisecond - and she neve...
I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to the next generation. Once past the...
The central attitudes driving the Demand Man are: It’s your job to do things for me, including taking care of my responsibilities if I drop the ball on them. If I’m unhappy about any aspect of my life, whether it has to do with our relationship o...
Men were created before women. ... But that doesn't prove their superiority – rather, it proves ours, for they were born out of the lifeless earth in order that we could be born out of living flesh. And what's so important about this priority in cr...
When true happiness shows up, the ego is bored with it: It's too plain, too ordinary, and it doesn't leave us feeling special or above the fray. It doesn't take away our problems, which is the ego's idea of happiness. The ego wants no more difficulti...
It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am wo...
