…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide. The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as adve...
Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in th...
-Paint- My girlfriend is so besotted that she can't take her eyes off me. After we've turned out the light she puts on her night-vision goggles, and watched me as I sleep. Quite often I am woken by her sighing and involuntary yelps of happiness. This...
Outside, milling under the ubiquitous gaze of security cameras, are bright splashes of colorful souls wearing crystals, beads, and Native American Indian paraphernalia; middle-aged academics with "Erowid" drug website t-shirts; and passengers that gi...
A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines....
I'm not sure whether to be relieved she didn't hurt you or diappointed. Now he's going to think he got away with that junk." -Abby I wouldn't say that. He got a stern talking-to, but he already made great progress with his groveling lessons." -Sam ""...
My mother showed her gratitude for her life in exile by alluding to India’s modernity: the expansive railway network; the Bollywood movies she came to love for their tumultuous stories which ultimately conceded to the cardinal guidelines she held i...
Accordingly, identification, or the formation of composite figures, serves different purposes: first, to represent a feature both persons have in common; secondly, to represent a common feature; but thirdly, to find expression for a common feature th...
And once when we were walking on Bredon Hill, we met a bedraggled and exhausted fox. 'Oh, poor thing,' Jack said. 'What shall we do when the hunt comes up? I can already hear them. Oh, I know -- I have an idea.' He cupped his hands and shouted to the...
We try to show that the well-ordered society of justice as fairness is indeed possible according to our nature and those requirements. This endeavor belongs to political philosophy as reconciliation; for seeing that the conditions of a social world a...
That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer , when we see these images. Nei...
How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the str...
If a child sees something in a parent that the child aspires to, he or she will copy that parent and be content. If a children feel that a parent is living a life that shows compassion and understanding, patience and love, that child will not have to...
It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in...
She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Nivas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena's love of music, Pran's asthma, Maan's generosity, the survival of some refugees four years ago, the neem leaves that would preserve q...
I think we go well together. I like being with you because I'm never bored. Even when we're not talking, even when we're not touching, even when we're not in the same room, I'm not bored. I'm never bored. I think it's because I have confidence in you...
To be beautiful, handsome, means that you possess a power which makes all smile upon and welcome you; that everybody is impressed in your favor and inclined to be of your opinion; that you have only to pass through a street or to show yourself at a b...
But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrar...
Humans have evolved levels of cooperation that are unprecedented among primate species. You can see it even in babies. Say you are playing with a baby and begin to put the toys in a box. If you point to one of the toys, the baby is likely to put it i...
It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our own deformities. Unable to find a place inside ourselves for the very real pain and suffering that these deformities cause, we come here to get away from such things. As long as we are here, we can ...
I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagance and love and art, and could even almost believe...
