xxxxxvvx

Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may
be us.

Forward!

xxxxxvvix

Yesterday at a little past mid-day Sarah Ann Henley of 48 Twinnell Road, St. Phillips, leaped from the Suspension Bridge,and, singular to state, when picked up in the mud below was conscious, and very soon after was able to state her name and address. The person that had such a marvellous escape is a young woman, 22 years of age, living with her father, a respectable working man, at the above address. She had been for some time keeping company with a young man, but recently had a disagreement with him, and a “few words” between them a night or two ago were followed by a parting and a letter in which he gave up the companionship. The letter was received on Thursday and was taken much to heart by Henley, who was noticed by the neighbours to be looking depressed in spirit. She was seen in Twinnell Street yesterday morning at about 11 o’clock, and this depression was noticed then. At a quarter past twelve she leapt from the bridge. The woman fell as if she was going into the river which was running down. The tide was extremely low. The soft mud banks were accordingly not completely covered by water. A rather high wind was blowing and the woman’s dress offered a good deal of resistance to it, not only materially checked the rapidity of her descent, but instead of falling vertically she was carried onto the Gloucester bank, where she fell on the mud in almost a sitting posture. The mud yielded freely, and the woman, straightened out to full length, sank some distance into it. An alarm was given, and John Williams, of Ashton Gate and George Drew proceeded to get her out of the mud into the roadway. Brandy was sent for, and, failing to secure the use of a passing cab, a messenger was despatched to the Clifton Police Station for the stretcher. She was conveyed on the stretcher by several constables to the institution, where after being seen by the surgeons in the casualty room, she was placed in one of the wards. She was not considered to be in any immediate danger.

xxxxxvviii

Q. On what gounds is it legally acceptable to be stopped and questioned under the Prevention of Terrorism Act? Do they need to have reasonable cause? If I want to tell them to get boned (politely), what articles of the act do I need to refer to?

A. The police have completed misappropriated the legislation to make their lives easier, and the quality of policing in this country slightly poorer.
The only circumstance in which the police can require you to submit to questioning under the Terrorism Act 2000 is when you are travelling in and out of the country. Under Schedule 7 the police can question you at ports (including airports) to determine whether they might be a terrorist and can hold you for up to 9 hours in order to do so.
Apart from this I know of nothing in the Terrorism Act or other anti-terrorism legislation that lays any sort of obligation on us to answer police questions. However, the reality is that the police seem to be asking people questions (which they are perfectly entitled to do) and then using the threat of a search under section 44 Terrorism Act to put pressure on the person to provide an answer. This is an illegitimate use of the powers but it may of course be difficult to prove what was said if you take a case against them.
If a police officer asks you a question without arresting you and you don't wish to answer, tell them you are not obliged to answer their questions. But be aware that standing up for your rights in this way may lead to them using their search powers under section 44 (or indeed other search powers) against you.
The power to abuse such a broad power as section 44 is what has led us to call for the circumstances in which the power can be used to be much more clearly defined.

xxxxxvvii

Ollie Campbell turned up in a lime-green stocking mask. He then got into a large tent, which over the course of 45 minutes shook violently and eventually disgorged a live chicken and two blow-up dolls. Gunter finally reappeared, stripped completely naked, hurled himself into the safety net, and then at the end of his hour jumped off the plinth and streaked across Trafalgar Square pursued by the police.

xxxxxvvi

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

xxxxxviv

What are you here for? We are all here to go.

xxxxxviii

OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

xxxxxvii

Under s7 Data Protection Act 1998 you have the right to request information held on you by a data controller, which includes the police and government agencies. Most such bodies have a form on their websites you should complete and you will have to pay £10 and provide proof of your identity before they will reveal information.

There are some exemptions, for example the police dont have to disclose information if to do so would be likely to prejudice the prevention or detection of crime. It helps to be fairly specific about what you want, for example you could ask for a copy of your police national computer record, copies of any entries on any local intelligence systems (in the Met Police area this is known as CRIMINT) and entries on the stop and search database. There may be specific information that you suspect or know is held on you, and you can ask for that. You could ask a 'catch all' question for any other information held on you in hard copy or on any database.
You have to make a separate request (and pay a separate fee) to each ‘data controller, so each individual police force, council, government agency and so on.

Bear in mind that the DPA only covers your own ‘personal data: if you are seeking information about someone else, you would generally not be entitled to it. If you seek information about an organisation's policies / figures or similar, you should use s1 of the Freedom of Information Act instead.

xxxxxvi

I bet i've slept longer than you've lived.

xxxxxv

Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror.

xxxxxiv

I started looking at history, and I wondered why no society ever survived more than three generations without a religious foundation as its raison d'etre.

xxxxxiii

You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless...Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag...Question your tea spoons.

xxxxxii

You tell me that I make no difference. At least I'm fuckin' trying. What the fuck have you done?

xxxxxi

You can't separate the world into two parts like that, good and evil. Terrorism is a method, but America has successfully tied all these pockets of independence struggles, revolutions, and extremists into one big notion of terrorism.

xxxxx

Boy, are you in for a treat.

xxxxix

shrug your shoulders and walk home alone
again
and again and again until one day
your just watching people do the same thing
you used to do
and wizened you say
good luck boys, maybe your luck will be better, cause i sure tried

because all i got was a beautiful hangover
tinged with the lingering of perfume on my jumper.

xxxxviii

Beyond watching eyes
With sweet and tender kisses
Our souls reached out to each other
In breathless wonder
And when I awoke
From a vast and smiling peace
I found you bathed in morning light
Quietly studying all the messages on my phone.

xxxxviii

Imagine what the world could look like if we made a conscious choice to live out whatever time we have with courage, compassion, service and joy.

Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks.

xxxxvii

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

xxxxvi

For most travellers, distant locations such as Cockfosters, Morden and Upminster are of little consequence; these places, if they exist at all, have a conceptual rather than a physical life, prompted only by illuminated destination boards and the unremitting automated litany of train Tannoy systems.

xxxxv

Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another's businesses.

...

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system.

The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression.
Today's action followed a rich Congressional debate about the history of finance in America in this century, the causes of the banking crisis of the 1930's, the globalization of banking and the future of the nation's economy.
Administration officials and many Republicans and Democrats said the measure would save consumers billions of dollars and was necessary to keep up with trends in both domestic and international banking. Some institutions, like Citigroup, already have banking, insurance and securities arms but could have been forced to divest their insurance underwriting under existing law. Many foreign banks already enjoy the ability to enter the securities and insurance industries.

''The world changes, and we have to change with it,'' said Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who wrote the law that will bear his name along with the two other main Republican sponsors, Representative Jim Leach of Iowa and Representative Thomas J. Bliley Jr. of Virginia. ''We have a new century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer.''

In the House debate, Mr. Leach said, ''This is a historic day. The landscape for delivery of financial services will now surely shift.''

But consumer groups and civil rights advocates criticized the legislation for being a sop to the nation's biggest financial institutions. They say that it fails to protect the privacy interests of consumers and community lending standards for the disadvantaged and that it will create more problems than it solves.

The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly.

''I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ''I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.''

Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had ''seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.''

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,'' Mr. Wellstone said. ''Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

Supporters of the legislation rejected those arguments. They responded that historians and economists have concluded that the Glass-Steagall Act was not the correct response to the banking crisis because it was the failure of the Federal Reserve in carrying out monetary policy, not speculation in the stock market, that caused the collapse of 11,000 banks. If anything, the supporters said, the new law will give financial companies the ability to diversify and therefore reduce their risks. The new law, they said, will also give regulators new tools to supervise shaky institutions.

''The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown,'' said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska.

xxxxiv

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That's our problem.

xxxxiii

A man reading the paper on a busy train, quietly, in an almost astonished resignment whispers, "oh god". a few seconds later tears the page out and softly folds the page up and puts it away.

~

a youngish man rests his head atop his empty starbucks cup, the crisp white polystyrene, the perfect commuter pillow. no cotton.

~

A woman peering over her reading glasses passes her judgement on the paper articles. Its hard to tell her age. She is trying, not trying, scavenging at her youth with a summer dress that was not meant for her body. An arm bracelet clutching and groping her flabby, wrinkled skin. She rests her forehead against four pink varnished fingers, her middle avoiding the shiny veneer. All lipstick and dye, except her chest, revealed through a linen dress, exposes the slow release of flesh into old age.

~

A man awakens and sneezes, "sorry" he says. to no one. He is the kindest person in the carriage. Polite and respectful, even in the midst of obscurity and anonymity.

~

Slowly slumping into sleep. The frozen pose of a drunk melting, harbouring their evenings drink, like a wasted day and an evenings excess rolled into a single movement. Gently dreaming. Smacks of the lips. Hinting to a dream inside. The judder of imagination awakes the toddler to the 00:01 train to Chingford.

I wish I knew what
she said. last night
she spoke swedish into
my shoulder. then
moved too quickly away
for me to know
what happened.




xxxix

since adam and eve ate the apple
man has never refrained
from any folly
of which he was capable.

xxxviii

Blacksmith Julian Coode was returning to work after a short tea break. It was a late winter afternoon and the light had faded outside his workshop in Littlebourne, Kent. He and his assistant had been discussing plans for some railings they were commissioned to make, and the forge, unusually, was quiet.

As the men returned to their craft benches, the door flew open. A young man stepped inside wearing a top hat, long black jacket, a white shirt under black corduroy dungarees with large mother-of-pearl buttons, a long twisted cane and a single earring from which hung a tiny key.

He informed his host that he was a Swiss-German blacksmith, named Sebastian Reichlin, and that he had come to stay.

Fortunately for them both, Coode had trained in German-speaking Europe and was familiar with some of the region's more bizarre customs. He was looking at a travelling journeyman, a craftsman who had served his apprenticeship and was now following tradition by arriving unannounced, to learn from an acknowledged master and to share his hospitality.

xxxvii

...I got served by the bald cunt behind the counter, the same guy responsible for the music in December I think, and as he handed me my coffee I smiled and said thanks. Cunt just looked back at me with a blank expression and said fuck all.

Fucking hate that. Really fucking hate that. It makes me just want to not say thanks to anycunt until they say thanks to me first. But that’s how you end up with places like London...

xxxvi

Born out of yesteryear, we work today, for a better tomorrow

xxxv

And one day we will die,
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea,
But for now we are young,
Let us lay in the sun,
And count every beautiful thing we can see.
Fuck rent.

xxxiv

They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of
a divine and benevolent creator.

xxxiii

where you are, is on, the edge. You are about to embark into the out-lying spaces and the real adventure. This is the jumping off place, and that is where you meet people who've been out there and run the machines that go out there and you haven't been there...

xxxii

Scarecrows and magic and other fatal fears do not bring people closer together. There is no magic substitute for soft caring and hard work,
for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the mistake
these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely grotesque, it would at least have been a lesson. A lesson, at last, to be learned.

xxxi

In most of the world when a person works long hours without pay, it is referred to as “slavery” or “forced labor.” For white people this process is referred to as an internship and is considered an essential stage in white development.

The concept of working for little or no money underneath a superior has been around for centuries in the form of apprenticeship programs. Young people eager to learn a trade would spend time working under a master craftsman to learn a skill that would eventually lead to an increase in material wealth.

Using this logic you would assume that the most sought after internships would be in areas that lead to the greatest financial reward. Young White people, however, prefer internships that put them on the path for careers that will generally result in a DECREASE of the material wealth accumulated by their parents.

For example, if you were to present a white 19 year old with the choice of spending the summer earning $15 an hour as a plumber’s apprentice or making $0 answering phones at Production Company, they will always choose the latter. In fact, the only way to get the white person to choose the plumbing option would be to convince them that it was leading towards an end-of-summer pipe art installation.

xxx

You are forty-six years old.
You are married and you have two children, teenage girls, thirteen and fifteen, they are supple, budding, on the edge of womanhood.
You work in finance. You are a partner in your company. You have forty million dollars in the bank, a Fifth Avenue co-op, a house on the pond in Sagaponack. You belong to a club in the city, and a club at the beach. You have a driver, a Mercedes and a Range Rover out East, your daughters both have horses.
You never fly commercial.
You never buy off the rack.
You never cook or clean you have people who do that for you.
Every year at Christmas you and your family go St. Barts. You stay at the Eden Rock in a suite you eat at La Plage, at des Pêcheurs, On the Rocks, Do Brasil. Your friends are all there some have yachts 200 foot pleasuredomes with millions of dollars of art on their walls, some rent houses, some are at your hotel, others nearby. You spend ten days eating and drinking and fucking sometimes your spouse, sometimes not. Your daughters lie on the beach and gossip with other girls and flirt with boys and disappear at night.
You’re going early this year, hey why not, the weather has been shitty in New York and political turmoil Russians Arabs Chinese fuck ’em all have been making business difficult.
Your driver picks you up everyone’s excited woohoo woohoo he takes you to Teterboro. The Gulfstream is waiting you only own a share of it someday the whole fucking thing will be yours. You get on. Your girls are texting their friends they have dvd’s and computers. You and your spouse each have a drink and go to sleep. You fly it’s fast and easy and extremely comfortable. You land there are people waiting for you they gather up your luggage and take you to the hotel. You check in everything is beautiful, perfect, expensive, somehow it evens smells of taste and luxury, it’s just the way you like it, just the way, another Christmas on St. Barts, lovely.
You have dinner drink too much the girls leave you go to bed you and your spouse both scream while you fuck even sex is better here.
You go to sleep. On sheets that cost more than most people on the island make in a year. Who cares. Fuck them. Let them sleep in dirt. As long as the food is warm and the drinks are cold and everything stays perfect. You go to sleep.
Peacefully.
Sleep.

***

You are shaken awake. Your daughters are in your room they know they are not supposed to come into your room, in New York it’s fine but not here, not on vacation, not when you might be doing something you don’t want them to see, they are thirteen and fifteen.
They looked shocked, terrified, hysterical. You immediately think they’ve been raped (not yet, my friend, not yet). You come out of sleep quickly ask them what’s wrong they’re both shaking their entire bodies somehow shaking one of them says it’s over, everything’s gone, the other immediately starts sobbing, everything’s gone.
You get out of bed. You tell your girls your beautiful young, supple, budding, on the edge of womanhood girls to calm down they don’t, they can’t, they both fall apart, neither can speak. You hug them your spouse wakes wonders what’s wrong you raise your eyebrows you still don’t know.
You still don’t know.
You still don’t know.
Your spouse gets out of the bed your older daughter calms down enough to say there was a war.
Was?
Everything’s gone.
Everything’s gone.

***

Not everything, but pretty fucking close. Every major city in North America. Every major city in Europe and Russia. The entire Middle East every city town village hamlet every mud fucking hut. Pakistan and India bye-bye. China bye-bye, though there is so much there that some may be left, no one knows, no one knows. There’s some desert in Australia, parts of the Reef. South Africa burned the rest soon to follow. Japan hit again it is no more. South America incinerated. Iran fired first. Israel responded. Then Russia. Then us. Then it didn’t matter who fired or when or where all of the buttons were pushed. Kaboom. Kaboom. Kaboom. Over and over and over and over, again and again and again. Kaboom. Not everything, but pretty fucking close.

***

First day you’re shocked.
Second day you’re scared.
Third day you’re confused.
Fourth day you’re panicked.
Fifth day you fall apart.
Sixth day there’s a riot.
Seventh day doom.

***

Your money is worthless. Your job and title and degrees mean shit. Your apartment and house are gone. Your parents are dead. Your friends are all dead. Everyone you know, except for your spouse and children, are all fucking dead. The restaurants, galleries, shops, and boutiques that meant so much to you, that were so much a part of your life, that were so fucking important, they’re ash. The school you went to, ha ha ha ha ha. The place where you were married, no longer. Everything that was, is no longer. That includes hope and love and the future. No longer. Ha ha ha ha ha .

***

The hotels become encampments. Water, food, and bullets become currency. Women become slaves. Some cook, some clean, some carry children, some take care of children, some care for the sick and the wounded, some care for prisoners. Some of the women become objects of pleasure and they are defiled, defiled every day, defiled in every way you can imagine. The weak become the strong. The fist rules the mind. Words you come to live with and know include force, brutality, violence. Fear loses its meaning because you are absolutely fucking terrified every moment of every day. You are not strong. Your hand is limp. You live in the dirt. You wear rags. You eat the leaves of trees at night when you’re done working and on good days, the best days, you get a piece of discarded fruit, or a well-chewed bone. When the sun sets, and the fallout has made the sunset beautiful beyond your imagination, you curse it, you curse it, you curse that fucking sun.

***

Your daughters are gone, they were taken, dragged away while you were lying beaten and bloodied too damaged to scream, they went into the hills, they remain in the hills, you don’t know where it’s an endless green mass, they were young, beautiful, supple, budding, on the edge of womanhood, and they are gone.
Gone.
Gone.

xxix

XXIX. NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

xxviii

Life, my young friend, is a woman on her back, with swollen, close-set breasts, a smooth, soft, fat belly between protruding hips, with slender arms, plump thighs, and half-closed eyes, who in her grandiose and taunting provocation demands our ardent fervour.

xxvii

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

xxvii

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

...

It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

xxvi

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.
It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen hom
icides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say: 'I'm a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

xxv

A man dies and is buried and all his actions forgotten but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children...The basis of their diet is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes. Would it not be better if they spent more money of wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread?...no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots ... A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita, an unemployed man doesn't ... When you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull, wholesome food. You want something a little bit tasty. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea!

xxiv

Bill Stone, Harry Patch, and Henry Allingham.

xxiii

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

xxii

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

...

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

...

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

xxi

What has brought them to the temple...no single answer will cover...escape from everday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparenly built for eternity.

xx

Liars, fools and knaves told us we don't need to manage our economies.
The planet is burning, oil is running out and food will rot as feezers shudder to a halt, trains, planes and cars become rusting street sculpture and hospitals go back to operating by torchlight.

All bow to the market, all bow to Mammon, all worship at the altar of our 48" plasma screens and praise the High Priests of Banking and Economics.
We are like selfish children......welcome to The Lord of The Flies.

Where are the adults?

And where are the tumbrils?

Perhaps not today, perhaps not this time....but the writing is on the wall and all over the news.....the system is utterly rotten and we must stop being so unimaginative as to believe the lie that alternatives can't bring us better lives.

ixx

The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly coloured and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: “Is this real, or is this just a ride?”
And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say,
“Hey, don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.”
And we kill those people.

xviii

Help lies not in priests, nor in prayer: it lies in no theories, it is written in no book: it is contained in no creed – it lies in science, art, courage and industry.

xvii

As you set out to Ithaca
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery,
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbours seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaca always on your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.

xvi

Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen and anything in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again.

xv

Steve Roach of Tuscon, Arizona, had an NDE after a bike crash and heard ‘the most intensely beautiful music you could ever imagine’ and decided ‘to dedicate my life to recreating the exact same sound.’ The result is a record entitled, ‘Structures from Silence". Many people contact him after hearing the recordings to tell him that they’ve heard the exact same music during their NDE’s.

xiv

...the more freely and intensely people wish to live, the more we hear them saying how difficult life can be.

xiii

We hear more about the dissatisfaction and frustrations attendant with one-night stands than we hear hymns to transient love affairs. Why does love remain an ideal, a mass aspiration, unless one reason is the value ascriped to the durability with which it is associated?

xii

I WANT EVERYTHING, NOW!

xi

Consume without delay, travel, enjoy yourself, renounce nothing: the politics of a radiant future have been replaced by consumption as the promise of a euphoric present.

x

Intellectuals are still the obstinate forgers of meaning. As such they are old-fashioned species, far from ready to rush through their work in a shameless attempt to meet their deadlines. Perhaps it is intellectual work, being inevitably something done with craftmanship and love that will be most able, here and there, to offer the most stubborn resistance to frivolity, to the way the world is converted to spectacle.

ix

Do you really believe there's some payoff for your dutiful death? There is no pension plan, you're dust and the painful fact is that you were miss-sold your life. There is no nest-egg waiting for you in the afterlife. What about the wheel of life and the harmony of the cosmic cycle? Well sure, there is a wheel of life, it's just that you seem to labour under the misapprehension that you are a spoke in its great circumference rather than something it simply rolls over. I know how you love elegant allegory and the graceful idea of harmonic balance just has to be right: death from life, life from death. You translate this as a constant retreading of your spectacular existence, with of course the unpleasant bits removed.

Here's another interpretation of the karmaic cycle. You live, you die, you're dead – nothing. Admittedly it's not much of a cycle but why assume you deserve something better?

viii

When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

vii

For nearly 200 years, England ruled over 500 million people on six continents – time in which it commonly said that the sun never set on the British Empire. Today, however, the sun sets on the British Empire at precisely 8:43pm GMT.

vi

And there -- it was incredible! -- was the little park where he had
played with his junior and high-school friends. The City Fathers were always arguing about its maintenance, as the water supply became more and more critical. Well, at least it had survived to this time -- whenever that might be. And then another memory brought tears to his eyes. Along those narrow paths, whenever he could get home from Houston or the Moon, he had walked with his beloved Rhodesian Ridgeback, throwing sticks for him to retrieve, as man and dog had done from time immemorial.
Poole had hoped, with all his heart, that Rikki would still be there to greet him when he returned from Jupiter, and had left him in the care of hisyounger brother Martin. He almost lost control, and sank several metres before regaining stability, as he once more faced the bitter truth that both Rikki and Martin had been dust for centuries.

v

Why did you become a doctor?

That's a long story. Perhaps because I'm a bit of an idealist.

I think all doctors ought to have ideals, really. Otherwise, their work would be unbearable.

Surely, you're not encouraging me to talk shop.

Why shouldn't you talk shop? It's what interests you most, isn't it?

Yes, it is. I'm terribly ambitious really, not ambitious for myself so much as for my special pigeon.

What is your special pigeon?

Preventive medicine.

I see.

I'm afraid you don't.

I was trying to be intelligent.

Most good doctors, especially when they're young, have private dreams. That's the best part of it. Sometimes though, those get over-professionalized and strangulated...What I mean is this, all good doctors must primarily be enthusiasts. They must, like writers and painters and priests, they must have a sense of vocation. A deep-rooted, unsentimental
desire to do good.

Yes, I see that.

Well, obviously one way of preventing disease is worth fifty ways of curing it. That's where my ideal comes in. Preventive medicine isn't anything to do with medicine at all, really. It's concerned with conditions, living conditions and hygeine and common-sense. For instance, my specialty is pneumoconiosis...it's nothing but a slow process of fibrosis of the lung due to the inhalation of particles of dust. In the hospital here, there are splendid opportunities for observing cures and making notes because of the coal mines.

You suddenly look much younger.

Do I?

Almost like a little boy.

What made you say that?

I don't know. Yes I do.

Tell me.

No, I couldn't really. You were saying about the coal mines.

Oh yes. The inhalation of coal dust...

iv

Does it always have to work?

iii

let us imagine a man whose wealth is equalled only by his indifference to what wealth generally brings, a man of exceptional arrogance who wishes to fix, to describe, and to exhaust not the whole world - merely to state such an ambition is enough to invalidate it - but a constituted fragment of the world: in the fact of the inextricable incoherence of things, he will set out to execute a (necessarily limited) programme right the way through, in all its irreducible, intact entirety. in other words, bartlebooth resolved one day that his whole life would be organised around a single project, an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion. the idea occurred to him when he was twenty. at first it was only a vague idea, a question looming - what should i do? - with an answer taking shape: nothing. money, power, art, women did not interest bartlebooth. nor did science, nor even gambling. there were only neckties and horses that just about did, or, to put it another way, beneath these futile illustrations (but thousands of people do order their lives effectively around their neckties, and far greater numbers do so around their weekend horse-riding) there stirred, dimly, a certain idea of perfection.

The first was moral: the plan should not have to do with an exploit or record, it would be neither a peak to scale nor an ocean floor to reach. what bartlebooth would do would not be heroic, or spectacular; it would be something simple and discreet, difficult of course but not impossibly so, controlled from start to finish and conversly controlling every detail of the life of the man engaged upon it.

the second was logical: all recourse to chance would be ruled out, and the project would make time and space serve as the abstract coordinates plotting the ineluctable recursion of identical events occurring inexorably in their allotted places, on their allotted dates.
the third was aesthetic: the plan would be useless, since gratuitousness was the sole guarantor of its rigour, and would destroy itself as it proceeded; its perfection would be circular: a series of events which when concatenated nullify each other: starting from nothing, passing through precise operations on finished objects, bartlebooth would end with nothing. thus a concrete programme was designed, which can be stated succinctly as follows. for ten years, from 1925 to 1935, bartlebooth would acquire the art of painting watercolours. for twenty years, from 1935 to 1955, he would travel the world, painting, at a rate of one watercolour each fortnight, five hundred seascapes of identical format (royal, 65cm x 50cm) depicting seaports. when each view was done, he would dispatch it to a specialist craftsman (gaspard winckler) , who would glue it to a thin wooden backing board and cut it into a jigsaw puzzle of seven hundred and fifty pieces.
for twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, bartlebooth, on his return to france, would reassemble the jigsaw puzzles in order, at a rate, once again, of one puzzle a fortnight. as each puzzle was finished, the seascape would be "retexturised" so that it could be removed from its backing, returned to the place where it had been painted - twenty years before - and dipped in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean and unmarked sheet of whatman paper. thus no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.

ii

a january, aged 23. the russians begin their offense into german territory. huddled between the two countries lies the heart of the second empire, now through conquest, at the heart of the third, the military backbone of a broken monster. ursula flee's her home in konigsburg, east prussia to escape the misery of the soviet army. with just one suitcase, she spends the next immediate years going across germany, without a home to ever return to. her home has been dissolved. east prussia ceases to be. her heimat is only memory. konigsburg is now kalingrad. now she speaks of it with such forlorn it makes you ache that you can be so pointlessly lost aged 23 in january.

i

by facing up to the complexity of the present, and refusing to accept idealistic or over-pessimistic views of it, lipovetsky puts forward an interpretation of our hypermodernity that seeks to be at once rationalistic and pragmatic, and in which a sense of responsibility is the cornerstone of the future of our democracies. without any real sense of responsibility, virtuous declarations of intent devoid of any concrete effects will not be enough.